Poynting Vector Gravity Modification & Searl Effect Experimental Results
An engineer and a physicist teamed up to test the controversial claims behind the Searl Effect Generator — and reportedly measured a surprising 7% reduction in weight. We’re joined by Dr John Brandenburg, a plasma physicist working in particle astrophysics, quantum gravity, and unified field theory to discuss experimental claims of gravity-modification and a new theoretical model of physics that may explain them.
John, let me start out by asking about the “Morningstar Energy Box” you developed with Paul Murad, which was a modified Searl Effect Generator that reportedly measured a 7% reduction in weight during testing. As I understand things, one of the goals of this experiment was to validate a new unified field theory of physics that you’ve developed, right?
Well, Paul and I have been working for a long time together. He was very encouraging when I was working down at the Florida Space Institute — he got me into going to conferences and presenting my work.
One of the things that came out of this was the GEM Unified-Field Theory (Gravity Electro-Magnetism), which is named after my initial goal of unifying the two long range forces of nature. It’s based on a combination of Kaluza-Klein and Sakharov’s radiation pressure theory of gravity, and I found that in GEM theory the Poynting vector assumes great importance — this is what carries momentum and energy in the electromagnetic field.
For instance, when light strikes a solar cell and creates electricity, the thing carrying the energy of that light wave is the Poynting vector. Similarly, if you launch a solar sail in space, the sunlight striking it creates a small pressure — and the Poynting vector is what carries the force of the sunlight.
Now in my theory, which unifies gravity and electromagnetism, the Poynting vector not only carries electromagnetic energy, but also does the work of gravity as a difference in Poynting vectors, or a curvature in fields, if you will.
Paul Murad and Morgan Boardman encouraged me to develop this aspect of the theory as much as possible, which shows that if we create a vortex of Poynting vectors, then local gravity will be affected — but how much the gravity would be affected was under dispute. There were some undetermined constants, but we felt we had an equation that would basically allow us to do local modification of gravity by generating a vortex of Poynting vectors.
So this was the model that we used to describe the effects we saw happening in the experiment you asked about — a series of rotating rings & magnets created a vortex of Poynting vectors, and that in turn modified local gravity.
Now you must understand the Poynting vortex is actually around us all the time — it’s in every induction motor, which makes Nikola Tesla the real inventor. He basically found the rotation of an electromagnetic field creates a vortex of Poynting vectors. If you put a piece of metal in this, the metal wants to rotate with the vortex, which is the principle of the induction motor.
Induction motors are nice and simple, they require almost no maintenance because everything is done by fields, not by electrical commutators carrying current across rotating contacts. It’s a block of metal, that’s specially designed, and it spins in the Poynting vortex created by the coils which operate normally on three phase power.
So with Paul’s encouragement I continued developing the GEM theory, and eventually found support for the idea that creating a Poynting vortex is capable of locally modifying gravity. I call this principle the “Vacuum Bernoulli Equation”, which is analogous to the aerodynamic Bernoulli equation for flight.
Okay, so you’re proposing that by creating a vortex of Poynting vectors that you can generate an area of reduced gravity. Can you explain how this concept generates a propulsive force, and is there any experimental support for this in past physics experiments?
It works just like the high speed movement of wind in a tornado, where an aerodynamic vortex creates a low pressure zone in the air. In the GEM theory, rather than air pressure, the Poynting vortex creates an area of lower gravity, which you can ultimately use for flight.
By the way, I’ve described all of this in much greater detail in a book I wrote called Beyond Einstein’s Unified Field, Gravity & Electro-Magnetism Redefined, which you can find on Amazon.
Now I want you to know that there is past experimental support for this — I’ve found a considerable amount from looking at data in the scientific literature. It starts with a Russian scientist named Kozyrev who created a Poynting vortex using an aviation gyroscope. Back in 1968, he reported that when he spun a gyroscope in the counterclockwise direction using three-phase electrical energy, the spinning rotor in the aviation gyroscope would lose a small amount of weight. It only lost about one part per thousand of weight, but it was easy to detect with sensitive balances.
