Tajmar spinning superconductor experiment

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Contents 8
Tajmar spinning superconductor experiment
Illustration of official papers and files
Illustration: official papers and files. An artist's impression drawn for this site, not a photograph of the event.
Date28 March 2006
TopicsGovernment programs (topic), Propulsion & physics (topic)
PeopleMartin Tajmar
TestimonyShellenberger testimony, p. 161
Year2006 in UFO history
Timeline2006 on the UAP Timeline
Sources12

On 23 March 2006 the European Space Agency announced that physicists funded by it — Martin Tajmar of ARC Seibersdorf Research in Austria, working with ESA's Clovis de Matos — believed they had measured a gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field in the laboratory, produced by a spinning superconducting ring. Later experiments did not confirm the effect.[1][2]

The experiment

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The experiment used a ring of superconducting material spun at up to 6,500 revolutions a minute. Spinning superconductors produce a weak magnetic field called the London moment; Tajmar and de Matos proposed that they might also produce a gravitational analogue, which they called the "gravitomagnetic London moment", as a way of explaining an anomaly in high-precision measurements of the mass of Cooper pairs, the current carriers in superconductors. Acceleration sensors near the ring recorded an acceleration field when it was speeded up.[1]

The claim

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The measured field was about 100 millionths of the acceleration due to Earth's gravity — tiny, but about a hundred million trillion times larger than general relativity predicts. Tajmar said the team had run more than 250 experiments, improved the equipment over three years and discussed the results for eight months before announcing them, and called on other physicists to try to replicate them. De Matos compared it to Faraday's 1831 induction experiment and said that, if confirmed, it could form the basis of a new technological domain. The two published experimental and theoretical papers that month.[1][3]

Later results

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Later tests, including Tajmar's own more refined experiments, pointed to probable experimental artefacts, and independent groups, including one in New Zealand, did not confirm the effect.[3]

Tajmar's later work

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Tajmar went on to lead a space propulsion group at the Dresden University of Technology, which has tested claimed exotic propulsion devices. In tests reported in March 2021 it rebuilt the setup used by NASA's Eagleworks lab and found that the apparent thrust of the EmDrive came from heating effects on the balance, refuting the claims by at least three orders of magnitude; it concluded that the thrust of James Woodward's Mach-effect thruster was a vibration artefact.[2]

People and topics

Illustration of official papers and files
Illustration: official papers and files. An artist's impression drawn for this site, not a photograph of the event.
  • Martin Tajmar — Physicist who tested claimed exotic propulsion devices.

On the Timeline

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See every 2006 event on the UAP Timeline →

References

Further reading

This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.

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