Why would we need to? Gravity doesn't even begin to register at the macroscopic level unless you're comparing objects many, many orders of magnitudes different in mass. Weakass and pathetic compared to the other 3 fundamental forces. And weak force translates to weak energy.
Well strong force can overcome electromagnetism... and it's strong.
__________________ Recently Produced and Distributed Young but High-Ranking Political Figure of Royal Ancestry within the Modern American Town Affectionately Referred To as Bel-Air.
You wouldn't have to go so far as nuclear weapons, nuclear power plants drop radioactive material in pools of water to heat it up and then generate electricity with that heat—well the process is a bit more complex than that, but that's the basic gist of it.
That said. What I was getting at was the range of influence, which is the second factor when it comes to how much energy you'll be able to harness from the strong- and weak nuclear forces.
Electromagnetism, gravity, strong force, and weak force.
According to Prof. Moriarty at Nottingham University, courtesy of this Sixty Symbols video, if you were to compare the ratio of the strength of gravity to that of electromagnetism, it would be like comparing the ratio of the weight of a 1 gram object to that of "4 million billion billion billion airbuses". EM is what gives protons their positive charge and makes them repulse each other, but it's the strong force that overpowers that charge and forces them to stick together in an atom's nucleus. It's why so much energy is released when you split an atom.
__________________ Recently Produced and Distributed Young but High-Ranking Political Figure of Royal Ancestry within the Modern American Town Affectionately Referred To as Bel-Air.
Then you're breaking the color interaction, a component of strong force. It would send a proton's (or neutron's) quarks flying. Actually you can just watch Scishow's series on the fundamental forces, beginning with strong force and color interaction. Here's the first video:
__________________ Recently Produced and Distributed Young but High-Ranking Political Figure of Royal Ancestry within the Modern American Town Affectionately Referred To as Bel-Air.
Nope, I was talking about a device which can literally harness energy from gravitational based interactions, not some gravity dam or other such variation.
And yet both the strong and weak forces have successfully yielded great amounts of energy in the laboratory, and both have had successful military applications, with at least one being a viable(although somewhat expensive) energy source which has already been commercialized.
As far as electromagnetic force is concerned, don't even get started on how successful humans have been in that particular field.
Gravitational force, while having impressive astronomical ranges, simply can't compete with its counterparts in this department.
Any energy that could be gained from falling mass would first require energy to raise that mass. The output just wouldn't be worth the cost. Unless of course mass was taken out of the equation, directly touching on the source of gravity--which would mean observing the mysterious graviton. I'm sensing repulorlifts and andti-grav sleds here.
__________________ Recently Produced and Distributed Young but High-Ranking Political Figure of Royal Ancestry within the Modern American Town Affectionately Referred To as Bel-Air.
Hydroelectric dams don't use solely gravity, which is what I think he wants to hear about. The only reason water flows is due to the Sun, which bombards us with EM.
__________________ Recently Produced and Distributed Young but High-Ranking Political Figure of Royal Ancestry within the Modern American Town Affectionately Referred To as Bel-Air.
KMC Community Forums
Nov 3rd, 2012 10:19 PM
To have displace body of matter in the gravitational field to generate energy is to harness the energy of a gravitational-based interactions.
