Jean-Louis Naudin

Jean-Louis Naudin
Residence	France
Nationality	French
Known for	JLN Labs; the Lifter experiments; open replication of alternative-science claims
Scientific career
Fields	Experimental replication; electrokinetic propulsion

Jean-Louis Naudin is a French experimenter who, through his laboratory website JLN Labs (jnaudin.free.fr), carried out and documented what is probably the largest single body of replication work in alternative science. Where most of the literature catalogued on this wiki consists of theory, Naudin's contribution is almost entirely practical: he built other people's devices, measured them, and published the results — including the negative ones.

Method

What distinguishes Naudin's work from most amateur replication is its openness. For each project he published construction drawings, parts lists, circuit diagrams, oscilloscope traces, photographs and video, in enough detail that a reader with a workbench could repeat the experiment and get the same numbers. He also maintained the practice of publishing when a device failed to perform as claimed, which is uncommon in this field and is the reason his measurements were taken seriously by people who did not share his interpretations.

That openness had a consequence he may not have intended but which is to his credit: by putting a device into hundreds of hands with reproducible instructions, he made it possible for a claim to be settled rather than merely argued about. The Lifter is the clearest case.

The Lifter experiments

Naudin's best-known work is the Lifter — a lightweight triangular frame carrying an asymmetric capacitor, a thin wire electrode above a wider foil skirt, energised at tens of kilovolts. It rises silently, with no moving parts, lifting its own weight and a payload on electrical power alone.

The configuration descends from the electrokinetic apparatus of Thomas Townsend Brown, and the effect is generally called the Biefeld–Brown effect after Brown's 1928 work. Naudin's contribution was to reduce it to a device that could be built from balsa, foil and magnet wire for a few euros. More than 350 successful replications followed worldwide, and Naudin extended the work through many variants — multi-stage lifters, tests with the wire unlinked, and an analysis of performance against applied voltage and geometry. He also replicated and analysed NASA's two-dimensional asymmetrical capacitor thruster, publishing a video demonstration and a proposed working principle.

The phenomenon is discussed on this wiki in Charles A Yost's "Naudin's Lifter Phenomenon" (Electric Spacecraft Journal 33, 2002), which reviews the debate over its cause.

Other replications

JLN Labs covered an unusually wide range, including:

• Propellantless and electrokinetic propulsion — lifters, asymmetric capacitors, and related electrogravitic claims
• Cold fusion and plasma electrolysis cells
• Magnetic motors and claimed self-sustaining rotors
• Water fuel cells and gas-generation devices
• Ball lightning and plasma experiments
• Bearden's Motionless Electromagnetic Generator (MEG), where Naudin's measurements — including the power drawn by the control board — are among the more careful figures available
• The Rodin coil, where he placed iron filings above a running coil in the manner of Faraday and photographed the resulting pattern; that image is reproduced in Marko Rodin and Greg Volk's 2010 paper, and Naudin read it as evidence for Myron Evans's B(3) field.

Papers on this wiki

• 2007 - "Classic Flying Saucers May Not Have Been Electric"
• 2000 - "The Advanced Reduced Drag Aircraft Project"
• 1999 - "Stimulated Forces Demonstrated: Why the Trouton-Noble Experiment Failed and How to Make It Succeed" (with Patrick Cornille, Electric Spacecraft Journal 28)

The Trouton–Noble paper is the most substantial of the three. With Cornille he argues that the 1903 experiment — routinely cited as a null result supporting relativity — in fact recorded jerking and torquing of the suspended capacitor, which the original experimenters set aside as error, and that modern replications reproduce those effects.

Media

• 2001 - The NASA Two Dimensional Asymmetrical Capacitor Thruster (video demonstration)

Assessment

Naudin's standing does not depend on whether the devices he replicated worked as claimed, and it is worth separating the two questions.

As an experimentalist and documenter he set a standard this field rarely meets. Full build documentation, measured data, published failures, and instructions good enough for others to follow are exactly what is needed to move a claim out of anecdote. Much of the material on this wiki would be more useful if it had been recorded this way.

The Lifter's outcome illustrates both points at once. Because Naudin's design was cheap and precisely documented, it was investigated properly. Bahder and Fazi of the US Army Research Laboratory analysed it in 2002–03 and reported that simple ionic wind was some three orders of magnitude too small to account for the force, while an ionic-drift treatment gave the right order of magnitude; they concluded the mechanism was not yet understood and called for tests in vacuum. Those tests followed, and the weight of subsequent work — including Martin Tajmar, whose paper is titled "Biefeld–Brown Effect: Misinterpretation of Corona Wind Phenomena", and detailed electrohydrodynamic modelling by Mario Pinheiro and others — concluded that the thrust arises from electrostatic interaction between the electrodes and the ion charge in the surrounding gas, and that it falls away without air. The Lifter is now understood as an electrohydrodynamic device: a real and genuinely useful effect, now studied seriously for silent solid-state propulsion in the atmosphere, but not evidence of an electrogravitic force.

That is a resolution rather than a debunking, and Naudin's own documentation is a large part of why it was reachable. The general caution that applies across this wiki's new energy material applies to the rest of the JLN Labs catalogue too: apparent excess power in pulsed and reactive circuits is very often a measurement artefact, since a multimeter's volts × amps product is not real power when current and voltage are out of phase — a point Patrick G Bailey makes on this wiki against claims from within the same community. Naudin's habit of publishing full traces rather than summary figures is what makes his measurements checkable against that objection.

See also

• Rodin Coil, Marko Rodin
• Patrick Cornille — co-author on the Trouton–Noble paper
• Tom Bearden, Charles A Yost, Viktor Schauberger
• Electric Spacecraft Journal
• Category:Antigravity, Category:New Energy, Category:Propulsion