Article in the August issue of Wired Magazine on antigravity devices called lifters which have no moving parts and require no onboard fuel supply. They almost look like the real deal. Sounds crazy, but apparently they do work. The only hitch is that it’s not antigravity that makes them fly:
What makes lifters fly? The simplest answer comes from antigravity debunkers. When I call university physicists to ask how these things work, they bark with laughter at the idea that it’s antigravity. The propulsive force, they say, has a simpler explanation: ion wind. When the current enters the wires ringing the top of the lifter, electrons race off to ionize the surrounding air. The ions are attracted to the foil skirt and race down, smacking into neutral molecules and generating a downward-moving breeze. At one point, I take my lifter to Rainer Weiss, a hyperactive, gray-haired gravity expert at MIT. He’s working on the groundbreaking LIGO project to detect gravitational waves – when he’s not dealing with journalists who plunk tinfoil UFOs down on his desk. He shakes his head and sighs. “There is nothing mysterious about this at all,” he says. He scribbles furiously across two sheets of paper, calculating the current flowing through the device, the number of ions it would create, and their total potential kinetic thrust. It’s about 7 millinewtons, he concludes, and scoops up my lifter. “Do you know how much this weighs? Let’s take a guess – it’s a couple of grams.” That’s probably just light enough to get it airborne. As far as he’s concerned, my lifter is nothing more than a hovercraft. Case closed.
