Artificial Gravity Propulsion

Dateline, Vancouver, May 2015

May 2015, NASA announced that it created a type of engine that seemed to work similar to artifical gravity thrust. Physicists never have liked these things because they seem to deliver more thrust than the energy being input, which they protest is a violation of the laws of thermodynamics.

However, let me be the first to point out: artificial gravity propulsion does not violate the laws of thermodynamics, it only appears that way because the source of the energy is unknown.

For example, consider a windmill. It takes reletively little engery to aim the windmill into the wind, but then it will output energy in excess of the energy being input. To someone who has never seen the wind, the windmill appears to be generating more energy than is being input.

Gravity propulsion works the same way. The device is merely pointing a gravity well into the flow of gravity so that the flow is pushing the device, much like a sail on a boat.

A common explanation of gravity is a trampoline with a bowling ball laying in the middle. The ball will bend the sheet downward and then when you roll a golf ball across the sheet it will deflect toward the bowling ball as if being attracted to the ball. This attraction is analogous to gravity.

Artificial gravity propulsion works by flexing this same sheet around an object - the front side is pushed down and the back side is up, creating a hill. This will cause the object to roll down the hill that it has created. As the object rolls down the hill, it moves the hill with it, thereby moving its self forward within its own gravitation field.

Note that, for the trampoline analogy to work there will have to be a vertical force in a third dimension pushing the objects downward into the sheet. On the trampoline this force is gravity, and the trampoline won't work in space without that force. This rolling on a flexed trampoline will happen to both the static mass and the artificial gravity object, both are pushed down the hill by this vertical force.

This downward force has nothing to do with the force that deforms the sheet. It could require (for example) one horsepower to deform the sheet, but it could then deliver two horsepower of vertical force to the object. This is exactly what happens to windmills and sail boats. The sail captures the inertia of the wind and then this inertia moves the boat forward, capturing still more wind as it goes.

In the real world, the mass of an object will bend space in three dimensions, and this vertical force will be delivered via a fourth dimension.