Did Kozyrev explain the weight-loss in his experiment as being connected to the Poynting vector, or did he have some other type of physical model to explain this effect?
Kozyrev had kind of a vague theory of how this was all working — he thought it was more of a vibration than a vortex pattern. But in any case, he reported these results in his report. This was back during the cold war, and he was considered a very important scientist in Soviet Union, so this was immediately translated by the US government, and that’s how I became aware of it.
Later on, in 1989, two Japanese scientists named Hayasaka and Takeuchi published a very similar experiment where they found the same effect. Exactly the same. In fact, what was interesting, as you rotated in the counterclockwise direction, the effect occurs. But if you rotate it in the clockwise direction, the effect disappears. So there’s some other subtleties involved. Quantum mechanics is full of effects like this when you get into spin relationships.
So anyway, some people also did experiments spinning up rotors with compressed air, and they found no effect, which indicated that the electromagnetic field is what was causing the weight reduction. This revelation was very exciting, and the fact that we have more powerful neodymium magnets gives us more to work with in testing it.
Now I understand that these neodymium magnets are what Paul used in the construction of the Morningstar SEG device, right?
Yes, and Paul created an array of these magnets with the poles reversed so that one magnet would be facing North, the next magnet would be facing South, and so on — based on his intuition as an engineer and along with my GEM theory.
We did this because arranging the magnets in an up/down, configuration creates a Poynting vortex when you rotate the array, and does it efficiently without having to carry a lot of electricity around the room. So it means a fairly low power experiment can create a tremendous Poynting vortex effect where otherwise you’d have to use a megawatt of power.
Once you’ve built that array, you then you spin that up with a motor, and Paul and Morgan Boardman wanted to explore what the phenomenology would be — and lo and behold, we found that at least according to the electronic load cells supporting the device that it lost a few percent of weight. So the experiment can be said to have a positive result.
Well, let me ask you about the paper that you wrote. It was called the Murad-Brandenburg Poynting Field Conservation Equation and Possible Gravity Law. Can you tell me a bit about that?
Paul was the main author of that, I was basically a contributor. It was a collaborative project, where Paul had the original idea and asked me to use my math expertise dealing with vector equations to write down a wave equation for the Poynting vector itself — not for the electric and magnetic fields, but their combination, the actual Poynting vector.
I was able to do that, and in free space, away from sources, the Poynting vector goes as a wave just like the electromagnetic fields do, it’s created by them and travels with them through space. So when the electrons move, Paul is quite good at math himself, though, and has further looked at what would happen if you had like magnetic charge, et cetera. So in that paper he’s elaborated on things a little bit, but the overall takeaway is that in GEM theory, the connection between the Poynting vector and gravity is strong.
From what I understand, your GEM model also offers a way to predict the mass of the Higgs Boson, and your prediction was close to the actual experimental measurement later observed in collider experiments.
I’m proud to say that I went from being a big skeptic about the Higgs boson to being a believer. Part of the issue was that they kept calling it the God Particle, which as a physicist just made my blood curdle.
Again, it was Paul & Morgan Boardman at Morningstar who pushed me over the hump on this. They essentially said, “John, we’ve seen that you’ve kind of unified gravity & electromagnetism in a practical way. How about the other forces of nature, the short range nuclear forces in quantum mechanics?” Well, it was an intriguing question, because GEM theory is based on quantum mechanics. I started looking into how to derive the strong and the weak nuclear forces from the GEM theory, and I found out that it was possible.
The carrier of the strong force in the nucleus is a charged pion, and I’ve derived the mass for that along with the mass for the the W-Boson to within one part per thousand using the GEM theory. The same theory predicts the mass for the Higgs Boson and gets it within a few percent. I predicted 128 mass units called GeV (billion electron volts), and the The Higgs Boson was measured at 125 GeV, which is within a few percent.
So I actually predicted & published the Higgs Boson mass before it was known — I’m very proud of that and grateful to Paul Murad and Morgan Boardman for sponsoring for that research. We got the Higgs Boson four months before it was known, and it falls right out of the theory, and in fact, the theory itself can be the GEM theory can be reformulated around the Higgs Boson.
