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Challenging the laws of physics



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Boeing challenges the laws of physics

By Nick Cook
Published: July 29 2002 18:12 | Last Updated: July 29 2002 18:12

Anti-gravity, the taboo of the science and aerospace communities, takes a
step into the limelight of respectability this week with news that Boeing,
the world's biggest aircraft-maker, is exploring concepts that could one
day - perhaps even soon - overturn a century of propulsion technology.

Boeing's interest in anti-gravity is encapsulated in a company project
known as Grasp - Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion. A Grasp
document, obtained by Jane's Defence Weekly, the defence industry magazine,
spells out what Boeing believes to be at stake if it can succeed in
engineering real hardware.

"If gravity modification is real," it says, "it will alter the entire
aerospace business."

That is probably an understatement. If gravity modification is real, it
will change the world. Cars, trains, ships, just about any transport system
you can think of, could be powered by "propellantless propulsion" - modules
that draw their energy from the gravitational force field.

Anti-gravity has been a dream for more than a century, since the science
fiction writer H.G. Wells described a mythical material called Cavorite,
which shielded the effects of gravity, allowing a spacecraft to fly to the
moon. Conventional science has long ruled that anti-gravity is impossible.

But in April 1992, the late Brian Young, a professor at Salford University,
England, and director of strategic projects at what was then British
Aerospace Defence, gave a lecture to the Institute of Mechanical Engineers
in London in which he described why the quest for anti-gravity was of
relevance to the aerospace industry - and the world.

"If Cavorite, or anything like it, did exist, it could be used as a
limitless source of energy. All you would have to do is lift a heavy weight
with Cavorite and then let it fall under gravity, a bit like the piston of
an engine but without steam or fuel," Prof Young said. "Enormous amounts of
energy could be generated with no fuel and no loss of the Earth's ability
to provide gravity."

With Boeing's admission that it is studying anti-gravity devices at its
Phantom Works advanced projects facility in Seattle, the genie, at long
last, is out of the bottle.

The Grasp briefing document sets out Boeing's interest in securing the
services of a Russian materials scientist, Evgeny Podkletnov, who claims to
have developed hardware that can shield the effects of gravity. In 1992, Mr
Podkletnov, who was working at the University of Technology in Tampere,
Finland, filed a paper to a British physics journal in which he described
how objects placed above rapidly spinning superconductors - materials that
lose their electrical resistance at very low temperatures - "lost" their
weight by up to 2 per cent.

The paper was leaked to a newspaper and - partly because of its use of the
taboo term "anti-gravity", partly because of the storm it whipped up in the
physics mainstream - Mr Podkletnov was ostracised by the university.

But the Russian's work attracted the interest of the US National
Aeronautics and Space Administration, which had already been approached by
Ning Li, a researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who
independently claimed that she could produce a gravity-like field, capable
of repelling or attracting matter using rapidly spinning superconductors.

In the mid-1990s, the Nasa Marshall Space Flight Centre in Alabama
unsuccessfully tried to replicate Mr Podkletnov's experiments. But the
space agency admitted that without the Russian's unique formula for
superconducting discs, it was largely operating in the dark.

In 1999, Nasa paid $600,000 to Superconductive Components of Columbus,
Ohio, to construct discs like the ones Mr Podkletnov had been using and the
Russian was hired as a consultant.

The experiment has been delayed but Ron Koczor, who heads the effort at
Nasa Marshall, is confident that it will take place by the end of this year.

Meanwhile, Mr Podkletnov, now based at the Moscow Chemical Scientific
Research Centre, has taken his ideas further. Last year he published
another paper - backed by Giovanni Modanese, an Italian physicist,
detailing work on an "impulse gravity generator" that is capable of
exerting a repulsive force on all matter.

Using a strong electrical discharge source and a superconducting "emitter",
the equipment has produced a "gravity impulse", Mr Podkletnov says, "that
is very short in time and propagates with great speed (practically
instantaneously) along the line of discharge, passing through different
objects without any observable loss of energy".

The result, he maintains, is a repulsive action on any object the beam
hits, that is proportional to its mass. When fitted to a laser pointing
device, Mr Podkletnov says, his laboratory installation has already
demonstrated its ability to knock over objects more than a kilometre away.
The same installation, he maintains, could hit objects up to 200km away
with the same power.

It was Mr Podkletnov's work with his impulse gravity generator that grabbed
the attention of Boeing. In the Grasp briefing document, Boeing describes
how the 4in beam shot from the device is reportedly immune to all
electro-magnetic shielding and that it goes through anything that gets
between it and the target.

Both Boeing and Mr Podkletnov flag the impulse gravity generator as a
potential propulsion source for aircraft and spacecraft. But it is clear,
too, that it also could be put to more sinister purposes.

Boeing repeats Mr Podkletnov's claim that the generator's gravity-like beam
has demonstrated a "maximum target acceleration" of about 1,000 Gs, with
two megavolts of electrical energy behind it. Put in the way of an orbiting
satellite or a ballistic missile, for example, the beam would in effect
vaporise them.

At last week's Farnborough Air Show in the UK, George Muellner, Boeing's
outgoing head of the Phantom Works, confirmed the company's interest in Mr
Podkletnov's work and other anti-gravity devices. Mr Muellner also declared
his company's belief in the science underpinning them.

"The physical principles appear to be valid," he said. "There is basic
science there. They're not breaking the laws of physics. The issue is
whether the science can be engineered into something workable."

The Grasp document points out that other large aerospace companies - BAE
Systems and Lockheed Martin among them - are also in contact with Mr
Podkletnov and that Boeing could be "ahead of the 'gold rush' by being
involved early".

What it does not say, perhaps because its authors are unaware of the fact,
is that 50 years ago a plethora of US aerospace companies, including
Martin, Bell Aircraft and Convair, expressed a similar outpouring of
interest in anti-gravity, then fell silent on the subject. Some have
surmised that their silence stemmed from the fact that the whole area of
anti-gravity, because of its world-changing potential, has been classified
as top secret ever since.

In fact, the murky world of anti- gravity research dates back at least to
the 1920s, when US inventor Thomas Townsend Brown discovered that a
disc-shaped capacitor charged positively on its upper surface and
negatively on its underside exhibited a tendency to rise in the direction
of the positive pole.

A Nasa scientist recently filed a patent for a "two dimensional
asymmetrical capacitor module" - a disc-shaped charge-holding device - that
is capable of generating thrust. Intentionally or not, it is remarkably
similar to Mr Brown's own ideas.

The US Congress earlier this year voted to give $4.75m to the West
Virginia-based Institute of Software Research to see whether it could get
to the bottom of the electrogravitic mystery.

In the meantime, you can log on to multiple websites and download plans on
how to build yourself a machine called a "lifter" that flies using the
Brown principle - a principle that science is at a loss to explain.

The writer is aerospace consultant at Jane's Defence Weekly. His book, The
Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Anti-Gravity
Technology, is published this month by Arrow in the UK and on August 13 by
Broadway Books in the US
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Jim Green
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http://users.sisna.com/jmgreen