A Reasoning Benchmark Test for AI: If A & B, then Superscience... See!
I have created a benchmark test for AI to test their reasoning ability, combining two facts - the Schwinger effect and the Meissner effect - that could lead to a form of propulsion that does not require chemical fuel. I have tested this theory on language models like GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Bing, and Bard, and have seen the potential of ChatBots, AI's, GAI's, and other technological advancements to help us make predictions.
Unlocking the Potential of AI: Combining the Schwinger and Meissner Effects to Create a Fuel-Free Propulsion System
By Michael Levin
Sunday, March 26, 2023
I have a benchmark for testing the reasoning ability of AIs like GPT-4 and such. This is an experiment I did with GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Bing and now as of recently, Bard. They all worked it out eventually, with a little help moving it along the thought process. And I myself am not even 100% sure that what I’m proposing as possible actually is possible. But it should be. A certain type of “poor-man’s” antigravity based purely on electromagnetic effects (not gravity) should be possible. Recent experiments showing at the release of energy as demonstrated by the Atomic Bomb and e=mc^2 should be reversible. Instead of energy from matter, you should be able to get matter from energy.
Experiments are starting to bear this out. At first I thought this is what Navy UFO patent guy Salvatore Pais was getting at with the Pais effect. But after digging deeper, I see that the Pais effect is slightly different from a more simple effect that’s demonstrated pretty much every day by pouring liquid nitrogen over yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO) discs. This is high school experiment stuff, and the Meissner effect is very well established. The rub is that another much less well established effect in which sufficiently high-powered photon lasers can momentarily create virtual plasma, or electron-positron pairs before they self-annihilate, called the Schwinger effect (matter from energy) when combined with the Meissner effect should very clearly lead to inertial momentum, thrust, chemical fuel-free propulsion… or more colloquially known as antigravity.
I shit you not. This is a fairly straight forward thought experiment and everything we know about physics confirms this. We are a few engineering problems away from having a highly efficient and versatile form of antigravity, which quite frankly from a theoretical basis should be viewed as 1950s science. The engineering to even just prove the Schwinger effect is real hasn’t fallen into place until recently, but the pure science behind it goes back to the activity around the development of the A-Bomb, the H-Bomb, and a few very closed gatherings of scientists at the “3 quantum conferences” that occurred around this time.
I find it great sport to see if the large language models see it the same way I do. It’s hard not to when you lead it down the right series of logical deductions. I’ve tried having this discussion with people on and off over the years, and now that the Schwinger effect is bearing out as real, I see no reason why a poor man’s AG-drive isn’t at TR1 stage. That is, technological readiness level 1, solid theory ready to be tested for practical application.
Take fact A and fact B and put them together in a way that creativity and/or insights are required to deduce fact C. Combining the recently proven Schwinger effect with the long-known Meissner effect to produce poor-man’s antigravity has got to be my favorite reasoning test. AI may know better than we do.
Next interesting issue is whether fessing up to AG’s viability promoting the spread of false information? I mean, the practical experiments combining the Schwinger effect (at scale) and the Meissner effect have not been done. So much else in the area of antigravity is false information, so why not this plausible one as well? Will ChatBots shut down such explorations as ridiculous or help propel them forward to reality?
Passing this test requires the open-mindedness to accept a recently theoretical effect as now factual. After that it requires speculating on scaling that effect up and how it would interact with another known effect that Startrek upgrades some wimpy magnetic sails into a kickass solid state (non-chemical fuel-burning) alternate propulsion system.
If you’re skeptical and think I’m on the fringe, just reproduce this large language model Chatbot benchmark test for yourself. I’m going to talk guy through some Star Trek technobabble what’s actually more real than tachyon manifold sporkon drives.
- Is the Schwinger effect real?
- Can the Schwinger-produced particle/anti-particle pairs be polarized, thus magnetic?
- What is the interaction of a type-2 superconductor with a magnetic field?
- If all the engineering problems such as having enough power, effectively containing plasma and managing heat were solvable, could this produce thrust?
Top ten answers on the board. Name viable technologies that could enable or account for:
On November 14, 2004, Commander David Fravor and crew of the USS Nimitz and nearby USS Princeton were conducting a training exercise off the coast of San Diego when they were called to investigate an unidentified flying object. The incident became known as the USS Nimitz UFO Incident. Fravor was a primary witness to this incident. His crew consisted of 4 members which was called to investigate an unidentified fly object flying off the coast of San Diego while they were on a training exercise. The Navy aviators saw a Tic-Tac-shaped object that had no wings, markings, or exhaust plumes. Fravor flew closer to it and the unidentified aircraft responded by mimicking the movements of Fravor’s Super Hornet .
The incident was covered in The New York Times article “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” published on December 16, 2017. It was also covered in a 60 Minutes interview with Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich which aired on May 16, 2021.
According to David Fravor, the object was described as a 40-foot-long, white, oblong shape (hence “Tic Tac”), hovering somewhere between 15,000 and 24,000 feet in midair and exhibiting no notable exhaust from conventional propulsion sources¹. The object descended from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet in less than a second before disappearing from radar³. Fravor also described how the object made an upward spiraling ascent with his jet and how it rapidly rotated to a alternating 90-degree orientations.
