Extended Weight Measurements of Uncharged and Charged Spinning Gyroscopes in the Earth's Gravitational Field

Abstract

A number of weight anomalies have been reported in the past with respect to gyroscopes, starting from the claims of E. Laithwaite in the 1970s, who designed a propellantless propulsion system using a special arrangement of spinning gyroscopes. Much attention was gained from a paper in Physics Review Letters, when Japanese scientists announced that a gyroscope loses weight up to 0.005% when spinning only in clockwise rotation with the gyro's axis in vertical direction. Immediately afterwards, a number of other teams tried to replicate the effect using a standard electronic balance all obtaining a null result. It was suggested, that the reported effect by the Japanese was probably due to a vibration artifact, however, no final conclusion on the real cause has been obtained. Shortly afterwards, a patent by a Japanese researchers was published, in which a weight anomaly was reported for a spinning gyroscope that was charged up to high-voltage using a Van-de-Graff generator. A weight change of up to 0.8% was found proportional to the rotation speed. The effect was reduced if the gyroscope was mounted with a 45° inclination with respect to the vertical axis. A replication was attempted at the US Air Force Academy, which did show a similar behavior with a weight change about one order of magnitude smaller, however, the measurement uncertainty was too high to prove the claim conclusively. Finally, anomalous behaviors of gyroscopes in free-fall experiments were reported were some groups obtained positive and some negative results. We decided to build a dedicated high precision setup to test weight anomalies of spinning gyroscopes in various configurations (single and double gyroscopes, change in orientations, etc.) as well as to build a charged gyroscope that can be tested for weight anomalies at least an order of magnitude better than previous efforts. This paper will give an overview of our experimental setups and a summary of our results so far. Any real gyroscope anomaly would be of tremendous interest not only for gravitational theories but of course for space propulsion applications. Nomenclature PWM= pulse width modulation