anti-gravity
So, ever since I saw Back to the Future Part II I’ve wracked my brain trying to figure this out so I could build my own flying DeLorean. True story.
The first thought in my then-11-year-old mind was to design the wheels (inside the tires) of the car as fans and articulate them so they could pivot down on command, at which point they would spin up, blowing air downward, which would levitate the car, similar to a helicopter or hovercraft. The problems with that scenario: I had no concept of AWD at that point, the power-to-weight ratio would be totally out of whack (i.e. there’s no way for four little fans to blow enough air to levitate a car), the issue of transitioning between one state and another, and it’s not a true anti-gravity device.
My second idea involved electron resonance. I did some research and discovered that if you can get any atom’s electrons to spin, you can affect them with magnetism. The idea would be to have some kind of “electron resonance gun” at the center of a magnetized, doughnut-shaped plate of metal which would then push away the magnetized atoms, creating an action-reaction effect, pushing the gun-and-plate assembly upward. Unfortunately, this idea has a number of problems as well: I’ve never been sure of the energy required to create resonance (but I’ve been told it’s unmanageably large), I’m unsure of the whole principle of the thing in the first place, more power-to-weight ratio uncertainties, the question of would the magnetism just push away the electrons and not the whole atom (ionize the atoms, in other words), and again, it’s not a true anti-gravity device.
Lately, I’ve started to ponder true anti-gravity. I have a pet theory that quantum field theory is barking up the wrong tree vis-à-vis a TOE and that high-dimensional physics is where it’s at, regardless of whether or not we can observe said dimensions. That said, I believe the hypothetical “graviton” particle doesn’t exist, and that gravity, light, higher dimensions and mass are inextricably linked. So there’s no hope of creating an “anti-graviton” to counteract the effects of gravity. The universe, in my estimation, just isn’t put together that way.
That said, if we visualize space as a two-dimensional grid, and that masses create depressions, or wells, in the grid, what we need is for something to create an “upward dimple” in the grid, an “anti-well,” so to speak. That would seem to imply something with the theoretical property of negative mass. In theory, if you’re, say, standing on the Earth, holding an object with a negative mass equal to your positive mass, you would “appear” to the Earth’s mass to have zero mass, and thus there would be no attraction. Spacetime would be flat at that location, and you would levitate.
The problem is creating, containing and using negative mass. As I mentioned above, I believe gravity, mass and light/energy are all linked in higher dimensions, light in particular simply being a “ripple” of spacetime in a higher-dimensional plane. I think if we understood light better, and its relationship to matter and spacetime, it would better illuminate (pun intended) the problem of negative mass and by extension, anti-gravity.