Electrogravitics Engineering: Tom Valone’s Experimental Playbook for High-Voltage Propulsion

January 23, 2026

Electrogravitics is one of those rare engineering rabbit holes where the hardware looks almost too simple—plates, dielectrics, sharp edges, high voltage—yet the meaning people attach to it keeps multiplying. Put the same asymmetric capacitor on a bench and it can feel like a Rorschach test: one observer sees ion wind, another sees overlooked electrodynamics, a third sees the first glimmer of “gravity control.” Dr. Tom Valone’s gift is not demanding a verdict before the work is done. He treats the whole domain like a design space—full of knobs, thresholds, artifacts, and discriminating tests—and invites builders to turn drama into data.

The Five Mechanisms of Electrogravitics: ion wind, electrostatic coupling, Lorentz forces, dielectric stress, and electrokinetic coupling

“Electrogravitics” often gets used as if it names a single phenomenon, but the label regularly lands on several different mechanisms that can look identical at casual glance. Lifters hovering in air, asymmetric capacitors twitching on thrust stands, dielectric stacks kicking during switching, and craft-scale narratives all get placed under the same umbrella. That isn’t a character flaw in the community; it’s a vocabulary problem that can quietly merge incompatible explanations into one story.

Valone’s work is valuable because it keeps the candidate mechanisms from melting together. A practical boundary appears between “electrogravitics” in the Brown-era gravitic lineage (a gravity/inertia coupling claim) and “electrokinetics” as a related but distinct family—forces associated with asymmetric capacitance and time-varying fields, without explicit dependence on mass. That distinction sounds academic until it changes what constitutes a decisive test.

Five mechanisms, in particular, repeatedly show up in the same experimental neighborhood. Ion wind (electrohydrodynamic thrust) is the atmospheric baseline: corona discharge accelerates ions, ions drag neutral air, thrust follows. Electrostatic coupling is the stealthy one: the device may be tugging on nearby grounded structures, stands, walls, or chamber geometry. Lorentz forces arrive through wiring and switching: current loops plus magnetic fields produce real impulses that can masquerade as “thrust.” Dielectric stress sits inside the materials: polarization, charge injection and migration, dielectric relaxation, and Maxwell stresses can generate forces that couple into mounts and sensors. Only after those pathways are mapped and aggressively controlled does electrokinetic coupling remain as the residual category—effects tied to energy flow and field momentum in dynamic regimes, and, in the strongest interpretation, possible gravity/inertia coupling.

Keeping those mechanisms separate doesn’t dampen the subject; it makes it workable. A builder’s mindset replaces a believer’s mindset: define candidates, design discriminators, map parameter space, and let the apparatus decide what survives.

The Core Claim Behind Asymmetrical Capacitance

The core claim is easy to say and stubbornly difficult to test cleanly: an asymmetric capacitor—unequal electrode areas separated by a dielectric—can produce a net force in a preferred direction, often described as motion “toward the positive” terminal. The hook is obvious. Geometry itself seems to contain an arrow of motion, waiting to be unlocked by high voltage.

The strongest version of the claim is not a slogan. It’s a set of predictions. If the force is intrinsic rather than an atmospheric side effect, it should persist across changes that hammer ion wind—pressure, gas composition, humidity—while remaining correlated with electrical state and geometry. It should flip with polarity reversals in a consistent, repeatable way. It should scale coherently with knobs that can be swept: electrode area ratio, dielectric properties, gap distance, voltage amplitude, current waveform, rise time, and repetition rate.

That framing draws a bright line between a demonstration and an experiment. An in-air lifter can be real and impressive while still being an EHD thruster. A serious asymmetrical-capacitance claim demands controls that feel almost boring: symmetry controls (remove asymmetry and check whether net force collapses), polarity controls (reverse repeatedly, not once), dummy-load controls (match current without the asymmetric field geometry), and isolation controls (rule out attraction to nearby structures and cable forces). These aren’t formalities. They’re the minimum needed to keep “force” from meaning “anything that moved.”

