In recent years, the "floating machine" folk science and technology movement has quietly spread to the whole world with Seattle as the center. The competition to build this so-called "anti-gravity" plane has made thousands of fans crazy; American official agencies also want to monopolize this technology and serve the space project. The history of elevators can be traced back to the 1920s, and American inventor Thomas Thomson Brown was a pioneer in this direction. The word "elevator" was borrowed from him Brown is a rich boy who likes to play with all kinds of electrical appliances since he was a child. When he was in college, under the guidance of his teacher Paul Biefeld, he observed a strange phenomenon when doing experiments with capacitors: as long as electric energy was input to the capacitors at a very high voltage, a weak thrust would be generated in a certain direction. He called this phenomenon the Bifield-Brown effect, and the "floating ancestors" were forgotten. Brown has a strong hands-on ability, but he is not good at theoretical analysis. Although he put forward some bold and naive assumptions about his invention-for example, the capacitor in his experiment produced a field that could interact with the gravity of the earth-he never made a rigorous scientific explanation for this phenomenon, which failed to attract the attention of the scientific community. However, he is full of confidence that his invention will drive the world: "Thousands of tons of multiple gravitons may become future ocean spacecraft, or even magical' space vehicles', providing power for spacecraft going to Mars. Who knows? " In 1930s, Brown served in the U.S. Navy, and continued to make capacitors, even bigger. His experiment peaked at 1952. That year, he gave a performance in front of many scientists and military personnel: at the end of a 10-foot-long rotating shaft, two 2-foot-wide metal disks were loaded, and the device was impacted with 50 watts of electricity at a voltage as high as 50,000 volts, and the metal disks rotated at a speed of 16 revolutions per second. This shows that Brown's invention is very valuable. But somehow, Brown was gradually forgotten. The Pentagon has never tracked this technology, and investors are not interested. To make matters worse, Brown's fascination with UFOs, especially its driving mode, even set up a committee to pursue little green men, who is said to be from space. His scientific reputation was hit by the orthodox scientific community and he was regarded as a madman.

Decades later, few people remember that he ever existed. It was not until the end of 1990s that a folk lover regained his old dream that this situation was changed. The work of Jeff Cameron Jeanblanc, a subcontractor of NASA, has come back to life. He once noticed that the capacitor suddenly twitched and remembered who mentioned the Biefeld-Brown effect in the university class. So he searched the literature and found some patents applied by Brown. Cameron thinks that the Bifield-Brown effect is real and wants to show the existence of this force vividly with a flying thing. Cameron chose a balsa wood to make a stable triangular plane. The upper part of the tripod is connected with high-voltage electricity by winding a circle of wires, and the lower part is stuck with aluminum foil strips, with a gap of 3 to 5 cm in the middle. It is said that there is an upward thrust between the aluminum foil strip and the conductor, which is the Biefeld-Brown effect. When the high-voltage electricity was pumped into the plane, it really floated into the air immediately, and the aerostat was born.

In June, 200 1 2000, Cameron posted the picture of this aerostat on the Internet. At the beginning of 2002, 26-year-old Tim Ventura saw Cameron's floating machine pattern on the Internet, then made one himself and really flew. So he got out of hand. After losing his job last summer, he did a lot, claiming to do more than anyone else on earth. He also set up a website "American Anti-Gravity" in Seattle, which collects flight videos of various lift planes and makes a theoretical summary. He also introduced the manufacturing method step by step on the website. As a result, floating elevator movement has become a global phenomenon, and Seattle has therefore become the headquarters of floating elevator movement. Millions of elevator enthusiasts visited Ventura's website, and many news media visited his laboratory for investigation. He designed a 4-foot-wide floating elevator device, which can lift nearly 1 pound of goods. This is the "ion wind"? Unfortunately, there are many pseudosciences in anti-gravity research, which are not accepted by the scientific community. Orthodox scientists laugh at the anti-gravity view that the power of aerostat is ion wind. Their simple explanation is that when the current enters the top coil of the flotation machine, the escaped electrons ionize the surrounding air, and the ions are attracted by the aluminum foil at the lower part of the flotation machine, impacting the medium molecules and forming a downward wind. Reina Weiss, a gravity expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said, "There is nothing mysterious about this." In his view, there is no difference between a flotation machine and a hovercraft.

Fans of aerostat admit the existence of ion wind. In fact, Brown has always described his invention as an ion wind engine. Reaching under the floating elevator, I really felt the wind. Moreover, the maker of the aerostat also admitted that his works just left the earth-this is the meaning of anti-gravity. However, some people think that the ion wind is not the only reason for the suspension elevator to fly, because it is said that in one case, some capacitors similar to the suspension elevator fly in a vacuum. Because there is no air intervention, anti-gravity theorists say that this shows that there must be unknown mysterious forces at work.

Toys may change the world. NASA hired some scientists to study floating machines. In the summer of that year, it also obtained a patent for aerostat technology, represented by Jonathan Campbell, the chief scientist of aerostat research hired by NASA. The public is very angry about NASA's elevator technology patent, and most fans regard their works as * * * enjoyment projects, which are similar to free software in the field of computer software and serve the public interest. However, NASA does not take this criticism seriously. It believes that studying this technology and applying for a patent is to better serve the society.

At the request of news media, NASA conducted an experiment of vacuum flotation machine, but the flotation machine failed to fly in vacuum. Scientists at NASA don't think elevators can fly in a vacuum, and they don't think there are any new physical mysteries, but they still think this technology is worth studying because this propeller has many advantages over the existing flight power system. They do not need control components, do not need to carry fuel, and can receive the required energy remotely. NASA hopes to use it as a driving force for space flight and envisages using this device in Mars exploration in the near future.

Indeed, the aerostat is also like a toy. But as Alexandre Chamus, a French aerospace science and technology writer, commented: "187 1 year, the first plane was not much better than toys when tested, and it was ridiculed." In some science fiction stories, there is an anti-gravity setting. In other words, there is a device that can partially or completely affect the gravitational effect. Putting this device under an object can reduce or completely eliminate the influence of gravity on the object. Float an object from the surface of the earth with little force. In Newton's law of gravity, gravity is the transfer of force from point to point. From this point of view, it is very likely that the gravitational field is shielded by another place. Similarly, the magnetic field can be shielded by diamagnetic substances.