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🕑 Added 2018-10-20 00:22:26 +0000 UTC

Comments

John

Ah, Piper quotes! Love me some pulp era scifi.

John

I did some research into "antigravity" and yeah, most scifi writers get it wrong. What they are talking about is either some form of propulsion that uses Newton's laws of motion to "float" or they are talking pure magic. Asimov got it mostly right with his story "The Billiard Ball", and despite the Wikipedia entry, it's not a perpetual energy machine, you still have to pump energy into it and pump matter into the feeder to produce power. There's another way to get your floaty things, and that's using Negative Matter and Negative Mass. It will cancel out the positive mass of the matter it's associated with, and basically act like a balloon. The only problem is that when negative matter touches positive matter, they cancel out. Not "annihilate" but "cancel"- they touch, they disappear, total energy=0. You'd have to create a "virtual" negative mass to make things float. Real Handwavium. Well, if you could create matter by making virtual particle pairs become "real", you'd have to "pay" for that either in energy or in creating the equivalent negative mass in the region that they were created. I'd think I'd have a better chance of flying by flapping my arms really vigorously...