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Antigravity Propulsion
« on: 2002-08-01 05:45:53 » |
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Boeing is investigating antigravity propulsion. This was brought to my attention by the "Good Morning Silicon Valley" newsletter (siliconvalley.com) of July 30, 2002. Of course, military applications are being considered too.
"Boffins hard at work on doomsday anti-gravity gun?
Researchers at Boeing are investigating the controversial anti-gravity experiments of Russian scientist Yevgeny Podkletnov in the hopes of developing a device that will defy gravity. Podkletnov in 1992 claimed that he created a column of reduced gravity above and below a foot-wide ceramic disc by cooling it to a few degrees above absolute zero and bombarding it with microwaves. He has been widely vilified by traditionalists who said the experiment was fundamentally flawed. But Boeing apparently thinks differently. Jane's Defense Weekly reports that the company has tried to solicit Podkletnov's services for its antigravity efforts, code-named "GRASP" -- Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion. The publication speculates that Boeing may be interested in Podkletnov's work not only for propelantless aircraft propulsion, but as a radical new weapon as well."
They give three links: two old ones and a recent one about Boeing.
=====================================
Breaking the Law of Gravity
By Charles Platt
Wired magazine, Mar 1998
http://hotwired.lycos.com/collections/space_exploration/6.03_no_gravity_pr.html
In 1996, Russian emigre scientist Eugene Podkletnov was about to publish a peer-reviewed article in the respected British Journal of Physics-D - proving, he claimed, that gravity could be negated.
Then a London newspaper publicized his conclusions, and the skeptics had a field day. Everyone knew you couldn't mess with the law of gravity - Einstein himself had said so.
Podkletnov withdrew the article.
His university evicted him.
He retreated from the public eye.
But the controversy hasn't gone away, as his findings began to be investigated in laboratories around the world. Including one owned by NASA.
<snip>
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http://www.physics.helsinki.fi/~matpitka/antigr.html
Anti-gravity and TGD
There is some experimental evidence [Podkletnov] for an unexpected interaction between gravitational fields and a toroidal rotating disk consisting of ordinary and superconducting layers and levitating in a vertical magnetic field created by AC currents. It seems that the gravitational force in a cylindrical region above the super conductor is reduced by about one percent. The effect seems to be enhanced by the rotation of the disk. The effect has no obvious explanation in standard General Relativity. Modanese has suggested an explanation based on the interaction of the Cooper pair Bose Einstein condensate with gravitational field leading to a generation of an effective local cosmological term [Modanese].
<snip>
=======================================
29 July 2002
Anti-gravity propulsion comes "out of the closet"
By Nick Cook, JDW Aerospace Consultant, London
http://www.janes.com/aerospace/civil/news/jdw/jdw020729_1_n.shtml
Boeing, the world's largest aircraft manufacturer, has admitted it is working on experimental anti-gravity projects that could overturn a century of conventional aerospace propulsion technology if the science underpinning them can be engineered into hardware.
As part of the effort, which is being run out of Boeing's Phantom Works advanced research and development facility in Seattle, the company is trying to solicit the services of a Russian scientist who claims he has developed anti-gravity devices in Russia and Finland. The approach, however, has been thwarted by Russian officialdom.
The Boeing drive to develop a collaborative relationship with the scientist in question, Dr Evgeny Podkletnov, has its own internal project name: "GRASP" -- Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion.
A GRASP briefing document obtained by JDW sets out what Boeing believes to be at stake. "If gravity modification is real," it says, "it will alter the entire aerospace business."
<snip>
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Re:Antigravity Propulsion
« Reply #1 on: 2002-08-31 12:45:46 » |
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More coverage on this controversial issue. Of course, it could be a hoax, it could be something different from gravity, or it could be something with possible applications that make it a sensitive subject. Maybe I wouldn't care to mention it if NASA and Boeing hadn't allegedly put money in this.
There are several reporting and scientific articles. Especially the last article from New Scientist seems to set some facts straight.
BBC
Boeing tries to defy gravity
Monday, 29 July, 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2157975.stm
Q&A: Boeing and anti-gravity
Monday, 29 July, 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2159487.stm
Guardian
Gravity [contains several links]
Monday July 29, 2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/netnotes/article/0,6729,765201,00.html
Scientific American
A Philosopher's Stone
Could superconductors transmute electromagnetic radiation into gravitational waves?
By George Musser
June 2002 issue
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00032353-36AB-1CDC-B4A8809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=1&catID=2
From Q&A
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000112A7-67A3-1C71-9EB7809EC588F2D7
In the latter, you can find theoretical arguments against the idea of gravity shielding as well as alternative possible explanations for Podkletnov's experiment. However, I think there is at least one argument agains a strawman.