With the claim stated as predictions, the work becomes friendlier in a strange way. It stops asking for belief and starts asking for measurements. That begins with the mechanism that dominates the earliest builds and most public demos.

Ion Wind: the baseline that must be mapped

Ion wind is not a debunking word; it’s a real propulsion mechanism that happens to look like magic at first glance. Put enough high voltage on a sharp electrode in air and the surrounding gas becomes part of the machine: corona discharge accelerates ions, ions drag neutrals, thrust appears. The glow, hiss, and ozone smell aren’t proof of new physics. They’re the working signature of electrohydrodynamics.

Valone’s synthesis takes this baseline seriously by acknowledging lifter behavior and ion mobility as the default explanation for many lightweight, in-air demonstrations. That posture builds honesty into the workflow. In air, ions matter. Edge radius matters. Humidity matters. Geometry matters. The same phenomena that make the device dramatic are often exactly what makes it push air.

The twist is that ion wind can be a training ground rather than a dead end. High-voltage discipline becomes unavoidable: leakage paths, field grading, insulation breakdown, power supply stability. Measurement discipline becomes unavoidable too: an experiment that can’t measure ion wind cleanly has no chance of measuring a subtler effect. In this sense, atmosphere becomes a calibration environment that teaches what real, repeatable thrust looks like—and how easily artifacts can mimic it.

Ion wind’s real value is that it has a signature. It responds to pressure, discharge onset, humidity, sharp edges, and electrode spacing. Mapping that signature turns it from a vague objection into a quantitative baseline. Anything that behaves differently starts to stand out.

High-Voltage Aerodynamics: laminar flow as an engineering dividend

One of the most practical doors into Valone’s world isn’t propulsion at all—it’s flow control. High voltage applied to aerodynamic surfaces is associated with visible changes in airflow that resemble laminarization. That matters because it offers an engineering win that doesn’t depend on settling the “gravity” argument: reducing drag, conditioning boundary layers, and managing flow transitions with electrostatic or plasma-assisted techniques.

This theme appears in gravitic-era material Valone curates: charged leading edges, ionization regions ahead of a craft, and claims of reduced drag or heating. Even when historical rhetoric is breathless, the underlying premise is grounded: the boundary layer is negotiable, and charged species can alter how a gas behaves near a surface. This is one reason “leading-edge glow” stories keep orbiting the electrogravitics conversation.

Flow control also comes with clearer success criteria than tabletop thrust. Drag coefficients, pressure distributions, flow visualization, stall behavior—these are measurable, repeatable, and instrument-friendly. The same competencies demanded by high-voltage propulsion experiments—insulation, dielectric robustness, field shaping, EMC discipline—translate directly into aerodynamic work that can be pursued openly and judged by well-understood metrics.

That practical branch offers an important comfort: even if the boldest electrogravitics claims collapse, the surrounding high-voltage engineering can still deliver real dividends—especially in how extreme fields interact with gases in motion.

Air Versus Vacuum: why “vacuum” isn’t one thing

A vacuum chamber changes the rules. In air, ion wind is always lurking. In sufficiently hard vacuum, it should be suppressed, sometimes drastically. That’s why vacuum behavior functions as a discriminator: it tightens the question. Is thrust an atmospheric phenomenon, or does something remain when the gas is removed?

But vacuum isn’t binary. It’s a continuum across orders of magnitude of pressure. A quick pump-down and a single datapoint at “some vacuum” is a snapshot with unknown context. What produces clarity is a pressure sweep: thrust measured as the system steps from atmospheric pressure down through rough vacuum and toward high vacuum, with stable dwell times and repeated polarity cycles.

A proper sweep yields a curve rather than a story. If thrust collapses with pressure in a way consistent with gas-driven mechanisms, the device is behaving like an EHD thruster—and that’s useful knowledge, not a defeat. If thrust persists but changes character—different scaling, different dependence on waveform, different directionality—that doesn’t prove new physics, but it identifies a regime where deeper scrutiny is justified.

