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I feel like part of the cultural fascination with flying saucers is that we intuitively feel like it should be possible for someone with advanced technology to

I feel like part of the cultural fascination with flying saucers is that we intuitively feel like it should be possible for someone with advanced technology to levitate without expending power. We are starting to get there, with quantum locking, which can levitate a type-II superconductor relative to a supporting magnetic field. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws6AAhTw7RA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws6AAhTw7RA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning I wonder if it would be physically possible to utilize the Earth's extremely weak magnetic field to support any meaningful mass?

purpled_haze 11y ago
I think the cultural fascination started with UFOs started with the first sighting on June 24, 1947: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting After that, it was picked up in movies and TV, with the first movie being the 1950 film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Saucer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Saucer Movies and TV continued to imprint the human psyche with the image of flying saucers for many years. Flying saucers also had the benefit of being much easier to hoax in pictures and video than cylinders or other shapes, for obvious reasons (an old hubcap or pie pan could be a UFO, and spinning them like a frisbee provides gyroscopic stabilization). The only thing close to flying saucers in terms of mass recognition and capturing the world's imagination would be greys. The movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_Kind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_... in 1977 popularized this image of aliens, even though aliens in fiction have included grey skinned beings since at least 1893: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_alien https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_alien Prior to greys, the most common cultural alien in popular culture, or at least in English language, were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men or anything with antennae, sometimes with helmets. Following these, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilians were popular, probably most popularized in the V series in the early 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_%281983_miniseries%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_%281983_miniseries%29 But, nothing beats the flying saucer.
krapp 11y ago
Well, bear in mind that before it was flying saucers, it was flying airships[0], and before that, many of the phenomena now associated with alien visitations and abductions were attributed to demons or angels. And of course, before it became known that there was no life on Mars of Venus, most aliens claimed to be from Mars or Venus. Strange how the technology and culture of aliens always seems to align with human cultural and technological norms, and how they always seem to be, biologically, human or humanoid. The aliens created by science fiction authors are often far more alien than the aliens people actually claim to encounter. The diversity of life on Earth is more alien. Never any Tines or Puppeteers or sentient blobs of dark matter or or twelve foot tall squamous hyperdimensional polyps. Just... strangely unusual space people in unusual space cars. But never too unusual. I'm an extreme skeptic about UFOs as alien spacecraft and of alien visitation because, other reasons aside, the universe they seem to describe is depressingly mundane. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_airship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_airship
- kpil 11y ago
  Oth if someone popped out of a n-dimensional quantumdoor here in my kitchen, I'd say they 'teleported' which probably would be technically wrong :-)
notthegov 11y ago
I think if you had a superconducting solenoid that exerted so many teslas of magnetic flux then it would diagrammatically levitate. But not sure. I think it's possible for a hoverboard-type technology and also, there's some theories that seem like someone would had pursued them by now but no one has or the govt did and it didn't work. In my experience, there is no "new physics" type technology possessed by the government and there is no UFO coverup with the government. However, the USAF polluted things with their psyops or whatever it was they were doing, so it is near impossible to discern anything. But I am a skeptic.
outworlder 11y ago
> I wonder if it would be physically possible to utilize the Earth's extremely weak magnetic field to support any meaningful mass? I bet that THERE IS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. Have we even figured out what magnetic fields actually are? Magnetism, and magnetic fields, are always defined in terms of what we observe. Usually called a "force". For instance: Magnetism, n: "a physical phenomenon produced by the motion of electric charge, resulting in attractive and repulsive forces between objects" Ok, fine. What is a "force"? That is also defined in terms of things we observe. Which is fine. But what we observe, and what something actually is, are two different things. I know that Feynman said something along the lines that "we question what magnetism is, but we never question the fact that your hand cannot go through a solid object". Well, I do. And that will boil down to other "forces" in the atoms. How far have we followed that rabbit hole? I can't find much. If you start from magnetism, you'll be led to electromagnetism, then eventually to quantum electrodynamics. Which, from a layman perspective, just shifts which part of the phenomena we choose to handwave away. So you change from "forces" to "interactions". In the unlikely chance that there are theoretical physicists on Hacker News reading a thread about UFOs, I'd really like to get an idea how much we actually know about all this. My uneducated hunch is that there is a lot of undiscovered fundamental physics waiting for us.