By Bruce DePalma
The beginning of this author's work with rotating objects began with moment of inertia measurements of constrained gyroscopes undergoing forced precession. The increased moments of inertia discovered for precessional motion were translated into a series of measurements on pendula with rotating bobs. Although the discoveries of the inertial effects associated with precession and pendulum oscillations of rotating bob weights were highly suggestive, this author greatly resisted attempts to force him to drop a rotating object for two reasons.
Firstly, he had no reason to be able to predict the motion of a freely falling object on the basis of the inertial alterations he had measured which had concerned themselves with constrained situations of rotating objects. Second, there was no reason to expect inertial alterations to affect the rate of fall of a released object and there was no available theory which could in any way be applied to the situation or a falling rotating object in a gravitational field. This is a situation known in religious terms as a "leap into the dark."
Since the author and his assistants are experts in the application of stroboscopic lighting techniques to the study of high speed motions, the first experimental cut at the situation was to photograph the trajectories of a steel ball bearing rotating at a high speed together with an identical control object moving at a similar initial velocity. The result of the experiment was so startling and anomalous as to have taken me five years to understand.
The original results of our experiments were circulated as a report [1] in 1974. Two years later the experiment was published in an appendix to a book of Christian exegesis [2]. In 1977, one of my former students performed a high precision verification of the dropping of a rotating object: "The Gyro Drop Experiment."[3] Actually the experiment has two parts, the spinning ball going up, and the spinning ball falling. Since I would be rather thought a fool than misrepresent results of experiments, I only attempted to analyze the portion of the experiment I thought I understood. Basically, the spinning object going higher than the identical non-rotating control with the same initial velocity, and, then falling faster than the identical non-rotating control; presents a dilemma which can only be resolved or understood -- on the basis of radically new concepts in physics -- concepts so radical that only the heretofore un-understood results of other experiments, (the elastic collision of a rotating and an identical non-rotating object, et al.), and new conceptions of physics growing out of the many discussions and correspondence pertaining to rotation, inertia, gravity, and motion in general. We should remember the pioneers in this field: Wolfe, Cox, Dean, Laithwaite, Rendle, Searle, KŸmmel, DePalma and Delvers, to name but a few.
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The question to be answered: is there any gravitational effect from rotation or is gravitation a special interaction of mass with its environment. I would tend to believe gravitation is a special interaction of real mass with its environment. This is not to say that artificial gravitational fields cannot be created but they would be always distinguishable from the real thing through some physical test. An artificial gravitational field would be non-isotropic and anisotropic.
In terms of the dropping of the spinning ball, the understanding of the experiment involves the results of many other experiments as well as the resolution of a mind picture of the Universe which is our best approximation to understanding at the present time. What makes it difficult for other experimenters to understand the experiment is that it is not simply the results which are important. Without a theoretical foundation of understanding to make the experiment comprehendible -- to fit the results into a context of rational understanding and harmony with the facts of other experiments -- the data become trivial and worthless, and, worst of all, subject to misinterpretation.
The availability of free energy from as simple an experiment as colliding a rotating object with a non-rotating one opens up the development of other machines for energy extraction and propulsion which may be more convenient to handle than the extraction of energy from the collision of a rotating object with a non-rotating one.