Vacuum also introduces its own mischief: electrostatic coupling to chamber walls, cable forces magnified by stiff feedthroughs, thermal gradients and outgassing effects that can nudge delicate stands. A chamber isn’t a truth machine. It’s a stress test for metrology, which is why the pressure sweep becomes such a central move.

Pressure Sweeps: the experiment that ends arguments

A pressure sweep is the least glamorous thing that can still reshape the conversation. Ion wind has a clear relationship to gas density and discharge physics; if thrust tracks pressure like a gas-driven mechanism, the argument becomes technical instead of ideological. That’s the quiet power of a sweep: it doesn’t pick winners—it isolates regimes.

To be meaningful, the sweep has to be run like a campaign. Step pressure slowly enough to reach thermal and charge-state equilibrium. Reverse polarity repeatedly at each pressure point. Rotate orientation relative to chamber geometry to probe electrostatic coupling to walls. Track environmental variables—temperature, leakage current, outgassing rate—so the sweep doesn’t become a tour of shifting artifacts.

The electrical side needs the same discipline. Voltage, current, and waveform can’t be treated as vague background conditions; they’re the independent variables. A sweep without time-correlated electrical logging can’t tell whether force signatures correlate with switching edges, discharge onset, or steady-state conditions. When forces are tied to transients, voltage, current, and thrust sensor output have to be recorded on the same clock.

The reward for this patience is convergence. “Interesting” starts to mean something specific: a region in parameter space with a repeatable signature and a clear dependency structure. Once that axis exists, Valone’s map naturally points to the lever that keeps surfacing as the quiet protagonist in many builds: the dielectric.

Dielectrics as the Hidden Engine

Valone returns again and again to the dielectric, treating it not as a passive insulator but as a central lever. High dielectric constant materials appear as amplifiers, and liquids like water show up in some of the more provocative discussions. In this view, the device becomes less like “a capacitor” and more like a field-interaction machine dominated by the medium between electrodes.

Even without exotic interpretations, dielectrics matter enormously in extreme regimes. Dielectric strength sets breakdown thresholds. Loss tangent sets heating under pulsed operation. Permittivity shifts with frequency and temperature. Interfaces trap charge. Voids behave like failure points. A dielectric stack isn’t just a K-value; it’s a material system with dynamics and memory.

Some curated material reaches for extreme “high-K” targets that can sound mythic taken literally. Read as an engineering pressure, those targets still point to a plausible bottleneck: if any vacuum-robust, non-ion-wind regime exists, it may demand dielectric systems that tolerate extreme fields with predictable losses and long-term stability. The limiting factor might not be theory—it might be materials performance and repeatability under stress.

This is fertile territory for inventors: multilayer stacks, graded dielectrics, polymer-ceramic composites, edge termination strategies, void elimination, thermal management, and characterization under repetition. A decisive experiment often depends less on a clever explanation and more on a dielectric system that behaves predictably while everything else is being pushed hard.

Modulation: turning a static capacitor into a dynamic machine

Valone’s synthesis repeatedly suggests that modulation is not optional. In historical definitions he draws on, electrogravitics is described in terms of “modulating influences” applied to an electrostatic system—hinting that time variation may be where interesting behavior lives. Transients are where couplings reveal themselves, and transients are where experiments can become time-correlated and causal rather than anecdotal.

Once modulation is embraced, the work becomes pulsed-power engineering. Rise time, pulse width, duty cycle, repetition rate, impedance matching, stray inductance—these become the true knobs. The device becomes inseparable from its driver, and the driver becomes inseparable from measurement. When the waveform is unknown, the force signature can’t be interpreted.

This shift changes what counts as evidence. A force that appears only at switch-on or switch-off suggests transient coupling—mundane or otherwise. A force that grows with repetition rate might reflect cumulative effects, thermal gradients, or scaling with average energy flow. A force that depends on waveform shape is a gift: it invites controlled sweeps and makes it possible to test cause and effect instead of trading interpretations.

