I had missed the fact that earlier this year in a response to an early version of Tajmar’s paper on the role of helium (see June 23 entry), Jochim Hauser and Walter Droscher suggested that there are no major friction effects with helium. Since the effect is not due to the mechanical friction of rotating gases the authors suggest Tajmar’s anomalous effect must be due to other mechanisms.
They go on to say that since symmetry breaking is required for the production of gravitophotons, yet the Tajmar’s effect occurs at temperatures higher than required for Cooper-pair formation, it is likely not the Cooper-pair bosons that produce the symmetry breaking.
This brings into the mix the possibility that a yet unidentified symmetry breaking mechanism far above superconducting temperatures may be sufficient to produce Tajmar’s results (see note from the Editor near the bottom of the April 14 Blog entry).
AUTHOR: Mike
DATE: 02/18/2009 12:52:32 AM
I haven’t been keeping up with Tajmar’s work but I came across this blog and found it quite interesting. However, I am curious – was Tajmar’s experiment ever replicated successfully? I have only found one independent replication attempt which did not succeed. If there is any chance of gravity modification being possible, then Tajmar’s work is probably it.
http://www2.phys.canterbury.ac.nz/~physrin/papers/SuperFrameDragging2007.pdf
Reply from Editor:
The Canterbury data was pretty noisy. Tajmar saw a dip in their data but the NZ group erred on the side of caution. Also, the Canterbury team measured lead, not niobium, used a slower rotation, moved the position of the sensors and averaged angular speeds, potentially smoothing the results of angular acceleration. So the results were not surprisingly minimal and noisy but the trend of the data supported Tajmar’s results.
But another source of confirmation is from Gravity Probe B. Even though NASA has lost faith in the reliability of GPB’s data, Tajmar compares his results to that of Canterbury and GPB and says the results of both are supportive: arXiv:0707.3806 (July 2007) – “Search for Frame-Dragging-Like Signals Close to Spinning Superconductors”
Finally, Dröscher and Hauser are supportive of Tajmar’s findings and we expect to see a joint publication before too long (we hope!). And experiments are still underway at EarthTech to independently verify his results.