The recent announcement by Dr. Martin Tajmar of measuring a gravitational-modification in a rotating superconductor is creating quite a stir. What makes this story so intensely interesting is that it connects to such a wide-variety of other avenues of research -- from the Mach-Lorentz Thruster Mass-Fluctuation technology to a collection of approaches involving superconductors & rotating magnetic fields stretching back over the last decade. The commentary below is part of an online exchange currently underway about the potential scope of the ramifications from the recent announcement:

Andrew Palfreyman: This strikes me as Machian-related stuff, but I haven't had time yet to really dig in yet. Here are a couple of observations and questions for Martin about the experiment & his publication:

1. It's intriguing that equation 16 of the theoretical paper "Local Photon and Graviton Mass and its Consequences" has a term in (2c/3); intriguing because of Dr. Franklin Felber's result that antigravitic effects begin at precisely this speed. Wonder if Martin has put these two facts together?

2. The experimental paper "Experimental Detection of the Gravitomagnetic London Moment" appears impressive (partly due to a healthy budget and USAF funding :). I am however unclear as to whether this forms the basis of a propellantless propulsion system. Since signed acceleration fields are claimed to be generated by signed accelerations of a superconductor, it's clear that an appropriate acceleration profile consisting of an asymmetric sawtooth will effectively rectify the external force experienced by an external mass. But how to exploit this? Momentum must be conserved, and so one would expect a back-reaction on the superconductor. I'm curious if this could be measured using the same experimental setup? Perhaps I misunderstand the big picture, since this assertion doesn't involve any Machian considerations. So, no, I don't have a clear picture in my mind as to how to turn this into a propellantless thruster.

3. As for increasing the measured effect:
a) Based on the final figure of 0603032.pdf, higher (dm/m)'s can be found if using aluminium as opposed to niobium, the best performer tested to data.
b) Much higher rotational accelerations can be had at the nanoscale. But I'm not going to think about that design right now :).

Paul March put the clue as to how to engineer this into a propellantless propulsion system at the end of his first email with the statement "Mass transients in variable gravitons anyone?": the key requires exploiting the proposed fluctuations in the gravitomagnetic photon mass. Since the Cooper pairs are electrically charged, they are amenable to the Lorentz force. Problem is that the Meissner-Ochsenfeld effct suppresses any B-field we try to impress deep into the bulk of the superconductor. Perhaps therefore the play area is some fraction of the London depth. Assuming the fluctuations are also occuring there...

Another speculation occurs to me, unfortunately far wilder than my Felber connection, and even than Pod's "moving furniture in the next room" experiment you mention. I happened this week after dinner to catch the History Channel's documentary on a UFO crash in Aurora, Texas in 1897. There were some informational nuggets in there; specifically, a piece of metal from the craft was spectrographically assayed twice independently with identical results. The constituents were 95% pure aluminium and 5% iron. Apparently this was not a common alloy in 1897, but my wild speculation here relates this to a "Tajmar disk", which ideally is made of aluminium, and ideally, in order to extract a rectified thrust, would benefit from a boost in aluminium's magnetic permeability. I just thought the serendipity was interesting, these two pieces of data having landed in my lap in the same week and are still fresh in memory.

Paul March: If Tajmar is right, then we also have to rethink the validity of Podkletnov's body of work as well, especially the claimed gravity impulse experiments using 2MV electron pulses slamming into a type-II superconductor target.  What do you guess is the magnitude of acceleration of the Cooper-pair ions when getting hit with a multi-megavolt per meter E-field gradient?  And add to that the very probable and bizarre B-field compression effects from all those magnetic vortices present in a type-II superconductor when they are hit by the INDUCED B-field impulse from that huge E-field pulse in the target and you SHOULD get some strange gravinertial effects.  If Pod actually performed the impulse experiments, he probably did see something akin to what was reported.

Are you familiar with F. E. Alzofon’s work back in the 1960s and 70s? If memory serves, Alzofon proposed that thin sheets of an aluminum/iron alloy with the iron suspended as discrete isolated particles in the aluminum, when excited by microwave radiation, would generated a net decrease of the material’s weight to the point of levitation.  I don’t know whatever became of Alzofon’s work, but it sure does seem to dovetail well with the Texas 1897 UFO crash report, (I saw that program as well),  and Tajmar’s results and theory.

I’ve been wading through Martin T.’s two papers this afternoon and noted some interesting relationships about the variable mass of photons and graviphotinos.  Martin & de Matos say the following after their equation-5 in the “Local Photon and Graviton Mass and its Consequences” paper, with the underlines being mine:

“We find that the photon mass inside normal matter must be defined over the charge density and the charge-to-mass ratio observed.  Note that the photon mass is then (due to the negative sign in the Larmor theorem) always a complex value independent of the sign of charge.  This is a surprising result and will need further investigation which is under preparation by the authors.  Especially as the photon mass inside a superconductor due to the Higgs mechanism has a real value.  As a hypothesis, we can postulate that the complex mass will change into a real value by passing from normal to coherent matter. That would actually introduce a sign change in the London moment and will not require Becker’s argument 17 any more to get the right sign as observed in experiments.”

We all know what a LASER does.  It’s Light Amplification from Stimulated (in phase) Emission of Radiation.  In other words this QM effect is due to all the atoms in the lasing media dumping their inverted electron shell energy density population all at the same time in a temporally coherent manner.  What Martin and de Matos appear to be saying above is that if we change electrically neutral and non-temporally coherent matter into electrically charged, i.e., matter with a charge imbalance AKA large dielectric constant, and temporally turn it into “coherent matter”, that it SHOULD act the same way gravinertially as does a superconductor with large populations of coherently coupled Cooper-pair electrons. 

Well guess what?  If you take a high dielectric constant ceramic capacitor and apply a large time-varying E-field across the cap’s electrodes, you have created a material with the required electrically non-neutral and temporally ordered state needed to become transiently “coherent” gravinertially in the same way that is proposed by Tajmar and de Matos for superconductors!  So our high-K dielectric caps used in Jim W’s MLTs are a prime example of this case.  I.e., the dielectric’s atoms/UCC are electrically non-neutral to spontaneous polarization at room temperature and then their electron shell quantum states are synchronized by the externally applied E-field, thus becoming effectively the same coherent beast as a Type-I superconductor if the dielectric constant and Synchronizing E-field are large enough and fast enough!  In addition, the larger the charge separation, the larger the E-field and the faster the rise time of the E-field excitation becomes in the caps, the more “coherent” the dielectric mass becomes and of course the larger the GRT based mass fluctuations becomes.  Us blind folk may just have connected the front two legs of the elephant for the first time…