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Is artificial gravity scientifically possible?

Cainkane1 said:
You see sci-fi movies and everyone on board the spaceship walks around like they have gravity. I this possible?
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In the way that Recovering Yuppy describes, yes entirely possible and quite doable.

In the way it's often portrayed in science fiction movies where some sort of a field is turned on? No. Not possible.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
The movie 2001 A Space Odyssey depicts artificial gravity in a scientifically valid way.
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Yeah, this. You need a large rotating body to do it. The centrifugal forces act as a substitute for gravity.

In The Expanse, you see some kind of magnetic boots used, so that people can walk around. That's not really artificial gravity though.

As far as I know, actual artificial gravity is impossible. You need mass to create gravity, you can't just magic it into existence. Maybe you can use the electromagnetic force, like in The Expanse, but that force acts differently from the force of gravity. It's very strong up close, but weakens quickly with distance.
 
Roboramma said:
In the way that Recovering Yuppy describes, yes entirely possible and quite doable.

In the way it's often portrayed in science fiction movies where some sort of a field is turned on? No. Not possible.
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Why? From what I´ve gathered, science still doesn´t have a full grasp of how gravity really works.
 
Abooga said:
Why? From what I´ve gathered, science still doesn´t have a full grasp of how gravity really works.
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It's the result of mass traveling in the time dimension through space/time warped by another mass.
 
Something to do with the Higgs field I think. I'm getting on thin ice here. Of course, it's likely that our understanding is incomplete (certainly mine is).
 
Artificial gravity is a piece of cake, conceptually.

Gravity is utterly indiscernible from acceleration.

Every time you accelerate in a car, train, whatever, you're experiencing 'artificial' gravity. Keep accelerating at 1G and you'll be in 1G of gravity.

Of course, if you want artificial gravity without having to move at all, then I think you'll have troubles.
 
Abooga said:
Why? From what I´ve gathered, science still doesn´t have a full grasp of how gravity really works.
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Rubbish. It is all explained by the diagram below.

timecubeflierimg.0.0.gif
 
Physicist and science fiction writer Robert Forward wrote a book called "Indistinguishable from Magic", that alternated scientific essays about hypothetical advanced technologies common in science fiction and short stories featuring those technologies. As I recall, the artificial gravity chapter involved somehow manufacturing hyperdense matter and placing it in a thin layer under a surface, with sufficient mass that it generated gravity pulling toward that surface. It couldn't be turned on and off though.
 
Cainkane1 said:
You see sci-fi movies and everyone on board the spaceship walks around like they have gravity. I this possible?
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with greater understanding of the underlying science and the right resulting technology, why wouldn't it be, we're just not quite there yet.
 
As an amusing aside, I knew a guy in Junior High who insisted that almost the entire crew of the Enterprise lived and worked in the saucer section, and the decks were actually a set of concentric rings, all rotating inside the saucer. This was pre-Next Generation, so saucer separation didn't exist yet. His argument was "they have gravity, and the only way to create gravity is by spinning." Faster-than-light travel, teleportation, energy weapons, and force fields were fine, but artificial gravity? That's just ridiculous.
 
Armitage72 said:
Physicist and science fiction writer Robert Forward wrote a book called "Indistinguishable from Magic", that alternated scientific essays about hypothetical advanced technologies common in science fiction and short stories featuring those technologies. As I recall, the artificial gravity chapter involved somehow manufacturing hyperdense matter and placing it in a thin layer under a surface, with sufficient mass that it generated gravity pulling toward that surface. It couldn't be turned on and off though.
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And it'd play havoc with your DeltaV
 
3point14 said:
And it'd play havoc with your DeltaV
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I want to say that it was mainly looking at use in stationary facilities, but it's a 20+ year old book, and it's been about that long since I read it. I remember him also talking about putting the matter in the ceiling of a room, configured so that it would exactly cancel the gravity of a planet, resulting in zero gravity in the room.
In retrospect, he seemed to be overly optimistic in some of his essays. His antimatter essay claimed that the technology to manufacture it in industrially useful quantities already existed (c. 1995), if the facilities would only be designed and built by engineers with the goal of building a power plant, instead of by scientists with the goal of winning a Nobel Prize.
 
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