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Could anyone interested in weight and gravity do the following experiment and post the results back on here in pounds. Weigh yourself at the middle of your ground floor, weigh yourself again immediately outside your building, and then again finally back at the middle of your ground floor. Thanks in advance. Mark

The way gravity effects quantum particles proves that it cannot be an emergent phenomenon, says physicist. One of the most exciting ideas in modern physics is that gravity is not a traditional force, like electromagnetic or nuclear forces. Instead, it is an emergent phenomenon that merely looks like a traditional force. This approach has been championed by Erik Verlinde at the University of Amsterdam who put forward the idea in 2010. He suggested that gravity is merely a manifestation of entropy in the Universe, which always increases according to the second law of thermodynamics. This causes matter distribute itself in...

Progress Toward the Dream of Space Drives and Stargates by Paul Gilster on May 23, 2011 by James F. WoodwardI first wrote about James Woodward’s work in my 2004 book Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration, and have often been asked since to comment further on his research. But it’s best to leave that to the man himself, and I’m pleased to turn today’s post over to him. A bit of biography: Jim Woodward earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics at Middlebury College and New York University (respectively) in the 1960s. From his undergraduate days, his chief...

An international team of astronomers claim to have found free-floating "planets" which do not seem to orbit a star.Writing in Nature, they say they have found 10 Jupiter-sized objects which they could not connect to any solar system. They also believe such objects could be as common as stars are throughout the Milky Way. The objects revealed themselves by bending the light of more distant stars, an effect called "gravitational microlensing".Objects of large enough mass can bend light, as Albert Einstein predicted. If a large object passes in front of a more distant background star, it may act as a...

Anti-gravity technology is a theme in many works of science fiction, and a hope for those who dream of radical engineering breakthroughs. It is also, I have learned, a topic of serious study in a segment of the scientific community. I recently interviewed Gregory Daigle, author of a newly released book Gravity 2.0: Design Strategies for a Gravity Modified World to learn more about the field... FET: What made you focus on the design aspect of modification of gravity? GD: If gravity-like fields, both attractive and repulsive, can be produced along the lines proposed by Extended Heim Theory (EHT) then...

Massive hump-backed animal falls on people in pewsA Christmas show camel got a little too close for comfort for audience members at a West Palm Beach Baptist church Thursday night, after it did a belly flop onto a row of pews during a rehearsal. The incident happened at the First Baptist Church of West Palm Beach and was filmed and posted to YouTube, thankfully. The video shows the massive hump-backed mammal being escorted down the aisle before it tumples over a few rows of pews an onto helpless spectators. Liz Reilly, an audience member who saw the whole thing...

1960s songbird Joan Baez had a treehouse built -- without walls -- 20 feet high in an oak tree behind her Woodside home because she wanted to sleep with birds. The folksinging legend, who once performed the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" before a half-million people at Woodstock, fell from that treehouse Wednesday as she climbed down from the platform.

God didn't create the universe, Stephen Hawking says in his latest book, "A Grand Design." Rather, the renowned physicist writes, "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing." Everything – created from nothing? The assertion begged a reply from the author of "Nothing Created Everything: The Scientific Impossibility of Atheistic Evolution." "It is embarrassingly unscientific to speak of anything creating itself from nothing," said Ray Comfort, a best-selling author and acclaimed minister who's confronted and confounded some of the world's most accomplished atheists. "Common sense says that if something possessed the...

As Sir Isaac Newton himself replied in response to similar questions, "hypotheses non fingo." Which roughly translates as "I don't have a clue." That such a simple question, about so common a phenomenon, has defied a direct answer for centuries might explain why the physics world has been atwitter lately over a novel attempt to resolve the riddle. A flurry of recent papers have examined this new idea, which mixes principles from string theory and black hole physics with basic old-fashioned thermodynamics. If this notion is right, gravity turns out to be a special sort of entropy, a result of...

Physicists struggling to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics have hailed a theory – inspired by pencil lead – that could make it all very simpleIT WAS a speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski proclaimed, "and...

When scientists send their spacecraft across the universe, they save fuel by performing “slingshot fly-bys”. This is where, rather than firing up the thrusters, the craft changes its trajectory by harnessing the enormous gravitational pull of a planet. However, this trick has had an unexpected side-effect: it seems to produce a change in speed that no one, since it was first discovered in the early 1990's, can account for. Experts are intrigued by the fact that while the acceleration is tiny and has no significant effect on NASA missions, it holds great interest because no explanation based on conventional physics...

