1. Is the chamber made of one single piece of high-quality fused silica quartz or several segments welded together?
The
chamber is made of 3 sections of tubes of silica quartz and was made at one of
Russian factories. Of course it is possible to make a smaller chamber and to use
steel with quartz glass windows or to use some plastic materials, but in that
case you won’t be able to reach high vacuum. However, that may be not important.
You can easily work in rough vacuum, the goal is to avoid the condensation of
moisture.
2.
Making the assumption that the main coil around the quartz tube contains approx.
330 turns, in order to obtain 0.9 T along the bore would require approx. 3.2 MW
of power (1880 A at 1.7 kV). Is this the case?
No.
The length of this coil is about 0.3 meters and there are several axial layers,
so that the thickness of the wounding is about 10 cm. The parameters above need
to be recalculated.
3.
Did you need a cryopump as well as a mechanical pump to obtain 1 Pa vacuum? I
would have expected just the mechanical pump alone would have done the
job.
A
mechanical pump can suffice, as we need just to take all the moisture away from
the chamber so that there is no material or gas that is condensed on the emitter
and its holder during the discharge.
4.
Does the effect get better as the temperature of the disk
decreases?
The
effect gets slightly better when the temperature of the disk decreases below Tc,
but this fact is not crucial for the experiment.
5.
Does the effect also increase as the length of time the high voltage pulse
remains at, say, 1 MV?
We
didn’t observe any dependence.
6.
Does the effect increase with distance between the emitter and the
target?
The
effect increases with the distance between the emitter and the target and this
can be observed easily with configurations in figures 1 and 2. The set-up of
figure 3 is the best decision and the effect depends mainly on the voltage of
the discharge.
7.
Was there a time lag between the high voltage pulse and the start of the
movement of the pendulum?
Probably
there is, but the delay is really short and we didn’t measure
it.
8.
Have you considered lining up many pendulums one behind the other - do you think
they would all deflect the same amount? Could you in principle line up an
infinite number and obtain an infinite amount of energy with a finite energy
input?
We
tried several pendulums, up to 5, the deflection is the same. Probably with many
pendulums one would start to observe some energy depletion from the
beam.
9.
Did any of the pendulum bobs show any signs of heating up after repeated
pulses?
We
didn’t observe any heating.
10. Did you see a pendulum swing at the same time as you applied the discharge or it was somehow a static deflection?
The
impulse sets the pendulum in motion and then the oscillation dies out with its
own decay time. The coincidence with the discharge was only observed visually.
Technically it should be possible to compare the signal from the discharge with
the output of the microphone. The impulse propagation appears to be very fast,
but quantitative data are lacking on this point, so we did not emphasize it in
the paper.
11. Did you eliminate all possibilities of some other well known but accidental influence (such as shaking or disturbance due to nearby truck or train passing, for example) making the pendulum swing?
We are very
serious about our work, and there are no trains passing near our laboratory, I
also do not believe that any shaking can move the pendulum 6 inches away unless
it is an earthquake.
12. I would like to suggest a simple modification to the experiment. Why not to try to apply discharge periodically at the resonant frequency of the pendulum (or at fractions of it). So instead of measuring a swing which eventually dies out (due to friction), periodic application of the discharge would excite the motion of the pendulum resonantly and make it swing as long as you apply the discharge. This way it would help to eliminate any spurious effects due to accidental influence from other objects, which is sporadic and hence incapable of sustaining the excitation of the motion of the pendulum for a long time.
The
proposal of resonant pulses is interesting and can easily be done. The only
drawback I see is that the swing amplitude will depend on one more parameter,
namely the frequency. However, I think a better proof is a thick dictionary
staying on the table and falling down at the moment of the discharge and this
can be observed several times and at maximum capacity we can even throw this
thick book away from the table entirely… We have performed many hundreds of
discharges using different conditions and superconducting emitters. The
discharge chamber was shielded by a Faraday cage and all the pendula were
shielded by a metal plate with the thickness of 1 inch. The second set of
pendula was situated 150 m away and was separated by two brick walls from the
discharge chamber. I do not know any static or other electromagnetic forces that
can move an object at this distance under these
conditions.
13. Have you tried conventional emitter materials, such as Cu, Cs, etc., and do you get any extraordinary results with them?
All
conventional materials gave no unusual effect, we used copper, Al, steel,
chromites.
14.
Have you tested any effects at 180 degrees from the beam
direction?
There
is a strange effect at the backside of the installation opposite to the
discharge: the main discharge is accompanied by some radiation that is dangerous
for human biological tissues. This radiation goes about 15 meters back and has a
form of a cone with the diameter of about 2-2.5 meters at the distance of 12-15
meters. Any biological tissue under stress or load may be fused with any other
material, such as steel, plastic and so on. It is dangerous to stay behind the
discharge chamber. The impulse itself is not dangerous and can be felt by hand.
The radiation at the back side is not studied yet. Its origin might be in the
dissociation of Cooper pairs just outside the SC electrode, followed by
recombination with helium ions to form neutral helium. This could produce an
e.m. radiation with wavelenght such to escape the Faraday cage and to heat
tissues.
15.
Have you used a cloud chamber anywhere along the beam to see if there might be
some nuclear particles being emitted?
We did not use any cloud chamber and usual Geiger counter gives no indication but the discharge is very short in time.
16.
