h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I feel the key to explaining gravity will be found here

http://www.hfml.ru.nl/froglev.html

i can't really see that a force of levitaion, in opposing gravitation, helps to explain it.

After all, I can remember Feynman in a TV interview years ago raising his enormous shoe and stamping it back on the floor, saying that that was the only antigravity device he could recognize.

There are in fact many ways of counteracting gravity, none of which provide any clues to how the force is either generated or applied, and mathematical analysis is entirely unhelpful in shedding any light. Only after the physical cause has been discovered can it be analysed mathematically, and I should be surprised it were then found to be a cosmic constant.

In my earlier reply, I feel I missed the point that the difference between levitation and gravitation is a matter of perspective. In opposing one another the two forces would normally be in equilibrium, but between two relatively adjacent bodies a marginal imbalance would account for the weak force of gravity.

I entirely agree that diamagnetism could be the mechanism involved, accounting at the same time for the force overcoming the repulsion between similarly charged protons in the atomic nucleus, and who knows what else beside. While you approach the problem from a mathematical angle, mine is concerned with the physics of it, and it would useful if a fusion could be found between the two.

Firehawk46064

The HFML website on Diamagnetic Levitation that you quote on various threads dates from some 8 years back, and there appears to be no follow-up to it that I can find. Yet, as you suggest, a case can be made for ascribing both levitation and gravitation to diamagnetism, providing preconceived notions about the force of gravity are shelved, even as Newton himself did when confronted by the weightlessness of objects in free fall. Weight being acquired only when a fall was broken was incompatible with a pull.

Is it, perhaps, professionally too dangerous to start raising doubts about the popular notion of a pull on which so much theory is now based?