Hollington & Kyprianou

Some of the IFFE teams notes rescued from the site pertaining to experiments in magnets, lifters, infrasound and plasma.

We are artists attempting to delve into the mysterious world of science. Our peer-to-peer review procedures may be inadequate. Our resources are limited. We have to attack things laterally and rely on help from willing engineers and scientists as well as a stock of human guinea pigs .

Current theory and practice that may lead to the making of an invisible force field that we are experimenting with, looking at, or just in awe of are summed up within the crossover areas of ion-related experiments, sound research, plasma research and general anti-gravity theory, which, if our hunch is correct, and, as well as controlling up -down we can control things left – right, may lead us to the path of least (or most) resistance.

Lifter & Magnet Experiments

Magnets

This is one early experiment we’ve been conducting - levitating magnets. Harder than it looks to get right too. Getting a magnet to stably levitate isn’t actually ‘allowed’ - Earnshaw’s theorem states that no stationary object made of magnets in a fixed configuration can be held in stable equilibrium by any combination of static magnetic or gravitational forces, but seeing as I’ve seen a frog levitating at the Faculty of Science of the University of Nijmegen we thought we’d have a go.

Earnshaw’s theorem is a kind of a consequence of the Maxwell equations, which don’t allow the magnitude of a magnetic field in a free space to possess a maximum, which is required for stable equilibrium.

Diamagnets (which respond to magnetic fields with mild repulsion) DO flout the theorem, as their negative susceptibility results in the requirement of a minimum rather than a maximum in the field’s magnitude. Nevertheless, we’d been told that this sort of levitation without a superconductor (which was used for the frog) was impossible. We found that the stable levitation of a magnet was achievable and portable using the feeble diamagnetism of even Simon’s fingers keeping the strong bismuth magnet hovering in midair without touching it. All the atoms inside Simon’s fingers created a very small magnetic field (2 gauss approx) which compensated for the effects of gravity and allowed the magnet to float.

In the case of diamagnetic levitation, the gravitational force is compensated on the level of individual atoms and molecules. –pretty close to an anti gravity machine. We’re now looking to see if we can scale things up so that it’s the human , not the magnet that levitates. Any help would as ever be greatly appreciated

As you probably saw many times when playing with magnets, magnets push each other away if you try to bring together their like poles, for example, two north or two south poles. Similarly, the north pole of the external field will try to push away the “north poles” of magnetized atoms.
Our magnet creates a very large magnetic field (about 100 to 1000 times larger than school or household magnets).
In this field, all the atoms inside the frog act as very small magnets creating a field of about 2 Gauss (although very small, such a field can still be detected by a compass). One may say that the frog is now built up of these tiny magnets all of which are repelled by the large magnet. The force, which is directed upwards, appears to be strong enough to compensate the force of gravity (directed downwards) that also acts on every single atom of the frog. So, the frog’s atoms do not feel any force at all and the frog floats as if it were in a spacecraft.

Shopping list

12 ceramic ring magnets
tiny neodymium-iron-boron magnet
8 inches of 1/4 inch threaded brass rod
4 brass hex nuts to fit the 1/4 inch rod
2 brass or nylon washers to fit the brass rod
wooden base (5 inch square, 3/4 inch high)
6 to 8 inch wooden support, 2 inches square
5 by 2 inch wooden block, 3/4 inch thick
2 tablespoons of Bismuth
10. wood glue
11. 1/4 inch drill bit and drill
12 . large cheap cooking spoon
13. empty aluminum soda can
14. coarse sandpaper or large metal file
15. wood glue
16. 5 minute epoxy

Assembly

Bismuth plates are what make the magnetic suspension possible. Its used as lead-free shot. We got some from a gun enthusiast (there are many in the New Forest). We melted the bismuth to make two plates raking off the oxide with a coathanger. The mismuth was then poured into the bottom of an aluminium can and left to cool. Then sanded flat and smooth. We made a support structure out of some bits of wood lying about and then inserted a brass rod into a hole in the wood block.Nuts were threaded top and bottom of the rod with 12 magnets. Tightened it a bit too hard the first time and some of the ceramic magnets shattered.
The bismuth disks were placed under the ceramic magnet tower with enough space for a small magnet to slip between them

The whole contraption was very sentitive to the distance between the two bismuth disks, and the height and strength of the magnet above them as the magnet jumped up,, down, occasionally got stuck on Simon’s watch etc. Eventually it floated between the two disks.Three pieces of leftover shot were glued in an equilateraol arrangement on the bottom disk.

The bismuth disks are diamagnetic, pushing away from the magnet. It doesn't matter whether the north pole of the magnet or the south pole is used, the bismuth always pushes away.
The ring magnets attract the small neodymium magnet with just exactly the right amount of force to counteract gravity.
At the critical point, where the magnetic pull just barely counteracts gravity, the weak diamagnetism of the bismuth is enough to keep the magnet from jumping up to the ring magnets, or falling down. The magnet thus floats, being repelled by the top and bottom bismuth disks.

