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Wenceslas Mine - Anti-gravity?

Oleron

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Oleron
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Feb 17, 2004
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I watched a show the other night where the presenter went to a remote location which was host to a WW2 nazi research site. This site, the Wenceslas mine, had a strange structure built on it which was claimed was a test facility for anti-gravity research.

It just looked like a derelict concrete circle to me but it seemed to be connected to a high voltage power supply and had its own electricity generator (apparently).

My guess is that perhaps the Germans were working on alternative propulsion - maybe magnetic/electrostatic. Does anyone know if there is a rational explanation for what went on there?

This is the only info I could find and it looks less than reliable-

http://www.americanantigravity.com/einstein.shtml
 
OK, so no-one has heard of this place?

Or maybe you all just think I've gone all woo. :jaw-dropp

What about antigravity research in general? Is there any basis for thinking that it might produce results?
 
Oleron said:
I watched a show the other night where the presenter went to a remote location which was host to a WW2 nazi research site. This site, the Wenceslas mine, had a strange structure built on it which was claimed was a test facility for anti-gravity research.

It just looked like a derelict concrete circle to me but it seemed to be connected to a high voltage power supply and had its own electricity generator (apparently).

My guess is that perhaps the Germans were working on alternative propulsion - maybe magnetic/electrostatic. Does anyone know if there is a rational explanation for what went on there?

This is the only info I could find and it looks less than reliable-

http://www.americanantigravity.com/einstein.shtml
Click to expand...


I watched some of the programme - missed the beginning. However from what they presented their reasoning went something like:

We don't know exactly what they were researching, therefore it is more then likely it was anti-gravity.

I mean he went on to dig up Roswell yet again and concluded that he wasn't convinced it was fully explained and (again) therefore it was more then likely anti-gravity.

(As you can tell I wasn't impressed by the programme ;) )

As far as the large concrete structure went, well considering we have amazing structures like these:

dungeness5.jpg


See: http://www.ajg41.clara.co.uk/mirrors/dungeness.html and http://ourpasthistory.com/sound_mirrors/

I think starting with the idea that they were something that was in-line with the actual technology of the day is a bit more sensible then jumping to theories involving anti-gravity.
 
Oleron said:
My guess is that perhaps the Germans were working on alternative propulsion - maybe magnetic/electrostatic. Does anyone know if there is a rational explanation for what went on there?
Click to expand...

Why does it have to be rational? Towards the end the nazis started working on some really wierd stuff.
 
I realise the nasties were pretty desperate towards the end and most of the stuff they worked on was just clutching at straws but they did have some very fine scientists working for them.

What about the claim that they made progress on Einstein's universal theory and this led to the ability to create a 'field' of antigravity?

Is this a load of cobblers? My understanding was that Einstein himself got frustrated with the search for the universal theory and never did get it sorted. The program speculated that perhaps the Germans 'developed' Einstein's flawed theory into a workable form and then they destroyed the research at the end of the war.

Do 'real' physicists take the idea of antigravity seriously? I only ask because I honestly don't know.
 
Just on the matter of anti-gravity, is this a thermodynamically sound concept? For example, I could take my anti-gravity device to the London Eye, turn it on under one side of the ferris wheel, and since one side of the eye is heavier than the other, the eye turns under its own weight and keeps turning. Attach a cable and generator to the eye and hey presto, free energy, a thermodynamic impossibility. As the other posters have said, I would like a "real" physicist (or someone more informed than me) to give us some input.
 
I suppose that the entire closed system would have to take into account the energy required to run the antigravity device - which would be considerable, I imagine.
 
The Nazis may have been daft and desperate, but they never stared at goats.
 
anor277 said:
For example, I could take my anti-gravity device to the London Eye, turn it on under one side of the ferris wheel, and since one side of the eye is heavier than the other, the eye turns under its own weight and keeps turning.
Click to expand...
No, it won't. It will be in equilibrium. Even if you assume entirely hypothetical substances and devices, it is still possible to analyse whether it would run or not, using Simon Stevin's Principle of Virtual Work. In your London Eye example, the final state and the initial state would be identical, and therefore the system would be in equilibrium.
 
On the concrete things, IIRC there was a Nazi project to detect incoming bombers by their sound. I thought I had come across something about some project like this that had been discovered, but I can't find the link now.

The show sounds like woo.

On the antigravity, technically, the suspending-aluminum-over-a-magnet thing, some people call it "maglev," is antigravity- as are electromagnets. However, as far as some new force that is the opposite of gravity, as positive electric charge is the opposite of negative, this is not possible if gravitons turn out to be spin-2 bosons, because a spin-2 boson has only an attractive interaction, not a repulsive one. Of course, we might be wrong, and gravitons might not be spin-2; but a lot of pretty well-known Standard Model stuff would be imperilled by that, so I guess most physicists don't expect it.
 
Schneibster said:
On the antigravity, technically, the suspending-aluminum-over-a-magnet thing, some people call it "maglev," is antigravity- as are electromagnets. However, as far as some new force that is the opposite of gravity, as positive electric charge is the opposite of negative, this is not possible if gravitons turn out to be spin-2 bosons, because a spin-2 boson has only an attractive interaction, not a repulsive one. Of course, we might be wrong, and gravitons might not be spin-2; but a lot of pretty well-known Standard Model stuff would be imperilled by that, so I guess most physicists don't expect it.
Click to expand...


Then technically using wings to fly is antigravity as well.

Or gravitons may not exist at all; Relativity doesn't have them. Gravity may be caused by dimples in the fabric of space-time. Or gravitons may exist, but they're closed loops of string that can leak of this universe's brane; hence why gravity is so much weaker than the other forces.
 
