this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
373 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
59605 readers
3397 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There is a connection between gravity and electromagnetics, but it's mostly through the stress-energy tensor giving photons momentum (and thus gravitational pull) but to use an EM field to measurable gravity you need absolutely insane amounts of energy.
You essentially need the literal inverse of a supermassive nuclear explosion (almost like a small star), because the gravitational effect of energy is equivalent to the gravitational effect of the mass which it would form if bound, and given E=mc^2 and the fact that nuclear bombs are small enough to barely have measurable gravity then the math means you need truly insane amounts of energy. (unless somebody can figure out a cheat to create directional pull with much less energy, but I strongly doubt it)
It's more plausible that somebody would be able to scale up "optical tweezers" to move large masses (directly depositing momentum of the energy field on an object) because that no longer involves the E=mc^2 equation, but it would be even more complicated by a HUGE factor than building the type of large supercooled electromagnets which already can make humans hover (due to water in the body being diamagnetic)