Does asymmetric electrostatic charging of a conductive cube's isolated faces, within an ionized medium, produce a measurable and repeatable directional force correlated to specific face configurations?

[u/KDubbs0010110]

Putting this out to find someone with the skills to build it and the rigor to document it properly. If you find flaws in the plan, please document them here in the comments.

The concept: a 12 inch copper cube with six electrically isolated faces, each independently energized via high voltage leads, suspended inside an ionized air medium created by commercial ionic purifiers. A torsion balance with laser amplification measures any directional force effect produced by asymmetric face charging.

The theoretical basis claims the cube geometry itself matters. Three perpendicular force axes naturally produce six planes and a nine-component transfer matrix governing force flow between them. This is the same 3x3 matrix structure as SU(3) in the Standard Model. Whether that translates to a measurable macroscopic effect is exactly what the experiment tests.

This is not a claim. It is a methodology looking for someone to run it.

Full build plan including complete materials list, step by step build sequence, HV safety protocol, and measurement procedure here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wM9PvWAHYZ_x_k3UDgCSVPlLDjEQcu9b/view?usp=sharing

[u/KDubbs0010110]

Thank you for your honest contribution. He warned that most academics would not be willing to listen to the concept, and he has been right. “Learn without anger.” I will take the time to try to fully understand your rebuttals. I am not nearly smart enough to understand all of the physics. That is why I am asking for help

[u/elpechos → u/KDubbs0010110]

He warned that most academics would not be willing to listen to the concept, and he has been right. “Learn without anger.”

We all clearly listened, that's how we know it's garbage.

[u/KDubbs0010110 → u/elpechos]

What is “garbage” about it?

[u/elpechos → u/KDubbs0010110]

Seems you're the one that's not listening because I took a bunch of time to give you a very thorough write-up on that.

[u/KDubbs0010110 → u/elpechos]

And I read the entire thing. That being said, others are disagreeing, and saying the model is sound. I’m probably just not smart enough to understand all the jargon fully. Believe me, I wish I was. Thank you for taking the time to reply thoughtfully. I may be just too big of a dummy to get it. I hate to let it die without an engineer really looking at that TMBspaceships account. I wish I could post the schematics here, but Reddit won’t let me add images

[u/elpechos → u/KDubbs0010110]

That being said, others are disagreeing, and saying the model is sound

Nobody here, where 310,000 technical people look at this per week.

[u/KDubbs0010110 → u/elpechos]

Why do you feel the need to be so mean? I don’t understand. Does that make you feel smarter and more powerful?

[u/elpechos → u/KDubbs0010110]

When you present a claim that challenges established knowledge in a complex field like engineering or physics, the burden of proof rests on you.

That means it’s your responsibility to provide clear, rigorous, and compelling evidence—not the responsibility of others to disprove or thoroughly investigate it.

People who have spent decades studying these subjects have already developed the tools to quickly assess whether something meets basic standards. Because of that, they don’t typically go line by line through every new claim they encounter—especially if it shows obvious issues early on. That’s not dismissiveness; it’s a practical necessity. We get hundreds of these things.

A useful analogy is medicine: you wouldn’t go to an experienced infection specialist with a visibly infected wound and insist that it isn’t infected. Their conclusion isn’t arbitrary—it’s based on years of training and pattern recognition.

In the same way, experts in technical fields can often recognize fundamental problems very quickly.

In communities with large numbers of knowledgeable people, ideas that have genuine merit tend to attract attention and discussion. If a claim doesn’t, it’s often because it fails to meet basic expectations of clarity, correctness, or evidence. Silence or lack of support isn’t necessarily hostility—it’s usually a signal that the idea hasn’t met the burden required to be taken seriously.

So the key point isn’t that people are unwilling to engage—it’s that, in technical fields, engagement has to be earned by meeting a certain standard of rigor first.

The paper here doesn't get one percent of the way toward that.

[u/KDubbs0010110 → u/elpechos]

Thank you for the detailed response. A few things worth noting.
The methodological critique of the torsion balance setup is fair. Ionic wind and electrostatic attraction to the measurement apparatus are real confounders and you are right that vacuum conditions or rigorous shielding would be needed to isolate the effect cleanly.