<quote>
"In summary, simple shielding of gravity is not possible. Not only would it violate the laws of gravity, it would provide a perpetual motion machine, thereby violating the principle of conservation of energy."
<end quote>
Of course, if you put a wheel partly inside a gravity shield it would rotate, but the setup would consume energy to function.
New Scientist
I found 3 articles, dated 1996, 1999, and 2002. I'll post the whole articles because they require a subscription.
Antigravity machine weighed down by controversy
Robert Matthews
New Scientist vol 151 issue 2048 - 21 September 96, page 7
http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp?rp=1&id=mg15120480.800
(requires subscription)
MYSTERY surrounds a Russian scientist's astonishing claim to have built an antigravity machine, following his decision to withdraw a paper describing the device from a leading physics journal.
According to the paper, the cylindrical device measures 275 millimetres across and contains a magnetically suspended and rotating ring of superconducting ceramic. It is said to reduce the weight of any object placed over it by up to 2 per cent. The authors claim to have observed the antigravity effect with a wide variety of materials suspended over the device, ranging from ceramics to wood.
Tests are also said to have ruled out the possibility that the weight loss was the result of magnetic fields or air flow. However, the paper gives no real clues to how the effect might be generated.
Even so, the paper, which carries the names of Eugene Podkletnov and Petri Vuorinen of Tampere University in Finland, was accepted for publication by the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, which took advice from three independent referees before deciding to proceed.
But Podkletnov has now withdrawn the paper, just weeks before it was due to appear. His decision follows a bizarre series of developments triggered by media interest in the device. Earlier this month Tampere University issued a carefully worded statement denying all knowledge of the antigravity research. While admitting that it had been involved in some preliminary experiments done by Podkletnov in the early 1990s, the university said he was no longer on the staff.
Suspicions deepened when Vuorinen, the supposed coauthor of the paper, issued a statement denying that he had ever worked on antigravity with Podkletnov.
The furore appears to have surprised Podkletnov, who insists that the claims made in the paper are genuine. But he says the university is correct in denying the existence of any recent research, as the paper centres on experiments carried out in 1992.
On the key issue of Vuorinen's denial of involvement in the work, Podkletnov says that there must have been some confusion over names, and that another Petri Vuorinen was the true coauthor. Podkletnov does have an unpaid affiliation with Tampere's Institute of Material Science. However, inquiries have failed to uncover anyone with a similar name at the university who admits to working on the antigravity research.
The controversy also appears to have shocked the Institute of Physics, which publishes the Journal of Physics D. Three referees failed to find any major flaw in the paper's claims, which if confirmed would rate as one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in history.
Gravity is the most ubiquitous force in the Universe, and no one has ever found any way of shielding matter from its effects. The discovery of a shielding effect would have huge theoretical and commercial implications.
Faced with Tampere University's statement, and Vuorinen's denial that he was involved, Richard Palmer, managing editor of the journal, decided to put the paper on hold pending further inquiries. Three days later, on 9 September, Podkletnov solved the institute's dilemma by withdrawing his paper. He gave no reason. But he stands by his claims: "This is an important discovery and I don't want it to disappear," he told New Scientist.
The paper may now never appear in any physics journal: Podkletnov is said to have been put under pressure from unknown "funding agencies" not to reveal any more, pending patent applications.
Even so, the mystery of the antigravity machine lingers. What is known is that the paper had passed scrutiny by independent experts in superconductivity, and had been accepted by a reputable journal. Tampere University itself concedes that Podkletnov has a good reputation for research, and refuses to pass judgment on whether the antigravity machine actually works.
Some theorists claim to have an inkling of an explanation for the phenomenon. At the University of Alabama, Huntsville, Ning Li has been investigating the possibility that superconductors may generate bizarre gravitational effects predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, but so far never observed.
According to the general theory of relativity, rotating matter can generate a new force of nature, known as the gravitomagnetic interaction, whose intensity is proportional to the rate of spin. Attempts to measure the incredibly feeble gravitomagnetic field of the Earth are currently being planned ("Music of the spheres", New Scientist, 31 August, p 28).
However, research published by Li and Douglas Torr of the Optical Aeronomy Laboratory at the University of Alabama suggests that rapidly spinning ions within superconductors may magnify the force to a level that might have detectable effects in the laboratory. Whether it can explain Podkletnov's results remains unclear, and with his paper now withdrawn, many scientists will conclude there is nothing to explain in any case.