The new role that quantum information plays in gravity sets the scene for a dramatic unification of ideas in physics One of the hottest new ideas in physics is that gravity is an emergent phenomena; that it somehow arises from the complex interaction of simpler things. A few month's ago, Erik Verlinde at the the University of Amsterdam put forward one such idea which has taken the world of physics by storm. Verlinde suggested that gravity is merely a manifestation of entropy in the Universe. His idea is based on the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy always increases over...

Gore vs. Palin on climate change Posted: Wednesday, December 09, 2009 10:41 AM by Mark Murray From NBC's Andrea Mitchell In an interview that will air on MSNBC at 1:00 pm ET today, Al Gore rebutted Sarah Palin's Washington Post op-ed and Facebook postings that question the science on climate change given the "Climate-gate" controversy. In response, Gore said that "the deniers are persisting in an era of unreality. The entire North Polar icecap is disappearing before our eyes... What do they think is happening?" He said we've seen record storms, droughts, fires -- and the effects taking place are...

Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint? EVER since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity has only become stronger. Could it now be that starlight from distant galaxies is illuminating cracks in the theory’s foundation? .... Yet it is still not clear how well general relativity holds up over cosmic scales, at distances much larger than the span of single galaxies. Now the first, tentative hint of a deviation from general relativity has been found. While the evidence...

He [Jesus] is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." -Col. 1:17 REPORTER'S NOTE: Though I'm taking a stab in the dark (excuse the pun) with interpreting this article, one thing is certain: these scientists seem to ascribe cognizant, rational attributes to an invisible "force" that is "ruling over" dark matter in the universe. I'll let you read the article and come to your own conclusions! -Teresa Neumann, BCN. Science Daily reports that an international team of astronomers have found an unexpected link between mysterious 'dark matter' and the visible stars and gas in galaxies that could...

Can we calculate the gravitational field of a mass moving close to the speed of light? Franklin Felber (Starmark Inc) believes he can, with implications for propulsion. Back in 2006 we looked briefly at Felber’s work, describing what the physicist believes to be a repulsive gravitational field that emerges from his results. Felber discussed the matter at the Space Technology and Applications International meeting that year, where he presented his calculations of the ‘relativistically exact motion of a payload in the gravitational field of a source moving with constant velocity.’ Above a certain critical velocity, Felber believes, any mass...

Are cosmic rays revealing the quantum nature of spacetime? Could theories of (not) everything help solve the puzzle of quantum gravity? The architect of doubly special relativity thinks so.In his youth, there were two things that regularly competed for Giovanni Amelino-Camelia’s attention: his favorite soccer team, Napoli, and "anything that came close to being scientific." And since Napoli was struggling in the Italian soccer league in the summer of 1978, Amelino-Camelia found himself watching a series of programs on special relativity instead of soccer. "That was really the point of no return for me," he remembers. "Although I was 13-years...

Scientists funded by the European Space Agency believe they may have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity and could help physicists to make a significant step towards the long-sought-after quantum theory of gravity. Just as a moving electrical charge creates a magnetic field, so a moving mass generates a gravitomagnetic field. According to Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, the effect is virtually negligible. However, Martin Tajmar, ARC Seibersdorf Research GmbH, Austria, and colleagues believe they have measured...

We don't think it's a surprise to anyone that there's a double standard in Hollywood when it comes to looks and weight loss. Why is it that Jessica Simpson and Hilary Duff get creamed for putting on a few pounds while Russell Crowe and Tom Hanks get awards for it?

For example, Dr Eugenie Scott of the staunchly anticreationist National Center for Science Education (NCSE) revealed their agenda when she said: “ … I would describe myself as a humanist or a nontheist. I have found that the most effective allies for evolution are people of the faith community. One clergyman with a backward collar is worth two biologists at a school board meeting any day! … What we [such clergy and atheists] have in common is that we want to see evolution taught in the public schools … .”4

Gravity highs (red) and lows (blue) on the Moon (Lunar nearside right, farside left)Science Results from the Japanese space agency's SELENE mission to the Moon are revealing details about why the lopsided lump of rock orbiting Earth is so unbalanced.The SELENE (Selenological and Engineering Explorer, or Kaguya) mission was launched in September 2007 to gather detailed geological information about the Moon. The results are published in Science1,2,3,4.Because the Moon has no atmosphere or weather to speak of, its geology has remained almost unchanged since it formed. So unpicking its structure could offer information about how the early Solar System —...