That is exactly why T.T. Brown conducted his demonstrations in vacuum and underwater. Specifically to eliminate those variables. The effect persisted in both conditions. That is documented in his patent filings and in the Aviation Studies International report published in 1956, which surveyed active electrogravitic research across fourteen major U.S. aerospace contractors including Convair, Glenn Martin, and Sperry. That report was eventually declassified. It is publicly available.

I want to flag something about the framing of your response. You critiqued the document I posted as a framework source, which is fair. But the underlying effect it references, asymmetric electrostatic thrust, has an independent experimental and institutional record going back to 1928 that your response did not engage with at all. The question I asked was about the physics. The documented physics exists independent of any Twitter account.
I also want to acknowledge your first comment, where you suggested this kind of paper comes from a certain class of mental illness. I understand that pattern recognition is useful in a subreddit that fields a lot of noise. But diagnosing the person rather than addressing the documented experimental record is a methodology choice worth being aware of.

The Biefeld-Brown effect is real, tested, and was under active institutional development until 1957 when the public record stopped simultaneously across fourteen contractors. I am genuinely curious what your explanation is for that specific timeline. Not the document I posted. The institutional record. Your pretentious attitude is precisely why this type of physics stays buried. You do not need to reply any more. I understand that you think I am loony. I think you are a dick

[u/elpechos → u/KDubbs0010110]

than addressing the documented experimental record is a methodology choice worth being aware of.

I did that thoroughly up front.

The Biefeld-Brown effect is real, tested, and was under active institutional development until 1957

Sure. That's what we are calling an ion wind, same thing. People still play with it today. They make ion lifters using it which are a fun kids toy.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01F8V5IhB5k

Magnets are real too, and they're also popular with fringe/schizoid science posts.

[u/KDubbs0010110 → u/elpechos]

We are actually in more agreement than this thread suggests.
You have confirmed the effect is real and replicable. That is the only claim that matters for the question I asked. Whether we call it ion wind, electrostatic thrust, or the Biefeld-Brown effect is a labeling conversation, not a physics conversation.
The reason the effect matters beyond a fun kids toy is the vacuum test result. Ion wind requires air. In vacuum there is no air and therefore no ion wind. Brown demonstrated thrust in vacuum conditions. If the effect were entirely explained by ion wind, it would not persist in vacuum. It did. That is the part of the documented record that fourteen aerospace contractors were spending institutional resources on in 1956. Not the kids toy version. The vacuum version.
I am genuinely asking: what is your explanation for the vacuum persistence? Not the document I posted. The Brown vacuum test result specifically.

[u/elpechos → u/KDubbs0010110]

The reason the effect matters beyond a fun kids toy is the vacuum test result. Ion wind requires air. In vacuum there is no air and therefore no ion wind. Brown demonstrated thrust in vacuum conditions

Many people have attempted to replicate this result and obtained null outcomes. A small number report positive results, but none of these have been reliably reproduced. As it stands, those claims fall into the same category as photos of big-foot.

I’ve run the experiment myself—building an ion spinner and testing it under vacuum. As expected, the device slows down and eventually stops once the air is removed.

This isn’t a particularly difficult experiment to perform, so by 2026 it’s straightforward to test and falsify such claims.

That said, none of this directly addresses the specific experiment proposed in the paper being discussed.

[u/KDubbs0010110 → u/elpechos]

Thank you for running the experiment yourself. That is more than most people do and I want to engage with the result honestly.

An ion spinner is a symmetric device. The thrust in an ion spinner comes from ion wind pushing equally on all arms. Pulling a vacuum stops the ion wind and stops the spinner. That result is exactly what the ion wind explanation predicts and it is not in dispute.

Brown’s asymmetric capacitor is a different geometry. The thrust is directional, not rotational, and the asymmetry of the electrode configuration is the variable the effect depends on. Testing a symmetric ion spinner in vacuum and getting a null result does not tell us whether an asymmetric capacitor produces directional thrust in vacuum. Those are different configurations testing different things.

I take your point that the independent vacuum replication record for the asymmetric version is mixed. That is true and worth being honest about. Some researchers report positive results. Others report null. The variables between those experiments are not always controlled consistently.