Modulation also makes the work feel more like engineering and less like folklore. Response curves replace one-off performances. Electrical logging becomes a first-class measurement rather than a footnote. And once time variation becomes central, the question of time derivatives—especially changing current—moves to the front.

dI/dt, “Jerk,” and the Discipline of Transient Forces

Valone emphasizes time derivatives—especially changing current—as a potential key. In electrokinetic framings, the relevant field exists only while current is changing. Read literally, that pushes attention toward pulses and edges. Read pragmatically, it also pushes straight into the territory where conventional transient forces are eager to fool an experiment.

This is the regime where false positives are easiest. A device that “kicks” when a switch is thrown is almost guaranteed to experience transient forces somewhere: Lorentz forces on wiring loops, magnetic coupling to structures, electrostatic attraction changes during switching, mechanical vibration injected into a sensor. If those pathways aren’t isolated, the experiment risks measuring layout, not physics.

The good news is that mundane transient forces are predictable and can be engineered out. Minimized loop areas, symmetric counter-wiring, careful cable routing, rotation tests, and dummy loads that reproduce current waveforms without asymmetric field geometry all help separate artifact from signal. Shielding and isolation stop being niceties and become the experiment.

When a force signature survives those eliminations and still scales coherently with controlled dI/dt changes, the result becomes meaningful regardless of interpretation. At that point, the apparatus is no longer begging for a story. It’s offering a repeatable signature with a dependency structure.

Torsion Balances and Charged Pendulums: Saxl as a metrology pivot

Electrogravitics becomes far more interesting—and far more honest—when metrology becomes the main character. That’s why Valone’s recurring mention of Erwin Saxl’s charged torsion pendulum matters: it shifts attention from “a device that moves” to “a measurement problem.” A heavy mass suspended in a torsion system turns tiny forces into observable changes in period and behavior. It’s less theatrical than a lifter, and far more demanding.

The value isn’t that every historical correlation must be accepted. The value is that the apparatus forces rigor. Torsion balances punish sloppiness: thermal gradients, vibration, humidity, electrostatic coupling, magnetic contamination, charge leakage, drift. All of it appears in the data. That’s precisely why these instruments are powerful—because they refuse to let wishful thinking hide in noise.

A torsion-balance culture also creates habits that transfer. Blind polarity cycles, careful grounding and shielding, continuous leakage-current monitoring, controlled environments, rotation relative to local fields and nearby masses—these turn ambiguous claims into testable ones. Even null results become informative when the instrument itself is trustworthy.

Once that culture exists, it becomes possible to engage adjacent lines of work that also depend on time variation and careful timing—without inflating confidence beyond what the apparatus can support.

Mach’s Principle and Inertial Modulation: Woodward as a neighbor field

Valone doesn’t keep electrogravitics quarantined inside Brown-style devices. A broader family appears that includes inertia-modulation ideas associated with Mach’s principle—particularly the Woodward–Nordtvedt line. The claim here isn’t cinematic antigravity; it’s a technical proposition that inertial mass may fluctuate under certain energy-flow and time-variation conditions, potentially yielding a net force if properly phased.

This sits comfortably alongside electrokinetic emphasis because the motif is similar: time derivatives matter. If a predicted effect scales with a second time derivative of energy, then switching speed, frequency, phase relationships, resonance, and electrical Q become primary knobs. The apparatus becomes a system-dynamics experiment rather than a static “voltage makes thrust” demonstration.

There’s also a unifying engineering perspective: many frontier propulsion devices resemble each other when viewed as energy-flow machines. A dielectric stack driven by pulses, a resonant electromechanical system seeking inertial modulation, and an asymmetric capacitor experiment all demand extreme, controlled time variation plus measurement integrity. The overlap doesn’t prove anything; it suggests shared instrumentation practices and shared discriminator protocols.

In that light, the neighbor field is useful even under skepticism. It motivates better timing control, better null tests, and a deeper understanding of the artifacts that masquerade as forces when transients are involved.

