Gravitational Field Created in the Lab

This is either one of those findings, like cold fusion, which will fall into the waste bin of Artifacts and Irrepeatable Results, or it will turn out to be something really significant. I think that it's too early to tell. Significantly, the authors, M. Tajmar et al of the European Space Agency, claim to have repeated their experiment 250 times, so either their interpretation of what they did is off or there is something really exciting going on. What they have done, apparently, is to rotate a ring of superconducting material at about 6500 rotations per minute (not that fast, really) and measured a gravitational field created thereby.

I came about this story via a blogger named Maynard at Daily Kos, a site usually more given to calls for political action rather than scientific musings. The physicists out there might want to read the original paper, which is linked here. There seems to be some dispute as to whether or not the size of the gravitational field created contradicts Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In their original paper, the authors do not make this claim.

Science Class

In science class today, we have a substitute teacher (me) who does not claim to be a physicist. The subject is gravity, which was pretty much taken for granted until the apocryphal apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head. The everyday experience of stuff falling to Earth didn’t seem to arouse that much curiosity until Newton, who was curious about everything, put his considerable intellect to work, and came up with his inverse square law for gravitational attraction. It must be said that Newton himself was not all that satisfied with his creation; it described gravity but didn’t say anything about how it worked.

Still, Newton had the last word on the subject of gravity until Einstein came along. Einstein didn’t like gravity at all. How can an object in space detect the presence of another object in space without exchanging some sort of information? But the fastest rate at which information can travel, according to Einstein, is the speed of light and light itself, even though it has no mass, seems to be bent by gravity. Ergo gravity can’t really exist. The presence of mass in the universe bends space-time and causes havoc with our presumed Cartesian coordinate systems. There really are no straight lines. The space-time that I am living in is rushing headlong into the center of the Earth, causing considerable strain on my aching joints as I struggle to avoid traveling with it.

Einstein, as you may have heard, had a lot of problems aligning his theories (which have now been largely verified experimentally) with the predictions of quantum theory, which have also been very successful. Quantum theory has its own take on gravity. Gravity is a weak force (compared to intermolecular and interatomic forces) in the universe whose effect is mediated by a particle (wavicle) known as the graviton. Alas, as far as I know, no one has ever actually captured a graviton.

However, if you think about it, gravity is very symmetrical in principle to the magnetic force. Like gravity, magnetism seems to involve force fields that allow action at a distance and can influence the trajectory of objects that are susceptible to magnetism. Think of those tracings of iron filings that illuminate magnetic force fields. A gravitational field is something like that, only it affects everything that has mass.

Gauge theories

To go beyond the above description of gravity requires that we call in a real physicist to give a more detailed explanation or resort to horrible stuff like equations (there is a reason that I’m a biologist).

So I will try to slide by with quotations from a book that I have been reading called The World within the World by John Barrow. “Modern theories of elementary particles and their interactions with one another are called “gauge theories.” The first such theory was Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism.” Here is where stuff starts to get interesting and bears on the creation of gravitation in the laboratory. “The requirement of the gauge symmetry of Maxwell’s equations and their quantum edition forbids the existence of a photon possessing mass…” Mass in the universe is created, it turns out, when gauge symmetries are broken, and that is apparently what Tajmar et al have done with their gravity spinning machine (the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic coil)--photons are actually gaining mass within the superconductor.

Some of their findings are as follows.

“An acceleration field was found to be induced by applying angular accelerations to a superconductor. The field produced is directly proportional to the applied acceleration with a correlation factor higher than 0.96. All mean values are 3.3 times above the facility noise level.”

“The gravitational field is emitted from the superconductor and follows the laws of field propagation and induction similar to those of electromagnetism as formulated in linearized general relativity.”

“For the first time, non-Newtonian gravitational and gravitomagnetic fields of measurable magnitude were observed in a laboratory environment.”

This is a startling result. If true, it is hard to imagine all of the consequences and fall-out.