from Hacker News

Lawrence Livermore Lab paper asserts gravity electromagnetism interaction

by erdos4d on 8/16/23, 2:43 PM with 2 comments

• by erdos4d on 8/16/23, 2:43 PM

  I posted this once before and it got no traction. I decided this time to make the title more descriptive of what is actually afoot here. I'd like people to note the level of engineering in this reactor concept demonstrates a long term commitment of serious resources by LLNL to a modified Einstein field equation (equation 15 in the paper), which states that electromagnetism can affect the curvature of spacetime under certain conditions. Given that the method of operation for the reactor explicitly requires these effects, I also believe they must be substantial in magnitude and that they have actually demonstrated this experimentally to justify this level of commitment. I personally think this paper is a decade or more of work by LLNL. I hope this gets looked at this time, please upvote if you think this is interesting. I look forward to hearing everyone's take on this.

• by greenbit on 8/16/23, 3:24 PM

  In the conclusions section, there is reference to "three conjectures on how one might enhance energy- momentum to spacetime curvature coupling" - which might be shortened to something like "e-m gravity coupling", but that EM is not the same as electromagnetic EM.

  Idk, it's kind of cool, smashing two plasma rings into each other, and not implausible that that might push the obtainable energy densities up by "orders of magnitude", but it's hard to see how this is about electric/gravity interactions.