In November of last year Dr. Jochem Hauser wrote an interesting article on “The physics of Hollywood’s blockbuster movie Interstellar“, which discusses some possible inaccuracies of the movie despite the guidance of its science advisor, Dr. Kip Thorne. An interesting and sobering view of conflicts in the physics community popularized through the reach of film. The above link goes to the pdf of the article.
This video is about an ingenious manipulation of magnetic fields with computers that simulate a Zero-g object. This project was done at MIT’s Media Lab by Jinha Lee under the direction of Hiroshi Ishii, whom I met several years ago. It was Published on May 7, 2012.
It asks, “What if materials could defy gravity, so that we could leave them suspended in mid-air? ZeroN is a physical and digital interaction element that floats and moves in space by computer-controlled magnetic levitation.”
This level of thinking about what you could do by manipulating objects in 3-dimensional space to simulate things like the 3-body problem are wonderful explorations of creative thinking.
Some time ago the thought occurred to me that the apparent violation of conservation of energy reported by Steorn might also be found in experiments to produce gravity-like fields, though at first glance the two would appear to be completely unrelated.
In April of 2007 while under an NDA to Steorn, I posted some very speculative threads within their private forum. The postings posited a connection between experiments in gravity modification (as reported by inventor Marcus Hollingshead) and results of anomalous heat generation in the Orbo device developed by Steorn. This posting explores those connections, but readers should realize that these are very speculative discussions and lack a set of experiments to make the connections clear.
At the time of my posts Steorn was claiming the generation of “joule heating” (known as the “Orbo effect”) with its device. To the detriment of Steorn’s reputation, their first public demonstration in 2007 was cancelled and another in 2009 drew criticism when it became clear that a battery to “prime” the excess heat into the system was used and frequently recharged and thus energy input could not be reliably measured without criticisms of tampering. In 2002 inventor Marcus Hollingshead had claimed generation of a gravity-like field in his “Marcus device” using a series of counter-rotating rings studded with electromagnets positioned around a charged iron core. His demo was similarly cancelled and he never came to market with his device.
Though this site is devoted to developing the discipline of gravity design, it has on occasion noted the similarities between the findings represented by Steorn’s Orbo and Rossi’s LENR-based E-Cat. In the book Gravity 2.0 those two inventions were the only technologies suggested as potential sources of energy for gravity-like generators. As with claims by Steorn, the E-Cat similarly exhibits (albeit with more solid verification) anomalous heat generation and injection of initial power to “prime” the generation of excess power. In addition there has also been the suggestion by Dr. Bruce Ahern that asymmetric magnetic pulses provide the key mechanism underlying LENR. Asymmetric magnetism is claimed by Steorn to be the mechanism of joule heating for its device.
What about the E-Cat? The E-Cat also makes use of pulsed magnetic fields to induce its effect. As stated in the Lugano (third party) report, “the resistor coils are fed with some specific electromagnetic pulses. Similarlly, Professor Mitchell Swartz of MIT showed how applying powerful magnetic fields to NANORs (his LENR device) improves their operating properties permanently. He calls NANORs treated with magnetic fields, “M-NANOR”. Application of magnetic fields appears to either underly or enhance LENR.
Recent findings by third party researchers in the “Lugano report” appear to validate Rossi’s claims of excess energy production for the “hot cat” version of the E-Cat and confirm it as a nuclear process shifting neutrons in the Nickel fuel to the Lithium fuel. The specific mechanism is yet to be clearly identified, though a recent suggestion of bound neutron tunneling is an interesting hypothesis suggesting the basis for the shift. It also suggests the possibility that the iron (Fe) additives to the E-Cat’s fuel may lose nucleons resulting in the decay of Fe to Mn.
