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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIA-08-1003-018), dated 30 March 2010, was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency as part of its FY 2009 Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It reviews theoretical approaches to antigravity for aerospace propulsion, drawing on Newtonian physics, general relativity, cosmological dark energy and quantum vacuum effects. The report notes that no current technology can actively control gravity and that many concepts are far from practicable engineering.
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIO k YEE a••k>/ The net gravity-induced (electrostatic levitation) self-force (Fn,r(;,,,") is given by (Reference 66): (N) (28) where /Jc is the electric charge on a particle and r is the radial distance between two charged particles in the dipole. There is an additional term of order g"fc+ in Fn,rGrav that is neglected because it is negligible in magnitude. Equation (28) states that an electric dipole will experience a push in the upwards direction (opposite direction with respect to the Earth's gravitational acceleration); that is, the dipole undergoes self-acceleration in which one charged particle in the dipole appears to be chasing the other charged particle. As an example, for a dipole comprised of two charges (for example, an electron-proton system) held at fixed r to levitate in the Earth's gravitational field, r would have to be~ 10 15 m (the size of an atomic nucleus). An experiment to test this prediction on such a small scale is too difficult to control or measure. An energy analysis done by Pinto showed that there is a distance r between two charges (each of rest-mass 1110) in a dipole (of mass MJ,1,= 21110) such that their electrostatic potential energy, U,1;p = -q//4n.::or, becomes equal to the unrenormalized mass of the system as r ➔ w. At this distance, the effective total gravitational mass Md,r + UJ;1Jc2 = o and the self-force alone can support the dipole at rest against its own weight. The self-acceleration of the dipole is such that the acceleration process can continue indefinitely, which poses a problem for energy conservation because the dipole can be left to self-accelerate for an arbitrary period of time and then stopped to harness the resulting kinetic energy. This process could be used to extract unlimited energy from the system. Pinto claims that there is no conflict with energy conservation because the renormalized inertial mass of the accelerating system is MJ,1,-,en = Mt1,p + U,1i1k 2 = 0 and the total energy of the system is zero at all times regardless of speed. This claim requires reevaluation because there are subtle boundary conditions involved that might have been overlooked in the analysis. Fermi's discovery led to a new subfield of research devoted to the study of electrodynamics and dipole and interatomic dispersion forces in a curved spacetime. Pinto's theoretical program extended the result of these studies by considering a system of polarizable atoms and adopting an approach in which the effect of a gravitational field in general relativity is modeled as an effective optical medium. In other words, the spacetime vacuum is treated as a non-uniform optical medium with a varying index of refraction that defines the components of a flat spacetime metric geometry (Reference 68). There is no spacetime curvature due to sources of matter in this model, instead its equivalent general relativistic effects (that is, gravitation) are produced by varying the vacuum index of refraction, comprised of the vacuum electromagnetic permittivity and permeability constants, in response to the presence of matter sources. Pinto's lengthy analysis gives the van der Waals dispersion self-force for two polarizable atoms in a curved spacetime (that is, a weak gravitational field) as (Reference 66): 22 UNCLASSIFIED/1CF8A: 8FFI&I.«1k 1!181! 8HLV
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 44 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.