Let’s imagine when the big bang happened: the universe was one big ball of rapidly expanding plasma and its temperature is unimaginable. As it expands and cools, the Higgs Boson appears, and lays the groundwork for the formation of hydrogen protons and electrons that make up the universe.
You can derive the the Higgs boson mass at 128 GEV because its Compton radius is the same as the classical electrostatic radius of the proton — which means both particles have a geometric resonance. The two sizes are the same.
The classical radius above the proton and the electron in turn are very important in scattering electromagnetic waves, which underlies the GEM model of gravity. Think of gravity is kind of running as a bunch of little nudges by the vacuum, the zero point fluctuation around us.
So you’re describing a push model for gravity like Le Sage proposed, right?
Oh, exactly. A push model of gravity was also proposed by Andrei Sakharov, and came out of his work building the Russian hydrogen bomb — and surprisingly, the H-bomb runs on Poynting vector energy.
The hydrogen bomb invented by Teller & Ulam uses a big watermelon shaped cavity, made of very heavy metal to trap the radiation. The radiation is trying to move at the speed of light, but the metal is massive, it can’t move very fast. So it’s essentially fixed during the reaction.
So you have an atomic bomb at one end of this watermelon shaped cavity, and at a focal point in the other end, you have a ball of hydrogen isotopes. When the atomic bomb detonates, it fills the cavity with electromagnetic radiation, and the Poynting vector converges down on the hydrogen and acts like gravity. It crushes it, and turns it into a star.
So in a sense, hydrogen bomb actually runs on controlled gravity. According to the GEM theory, you’re creating instant millionfold gravity inside that container, because in the GEM model gravity is a Poynting vector push.
While Sakharov was working with these ideas, he realized that gravity is a push by the Poynting vector — but because he was working on highly classified Russian weapons programs, his article about gravity as a push gravity is very terse and abstract, so the key to understanding it is knowing his research.
If I understand push gravity correctly, it basically says that background energy from the universe is constantly striking an object from all sides and exerting a force on it, which pushes it towards other objects of mass. So mass basically casts a “shadow”, and other mass is pushed towards it?
Let’s do a though experiment: let’s say that you put two ball-bearings in a box of heavy metal, and then you heat the box white hot. What happens? The two ball bearings will actually attract each other with a one over R squared force because they’re partially shielding each other.
If you stand on one ball bearing and you look around, you see white hot metal everywhere except in the distance you see a black spot that is the other ball bearing — the black spot is actually its shadow. So in this model, you’re pushed towards the shadow of the other ball bearing by energy of this white hot box you’re in.
Now in Sakharov’s theory — you’ll love this — the white hot box that creates all of this Poynting vector is the vacuum’s zero point energy — so Sakharov is really the origin of the zero point gravity model.
So you’re saying that the energy that creates the “push” isn’t something like cosmic microwave background radiation, but instead zero-point fluctuations in the vacuum energy state by virtual particles?
Right. We exist on a scale above the vacuum ground state, but below that, the vacuum is full of electromagnetic turbulence created by virtual particles on a subatomic level.
A lot of the recent work on this has been done by Hal Puthoff, who basically filled in a lot of the gaps in Sakharov’s model of gravity. He also pointed out that you can have an electromagnetic model of gravity that agrees with the standard model of physics because all of the quarks that make up the proton and the neutron, supposedly the neutral particle, are all charged.
In any case, the GEM theory is moving ahead. We’ve got the Higgs boson, we’ve got the weak and the strong forces, and what that means is that we’ve gone beyond just the long range forces of nature — it’s now wall-to-wall unification, and I’ll be presenting this theory very aggressively at scientific conferences in the future.
About Our Guest
Dr. John Brandenburg is a theoretical plasma physicist who specializes in magnetic fusion energy and plasma propulsion for space travel. He has taught Aerospace Engineering at University of Central Florida, served as the Chief Propulsion Scientist at Orbital Technologies Corporation, and has developed the GEM Unified Field Theory of physics. John holds MS and PhD degrees in theoretical plasma physics from the University of California, Davis.