Voltage, Current, and Thrust: the scaling trap

Valone is explicit about a point that belongs above every electrogravitics bench: scaling isn’t one knob. Voltage and current have to rise together, and increases in device area demand proportional increases in power—often with frequency considerations. This isn’t mere advice; it explains why the literature struggles to converge. Different experiments can inhabit different regimes while wearing the same vocabulary.

This perspective also softens the drama around “failed replications.” If one report implies behavior at extreme voltages and another test runs at an order of magnitude less, that isn’t a disproof—it’s a non-decisive test of a different regime. That doesn’t rehabilitate the claim. It clarifies what a decisive test requires: spanning the alleged regime while keeping controls intact and metrology stable under stress.

The deeper lesson is that the device is never a capacitor alone. It’s a coupled system: power supply, switching network, dielectric stack, geometry, environment, and measurement apparatus. Raise voltage and breakdown and corona become dominant. Raise current and heating and magnetic forces enter. Raise frequency and dielectric losses and impedance issues appear. Increase area and stored energy, mechanical stress, and safety risk jump. Scaling pushes the apparatus into regimes where it pushes back.

That’s why “electrogravitics engineering” can be inspiring even before the physics question is settled. It becomes a sequence of legitimate engineering challenges—insulation, pulsed drivers, dielectric characterization, EMC, thrust stands, vacuum protocols—each of which can be improved incrementally, measured honestly, and iterated without grand claims.

Efficiency: from plausible to wild, and how to stay honest

Efficiency is where electrogravitics rhetoric often fractures. Valone’s corpus contains a wide spread of performance claims—from modest numbers in Brown-era narratives to dramatically higher implied efficiencies in some pulsed-dielectric discussions. Presented naively, that spread looks like contradiction. Presented like an engineer, it looks like either mechanism conflation or measurement uncertainty.

Mechanism separation makes the difference. Ion wind is an air-breathing thruster; its efficiency is bounded by fluid dynamics and discharge behavior. Any claimed vacuum-robust thrust would require a different momentum ledger and would deserve extraordinary measurement rigor. That’s why headline efficiencies are both intoxicating and dangerous: they encourage interpretation before accounting.

A productive stance treats the numbers as hypotheses that demand bookkeeping. Real power versus reactive power. Pulse energy per cycle. Stored energy in capacitors. Thermal losses in dielectrics. EM emissions. Mechanical drift and damping in thrust stands. If the effect is transient, time-resolved measurement is essential. If it’s steady, long-duration stability and repeatability are essential. The instrument has to be at least as persuasive as the claim.

Handled this way, efficiency becomes a forcing function for better experiments rather than a battleground of belief. Even null results gain value when the accounting is credible. And if any residual effect survives, it will arrive with the discipline needed for serious discussion—especially on the question of where momentum may be hiding.

Field Momentum and “Pushing Against Space”: Poynting-vector bookkeeping

When a system appears to produce force without ejecting reaction mass, the natural question is “what is it pushing against?” Valone treats this not as a philosophical objection but as a bookkeeping problem that electrodynamics can address when field momentum is included. Dynamic fields can carry momentum, and changing the distribution of field momentum can produce reaction forces in matter.

The Poynting vector—energy flow density—becomes part of the momentum ledger. In this view, the question isn’t “reactionless or not,” but whether energy is being moved through space and time in a structured way that yields a measurable mechanical response. This framing doesn’t validate extraordinary propulsion claims. It does make room for careful transient experiments where the accounting includes fields rather than pretending they’re irrelevant.

This is also a disciplined alternative to vague metaphors. It suggests a pathway: build systems where energy is circulated, stored, and abruptly redirected; measure whether correlated impulses appear; then design controls to eliminate wire-loop Lorentz forces, chamber coupling, and sensor artifacts. If an impulse scales with energy-flow timing and geometry while surviving controls, a real coupling has been found—whether classical or novel.

In that sense, field-momentum bookkeeping is both restraint and permission: restraint against overclaiming, permission to keep testing dynamic regimes with better instruments and tighter ledgers.