There are other times in history where nearly identical objects were observed. For example, in 1951, a similar object was observed by a pilot named George Gorman over Fargo, North Dakota. The object was described as a bright light that moved in a zigzag pattern. In 1957, two pilots flying over the Gulf of Mexico reported seeing a similar object that was described as a “bright white light” that moved at high speeds. In 1966, two police officers in Portage County, Ohio reported seeing a similar object that was described as a “large metallic disc” that hovered above their patrol car.
When you look at the dates of identical tic-tac sightings, they are conspicuously after WWII, the atomic bomb but right before the H-bomb. The world’s first thermonuclear weapon test, code-named Mike, was carried out by the United States at Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands on November 1,
- Thermonuclear weapons, or hydrogen bombs, use the energy of a primary fission explosion to ignite a hydrogen fusion reaction. Scientists call this sort of thermonuclear reaction a Teller-Ulam design.
Three conferences were held right after WWII in the New York and Pennsylvania areas: the Shelter Island Conference (1947), the Pocono Conference (1948), and the Oldstone Conference (1949). These were small, closed conferences held to discuss quantum physics. The topics discussed at these conferences included the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, and nuclear physics.
Among this included Richard Feynman’s hoop and beads thought experiment used to illustrate the concept of inertial momentum. The experiment involves a hoop that is free to rotate about its axis and a string of beads that can slide freely along the hoop. When the hoop is rotated about its axis, the beads move outward due to their inertia. The experiment was used by Feynman to explain how inertial momentum can be created from energy.
Another topic discussed was the Lamb shift, which is a difference in energy between two energy levels of the hydrogen atom that was not predicted by the Dirac equation. The shift was discovered by Willis Lamb and Robert Retherford of Columbia University in 1947, where it was first measured and experimentally verified using microwave spectroscopy. The discovery of the Lamb shift was an essential clue in solving problems related to quantum mechanics and development of new experimental techniques for studying atomic physics.
The Casimir effect is a small attractive force that acts between two close parallel uncharged conducting plates that arises from the quantum fluctuations of the field. While the existence of the Casimir effect was not confirmed experimentally until 1996 by Steven Lamoreaux in Los Alamos National Laboratory, it was first postulated by Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir in 1948, also closely aligned with these conferences.
All this lends to establishing the existence and reality of fluccuating quantum field that exists everywhere. Quantum fields are fundamental fields that exist everywhere in space, even when there are no particles present. They come in many varieties and fluctuate like a rolling ocean. So during these conferences, we established that for all intents and purposes, a vacuum isn’t empty at all. It’s actually filled with quantum energy and particles that blink in and out of existence for a fleeting moment.
To a mind such as Richard Feynman it’s hard to imagine that such revelations didn’t connect immediately to the Bernoulli principle. Airplane lift is created by the flow of air over an airfoil. The shape of an airfoil causes air to flow faster on top than on bottom. The fast flowing air decreases the surrounding air pressure. Because the air pressure is greater below the airfoil than above, a resulting lift force is created. This principle was discovered by Daniel Bernoulli, a Swiss mathematician and physicist in 1738. It took more than 150 years for the Wright Brothers to turn this principle into actual flight.
It’s not hard to imagine that after the A-bomb and the H-bomb, more potentially societally disruptive super-science was born, but the kibosh put on it for the sake of social stability. Ask yourself how the world inevitably knows about breakthroughs connected to explosions. Now ask yourself if there were breakthroughs on the same order of magnitude advancement that didn’t go boom, how would the public know? Would they even be told?
Likely, not. Teasing that government incompetence would never allow for such a long term secret is a straw man argument. Of course secrets can be kept for hundreds of years. That they can’t is pure misinformation. Misinformation like this can be spread while research and development continue. UFOs are plausible, especially given that we fired off the starter pistol to our the age of fusion and the unlimited energy, but completely unnecessary to explain existing alternate solid state propulsion systems that don’t burn fuel.
A reasonable person can piece together that some quantum analogs to the Bernoulli effect must have come out of those closed quantum conferences of the late 40s. Even without a conspiracy theory and without believing what David Fravor and his crew saw were true, recent confirmation that an e=mc^2 ray-gun is possible, i.e. the Schwinger effect, makes certain electric-field based propulsion systems possible. Whether thrust results from this approach is rarely debated. You can do the equivalent of maglev trains through air, water and space if you can just tackle a few very challenging engineering issues.
Interestingly enough, these engineering advances needed for the poor-man’s antigravity maglevfluxliner drive is about the same as the engineering problems keeping fusion from being a cheap and clean energy source today, even though we achieved Q = 1, the crossover where more energy is produced than consumed.
Anyhow, I could write forever on this topic. I feel us moving into the future and I feel these ChatBots, AI’s , GAI’s or whatever they’re turning out to be as great ways to leap over hurdles that scientific dogma, cynicism and perhaps even a touch of misdirection would normally keep us from ever identifying, fixing our sights on and driving a thing from TR1 (technological readiness 1) up to being part of our admittedly radically different everyday lives.