"I don't know of any way in which these effects can be made very large and so I'd have to be sceptical," says Bernard Schutz, a gravity theorist at the University of Wales, Cardiff. "It's implausible--but not impossible".
Escape from Earth
Charles Seife
New Scientist vol 161 issue 2172 - 06 February 1999, page 6
http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp?id=mg16121720.800
(requires subscription)
NASA is spending over half a million dollars on bizarre antigravity research
UNTIL now, flying saucers and gravity shields have been the stuff of science fiction. But NASA has just awarded $600 000 to a project that could change all that. The space agency hopes to duplicate the controversial experiments of a Russian scientist who claims to have invented a device that blocks the force of gravity.
NASA's interest in antigravity stems from the weighty matter of getting rockets into orbit. If you could create a device that shields a rocket from the Earth's gravity, the spacecraft would need only a gentle push before it would zoom out of the Earth's atmosphere and into space. Most scientists think this is impossible, but E. E. Podkletnov, a materials scientist at the Moscow Chemical Scientific Research Centre, is not one of them.
Several years ago, in the journal Physica C, Podkletnov claimed that a spinning, superconducting disc lost some of its weight. And, in an unpublished paper on the weak gravitation shielding properties of a superconductor, he argued that such a disc lost as much as 2 per cent of its weight. That's when NASA officials pricked up their ears and decided to get in on the act.
NASA is paying an Ohio-based company, Superconductive Components, to build a 12-inch (31-centimetre) superconducting disc to continue a series of experiments on gravity shielding. The first experiment didn't work. "For a small disc four to five inches in diameter, we didn't see any gravitational signal much above the noise of tens of nanogees," says Ronald Koczor, a physicist at NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
However, Koczor and David Noever, also at Marshall, believe that the experiments are worth pursuing. "We're trying to get a 12-inch disc. We succeeded in pressing one last November, and we're trying to set it up to put radio-frequency signals into the disc." The RF signals used by Podkletnov varied from 100 to 1000 megahertz.
According to Ho Paik, a gravitational physicist at the University of Maryland, they are probably wasting their time. "Gravity's produced by mass--it's not produced by quantum mechanics," he says. "I can't see why you'd do an experiment based upon physics that's completely wrong."
But the team seem undaunted. Eventually, Koczor and Noever hope to replicate elements of Podkletnov's experiment more faithfully. "There will be an exhaustion point, but in my opinion anyone who proves it's not worth doing had better have done it in the same way he did," says Noever.
Going up
David Cohen
New Scientist vol 173 issue 2325 - 12 January 2002, page Page 24
http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp?rp=1&id=mg17323253.800
(requires subscription)
SEATED in a near-empty restaurant in a backstreet of Tampere in Finland, Evgeny Podkletnov certainly doesn't look crazy--even when he holds up the superconducting disc he says he used to reduce the effects of gravity. The Russian émigré's claim caused such a storm he was thrown out of his job at Tampere University of Technology five years ago. He now works as a researcher in superconducting materials at the nearby University of Tampere, but he's not about to give up his quest to be taken seriously.
Podkletnov claims others have repeated the experiments with great success, and for the moment at least, influential scientists around the world are giving him the benefit of the doubt. Researchers at Toronto University in Canada, at CNRS--France's national research agency--and even an employee of Boeing in the US all want to repeat his experiment, Podkletnov says. And perhaps most significantly of all, NASA is ready to give the idea a shot. This month, after a two-year wait, Ron Koczor and his team at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, will take delivery of a machine that Koczor believes could shield matter from gravity.
Koczor persuaded NASA to pay Superconductive Components (SCI) of Columbus, Ohio, $600,000 to build a copy of Podkletnov's apparatus. If SCI's replica works, it could change our way of interacting with a fundamental force of nature. And that, Koczor says, would change everything. Wave goodbye to rockets and the internal combustion engine. Say hello to energy-saving, gravity-powered spaceships, aeroplanes, cars and elevators--and a whole new branch of theoretical physics.
Koczor is aware of what the critics will say, but he believes there are hints that it might work and he is determined to keep an open mind. This kind of investigation lies within the Marshall Center's remit to seek out new and exotic forms of propulsion, and the potential payoff is huge, he says. "It's worth a little bit of effort to pursue it to its end."
But that "little bit of effort" is, essentially, a gamble on Podkletnov's claims. In 1992 he published a paper describing how he had stumbled across a "gravity shielding" effect while running a routine test on one of his superconductors. The details were sketchy. But the basics are these: make a superconducting disc 145 millimetres in diameter and 6 millimetres thick, according to a special chemical recipe that Podkletnov did not make public. Cool the disc to below -233 °C, then levitate it using a magnetic field. Finally, apply an electric current alternating at around 100 kilohertz to coils surrounding the disc. The current makes the disc rotate in the constantly changing magnetic field, something like an electric motor. So far, there's nothing extraordinary here.