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  There is sufficient data about it, electromagnetism is probably the best studied field in physics to date. Magnetism is in it's base not generated due to the modulation of an electric charge but due to a much more basic attribute of charged particles, their magnetic moment which is a result of their spin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_magnetic_moment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_magnetic_moment So until you find a zero spin charged particle with a magnetic moment (which will contradict everything we understand about magnetism) I'll bet on that we understand it quite well. As far as UFO's using the Earths magnetic field we can pretty much rule that out because we know just how weak it is on average it is about 30 Tesla, and 16 Tesla's is about the force required to levitate a frog. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15420771.600-frog-defies-gravity/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15420771.600-frog-def... So unless flying saucers weight just about as 2 mid sized frogs I'll take the bet that if they do exist they use something else to keep them from crashing in the backyards of hillbillies.
13of40 11y ago
> I wonder if it would be physically possible to utilize the Earth's extremely weak magnetic field to support any meaningful mass? Woooo. Woooooooooo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkpPbro-EAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkpPbro-EAk (Yes, I know.)
themartorana 11y ago
As probably the only person who will respond without trying to answer or further your line of questioning, I'd like to say how ridiculously cool that video is. Whenever anyone asks why I armchair-physics, I just show them that. Because, come on. I mean, sometimes, we have to stop and realize how cool this stuff is. I may or may not be alive when we figure out how to use that sort of quantum locking IRL, but I would love love to be able to get a quick peek at 150 years from now before I go.
Laaw 11y ago
I realize I'm going to sound absolutely bonkers, but I definitely read an article in Wired about devices which used very large amounts of electricity to hover feet in the air. They were triangularly shaped, built in garages, used aluminium somehow, and could hover in the air. I really wish I could find a link to that Wired article... Edit: Found it! http://www.wired.com/2003/08/pwr-antigravity/ http://www.wired.com/2003/08/pwr-antigravity/ Edit2: Doing some research (it's coming back to me now), it runs off of ionic wind, which is apparently a well understood phenomena. I'm guessing this was/is being thoroughly researched, and any outcomes have apparently not been fruitful (yet?). I realize I sound bonkers, but come on, this is pretty cool, even if nothing of value has resulted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_wind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_wind Guy explains it pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzZy1Aqleno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzZy1Aqleno
- rl3 11y ago
  >I realize I'm going to sound absolutely bonkers, ... At the risk of sounding even more bonkers, The Hunt for Zero Point[0] claims that most UFOs are attributable to an exotic man-made propulsion technology first developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. While I don't particularly believe the book's claims, it's worth mentioning because Nick Cook wrote it. Cook was the former aviation editor for Jane's Defence Weekly, which was quite a prestigious position during his tenure. Though I read the book over a decade ago, I'm still puzzled. The book basically claims the U.S. launched an anti-gravity program based on technology it extracted from Nazi Germany in the later stages of WW2, and that the subsequent rash of UFO sightings in the U.S. were related. Supposedly the technology then started to make its way into the mainstream[1], and was abruptly quashed. It also advanced a couple of theories suggesting the B-2 bomber is more than the public was led to believe—ranging from having hypersonic propulsion capability at altitude (unlikely), to a more benign theory of an electrified leading edge for both aerodynamic and stealth purposes. If I recall, the latter theory required the use of a highly toxic substance, and I could see that given the Air Force's troubled history[2] with stealth coating toxicity. The book also made claims of seemingly impossible transmutations being conducted by a fringe experimenter in his apartment, using high-voltage electricity. I'm sure there was more crazy stuff I failed to mention. The reason the book continues to puzzle me is that, while it's easy to just say "Nick Cook went off the deep end", that isn't necessarily true. Despite the book being published in 2003, Cook remained as a consultant to Jane's from 2002 until 2008. In 2006 he uncovered a classified high-altitude UCAV program[3] by digging through budget requests. Now he runs his own consultancy[4]. Not exactly crazy. My opinion is that while the majority of the book is probably not true, Cook may have been on to something. What exactly I'm unsure, other than that when you apply ridiculous amounts of electricity to objects in novel state or material configurations, you get interesting results. Whether that means there's some long-running government conspiracy to conceal such things is another question. [0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Hunt-Zero-Point-Antigravity/dp/0767906284 http://www.amazon.com/The-Hunt-Zero-Point-Antigravity/dp/076... [1] http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?p=18892220&postcount=1317 http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?p=18892220&postc... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/area-51-secrets-under-the-sun/2013/08/16/d9fea198-06b1-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/area-51-secre... [3] http://defensetech.org/2006/04/23/air-forces-secret-drone-program-revealed/ http://defensetech.org/2006/04/23/air-forces-secret-drone-pr... [4] http://www.dynamixx.co.uk/index.php/conferences/ http://www.dynamixx.co.uk/index.php/conferences/
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

