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Variant, v. 1, issue 3, September 1947
Page 35
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[[illustration text]] FIGURE 3 Wheel Weightless Area Antigravity plate [[end illustration text]] And this is just the idea which is being worked on at the present time. The problem still before us, however, is; what method of propulsion is available having these two properties: (1) it will operate in a vacuum, and (2) it is powerful enough to make seven miles per second a practical proposition. We know of one such method at present. That is, of course, the rocket. Before taking up rockets in detail, perhaps we may digress for a moment and examine one or two other methods which have been proposed by fiction writers. The most notorious of these is antigravity, in its various aspects. The first one to be used, probably, was H. G. Well's wonderful material, Cavorite, which was a gravity screen or shield. This had the convenient property of causing bodies above it to become weightless. Unfortunately, general principles insist that such a material is a scientific impossibility. The reason is that it would make perpetual motion possible, since you could place above a piece of this material one side of a wheel: Since this side would become lighter than the other side the wheel would commence to turn, and would keep on turning in defiance of conservation of energy. (See figure 3) Now if there is one basic law in the universe as it exists today, it is this: You can't get something for nothing. Hence a gravity screen is impossible. A horse of a different color is the kind of antigravity device which requires the consumption of power for its operation. These can be divided into two groups: first the kind which renders a body completely weightless at one blow, and second, the kind which merely makes the body partially lighter. Both of these ideas entail serious difficulties the moment one begins to dig beneath the surface in an effort to find out what we are talking about. In the first place, the current notion concerning gravity is that it is not a property of the object itself, but of the space around it. That is, when a body moves under the influence of gravity, it is merely moving along a line which is the shortest distance between two points, but in a space shich itself is curved. It would then appear that an antigravity machine would be required to flatten out the curvature of the space around the object. At the moment, I'm not certain whether or not that sentence means anything[[?]]. Energy considerations also create difficulties. I think that Cambell was the first to point out in a story that to render a body completely weightless by an antigravity machine would require the consumption of the amount of energy necessary to lift a weightless body to any height with the application of very little power, (35)
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[[illustration text]] FIGURE 3 Wheel Weightless Area Antigravity plate [[end illustration text]] And this is just the idea which is being worked on at the present time. The problem still before us, however, is; what method of propulsion is available having these two properties: (1) it will operate in a vacuum, and (2) it is powerful enough to make seven miles per second a practical proposition. We know of one such method at present. That is, of course, the rocket. Before taking up rockets in detail, perhaps we may digress for a moment and examine one or two other methods which have been proposed by fiction writers. The most notorious of these is antigravity, in its various aspects. The first one to be used, probably, was H. G. Well's wonderful material, Cavorite, which was a gravity screen or shield. This had the convenient property of causing bodies above it to become weightless. Unfortunately, general principles insist that such a material is a scientific impossibility. The reason is that it would make perpetual motion possible, since you could place above a piece of this material one side of a wheel: Since this side would become lighter than the other side the wheel would commence to turn, and would keep on turning in defiance of conservation of energy. (See figure 3) Now if there is one basic law in the universe as it exists today, it is this: You can't get something for nothing. Hence a gravity screen is impossible. A horse of a different color is the kind of antigravity device which requires the consumption of power for its operation. These can be divided into two groups: first the kind which renders a body completely weightless at one blow, and second, the kind which merely makes the body partially lighter. Both of these ideas entail serious difficulties the moment one begins to dig beneath the surface in an effort to find out what we are talking about. In the first place, the current notion concerning gravity is that it is not a property of the object itself, but of the space around it. That is, when a body moves under the influence of gravity, it is merely moving along a line which is the shortest distance between two points, but in a space shich itself is curved. It would then appear that an antigravity machine would be required to flatten out the curvature of the space around the object. At the moment, I'm not certain whether or not that sentence means anything[[?]]. Energy considerations also create difficulties. I think that Cambell was the first to point out in a story that to render a body completely weightless by an antigravity machine would require the consumption of the amount of energy necessary to lift a weightless body to any height with the application of very little power, (35)
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