14 DAY TRIAL // Could it really be that a rapidly oscillating molecule is capable of slowing down its fall in a gravitational field, much like skydivers that increase the area of body parallel to the Earth to glide on the air current?
Einstein's theory of general relativity states that the presence of matter in huge amounts (stars, planets) changes the geometry of spacetime by folding or warping space around the mass like a ball on a straight piece of cloth, this curved geometry being interpreted as gravity. In this theory, spacetime is treated as a 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifold which is curved by the presence of mass, energy and momentum (or stress-energy) within it.
In 2003, Jack Wisdom, a Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was co-author on a book called Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics in which he describes a new geometric phase effect which he named "spacetime swimming" and is known as "the Wisdom effect."
Wisdom claimed that an object shaped like a tripod could push off from this spacetime fold, slowly swimming like a jellyfish through empty space by varying the lengths of its legs and the angle between them.
It has been considered a controversial theory ever since, but now physicists Eduardo Gueron of the Federal University of ABC and Ricardo Mosna of the University of Campinas, both in Brazil, say they have stumbled into something else lurking in Einstein's equations that could support the Wisdom effect.
They presented an example of a pair of masses shaped like dumbbells, much like a molecule, for example, that could push off not from empty space but from a gravitational field such as that of Earth.
It could sound much like antigravity, but Gueron says the proposed gliding relies completely on general relativity: "we only need one parameter that oscillates," he says, and that is the distance between the two masses. So, with each vibration, the dumbbell catches on the spacetime fabric and pushes itself up a tiny bit.
The only trick would be to make sure that the oscillation is asymmetric, like an inchworm's crawl, with one motion taking longer than the other and such an object would have to vibrate one billion times per second to slow its fall by 1 percent, which a molecule with the right asymmetry could do in controlled conditions.