purpled_haze 11y ago

I think the cultural fascination started with UFOs started with the first sighting on June 24, 1947: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting After that, it was picked up in movies and TV, with the first movie being the 1950 film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Saucer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Saucer Movies and TV continued to imprint the human psyche with the image of flying saucers for many years. Flying saucers also had the benefit of being much easier to hoax in pictures and video than cylinders or other shapes, for obvious reasons (an old hubcap or pie pan could be a UFO, and spinning them like a frisbee provides gyroscopic stabilization). The only thing close to flying saucers in terms of mass recognition and capturing the world's imagination would be greys. The movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_Kind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_... in 1977 popularized this image of aliens, even though aliens in fiction have included grey skinned beings since at least 1893: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_alien https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_alien Prior to greys, the most common cultural alien in popular culture, or at least in English language, were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men or anything with antennae, sometimes with helmets. Following these, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilians were popular, probably most popularized in the V series in the early 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_%281983_miniseries%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_%281983_miniseries%29 But, nothing beats the flying saucer.

krapp 11y ago

Well, bear in mind that before it was flying saucers, it was flying airships[0], and before that, many of the phenomena now associated with alien visitations and abductions were attributed to demons or angels. And of course, before it became known that there was no life on Mars of Venus, most aliens claimed to be from Mars or Venus. Strange how the technology and culture of aliens always seems to align with human cultural and technological norms, and how they always seem to be, biologically, human or humanoid. The aliens created by science fiction authors are often far more alien than the aliens people actually claim to encounter. The diversity of life on Earth is more alien. Never any Tines or Puppeteers or sentient blobs of dark matter or or twelve foot tall squamous hyperdimensional polyps. Just... strangely unusual space people in unusual space cars. But never too unusual. I'm an extreme skeptic about UFOs as alien spacecraft and of alien visitation because, other reasons aside, the universe they seem to describe is depressingly mundane. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_airship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_airship

kpil 11y ago
Oth if someone popped out of a n-dimensional quantumdoor here in my kitchen, I'd say they 'teleported' which probably would be technically wrong :-)

notthegov 11y ago

I think if you had a superconducting solenoid that exerted so many teslas of magnetic flux then it would diagrammatically levitate. But not sure. I think it's possible for a hoverboard-type technology and also, there's some theories that seem like someone would had pursued them by now but no one has or the govt did and it didn't work. In my experience, there is no "new physics" type technology possessed by the government and there is no UFO coverup with the government. However, the USAF polluted things with their psyops or whatever it was they were doing, so it is near impossible to discern anything. But I am a skeptic.

outworlder 11y ago

> I wonder if it would be physically possible to utilize the Earth's extremely weak magnetic field to support any meaningful mass? I bet that THERE IS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. Have we even figured out what magnetic fields actually are? Magnetism, and magnetic fields, are always defined in terms of what we observe. Usually called a "force". For instance: Magnetism, n: "a physical phenomenon produced by the motion of electric charge, resulting in attractive and repulsive forces between objects" Ok, fine. What is a "force"? That is also defined in terms of things we observe. Which is fine. But what we observe, and what something actually is, are two different things. I know that Feynman said something along the lines that "we question what magnetism is, but we never question the fact that your hand cannot go through a solid object". Well, I do. And that will boil down to other "forces" in the atoms. How far have we followed that rabbit hole? I can't find much. If you start from magnetism, you'll be led to electromagnetism, then eventually to quantum electrodynamics. Which, from a layman perspective, just shifts which part of the phenomena we choose to handwave away. So you change from "forces" to "interactions". In the unlikely chance that there are theoretical physicists on Hacker News reading a thread about UFOs, I'd really like to get an idea how much we actually know about all this. My uneducated hunch is that there is a lot of undiscovered fundamental physics waiting for us.

dogma1138 11y ago
There is sufficient data about it, electromagnetism is probably the best studied field in physics to date. Magnetism is in it's base not generated due to the modulation of an electric charge but due to a much more basic attribute of charged particles, their magnetic moment which is a result of their spin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_magnetic_moment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_magnetic_moment So until you find a zero spin charged particle with a magnetic moment (which will contradict everything we understand about magnetism) I'll bet on that we understand it quite well. As far as UFO's using the Earths magnetic field we can pretty much rule that out because we know just how weak it is on average it is about 30 Tesla, and 16 Tesla's is about the force required to levitate a frog. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15420771.600-frog-defies-gravity/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15420771.600-frog-def... So unless flying saucers weight just about as 2 mid sized frogs I'll take the bet that if they do exist they use something else to keep them from crashing in the backyards of hillbillies.