ABHAY ASHTEKAR remembers his reaction the first time he saw the universe bounce. "I was taken aback," he says. He was watching a simulation of the universe rewind towards the big bang. Mostly the universe behaved as expected, becoming smaller and denser as the galaxies converged. But then, instead of reaching the big bang "singularity", the universe bounced and started expanding again. What on earth was happening? Ashtekar wanted to be sure of what he was seeing, so he asked his colleagues to sit on the result for six months before publishing it in 2006. And no wonder. The theory...

~~~snip~~~ Electromagnetic waves are far too slow to be the only means of signalling in an immense universe. Gravity requires the near-instantaneous character of the electric force to form stable systems like our solar system and spiral galaxies. Gravitationally, the Earth ‘sees’ the Sun where it is this instant, not where it was more than 8 minutes ago. Newton’s famous law of gravity does not refer to time. We must have a workable concept of the structure of matter that satisfies the observation that the inertial and gravitational masses of an object are equivalent. When we accelerate electrons or protons...

May 22, 2008: Meet MIT professor of physics Maria Zuber. She's dynamic, intelligent, intense, and she's on a quest for the Grail. No, not that Grail. Zuber is the principal investigator of the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory — "GRAIL" for short. It's a new NASA mission slated for launch in 2011 that will probe the moon's quirky gravity field. Data from GRAIL will help scientists understand forces at play beneath the lunar surface and learn how the moon, Earth and other terrestrial planets evolved. "We're going to study the moon's interior from crust to core," says Zuber. "It's very...

Pioneer spacecraft mystery may be laid to rest 14:30 15 April 2008 NewScientist.com news service Valerie Jamieson, St Louis What is making NASA's twin Pioneer spacecraft mysteriously drift off course, apparently defying the laws of physics? A rigorous new analysis suggests ordinary heat emission can at least partly explain the wayward probes' strange trajectories.Pioneer 10 and 11 were launched in the early 1970s and explored the outer solar system. But in 1980, mission scientists noticed that the spacecraft have unexpectedly drifted off course.Both spacecraft have been pulled a little harder than expected towards the sun, and since their launch, they...

Everyone knows the score with black holes: even if light strays too close, the immense gravity will drag it inside, never to be seen again. They are thought to be created when large stars finally spend all their fuel and collapse. It might come as a surprise, therefore, to find that physicists in the UK have now managed to create an “artificial” black hole in the lab. Originally, theorists studying black holes focused almost exclusively on applying Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes how the gravity of massive objects arises from the curvature of space–time. Then, in 1974, the...

Gravity Powered Lamp, Designed By Student, Provides As Much Light As 40 Watt BulbThe Gravia LED lamp will be powered by gravity. It will be about 4 feet high and the entire column will glow. (Credit: Clay Moulton) ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2008) — A Virginia Tech student has created a floor lamp powered by gravity. Clay Moulton of Springfield, Va., who received his Master of Science in Architecture with a concentration in industrial design from the College of Architecture and Urban Studies in 2007, created the lamp as a part of this master’s thesis. The LED lamp, named Gravia, has...

I have a small LSA airplane that is kind of weak on instruments. One thing I do not have is an attitude indicator so when I am in a cloud or fog, I do not know if I am in a bank, a dive, or a climb. Some of my "friends" and experienced aviators suggested I carry one of my cats with me. I was told to fly with my left hand on the yoke and toss the cat up and down with my right hand. As we all know, cats always land on their feet. I was told to...

Obesity is more dangerous than smoking and will dramatically shorten the lives of millions, a landmark study has found. While smoking reduces life by an average of ten years, the research says being seriously overweight can cut life expectancy by as much as 13 years. The Foresight report, written by 250 leading scientists, says Britain's obesity crisis is so severe that it would take at least 30 years to reverse. If current trends continue, by 2050 about 60 per cent of men, 50 per cent of women and 25 per cent of children in the UK will be clinically obese...

The 'Pioneer anomaly' – the mystifying observation that NASA's two Pioneer spacecraft have drifted far off their expected paths – cannot be explained by tinkering with the law of gravity, a new study concludes. The study's author suggests an unknown, but conventional, force is instead acting on the spacecraft. But others say even more radical changes to the laws of physics could explain the phenomenon. Launched in the early 1970s, NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft are drifting out of the solar system in opposite directions, gradually slowing down as the Sun's gravity pulls back on them. But they are...