Negative Mass: a boundary marker, not a conclusion

Valone’s anthology includes Banesh Hoffman’s Gravity Research Foundation essay on negative mass as a boundary marker. Negative mass is a thought tool that clarifies the rules precisely because it breaks intuition. It forces careful attention to sign conventions, momentum bookkeeping, and the difference between “force” as an observation and “propulsion” as a mechanism.

The value isn’t that it licenses antigravity dreams. It disciplines language. In this domain, it’s easy to smuggle gravitational conclusions out of non-gravitational observations—like in-air thrust or transient impulses. Negative-mass thought experiments highlight why “antigravity” talk can become slippery, and why extraordinary claims require extraordinary conceptual clarity rather than extraordinary voltages.

It also separates two healthy urges. One is to build devices that do something strange—produce force signatures, change flow behavior, generate impulses. The other is to interpret every strange signature as gravity manipulation. Hoffman’s essay functions like a warning label: imagination is powerful, but it cannot replace discriminating tests.

That warning doesn’t cool curiosity; it sharpens it. It pushes attention back toward apparatus, protocols, and the humble discipline of eliminating alternatives.

The B-2 Bomber: inference versus evidence, and why it still matters

Valone’s ecosystem sometimes points toward advanced platforms—especially the B-2—as suggestive of high-voltage aerodynamic phenomena. Claims of bluish glow along leading edges are often framed as consistent with ionization and high-voltage effects, and then linked to the possibility of boundary-layer conditioning and drag reduction.

The clean way to handle this material is as inference rather than proof. A glow can be consistent with discharge. Electroaerodynamic flow control is a real domain; charged species can modify boundary layers and influence drag and stability. Those facts don’t require exotic gravity coupling. They do, however, make high-voltage integration on an aircraft a plausible engineering topic.

The leap happens when the existence of high voltage is treated as evidence of electrogravitic propulsion. That move converts interpretation into certainty without an instrument bridging the gap. The more responsible framing treats the platform as a constraint generator: power distribution, insulation, EMC, materials under field stress, and fault tolerance become the real questions.

In that mode, the B-2 becomes less a verdict and more a reminder: operational constraints are the hardest filter. Any concept that can’t be imagined surviving them is still a demo, no matter how dramatic the bench results look.

The Discriminator Roadmap: how inventors make the field converge

The path out of endless argument is a simple one, even if it’s not easy: build experiments designed to discriminate between mechanisms. The field has struggled because people debate interpretation while producing data that can’t eliminate obvious alternatives. The fix isn’t a new slogan. It’s protocols that make it hard for artifacts to survive.

A parameter map is the beginning: electrode geometry and area ratio; gap distance; dielectric constant, strength, and loss; voltage amplitude; current waveform; rise time; pulse width; repetition rate; pressure; humidity; polarity; grounding and shielding. Choose a waveform family and sweep deliberately while logging electrical and mechanical data on the same clock. The goal is to find stable regions where force correlates with controlled electrical changes rather than environmental drift.

Then run discriminators as standard practice: pressure sweeps in steps, not “vacuum yes/no”; repeated polarity reversals at each condition; symmetry controls; dummy loads; deliberate wire-routing changes to quantify Lorentz and cable effects; rotation tests relative to chamber geometry. If a signal survives those eliminations, it earns attention as a candidate phenomenon rather than a recurring argument.

Finally, scale with discipline. First scale measurement confidence: replicate across days, instruments, and setups. Then scale geometry in controlled steps while scaling power and waveform family accordingly. Only after a predictable response curve exists does it make sense to chase grand implications. That is how the domain becomes a serious engineering playground rather than a permanent debate club.

Appendix: Tom Valone’s Key Electrogravitics Insights

Across papers, presentations, and compiled anthologies, Tom Valone returns to a consistent set of principles for thinking about electrogravitics and electrokinetics. The themes below are offered as a practical tool for innovators—both to spark new experiments and to avoid the pitfalls that have trapped this field for decades.