Pulsed magnetic fields may make possible nuclear processes in LENR. Might they also initiate nuclear processes for generating gravity-like fields? Hollingshead suggested a nuclear mechanism for his gravity-like field generator. He stated that a Cambridge University based physicist reported the gravitational effect was due to “pushing protons into becoming neutrons” by pulsing the iron core at the center of the device with strong magnetic fields. This suggestion of magnetically induced nucleon interactions would mean that eventually the iron would be depleted and the effect diminished. Hollingshead reported that after about 200 hours the iron purity of the core was contaminated with sufficient byproducts so that it would stop working until the iron core was replaced. I suggested in a December 2005 article that the decay of Fe to Mn in the iron core might be the “contaminants” mentioned by Hollingshead in his communications.
What are the similarities between the Marcus device and Orbo? In June 2007 I made the following proposal on Steorn’s private forum:
The Steorn Effect is the magnetic (Sv) analog of a gravitomagnetic (Gv) effect first reported by Marcus Hollingshead.
I’ve always wondered why inventors touting the discovery of antigravity also often mention that their devices create free energy. Perhaps these effects are rough analogs where free energy is about magnetic lag and antigravity is about gravitational lag.
About the time that Mssrs. McCarthy and Daly [Steorn] were pondering the energy excesses of their wind generator, an inventor named Hollingshead was posting on the BBC boards about an AG device that he had refined through 161 iterations (though he preferred the term “modified gravity” to AG). Like Steorn he also stumbled upon his effect, first thinking it purely magnetic until a professor at Cambridge with whom he consulted essentially said, “What you have here is modified gravity lensing”.
In that thread I noted similarities of the two systems:
Despite both inventions lacking sufficient replication from third parties (the Marcus device particularly so) there are intriguing similarities. However, to date Steorn has not suggested a nuclear mechanism for Orbo and has not claimed that it is LENR. The E-Cat does have a nuclear mechanism and employs “magnetic pulsing” similar to reports for the Marcus device.
But is there unaccounted energy produced in generating gravity-like fields? In their first published paper describing a set of experiments to produce gravity-like fields, Martin Tajmar and his co-author Clovis deMatos (at the time an Advanced Concepts and Studies Officer at ESA) described a lack of conservation of energy produced that might be tied to dark energy. In an April 2007 article New Scientist entitled “Superconductors inspire quantum test for dark energy”, DeMatos stated that “We did the sums and found out that energy wasn’t conserved, but perhaps that was just because we were missing dark energy.” Extended Heim Theory also posits that the gravity-like fields generated by symmetry breaking could explain dark energy. However, the nature of the lack of energy conservation does not appear to be related to the energy released through LENR.
At this juncture the following appears to be the status of the various devices:
EHT has suggested mechanisms for producing gravitomagnetic “symmetry breaking” through either fermionic coupling (due to polarization of the vacuum induced by very strong magnetic fields), or bosonic coupling (induced by rotating superconductors producing Cooper pairs). In an early paper on EHT, “SPACETIME PHYSICS AND ADVANCED PROPULSION CONCEPTS”, the authors suggested that though the exact formation of Cooper pairs is not known the coupling of the electron pairs seems to be via phonons, generated by electron movement through the proton charge of the ions in the crystal lattice of the superconductor. LENR has also been called Lattice Energy Nuclear Reactions due to the suggested site of the nuclear transformation within the lattice of nickel particles through the excitation of phonons.
The final thought on this speculative thread is this… is there a third way to induce symmetry breaking (either fermionic or bosonic) that follows the pathway of LENR, gives credence to Hollingshead’s claims, and still supports the theory of EHT?
A long-awaited extended study of the E-Cat low energy nuclear reactor by third party scientists has been published. A copy of the report is now posted at the web site Sifferkol.se.