...what if the equivalence principle (EP) is wrong? Galileo's experiments were only accurate to about 1 [per cent], leaving room for doubt, and skeptical physicists have been "testing EP" ever since. The best modern limits, based on, e.g., laser ranging of the Moon to measure how fast it falls around Earth, show that EP holds within a few parts in a trillion (1012). This is fantastically accurate, yet the possibility remains that the equivalence principle could fail at some more subtle level. "It's a possibility we must investigate," says physicist Clifford Will of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. "Discovering...

Satellites solve mystery of low gravity over Canada 20:16 10 May 2007 NewScientist.com news service Kelly Young The GRACE satellites have detected changes in the gravitational field over regions of Canada that can be attributed to the crust bouncing back after the melting of a glacier 20,000 years ago and convection in Earth's mantle (Illustration: Science/M Tamisiea) If it seems Canadians weigh less than their American neighbours, they do – but not for the reasons you might think. A large swath of Canada actually boasts lower gravity than its surroundings. Researchers have puzzled for years over whether this was due...

NEW YORK – It’s been years since NASA last heard from either of its two Pioneer probes hurtling out of the solar system, but scientists are still debating the source of an odd force pushing against the outbound spacecraft. Dubbed the Pioneer Anomaly, the unexplained force appears to be acting against NASA’s identical Pioneer 10 and 11 probes, holding them back as they head away from the Sun

Ramanath Cowsik, a Washington University physicist, will poke and prod at some of the most daunting problems remaining in physics: What is causing the universe to fly apart, faster and faster each year?Why is gravity so weak and so different from the other basic forces in the universe? And what is the true shape of the universe? In an era of big science -- billion-dollar space telescopes and atom smashers -- Cowsik's approach is refreshingly small. The apparatus, called a torsion balance, is cheap and based on a centuries-old idea. He says the torsion balance will cost about $100,000. When...

Al-Jazeera is reporting that Saddam Hussein, a former President of Iraq, has discovered “The Law of Gravity” according to The Grand Muff-Tea cleric of the Al Akbar Mosque. “Saddam Hussein is a great scientist. Yesterday, he made a great discovery, and has proven what we Muslims now call The Law of Gravity”, said the Grand Muff-Tea. According to the leader of the Al Akbar Mosque, “. . . all great achievements come from Islam, as we see in this great discovery from Islamic scientist Saddam Hussein . . . the West cannot defeat our genius . . .” Others in...

In the standard theory of gravity—general relativity—dark matter plays a vital role, explaining many observations that the standard theory cannot explain by itself. But for 70 years, cosmologists have never observed dark matter, and the lack of direct observation has created skepticism about what is really out there.Lately, some scientists have turned the question around, from “is dark matter correct?” to “is our standard theory of gravity correct?” Most recently, Fermilab scientists Scott Dodelson and former Brinson Fellow Michele Liguori demonstrated one of the first pieces of theoretical evidence that an alternative theory of gravity can explain the large scale...

When Douglas Clowe of the University of Arizona in Tucson announced on 21 August that his team had "direct proof of dark matter's existence", it seemed the issue had been settled. Now proponents of the so-called modified theories of gravity, who explain the motion of stars and galaxies without resorting to dark matter, have hit back and are suggesting that Clowe's team has jumped the gun. "One should not draw premature conclusions about the existence of dark matter without a careful analysis of alternative gravity theories," writes John Moffat, of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, who pioneered an...

Gravity's quantum leaps detected   19:00 16 January 02 Hazel Muir   Gravity's subtle influence in the quantum world has been directly observed for the first time. On tiny scales, nature makes particles behave according to curiously rigid rules. For instance, negatively charged electrons trapped around a positive nucleus under the pull of the electromagnetic force cannot have any energy they want -they have to fall into a set of distinct energy levels. In the same way, the pull of gravity should make particles fall into discrete energy levels. But because gravity is extremely weak on small scales, the effect has been ...

Scientists use quantum gravity to describe the universe before the Big Bang.Scientists may finally have an answer to a "big" question: If the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, what could have caused it to happen? Using a theory called "loop quantum gravity," a group led by Penn State professor Abhay Ashtekar has shown that just before the Big Bang occurred, another universe very similar to ours may have been contracting. According to the group's findings, this previous universe eventually became so dense that a normally negligible repulsive component of the gravitational force overpowered the attractive component, causing...

Neptune's largest moon, Triton, was originally a member of a duo orbiting the Sun but was kidnapped during a close encounter with Neptune, a new model suggests. Triton is unique among large moons in that it orbits Neptune in a direction opposite to the planet's rotation, which long ago led scientists to speculate that the moon originally orbited the Sun. But until now, no convincing theory for how Triton paired with Neptune existed. Gravity might have pulled Triton away from its companion to make it an orbiting satellite of Neptune, researchers report in a new study published in the May...