But Podkletnov claimed that when the disc was spinning at more than 5000 revolutions per minute, objects placed above it lost around 1 per cent of their weight. Increasing the spin speed, he claimed, reduced their weight still further. In subsequent experiments, he claims to have seen weight reductions of up to 2 per cent.
Podkletnov concluded that this apparatus somehow reduced the strength of the Earth's pull on any object placed above it and called it a "gravity shielding" device. Stick a more powerful version of this apparatus on the bottom of a spacecraft and rocket propulsion would be history: just the slightest nudge would be needed for lift-off into space. Terrestrial transport would be revolutionised too, together with a large chunk of theoretical physics.
At the time, the paper was greeted without fanfare. It would probably have been forgotten, but for the fact that Podkletnov continued his experiments and, in 1996, produced another paper. Physica D reviewed and accepted it, but its contents were leaked to the press before publication. "The world's first anti-gravity device", as The Sunday Telegraph in Britain called it, was rubbished by scientists around the globe, who loudly proclaimed that it broke the known laws of physics. In the academic scuffle that ensued, Podkletnov was dismissed from his post. After withdrawing the paper (to protect his co-author's career, he says) he disappeared--for a while, at least. I caught up with him in Tampere at the end of last year and found him still adamant that his superconducting disc can shield matter from gravity.
Podkletnov has the air of a persecuted man. While talking about his work his mood shifts constantly between suspicion, seriousness and wild excitement--there are echoes of the cold fusion debate here. But his frustration is clear. "I am a professional scientist and have published more than 30 papers and hold many patents," he says. "Some people say 'Podkletnov is a fool,' but there are too many other people in the world who have seen this and they all can't be wrong." His English is almost perfect with only a faint Russian accent. He peppers his conversation with references to private conversations with eminent scientists who would come right out and support him, were they not so scared of losing their credibility.
His confidence--and Koczor's--stems from the fact that he is not alone in suggesting a way to modify gravity. In 1995, Koczor and his team were approached by Ning Li, a researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Li had never met or even heard of Podkletnov, yet she was developing a theory, based on the idea of converting electromagnetic fields into gravitational fields, that came very close to explaining Podkletnov's experiment. She claimed her theory pointed to the possibility of producing a "gravito-magnetic effect" by spinning a supercooled superconducting disc: the angular momentum of fast-spinning ions in the superconductor would produce a gravitational field, she said. By 1995 Li felt she had reached the point where she could approach NASA to fund an experimental test of her ideas.
"We were interested in her theories," says Koczor. "But we thought her experiment was undoable." Then, in a literature search, Koczor and Li found Podkletnov's 1992 paper in the journal Physica C. "We were intrigued. It was essentially the same experiment, only simpler," Koczor says. "Physica C is not a trivial journal. If [the experiment] got in there then it must have got through sufficient scientific vetting to take to a higher level, so we decided we'd try it ourselves."
For the following two years, Koczor and Li tried to duplicate Podkletnov's experiment. They bought some small superconducting discs, levitated them, put high-frequency electromagnetic fields into them and did a few experiments to measure the gravitational effects. "We tried to see if there was one or other of these factors that could be isolated and identified as responsible for the Podkletnov effect," explains Koczor.
Their experiments were unsuccessful. In 1997 Koczor's team reported their lack of findings in Physica C, saying that for their 10-centimetre discs the measurable effect on gravitational pull was a mere two millionths of 1 per cent--small enough to have been background noise in the measuring equipment. But they were not disheartened.
"Podkletnov told us we wouldn't see any effect unless we repeated his experiment faithfully," Koczor says. "We never did the full Podkletnov experiment--we were still learning to work with these superconductors." And so the team focused on producing a 30-centimetre yttrium-barium-copper-oxide (YBCO) superconducting disc like that used by Podkletnov. But they still didn't have his recipe. Eventually, in 1999 Koczor gave up and commissioned SCI to build a replica of Podkletnov's apparatus. At the same time, Li set up an independent laboratory to pursue the research. SCI contracted Podkletnov as a consultant on its project, asking him to advise on some technical aspects of building the superconductor. "Podkletnov has been as helpful as he could be to get our mission fulfilled," says J.R. Gaines, vice president and general manager of SCI. And so this month--a year behind schedule--Gaines will hand over the finished apparatus.