Here is the explicit URL link: http://www.sifferkoll.se/sifferkoll/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/LuganoReportSubmit.pdf
Two days after the release of the paper the reaction from the major media outlets has yet to arrive. Several reviews from minor outlets are informative, including an article by Mark Gibbs who used to write for Forbes on the LENR phenomenon, and Extreme Tech. I have written about LENR and Rossi’s E-Cat eleven times in this blog since first mentioning the E-Cat in my book in March 2011. The two most relevant articles are here: E-Cat and Gravity Generators and It is Occasionally Nice to Back a Winner
In the book I singled out E-Cat as one of two potential non-interruptible distributed energy resources with sufficient energy density for powering floating architecture. But it is the shift in thinking about distributed power that will be most important in the coming months. A source with a million times the energy density of gasoline that does not use rare or expensive elements is going to create a major shift in thinking about energy. Because of its high Coefficient of Power (COP) the E-Cat has been shown to be capable of self-sustainability, though that was not tested in this most recent paper.
Gravity-like field generators are theorized to also self-sustain due to a tangential rotational force generated, similar to the homopolar motor effect (as can be demonstrated by anyone with a strong magnet, nail, battery and a wire). Until fabricated it is unknown how much power could be generated by the rotational force. Would it be able to generate sufficient excess energy to cool the required superconducting coils? If not, then a sustainable power source such as LENR would come into play.
As stated in NextBigFuture, a US scientist, Guido Fetta, has built his own propellant-less microwave thruster, and managed to persuade NASA to test it out. The test results were presented on July 30 at the 50th Joint Propulsion Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. Astonishingly enough, they are positive.
Numerical and Experimental Results for a Novel Propulsion Technology Requiring no On-Board Propellant
Guido P. Fetta, Cannae, LLC
Read More: http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2014-3853
The NASA team based at the Johnson Space Centre gave its paper the title “Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF [radio frequency] Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum”. The five researchers spent six days setting up test equipment followed by two days of experiments with various configurations. These tests included using a “null drive” similar to the live version but modified so it would not work, and using a device which would produce the same load on the apparatus to establish whether the effect might be produced by some effect unrelated to the actual drive. They also turned the drive around the other way to check whether that had any effect.
Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum
David A. Brady, Harold G. White, Paul March, James T. Lawrence, and Frank J. Davies
NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas 77058
This paper describes the eight-day August 2013 test campaign designed to investigate and demonstrate viability of using classical magnetoplasmadynamics to obtain a propulsive momentum transfer via the quantum vacuum virtual plasma. This paper will not address the physics of the quantum vacuum plasma thruster, but instead will describe the test integration, test operations, and the results obtained from the test campaign.
Back to 2009
A Nextbigfuture review of emdrive in 2009
A link to the 14 page word document on the 2009 EMDrive research
Wired also has an article on the Emdrive
A connection to EHT is not suspected as a theoretical basis for this drive despite the reliance of both upon superconductors.
A few weeks ago Steorn’s HephaHeat site threw up a construction sign as they get ready for a new phase. HephaHeat is a line of inline water heaters employing inductive heat and developed by the Irish engineering firm . The HephaHeat technology is purportedly based upon Steorn’s Orbo technology. See 2012 blog entries from Aug 3 and July 20.
CEO Shaun McCarthy recently mentioned in a forum that the coming weeks would be very interesting. Of course, Steorn’s Orbo-tech was mentioned in my book Gravity 2.0 as one of two possible avenues for providing continuous power for gravity-like field generators, the other being LENR (low [lattice] energy nuclear reactions). Steorn has backed off on its claims of a coefficient of power (COP) greater than 1 (more energy out than in) as it began developing HephaHeat.
Physicist Brian Ahern, mentioned in those previously cited blog entries, gave a presentation at the recent 2014 CF/LANR Colloquium at MIT on cold fusion (LENR).
The link to his presentation can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PS2v1kN1U8
Videos of the other conference presenters can be found here: http://coldfusionnow.org/interviews/2014-cflanr-colloquium-at-mit-full-coverage/
Ahern’s presentation, “Nanomagnetism for Energy Production”, proposes that nano-magnetism is perhaps the underlying basis of LENR. He has suggested that asymmetric magnetism within magnetic nanomaterials particles of 5-10nm underlies the effect of LENR due to the manner in which particles contained within a metal lattice oscillate, nanonickel being one of the more recent materials of choice in LENR research.
