Historical research guide · 0183 · 2010

DIRD The Role of Superconductors in Gravity Research

DIA / AAWSAP contractor

In one minute

This is number 14 of the thirty-eight Defense Intelligence Reference Documents Hal Puthoff administered for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and it is written by someone who ran the experiments himself. The author starts with physics that is not in dispute: in the weak-field, slow-motion limit Einstein’s equations rearrange into a Maxwell-like form, giving a gravitoelectric field that acts between masses and a gravitomagnetic field that acts between currents of moving mass, joined by a Faraday-like law of induction. He then walks the whole timeline of the laboratory search for a superconductor that touches gravity — DeWitt and Ross on the London equations, Li and Torr predicting an induced gravitomagnetic field inside a superconductor, Podkletnov’s spinning yttrium-barium-copper-oxide disk, NASA’s attempts under Ron Koczor, his own Toronto rebuild, Harald Reiss’s repeatable weight change on cool-down, and Martin Tajmar’s spinning rings. And he writes the part an experimentalist most needs: an inventory of the ways this measurement can fool you.

Connection

Chapter 11 is the superconductor thread, and this is the document that says who tried what, in what order, with which disk, and at which temperature — the replication ledger chapter 1 keeps asking for. Its closing pages are also a standard: complete information from the experimenter, correct foundations from the theorist, and a named artefact to rule out for every claimed result.

From the source

In the weak-field approximation and for non-relativistic velocities, general relativity can be rewritten in a Maxwell-like vector form: a gravitoelectric field that produces a force between masses, a gravitomagnetic field that produces a force between currents of flowing matter, and a Faraday-like law of induction by which time-varying gravitomagnetic fields generate Newtonian gravitational fields.Gravitoelectromagnetism, pp. 1–2
Gravity may be a Casimir-like attraction arising within the universal sea of fluctuating electromagnetic interactions — the zero-point fluctuations — an idea Sakharov put forward in 1968 and Puthoff developed in Physical Review A in 1989.Gravitoelectromagnetism, p. 1; References 4 and 5
DeWitt showed in 1966 that a time-varying gravitomagnetic field must arise from magnetic flux quantisation in a superconductor, and Ross produced a modified set of London equations in 1983; these two papers are the theoretical foundation on which Li, Torr and Tajmar later built.Historical timeline, p. 3; References 19 and 20
Solving the coupled Maxwell, general-relativity and London equations for a superconductor exposed to external magnetic and gravitomagnetic fields, Li and Torr predicted a small residual internal magnetic field which in turn produces an internal gravitomagnetic field, the two related by the Cooper-pair mass-to-charge ratio, with the gravitomagnetic penetration depth larger than the magnetic one.Historical timeline, pp. 3–4; References 16 to 18
Tajmar and De Matos showed that every electromagnetic field is coupled to a gravitoelectric and a gravitomagnetic field, that the coupling is generally valid and does not require superconductivity, and that the coefficient — very small on its own — can be increased by massive ion currents such as rotating mass or dense plasmas and by aligning electron and nuclear spins.Historical timeline, p. 9; References 36 and 37
Tajmar’s spinning niobium and ceramic rings left an unexplained residual signal with a coupling constant of about 10⁻⁸ between the observed acceleration and the applied angular velocity, proportional to angular momentum, inversely proportional to temperature past a critical temperature that is not the superconducting one, stronger in clockwise rotation, and not falling off as a dipole field would.Historical timeline, pp. 9–10; References 44 and 46

The way in

https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/dia/AAWSAP-DIRDs/DIRD_14-DIRD_The_Role_of_Superconductors_in_Gravity_Research.pdf

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

Defense Intelligence Reference Document DIA-08-1003-013, dated 23 March 2010, one of the advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009 under the Defense Intelligence Agency Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. Released under FOIA and published by The Black Vault. The author’s name is withheld under exemption (b)(6), but the text identifies him: he calls Reference 9 — Hathaway, ‘Nightmares of the Art of Measuring’ — his own list, and Reference 35 — Hathaway, Cleveland and Bao, Physica C 385, 2003 — ‘our own version’ of the Podkletnov replication, which makes the author George D. Hathaway of Toronto. Further dissemination of the photographs in the original is not authorised, so the figures are not reproduced. The corpus record carried no URL and no fetched text; the text below was taken from the Black Vault scan, with the classification banners, page numbers and running heads removed, hyphenated line breaks rejoined, flattened exponents restored, and obvious character-recognition errors corrected.

How to cite it

DIA / AAWSAP contractor (2010) DIRD The Role of Superconductors in Gravity Research https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/dia/AAWSAP-DIRDs/DIRD_14-DIRD_The_Role_of_Superconductors_in_Gravity_Research.pdf

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