Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Animats 3453 days ago
There are others. There's cold fusion. There's a strange effect by which a rotating superconductor appears to induce gravity.[1] (Whatever happened to that? Articles from 2002-2006, then nothing.) They're all down near the noise threshold.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060325232140.h...

2 comments

Here's what happened to it. The Austrian Institute of Technology tried the rotating superconductor thing with a big rotating superconductor and a fiber optic gyro nearby. No "dragging of the metric" was observed.[1] Too bad.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0608017.pdf

There was another paper about 15 years ago where a electrically pulsed, superconducting thin film was able to displace a pith ball from tens of meters, through walls. I can't find the paper but it was on arxiv. Some sort of gravity pulse; weird shit.
Made me think of this. Maybe when they were doing the experiment, a gravitational wave happened and they somehow reflected it?

> Thin superconducting films are predicted to be highly reflective mirrors for gravitational waves at microwave frequencies. The quantum mechanical non-localizability of the negatively charged Cooper pairs, which is protected from the localizing effect of decoherence by an energy gap, causes the pairs to undergo non-picturable, non-geodesic motion in the presence of a gravitational wave.

https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0661

They were able to repeat it. Damn, I wish I could find it. I actually have it printed off somewhere.

The issue is that distorting gravity has far more consequential effects due to generally relativity than just moving something. You are actually distorting time too.

> You are actually distorting time too.

That explains the significance of the floating hole-puncher confetti in the movie Primer.