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Comment by mLuby | Hacker News Reader

There are Gravity Stones from the 60's scattered among US colleges to

> "remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents"

Decent way to get students thinking about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Research_Foundation#Mo...

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Oh the story behind that is a wild ride from start to finish. Babson's sister drowned when they were children, and he decided the real reason that happened is anti-gravity technology wasn't sufficiently advanced to prevent her drowning. He spent a large amount of his philanthropy funding anti-gravity research for the rest of his life.

Edit: Just realized this is mentioned in the article you linked.

It's still worth a call-out. The other line in the article that always gets me is "Sometimes, attendees [of the Gravity Research Foundation] sat in chairs with their feet higher than their heads, to counterbalance gravity."

It feels like absurd lore in Fallout, but probably actually happened.

I took a look and found plenty of semi-insulators out there, but no peep about what association those materials have to do with taming the gravitational force - or am I missing the point?

Maybe it means a gravitational insulator?

Why did he think to mention airplanes? The whole concept of airplanes would be obsolete with anti-gravity.

I feel like in 40% of SF stories it will at one point be important that your spaceship not have the glide ratio of a buttered brick, even if it has an antigravity drive.

Depends on the nature of the anti-gravity drive. If it's like an engine, which needs some sort of process to operate, then yes, it can fail to work and you want a backup system. If it's a specific material, which works like a magnet in that the anti-gravity effect is present as a result of the passive configuration of matter, less so.

The Enemy could still shoot and destroy your cavorite plates, or the mechanism which turns them so that it does or doesn't block gravity from the desired direction.

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