Asymmetric magnetism has been stated by Steorn as the basis of Orbo, and therefore HephaHeat. Seemingly, the connections between LENR and HephaHeat draw closer. This is important because although the granting of patents for LENR may have been proceeding in Europe and Japan, the US patent office does not grant patents for LENR (ie. cold fusion). However, Steorn has been granted patents in the US for its Orbo magnetic technology.
It has been too long since my most recent post in this blog, but a research paper caught my attention… and apparently that of Forbes.
My book Gravity 2.0 primary discusses social and design implications if gravity modification is achieved here on earth, though I do have one chapter devoted to what it means for near orbit technology and for deep space exploration. Both of the space venues would require new power technologies to produce sufficient specific energies to power craft to the stars and back over a period of years (not centuries).
In my book I mention two potential sources, one being Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat reactor employing Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR), otherwise known as cold fusion. That was in March 2011.
Yesterday a team of researchers from Bologna University in Italy and Uppsala University in Sweden reported in Cornell’s pre-publication physics archive arXiv.org that Rossi’s latest iteration of his reactor does indeed produce anomalous heat, “that is one order of magnitude higher than any conventional source.” That is, with the most conservative of figures and assumptions, the heat produced is at least ten times higher than that of any chemically energetic reaction known.
The devices tested contained nickel powder plus unknown additives pressurized with hydrogen gas. When the container was heated, substantial heat was produced in excess of the input heat. Initial heat was provided by spiral resistor coils powered from an outside source. “In the ON/OFF phase, the resistor coils were powered up and powered down by the control system at regular intervals of about two minutes for the ON state and four minutes for the OFF state. This operating mode was kept more or less unchanged for all the remaining hours of the test.” Rossi has mentioned on several occasions tests of versions of the device that use the excess energy from the device itself once initial operating temperatures are reached. In essence, it becomes self-sustaining.
The report has already been mentioned in Forbes, and its author, Mark Gibbs, concludes his story, “While a few commentators have raised criticisms concerning how the measurements were made and sources of error others have argued that the energy produced is so significant even knocking off an order of magnitude on either axis still portrays a process with insanely valuable output. This is not, of course, the last word or even one anywhere near the end of this story but unless this is one of the most elaborate hoaxes in scientific history it looks like the world may well be about to change. How quick will depend solely on Rossi“.
As for Extended Heim Theory, the theoretical basis for gravity modification, additional publications are being prepared. But I will offer this small offering for now, an interactive version of my book’s free preview. Roll over the “Z” for the option to open in a new window (preferred) or view full screen. It requires Flash, but later this year, it will run on all mobile devices.
On July 20 I mentioned in this blog that physicist Brian Ahern had proposed asymmetric magnetism as the basis for LENR. Steorn, an engineering firm in Dublin, had previously claimed that its Orbo power generation technology operated through the application of asymmetric magnetism. The Sunday Times Ireland’s business section recently contained a surprising new article on intellectual property development firm Steorn.
As reported in truthfall.com, “Their HephaHeat hot water boiling technology looks certain to reinvigorate the company’s finances with two multinational companies seeking to incorporate HephaHeat into consumer and commercial products netting Steorn royalties of around €50 Million per annum by 2017.”
Sunday Times Ireland reported…
“The Dublin technology company that claimed it could produce energy from nothing says that it has signed collaboration agreements with two large multinational manufacturers writes Tim Madigan.”
The agreements cover the design work required to incorporate Steorn’s HephaHeat technology into products that use steam and hot water.
This development marks the first time consumer product manufacturers have considered using HephaHeat in their designs.
Steorn courted controversy by placing an advert in the Economist in 2006 inviting scientists to inspect its Orbo technology, which it claimed produced “free, clean and constant energy”.
A two-year verification process overseen by a scientific jury concluded that Steorn has “not shown any evidence of energy production”.