Lifter Experiment

‘Lifters’ – devices that levitate without moving parts or onboard fuel have been around for a while, but now there’s an upsurge in people making these things around the world and even Orville (a mouse) has flown on one.

A lot of the debate hinges not on wether they work but on why and how. There are two splits as far as I can see within the antigravity underground- NASA had initially done research in this area but shelved it for a while and are now back testing it again. The difference of opinion hinges on wether the effect is just from ion wind (something of particular interest to us as we’re experimenting with ions for our force field) or wether they would operater in a total vacuum and are therefore operating with “Field Effect Propulsion”.

The second theory holds that these devices work in a vacuum and as such would be an alternative for space travel.

This is our basic lifter that we’ve made. It’s a bit bodge but it’s only a little one made from balsa and foil. We’re picking up a power supply from an engineering testing firm at the end of the week and we’ll launch it then. We think that this will help us do some observable field tests to see what direction we can go in for the Invisible Force Field. The only snag is we we can’t work out how to make it totally safe for a viewing public yet.

August 2003 rescued from technical papers of the IFFE team

Ways of building an invisible force field. 3 Sound.

This is another form of force field production, we found on the net,
Posted by William J Beaty.
Now, we don’t fully understand this one. This does not mean it is not a viable hypothesis, only it’s a bit particular. Although we have a working knowledge of the physics of sound, we found some of Beatys ideas hard to follow, and he states that it is just a theory and never been tested, and so we passed on this method too.

However, his theory, or ‘speculation’ as he calls brackets it involves producing thin ‘Pressure membranes’ by ( and I think this is right) a spike impulse or ‘delta function ‘ within an acoustic resonator containing a type of sinusoidal standing wave and supporting a number of harmonics.

Beaty explains;
‘A Delta function is composed of all possible sine waves of frequencies 1,2,3,4,etc. When a large set of sine wave signals are all added together, they cancel out everywhere except at the zero location (origin) of the graph. There they add up to create a large transient-spike’. He continues by suggesting an organ pipe as an example of an acoustic resonator containing all the appropriate qualities.

Essentially, (and this is a brief summary) acoustic standing waves are selected to produce a pressure maximum in the mouth of the pipe, and if the audio amplitude is high in intensity, the pressure created at the mouth at the end of the pipe might become so high that it would become a kind of ‘shock wave’, in which the waveform excursion approaches both two atmospheres and vacuum. The shock wave essentially would bounce the sound back into the pipe, and the possibly even block objects entering the pipe.
The pressure at the end of the pipe would be akin to a very thin membrane, which would be invisible unless viewed from an angle, at which point it would appear silver, due to internal reflections.

As I stated, this is a hard theory to grasp, and we are still quite perplexed by it. However we are aware of the amount of things that sound can achieve, and it’s still, in many ways unexplored possibilities so we feel further exploration of this area is required, just not by us. ( although we are currently experimenting with infra sound which, if we get any good results we’ll report them else where on the site).

Possible ways of building an Invisible Force Field.

Another way we found to make force fields involves cold plasma. We abandoned this process at early stage due to lack of due to the lack of plasma producing facilities.

However, it is still an interesting and viable method which is currently under scrutiny. It will may also be of particular interest to ‘Star Trek ‘
Fans.

The following of the theory is a synopsis ofan article written by James Schultz entitled ‘Force Fields and ‘Plasma’ shields Get Closer to Reality’. For SPACE.com.

Of the 10 million dollars The US Air force spends on researching satellite protection, 20% is dedicated to low temperature plasma studies.

One of the areas in which these technologies could be used is in defending against an attack from new weapon systems.

"In theory, a plasma could deflect a particle beam or laser attack .It depends on what you’re shooting at it and how high you can tune the plasma frequency. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or practically achievable, particularly with a cold plasma. It’s a tough requirement to meet at present.", States Mounir Laroussi, an electrical and computer engineer at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and a leading expert in this field.

Laroussi has been experimenting with plasma within a plexiglass cube, the plasma being created by passing an electric current through helium gas via specially calibrated electrodes.
This allows a large volume of plasma to be produced at normal atmospheric pressure.

James Schultz explains; “Swirling in and around one another, a plasma’s charged particles interact constantly, giving rise to localized attractions or repulsions. External energy splashing against the plasma …… could be caught up within the plasma’s complex electromagnetic fields to be dissipated completely or deflected into space”.

However, the ability to create a plasma shield that protects against physical attack is still considered to be decades away.

Seemingly a far more achievable short-term aim appears to be the ability to cloak satellites or spacecraft from radar tracking.

Current experiments suggest that plasma can be made into an ‘energy mirror’, deflecting incoming electromagnetic waves, from ground-based radars. In essence, any craft employing this kind of plasma field would be completely cloaked from radars, so essentially rendered invisible.

"The idea is to deflect or absorb the energy completely," Laroussi said. "If you absorb the energy completely dissipating it within the plasma, the radar doesn’t see anything. Nothing reflects back."

So essentially, Plasma based invisible force fields are on the way, but if NASA are still decades away, they must be a bit tricky to make, and
we felt it would be an almost impossible task to replicate these experiments on such a small scale.