Jude Gomila

Where are my flying cars?

There has been a pretty large rise in the mainstream discussion of UAPs recently and all sorts of discussions on whether the government could make such craft that could manipulate gravity.

My gripe has been a severe lack of actual conversation on the physics, material science and experimental results about what is currently possible. When it comes to the youtube podcast interviews on such topics, we see analysis of secret sources, grainy videos and first hand eye witness testimonies from people situations we can never replicate.

I believe there is a gravity renaissance occurring right now on real terms and people are getting excited about the possibilities and mystery.

So I decided to investigate a little as to whether one could manipulate gravity with the currently 'known' physics hiding in papers and recent engineering technologies.

To throw some background on it, there is something called the Equivalence Principle (EP) which underpins our description of gravity and it comes in 3 flavors (weak, einstein and strong). Any violations of EP and you have got something HUGE which engineers could use to work with. So the search starts with that.

Weak EP suggests the trajectory of a falling test mass is independent of its internal structure and composition. I.e. we cannot build craft that would mess with gravity (reflect/concentrate it etc) in order to make an antigravity craft no matter what exotic geometry and materials you use. But is this principle true?

Back in 2009 there was an interesting paper that claims we might be able to make 'gravity mirrors' using superconducting films to reflect gravity waves (at microwave frequencies). (This paper is in the next tweet).

Since then, there has been huge progress in gravity research. From LIGOs quantum squeezing breakthrough that allows to surpass quantum limits in measurements to measure spacetime distortions 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 times smaller than a human hair. Frequency dependent optical cavities for noise reductions in measurement. Selective control on quantum noise for different frequencies of gravity waves. Dark matter detection using gravity wave detectors.

Zoom forward to aug 2024, a paper came out that goes to directly test violations of EP (specifically weak EP).

They use a cryogenic torsion balance with a pendulum made of superconducting niobium and copper. (This experiment is hard to pull off! see diagram in this tweet).

Their conclusions put constraints on deviations from EP on super conductors. But, as far as I understand doesn't rule it out.

I'd like physics twitter have a go at attacking it in this thread. Bring your ideas, papers, arguments, evidence, builds.

Some scale up ideas though for making it a more practical device if the effect worked here:

• use metamaterial hyperbolic hybrid layers of the superconducting thin films, to widen up the frequencies that the mirror can reflect from beyond microwaves to broad spectrum
• use dynamic tuning of the system to detect the frequency spectrum of the incoming gravitational waves and adapt the geometry of the nested hyperbolic hybrid metamaterial . this might be achieved with photonic crystals that can adapt to gravitational wave frequencies.
• use epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) materials to get to near zero permittivity of the wave and achieve enhanced coupling.
• use higher temp superconductors for reduction of overall system weight

Anyway, what you got on this?