Have you placed any biological material, such as a test mouse, in the beam path
to see if there is any effect? It would seem to me that this force, whatever it
is, might be extremely dangerous biologically.
The main impulse gives no observable damage, perhaps long time exposure might cause some changes.
17. I am slightly confused by the diagram in Figure 4, which shows the output of the pulse generator as being a positive voltage. Is the emitter connected to a positive or negative voltage? Figure 4 suggests a positive voltage, yet the description in section 3 suggests a negative voltage as a huge charge of electrons leaves the emitter and strikes the target. Indeed, what happens if the voltage on the emitter is reversed?
Figure
4 is a general purpose scheme. The SC electrode is actually negative and the
reversed configuration does not work.
18. I am struck by the crudeness of the instrumentation for measurement of the impulse. A pendulum seems more like 18th century science. I would suggest that a piezoelectric transducer attached to a test mass might provide a better and more accurate detector, since it can be calibrated for momentum & force integration fairly easily.
It is true that the pendulum seems more
like old science, but results with a pendulum are straightforward and
unambiguous. We did consider using a piezo; eventually we used a condenser
microphone, for simplicity; but the problem is that these devices have a
peculiar transfer function depending on the frequency of the signal. So either
you are able to reconstruct the original signal properly, or the information is
incomplete.
19.
Did you measure the electromagnetic field at the location of the pendulum? I
understand that you have a Faraday cage, but how well does it screen the
electromagnetic field? You are dealing with rather short pulses, which may
contain significant energy at the frequencies higher than the plasma frequency
of the metal (depends on what metal you use). Such frequencies are not well
screened and may penetrate the metal.
We
agree that in an improved version a measurement of the e.m. field/radiation over
all spectrum will be necessary, also in order to obtain more complete
information about the phenomenon in general, about the features of the discharge
etc. (Compare the strange radiation, probably of e.m. nature, observed on the
back of the emitter.) We absolutely do not see, however, how any high-frequency
radiation could displace the pendulums as observed. Also note that if the SC
disk is not cooled down to liquid helium temperatures the discharge is
absolutely normal and no gravity impulse is observed.
20.
If the acceleration due to the impulse is about 10^3 g, it will lead to a
velocity shear of the air on the order of 1 m/sec between the areas in the path
of the impulse and those away from it. This should lead to quite a significant
air turbulence after the pulse. Is it something you observe? Furthermore,
because of the interaction with air, the energy should be depleted from the
radiation pulse as it propagates. With an air velocity of 1 m/s at standard
pressure and temperature, the energy lost by the beam should be of the order of
10^(-3) J per meter.
Observations
with smoke show that a brief movement of the particles occurs in the forward
direction and then the particles slightly go back. There is no real “wind” as
the impulse is very short, and there is no turbulence, no vortex phenomena. From
the theoretical point of view, the action of the beam on air is not easy to
describe. One can regard air as an elastic medium with pressure etc., or one can
consider scattering of radiation by the single molecules, but it is impossible
at this stage to tell which picture is correct.
21.
Do you know the % efficiency of this apparatus as a gravity
generator?
We
do not know exactly what fraction of the available e.m. energy is carried away
by the gravity impulse. The maximum energy available in principle in the
discharge is of the order of 10^5 J (Section 4(a)). The energy in the beam is
smaller than this and larger than the energy absorbed by the pendulums (~10^(-3)
J).
22.
Did you observe any effects of the beam farther than 150 m?
We
have already tested the effect of the beam at the distance of 1200 m.
Measurements a this distance show the same pendulum deflection within the error
of the readings (that does not exceed 10%), but further experiments are needed
as the target at the distance of 1200 m was at some angle to the surface (5th
floor of the building and the generator is at the ground level) and the results
are not precise enough. The borders of the impact are clearly observed, there
are no indications of any deviation from the geometry of the emitter.
23.
Do you believe the beam could reach several kilometres without
divergence?
It
depends on whether it is coherent, like a laser beam, or just well focalized,
like the beam of a parabolic antenna. It is entirely possible that the beam is
coherent, because its emission is induced by electron pairs which are in a
coherent state, a collective wave function. We cannot tell yet, however. Also,
this is not a radiation beam in the usual sense, because its energy-momentum
relation is not E=pc. In our view it is a "virtual beam" emitted by vacuum
fluctuations.
24. You could measure the beam
velocity as follows. Place two identical detectors A and B along the beam, at a
known distance one from the other, for instance AB=300 m. If the beam propagates
with the speed of light, then the detection delay will be 10^(-6) s. This can be
observed by comparing the signals of the two detectors as seen at the middle
point between A and B. Then for a check one can exchange A with
B.
This is correct. However, the method requires that the detectors have a temporal resolution better than 10^(-6) s. This is not the case of our microphone: the start of the oscillation can be marked with an uncertainty of 10^(-4) s at least (compare Fig. 6).
25.
Newton's Third Law of Motion would seem to indicate that if your experimental
device is creating a force on the objects in the path of its beam, then that
device should experience an equal back reaction. It may be possible to detect
this back-reaction simply by applying strain gages to the weakest portion of the
emitter's structural supports.
We did not notice any recoil, but precise measurements with strain gauges or similar were not done.
26. Is the quoted strength of 50 MOe for the NdFeB magnet correct, or a typographical error of some kind? Usual values are in the ~ 8,000 Oe range.
This
is actually the value of the magnet energy and should be expressed in
MGOe.
©
2001 – The Gravity Society –
www.gravity.org