Yesterday, quite at random, I happened upon a website which mentioned the concept that electrokinetics is the principle upon which UFO's fly around. I haven't delved into it too deeply yet, but the general idea seems to be that if you can generate a non-symmetrical electrical field in a non-conducting medium, there will be a resulting physical force in the direction of the positive pole of the field. The medium, for example air, gets dragged along the field lines. The resulting force moves the object.

The idea is intriguing as hell. But in what little reading I have done so far, something peculiar and sad caught my attention. While the science of electrokinetics is real, and is used in fields such as drug dispersal and molecular-level power sources (check out wikipedia for that one), all the websites that talk about using this notion on a large scale to, for instance, lift an aircraft are all crackpot sites.

Maybe that's the nature of it. It works on a small scale, but fails when you try to scale it up, and all the reputable scientists know that already. But the ill-informed, the sorts of people who take a general description and treat it as if it were the rigorously defined truth, they run with it. They conflate it with other ideas (one site suggested that the motive force results from tachyons, in some way I didn't bother to pursue). They get all hot and bothered over it, and you can see the CrazyEyes darting just on the other side of the text.

Which is unfortunate because, if they really do think it'll do what they say, it would be better for them to pursue the technical hows and whys than to just write breathless prose and post it on the internet. Or, for those who seem to know what they're talking about, the grandiose "cure the common cold" style of presentation kills their credibility as well.

I say that in full awareness that I tend to come onto this blog and post weird-ass pseudoscience on a fairly regular basis. The difference is that I don't claim that anything I come up with is true. I only put the questions out there. And I would pursue them to learn the truth of them, but I tend to lose interest in things quickly, so the odds are that I would never get anywhere. Plus, I don't want to spend the kind of money it would take if I'm not going to get anywhere. So, yes, inventing a new and radical aerial propulsion system would cut into my sitting around time.

By the way, there is a functional design of a device that uses a voltage difference to induce sufficient airflow to lift its own weight with no moving parts. To give you an idea of both the device and the crackpot vibe that tends to accompany it, check out American Antigravity, Inc..