random theories about artificial gravity

[timeshifter]

Some friends of mine along with myself have spent the majority of the past half year trying to figure out how to make artificial gravity work. We do have one working theory right now, but I need to know one important piece of information before I go making final judgements.

I have chosen to use neutrons for this project due to the fact that they have no electrical charge and are the heaviest uncharged particle that we know of.

What materials are there that would be able to withstand trillions of highly energized neutrons?

[irizarry]

In the book “Project Orion” by George Freeman the project’s engineers and scientists faced that very problem. What shielding would they use to absorb huge neutron fluxes and put between the occupants of the atomic ship and the detonation field behind the ship that would propel it. There choice was good ol’ fashion lead.

Irizarry

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[PhysBrain]

I believe you are looking for a material named unobtanium. It is commonly invoked in sci-fi to refer to that material which has really nifty properties, but doesn't really exist.

There is no compelling reason to believe that a material made of solid neutrons, called neutronium (also sci-fi verbage), is impossible to create. In fact this material actually exists in nature in the form of neutron stars.

The problem with containing many neutrons in a confined space is there is no good way to make them stay there. They have no electrical charge so they do not respect Coulomb barriers (ie. electrostatic potentials established by charged particles). Their size is on the order of femtometers (10^-15 m), so they escape rather easily through the lattice of nuclei and electron shells of normal matter. Neutrons do possess a very small magnetic moment due to its spin property, but its interaction with normal matter is negligable.

So, with our current level of technology, there are only two things which you can do to a neutron to keep it contained: a) attempt to capture it within an atomic nucleus which will accept it nicely (such as Boron), or b) trap it in a very deep gravitational potential on the order of a neutron star. The former is not likely to yield any noticable gravity altering effects high enough to be of use to you, and the latter will likewise be unusable as the gravity effects would be too great.

If you really want to make it work, then go to university, study condensed matter physics, and concentrate on manipulating neutrons by their magnetic moments using very large electromagnetic fields. If you can figure that out, then you're looking at a Nobel prize.