The bundle is a stitched set of near-duplicates plus three distinct layers.
The same core paper appears in multiple PDFs, and the AIAA 2008 paper also shows up in near-duplicate form. The distinct layers are: (a) paper-style arguments, (b) talk/transcript framing, and (c) the Electrogravitics Systems anthology, which preserves older program vocabulary and design heuristics.
Two tracks run in parallel: electrogravitics vs. electrokinetics.
Electrogravitics (EG): framed as an electricity–gravity/mass-coupling problem (force claimed to depend on voltage and mass, with geometry/separation).
Electrokinetics (EK): framed as a propellantless force from time-varying fields/currents where no explicit mass term appears in the governing expression (not “gravity by equation,” even if interpretations drift there).
The historical spine is Brown → mid-century “gravitics” framing → modern re-analysis.
Brown’s “gravitators” and the Biefeld–Brown lineage anchor the narrative, mid-century “Gravitics Situation” language supplies a systems-definition lens, and modern re-analysis tries to reinterpret parts of the story in electrodynamic terms.
“Gravitators” are capacitor-like machines where dielectrics are enabling technology.
Performance is repeatedly tied to dielectric strength and dielectric constant: dielectrics matter as insulation, field shapers, and (in some claims) effect amplifiers.
Legacy heuristics function like an engineering checklist.
Repeated “rules” show up: voltage and current must scale together; spacing and dielectric properties must keep up; geometry matters; breakdown/arcing kills repeatability; and K-value targets are treated as design goalposts in older reporting and commentary.
A Brown-style electrogravitic scaling claim is presented as phenomenology, not settled physics.
A recurring expression is used as an analogy-like scaling relationship where force depends on voltage, two masses, and separation—treated as part of the historical/empirical narrative rather than a mainstream derivation.
The electrokinetic core leans on causal fields and transient impulses.
EK is tied to a Jefimenko-style emphasis: the relevant field/force term exists while current is changing, so impulses appear at turn-on/turn-off and in sharp transients—pushing attention toward edges rather than steady HV.
Waveform is not garnish; pulsed operation is portrayed as the unlock.
Across papers and talk framing, the big lever is fast rise times (large dI/dt), pulse shaping, and repetition—suggesting the “interesting regime” is dynamic, not static.
Ion wind is the central ambiguity that must be killed, not argued about.
Asymmetric capacitors in air can generate thrust via ion mobility/EHD. The work repeatedly pushes toward vacuum testing, better thrust balances, and strong controls before invoking any gravity-coupling interpretation.
Vacuum discrimination is implied, but pressure-sweep logic is the real test.
The thrust question is often framed as “air vs. vacuum,” but what’s actually needed is systematic discrimination: pressure sweeps, careful grounding, isolation from chamber coupling, and curves across pressure rather than a single datapoint.
Zinsser functions as the high-leverage comparison case.
Nanosecond pulses applied to plates in water are presented as a strong anchor example: water’s high dielectric constant is highlighted, the force is described as unusually large relative to input power, and persistence after switching is treated as especially provocative.
Other experimental threads serve as supporting pillars, not replacements for discriminator tests.
Saxl’s charged torsion pendulum is used as suggestive “voltage + mass” anomaly evidence (period changes and reported environmental sensitivities). Woodward/Mach-effect work appears as adjacent, with forces described as very small in the talk context.
Patents and aerospace interest are used as credibility signals and design inspiration.
Patents and reported institutional attention are framed as evidence the ideas were “serious enough to document,” while also seeding architectures and experimental directions to explore.
Electroaerodynamics is treated as a practical application branch.
High-voltage approaches are explicitly connected to laminar flow and drag reduction—an application-shaped pathway that can be pursued even if propulsion claims don’t survive.
The anthology preserves a program-definition vocabulary that shapes how the field thinks.
Electrogravitics is framed as applying modulating influences to achieve special control/propulsion-like effects—language that reads like early programmatic definition. Alongside it are heuristics meant to guide experimenters toward repeatable regimes rather than one-off demonstrations.