High hopes
NASA is not the only bona fide organisation that has been taking Podkletnov seriously. When British military and aerospace company BAE Systems learned that Clive Woods, a superconductor researcher from Sheffield University, was trying to replicate the experiment it decided it too would hedge its bets and help fund his attempts.
"We know we're out on a limb," says Ron Evans, director of Project Greenglow--BAE Systems' research programme into alternative forms of propulsion. "But even though we got negative advice from several professors, it seemed to me that for a small amount of money it's worth the gamble. Experts have been wrong before and that's the only thing that makes it worth doing."
Evans is giving Woods an undisclosed sum to reproduce Podkletnov's experiment. So far Woods, too, has been unsuccessful. Like Koczor, Woods believes this could be because he has not managed to reproduce all the conditions Podkletnov says are necessary--the specifications are extremely demanding. "That does not mean there is no effect to be observed," Woods says.
Meanwhile, Podkletnov has been quietly continuing his research. "I am not a rich man," he says. "But I have some funds from other projects and I put everything I have into gravity research. This is my life's dream, my hobby, my goal."
He has made good progress, he says. With the help of friends in a laboratory that once belonged to Moscow's Institute for High Temperatures, he claims to have built an "impulse gravity generator". He says its pulse--produced by a spinning superconductor with a strong electrical charge--is capable of knocking over a book placed on end more than a kilometre away.
The pulse has the same properties as a gravitational field, says Podkletnov. It is unaffected by an inch-thick steel plate fixed in the beam path, and the force it exerts is changed only with the target's mass, not its constituent material nor its chemical or electromagnetic properties. As he talks about it, he suddenly becomes animated. He thinks it could one day be used to nudge satellites into the correct orbit, and even knock incoming missiles off course. "This is a very powerful device, and I am now in the process of arranging a future project on the gravity generator with serious European firms," he says, almost in a whisper. But, he adds, he cannot divulge which firms--he has signed confidentiality agreements.
Although Podkletnov is happy to discuss his work, he says no one can come and look at the gravity pulse experiment. It requires extremely high voltages, and the required generating equipment is, unfortunately, in a restricted area of Moscow State University's campus. So he refused my request to watch the gravity generator in action.
Evans, too, has suggested that an independent observer might visit Podkletnov's Moscow laboratory. Again, Podkletnov refused. "He told me that he once hosted some Japanese visitors to his lab, but they tried to bribe his technicians for the secrets on how the experiment worked," Evans says. "As a result he decided not to bring any other visitors."
Podkletnov, who says he is in the process of patenting his work, is also scared someone might steal his intellectual property rights to the experiment. But Robin Tucker, a theoretical physicist at Lancaster University who is also investigating possible ways to control matter with gravity, thinks Podkletnov's secretive behaviour is odd, to say the least. "Any normal physicist who found this kind of effect would be shouting about it from the tops of the trees and asking people to come and verify it," he says. "It would mean a Nobel Prize if you'd actually discovered some kind of gravity focusing."
Podkletnov's refusal to open up to scrutiny leaves the scientific world lacking any independent, verifiable observations of gravity modification. He gave me an untraceable e-mail address for a Takashi Nakamura, who he claimed was a senior physics professor employed at Toshiba Electronics in Japan. Nakamura responded to my e-mail question, saying that he had managed to reproduce Podkletnov's experiments with even better results. "With all my respect to Evgeny-san, our ceramics is better and we got 8.79% of the weight reduction," he wrote. "Our programme of research has already shown much better efficiency."
However, when I asked for references documenting these results, Nakamura terminated the correspondence.
Quantum suspects
Podkletnov's only current collaboration is with Giovanni Modanese, an Italian physicist who is trying to build a theoretical explanation for Podkletnov's results. But because physicists have such a poor understanding of the mechanisms behind both gravity and high-temperature superconductivity, his explanations are necessarily vague. He suggests that quantum processes within the superconducting material are interacting with quantum processes in the gravitational field. But, he admits, he can't go far with the work because there are too many unknowns. Again, Tucker is sceptical even of this attempt to formalise what's going on. "I think the correlation between the experiment and the theoretical description is very tenuous," he says.
So, frustrating as it is, that's as much as we know at the moment. I contacted several of Ning Li's ex-colleagues, but all said they did not know of her current whereabouts or the state of her research. NASA and BAE Systems still don't know whether they have been sent up a blind alley by Podkletnov's enthusiasm. But Koczor believes he'll soon have the answer. "Running the experiment will take six months at most," he says. If it fails to confirm Podkletnov's experiment, that will be the end of the matter. But if the experiment succeeds, and they can modify gravity, then who knows what could be possible? In the end, pigs really might fly.
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