The manufacturers, more convinced of the technology’s potential, are keen to enter into a design phase with the company.
HephaHeat is the tradename for Orbo in heating applications.
Steorn has raised 19 million Euros from investors to date according to Sean McCarthy, Steorn’s chief executive. Recently filed accounts show accumulated losses had reached 17.2m by the end of 2010.
If manufacturers include HephaHeat in their products, a license agreement is envisaged which would provide a royalty fee for each product sold.
HephaHeat technology is designed for electric water-heating products aimed at the domestic and commercial water-heating industry.
McCarthy claims that royalty fees from these agreements could be bringing in up to 50 million a year by 2017 if these deals progress beyond the design stage.”
Steorn will provide E-Cat, Defkalion and other LENR manufacturing firms with competition from their technology which may also employ LENR, but by another name.
Since I’ve broached the topic of LENR, the question now is “How commercially viable is LENR?” In part, that has been address in Tyler van Houweligne’s slideshow, “Is Commercial Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) the Real Deal?” available here: http://www.slideshare.net/tylervan/lenr
It is a well considered compilation of research and opinions, and though the tone may be influenced toward the affirmative by the author, the sources cited appear both legitimate and accurate according to several sources. However, this is not the final word and widely published research confirmations are still required.
This also posted in e-Cat World on the 17th:
“This short comment by Brian Ahern, CTO of Vibronic Energy, was posted on Peter Gluck’s Ergo Out web site today.
I am announcing the nanonickel breakthrough at the New Energy Symposium in NYC on Wednesday. I am saying the energy is real, repeatable and of useful output. I will also state that it is not of nuclear origin. I will say that it is a manifestation of asymmetric magnetism. This explains the lack of radiation accompanying my 21 watts of thermal excess power. Defkalion is getting even better results and others around the world are as well.
The energy landscape is going to change in a viral manner.
The New Energy Symposium is being held at 7 World Trade Center from July 17-19th, and Vibronic Energy Technologies is listed as one of the presenters there. Ahern has been working in the nickel-hydrogen reaction field for some time now, but neither he, or any other researcher in that field as far as I know has mentioned that the Ni-H reaction is a product of ‘asymmetric magnetism’. That sounds like something that would come from Steorn, rather than people working on LENR. Very curious.”
____________________
Steorn has a rather mixed reputation after a very high profile claim of an excess production of energy through subtle manipulation of asymmetric magnetism, and then switching to a very low profile as they develop their HephaHeat spinoff product.
In my book I had suggested that gravityships and other uses of gMOD might be continually powered either through LENR or through application of Steorn’s research in asymmetric magnetism to providing high energy outputs after an initial input of energy… very similar to LENR.
Many thousands of hours under four years of NDAs were spent by myself and dozens of outside engineers to study the “Steorn Effect” using solid and nanonickel alloys, but key elements to a successful replication were always out of reach. Now Ahern (PhD in Materials Science from MIT, consultant to the USAF and formerly of Ames National Laboratory) is similarly announcing energy production from asymmetric magnetism. Here is his presentation (actually more of a pitch… and parts are visually clipped) to the New Energy Symposium: http://cnse.albany.edu/download/Vibronic_Energy_Technologies.pdf
In NextBigFuture on Nov 18 of last year, it was reported that Ahern explained his findings to Akito Takahashi working to replicate the LENR experiments of Yashiaki Arata in early 2009 and he (Takahashi) succeeded immediately.
As NextBigFuture reported,
“Ahern has been funded for 2.5 years to replicate Arata and then push on towards Piantelli. Ahern has also been guiding George Miley’s group at UIUC on this nanotechnology, and the group seems to be enjoying a great deal of success in the month on October.
It also appears that the phenomenon may account for and explains a persistent mystery regarding the unification of physics.
Ahern states “In the last 8 weeks I have been astounded by a superior nanotechnology that will capture the imagination of even the greatest foes of LENR. I believe all of LENR is just a new and unanticipated form of nanomagnetism.”