Boeing's challenge to the laws of physics
@ Physics Jul 30 2002, 21:01 (UTC+0)

sekou writes: 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 challenge to the laws of physics
Financial Times 07/30/02
author: Nick Cook
Copyright (c) 2001 Dow Jones Reuters Business Interactive Ltd., trading as Factiva.

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 ruled for years that anti-gravity is impossible.

But in April 1992, the late Brian Young, a professor at Salford University 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 (3.02m) 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.