Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
Oh No wrote:


Really difficult to say. If it is not experimental
mistake and the results are verified, then the one
has to recognise that superconduction is a quantum
mechanical effect and is not fully understood. The
implication then is that it is something which
will be very difficult to analyse in a theory of
quantum gravity which we do not yet have.


It's important to realize that this experiment
didn't spring out of the woodwork unprovoked. They
did some fairly obvious (in hindsight, of course)
twiddling with Maxwell's equations, found something
predicted that wasn't known, set up the needed
experiment, and found exactly what their math said
they should see.

No "changed plank scale" or any other voodoo.

What I found fun in reviewing their work, is that to
do some of the most precise measurements imaginable,
required lots of big bags full of sand draped all
over everything. I'll admit also to being way
disappointed at the available sensitivity of their
accelerometers; there were possible effects they
wanted to measure that still drowned in the
experimental noise.

What I wish I could understand, but don't, is the
direction of the force they measured. Their diagrams
had arrows for everything but that, and the wording
was splendidly ambiguous. I'd _like_ it to be a
frame dragging force that was axial to the spinning,
a new "exhaustless Dean drive", but I'm almost
convinced that's not what it was.

FWIW

xanthian.

Tajmar's group likes to distance itself
from the original Podkletnov experiments,
but furthering your 'simplicity is best' comments
I thing the effect may be similar
and due to engineering an apparatus
to create a significant fraction of the material
as superconducting supercurrent.

This significant fraction moves at orbital velocity of earth
sqrt(g*R) which results in observed gravity effects.

Values of 'significant fraction' as measured as
superconducting supercurrents are large (~100 amps/cm^2),
but theoretically, these supercurrents
can be on the order of 1E9 amp/cm^2.

Perhaps, Podkletnov and Tajmar have been able to do this
by some means, perhaps not even known to them.

Richard