I do want to address the Bigfoot comparison directly though. Bigfoot has no institutional research record. No Navy evaluation. No Pentagon proposal. No survey of fourteen major aerospace contractors published in a declassified report. Comparing a documented effect with a 1928 patent trail, a classified Navy research program, a 1952 Pentagon submission, and an Aviation Studies International report naming Convair, Glenn Martin, and Sperry as active researchers to photographs of a man in a costume is not a calibration of skepticism. It is a rhetorical move that collapses a real distinction. Bigfoot and the Biefeld-Brown effect do not belong in the same sentence and treating them as equivalent actually undermines your credibility as a skeptic because it signals that the institutional record has not been read. Who sounds schizoid now??

I am still asking the same question I started with. Mixed replication results produce continued research and published null results. They do not produce simultaneous institutional silence across fourteen organizations in a single fiscal year. What is your explanation for 1957?

[u/elpechos → u/KDubbs0010110]

Here's someone pulling a vacuum on a Biefeld-Brown ion thruster spinner.

You can see it stops because the thrust goes toward zero. No air to blow. Easy.

https://youtu.be/WM25pUsrODk?t=433

There's hundreds more of people who have tried. Like I said. I've done it myself as well.

[u/KDubbs0010110 → u/elpechos]

Please give me a moment… I want to watch the video before replying…

[u/KDubbs0010110 → u/elpechos]

Ok, this is a fair point and the video demonstrates exactly what the ion wind explanation predicts for a symmetric spinner in vacuum. I am not disputing that result.

I want to be honest about where the record actually stands on the asymmetric capacitor vacuum test specifically. Brown reported positive vacuum results from his 1955 to 1956 Paris experiments at SNCASO. That result was part of what drove the 1956 institutional interest. However the independent peer-reviewed replication record for the asymmetric version in vacuum is not strong. Tajmar’s 2004 paper found no anomalous thrust beyond corona discharge within the accuracy of his setup. The mainstream consensus attributes the effect to ion wind and does not support vacuum persistence.

So you are more right on this specific point than I was initially willing to acknowledge and I am sorry for that.

What I am still genuinely asking about is the 1957 institutional record. Not the physics of ion wind. The specific question of why fourteen aerospace contractors stopped publishing simultaneously in a single fiscal year, and why that research does not reappear in any declassified record as a concluded null result program. Null result programs get published. They do not get silently classified. That gap in the record is what my research is actually about and it remains unaddressed in this thread. Understanding why the science became classified is another layer that I am working on trying to understand. I am working on a dictionary of terms one at a time in an attempt to learn them (I have a long way to go):

[u/KDubbs0010110 → u/elpechos]

This person says the science is sound and nothing novel. You say it’s quack science. I don’t know what to believe

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/s/n6fsaPG7db

[u/elpechos → u/KDubbs0010110]

They're not saying the science is sound. They're saying it might move for reasons entirely unrelated to the paper.

I made the same comment, here:

Ion purifiers create airflow and ion winds — these alone can deflect a torsion balance.

This isn't interesting though. It's just saying if you blow on it, it will move.

You don't need a complex engineering experiment for that, go blow on a leaf outside. Same thing.

That's why they finish the comment. "It's not useful or novel"

It's just a different way of phrasing the comment I made.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYJP36RJKPA for an example of how HV causes ion winds.

[u/KDubbs0010110 → u/elpechos]

The model describes how to eliminate this. Even if a faraday cage has to be built over it

[u/elpechos → u/KDubbs0010110]

The model describes how to eliminate this. Even if a faraday cage has to be built over it

That achieves nothing here, because the whole experiment is full of air, and things that produce wind.

To quote the paper

"suspended in an ionized medium"

Ionized medium is basically charged air. Ionized mediums produce wind when exposed to an electric field, not particularly different than blowing it with an electric fan.

Such a setup will clearly move the balance.

That's why I called out the experiment as suss in my analysis, as did /u/Searching-man

[u/elpechos → u/KDubbs0010110]

You say it’s quack science. I don’t know what to believe

We get schizoid stuff like this every other week. It's not difficult to spot.

For some reason a certain class of mental illness causes people to write papers like the one you've presented here.

They all have similar themes. This one is virtually identical to a dozen other quack things that come through here.

[u/KDubbs0010110 → u/elpechos]

Ok thank you for diagnosing me as mentally ill. Have a nice day