Schneibster said:
On the antigravity, technically, the suspending-aluminum-over-a-magnet thing, some people call it "maglev," is antigravity- as are electromagnets. However, as far as some new force that is the opposite of gravity, as positive electric charge is the opposite of negative, this is not possible if gravitons turn out to be spin-2 bosons, because a spin-2 boson has only an attractive interaction, not a repulsive one. Of course, we might be wrong, and gravitons might not be spin-2; but a lot of pretty well-known Standard Model stuff would be imperilled by that, so I guess most physicists don't expect it.
Click to expand...

To (weakly) argue the opposite (just for the sake of it): no one believes that all of gravity will be described by gravitons, no matter what their physisophical persuasion on quantum gravity - some folks believe that at low enough energies gravitons will be "da sh*it", others don't. But so far all proposals involve much more than simple graviton scattering being involved at high enough energies, and this could lead to all sorts of whacky things in the "extended" Einstein equations (or whatever they'll be called!). [Please no one quote me to a crackpot anti-gravitationalist...] The standard model isnt really an issue, since gravitons arent really incorporated into it naturally (not being renormalisable).
 
Tez,

You have evolved into quite a character - especially that outrageous nose. :D

I have often come across that word "renormalizable" and have yet to understand what it really means. If you have a postage stamp explanation, it would be appreciated. If you are thinking of introducing equations, though, forget it. :D

BillyJoe
 
Renormalizable is basically this:

We physicists have finally come to the realization that we do not know everything. I know this may come as a shock to you, but we don't. I don't just mean we don't know how to find matching socks or boil an egg (that too), I mean that we realise that our present physical theories are simply not correct. They're plain old wrongedy, wrong wrong at all energy scales. Energy scales to a physicist means length scales (though I'm yet to pay for my electricity in length, try as I might). So we admit that as we probe smaller scales, our current theories will break down.

However, we can demand the following: Whatever deeper theory lies beneath our current ones should be compatible with them - our current theories should form a good "effective theory" (as its technically known) at the energy scales we have so far probed. In particular, we demand that the things we can measure but not yet predict (such as the mass of an electron, or its charge say) can be incorporated in our theories and still dealt with consistently (and predictively).

The problem is that almost every physical theory you can think up predicts stupid things, like the mass of an electron should be infinite. So its a very much smaller class of theories that can sweep away those infinite predictions into a consistent "do not know basket". Those renormalisable theories are the ones that turn physicists on. Or at least, turn the older generation of physicists on.

A little more picturesquely, renormalisability is about "coarse graining" out information you don't know in a consistent fashion. For a long time it wasn't understood that this is what it was about though, which is why older folks like Feynman, Dirac etc went into conipulations about it... More importantly, is conipulate even a word?
 
Tez,

Perhaps I'm getting the flavour of it, but I'm not nailing it.
Perhaps I need to study some physics. :(

Is it like letting infinity equal one, so that it has no effect on your equations and hoping it doesn't matter and then finding at the end of the day, to your complete surprise and utter inability to explain, that it doesn't actually matter?

....or something like that. :)

BillyJoe
 
Cleopatra said:
Don't worry. It's the psysicists. That's why we mathematicians appear that smart. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
Fortunately, there is hope for me in that department. I am keeping up with my sons who are working their way through secondary school. Presently I am handling year 10 maths pretty well. :D

BillyJoe
 
Tez said:
Renormalizable is basically this:

We physicists have finally come to the realization that we do not know everything. I know this may come as a shock to you, but we don't. I don't just mean we don't know how to find matching socks or boil an egg (that too), I mean that we realise that our present physical theories are simply not correct. They're plain old wrongedy, wrong wrong at all energy scales. Energy scales to a physicist means length scales (though I'm yet to pay for my electricity in length, try as I might). So we admit that as we probe smaller scales, our current theories will break down.

However, we can demand the following: Whatever deeper theory lies beneath our current ones should be compatible with them - our current theories should form a good "effective theory" (as its technically known) at the energy scales we have so far probed. In particular, we demand that the things we can measure but not yet predict (such as the mass of an electron, or its charge say) can be incorporated in our theories and still dealt with consistently (and predictively).

The problem is that almost every physical theory you can think up predicts stupid things, like the mass of an electron should be infinite. So its a very much smaller class of theories that can sweep away those infinite predictions into a consistent "do not know basket". Those renormalisable theories are the ones that turn physicists on. Or at least, turn the older generation of physicists on.
Click to expand...

I think that we should limit this to quantum theories. It's on the scale of the very small that these problems occur. And there are many speculations about how to solve them.

General Relativity is, in a sense, a "classical" theory quite unlike quantum theory. That why joining them together has been such a tough problem.

A little more picturesquely, renormalisability is about "coarse graining" out information you don't know in a consistent fashion. For a long time it wasn't understood that this is what it was about though, which is why older folks like Feynman, Dirac etc went into conipulations about it... More importantly, is conipulate even a word?
Click to expand...

The word is "conniption".

Dirac pointed out that renormalization involves dividing out infinities - which is mathematically fallacious.

Back to the original point - there is no such thing as a gravity shield. Gravity is not a "force" in the sense that the other forces, strong, weak, electromagnetic are. Those forces are explained by particle exchange, photons in the case of EM, mesons for the strong force, for example.

Gravity is really a change of the geometry of space time. Although "gravitons" have been postulated as the exchange, nobody has any idea what gravitons are or even if they exist.
 
Diamond said:
Dirac pointed out that renormalization involves dividing out infinities - which is mathematically fallacious.
Click to expand...

The point I was making is that we now know why it works, when we can do it consistently, and how to understand it physically. These are things Dirac did not know, and therefore understandably felt very unhappy about. It wasn't until Wilson's work in the 70's that we did understand them. Very few modern physicists have the same queasy feelings about renormalization his generation did.
 
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