13of40 11y ago

> I wonder if it would be physically possible to utilize the Earth's extremely weak magnetic field to support any meaningful mass? Woooo. Woooooooooo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkpPbro-EAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkpPbro-EAk (Yes, I know.)

themartorana 11y ago

As probably the only person who will respond without trying to answer or further your line of questioning, I'd like to say how ridiculously cool that video is. Whenever anyone asks why I armchair-physics, I just show them that. Because, come on. I mean, sometimes, we have to stop and realize how cool this stuff is. I may or may not be alive when we figure out how to use that sort of quantum locking IRL, but I would love love to be able to get a quick peek at 150 years from now before I go.

Laaw 11y ago

I realize I'm going to sound absolutely bonkers, but I definitely read an article in Wired about devices which used very large amounts of electricity to hover feet in the air. They were triangularly shaped, built in garages, used aluminium somehow, and could hover in the air. I really wish I could find a link to that Wired article... Edit: Found it! http://www.wired.com/2003/08/pwr-antigravity/ http://www.wired.com/2003/08/pwr-antigravity/ Edit2: Doing some research (it's coming back to me now), it runs off of ionic wind, which is apparently a well understood phenomena. I'm guessing this was/is being thoroughly researched, and any outcomes have apparently not been fruitful (yet?). I realize I sound bonkers, but come on, this is pretty cool, even if nothing of value has resulted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_wind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_wind Guy explains it pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzZy1Aqleno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzZy1Aqleno

rl3 11y ago
>I realize I'm going to sound absolutely bonkers, ... At the risk of sounding even more bonkers, The Hunt for Zero Point[0] claims that most UFOs are attributable to an exotic man-made propulsion technology first developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. While I don't particularly believe the book's claims, it's worth mentioning because Nick Cook wrote it. Cook was the former aviation editor for Jane's Defence Weekly, which was quite a prestigious position during his tenure. Though I read the book over a decade ago, I'm still puzzled. The book basically claims the U.S. launched an anti-gravity program based on technology it extracted from Nazi Germany in the later stages of WW2, and that the subsequent rash of UFO sightings in the U.S. were related. Supposedly the technology then started to make its way into the mainstream[1], and was abruptly quashed. It also advanced a couple of theories suggesting the B-2 bomber is more than the public was led to believe—ranging from having hypersonic propulsion capability at altitude (unlikely), to a more benign theory of an electrified leading edge for both aerodynamic and stealth purposes. If I recall, the latter theory required the use of a highly toxic substance, and I could see that given the Air Force's troubled history[2] with stealth coating toxicity. The book also made claims of seemingly impossible transmutations being conducted by a fringe experimenter in his apartment, using high-voltage electricity. I'm sure there was more crazy stuff I failed to mention. The reason the book continues to puzzle me is that, while it's easy to just say "Nick Cook went off the deep end", that isn't necessarily true. Despite the book being published in 2003, Cook remained as a consultant to Jane's from 2002 until 2008. In 2006 he uncovered a classified high-altitude UCAV program[3] by digging through budget requests. Now he runs his own consultancy[4]. Not exactly crazy. My opinion is that while the majority of the book is probably not true, Cook may have been on to something. What exactly I'm unsure, other than that when you apply ridiculous amounts of electricity to objects in novel state or material configurations, you get interesting results. Whether that means there's some long-running government conspiracy to conceal such things is another question. [0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Hunt-Zero-Point-Antigravity/dp/0767906284 http://www.amazon.com/The-Hunt-Zero-Point-Antigravity/dp/076... [1] http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?p=18892220&postcount=1317 http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?p=18892220&postc... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/area-51-secrets-under-the-sun/2013/08/16/d9fea198-06b1-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/area-51-secre... [3] http://defensetech.org/2006/04/23/air-forces-secret-drone-program-revealed/ http://defensetech.org/2006/04/23/air-forces-secret-drone-pr... [4] http://www.dynamixx.co.uk/index.php/conferences/ http://www.dynamixx.co.uk/index.php/conferences/

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]