Not really a game, but fun to play with. Gravity Based Movement

The simple common belief that UFOs propagate with anti-gravity lift and “known gyroscopic” principles is not correct. That is what may have misguided country after country as they have tried to mimic UFO propulsion and navigation. What really induced engineers to develop the computer models is that simple anti-gravity lift and propulsion systems were not taking them anywhere. Soon they realized that anti-gravity is the secondary dynamic force. The computer models were showing that the flight trajectories were too flexible for any gyroscope driven just with anti-gravity lift. The model brought engineers to look into something called “inertia of an...

Spaceflight Now | Breaking News | Relativity mission achieves two major milestones Relativity mission achieves two major milestones NASA-MSFC NEWS RELEASEPosted: March 6, 2002 The NASA Gravity Probe B (GP-B) Relativity Mission has successfully mated its science payload to its spacecraft and after successful systems testing, the GP-B space vehicle was shipped to Sunnyvale, Calif., on Feb. 9, 2002, to prepare for upcoming rigorous environmental tests. The Gravity Probe B spacecraft on a modal stand in preparation for environmental testing. Photo: Lockheed Martin  "These milestones are a huge accomplishment for this dedicated team," said Gravity Probe B program manager Rex ...

Painstaking observations of a kind of subatomic dance suggest that the universe may contain a shadowy form of matter that has never been seen directly and is unexplained by standard physics theories, a team of scientists working at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island announced yesterday. The studies appear to confirm similar findings the scientists reported last year. The research involves muons, rare subatomic particles similar to electrons but 207 times as heavy. The work has been controversial, though for reasons that have little to do with the experiment itself. Theorists who are not involved in the research, but whose...

Gravity waves analysis opens 'completely new sense' PRESS RELEASE Washington University in St. Louis St. Louis, MO. -- Sometime within the next two years, researchers will detect the first signals of gravity waves -- those weak blips from the far edges of the universe passing through our bodies every second. Predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity waves are expected to reveal, ultimately, previously unattainable mysteries of the universe. Wai-Mo Suen, Ph.D., professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis is collaborating with researchers nationwide to develop waveform templates to comprehend the signals to be analyzed. In...

Red faces, and empty pockets, at the bookies Iain Thomson, vnunet.com 07 Nov 2005 Scientists working on the detection of gravity waves could be in line for huge payouts from bookmakers Ladbrokes. Ladbrokes began promoting bets on scientific discoveries last summer, and offered 500:1 on gravity waves not being detected before 2010. After scientists flocked to the betting shops the odds were cut to 5:1 and Ladbrokes closed the book a few weeks later when odds had fallen further. Ladbrokes spokesman Karl Williams said: "We've been blinded by science. We're looking at a £150,000 loss if the experiments are successful....

Is Earth in a vortex of space-time? We'll soon know the answer: A NASA/Stanford physics experiment called Gravity Probe B (GP-B) recently finished a year of gathering science data in Earth orbit. The results, which will take another year to analyze, should reveal the shape of space-time around Earth--and, possibly, the vortex. Time and space, according to Einstein's theories of relativity, are woven together, forming a four-dimensional fabric called "space-time." The tremendous mass of Earth dimples this fabric, much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline. Gravity, says Einstein, is simply the motion of objects following...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- The U.S. patent office has reportedly granted a patent for an anti-gravity device -- breaking its rule to reject inventions that defy the laws of physics. The journal Nature said patent 6,960,975 was granted Nov. 1 to Boris Volfson of Huntington, Ind., for a space vehicle propelled by a superconducting shield that alters the curvature of space-time outside the craft in a way that counteracts gravity. One of the main theoretical arguments against anti-gravity is that it implies the availability of unlimited energy. "If you design an anti-gravity machine, you've got a perpetual-motion machine," Robert...

On Tuesday, Feb. 14, noted physicist Dr. Franklin Felber will present his new exact solution of Einstein's 90-year-old gravitational field equation to the Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF) in Albuquerque. The solution is the first that accounts for masses moving near the speed of light. New antigravity solution will enable space travel near speed of light by the end of this century, he predicts. Felber's antigravity discovery solves the two greatest engineering challenges to space travel near the speed of light: identifying an energy source capable of producing the acceleration; and limiting stresses on humans and equipment during...

<p>The US military is considering testing the principle behind a type of space drive which holds the promise of reaching Mars in just three hours. The problem is, as New Scientist explains, it's entirely theoretical and many physicists admit they don't understand the science behind it.</p>