Breaking the Law of Gravity
Wired Mag
March 1998
In 1996, Russian émigré 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.
Now, as Charles Platt discovers, Eugene Podkletnov is
back and unrepentant.
Shortly before dawn on a dismal, rain-drenched winter
morning I'm heading out of Helsinki along Highway 3, into the heart of
Finland. This obscure nation is an underpopulated wilderness
sandwiched like a DMZ between Russia and Sweden, extending all the way
up into the Arctic Circle. The sun barely
sets here in the summer, while in the winter, it barely rises. I can't
imagine why anyone would visit Finland in the dark months, unless
motivated by some strange need to go skiing in perpetual twilight ...
but my grueling pilgrimage has nothing to do with snow. I've come in
search of a singular individual, a reclusive, elusive Russian émigré
scientist named Eugene Podkletnov, who claims that he can defy the
force of gravity.
Five years ago, while testing a superconducting ceramic
disc by rotating it above powerful electromagnets, Podkletnov noticed
something extremely strange. Small objects above the disc seemed to
lose weight, as if they were being shielded from the pull of Planet
Earth. The weight reduction was
small - around 2 percent - but nothing like this had ever been
observed before. If the shielding effect could be refined and
intensified, the implications would be immense. In fact, practical,
affordable gravity nullification could change our lives more radically
than the invention of the internal combustion engine.
Imagine a future in which vehicles can levitate freely.
Highways and railroads become obsolete, airplanes no
longer need wings, and oceangoing ships can be broken up for scrap.
Industries in which large masses have to be transported or supported -
from mining to construction - are revolutionized. Citizens gain
unprecedented mobility, transcending all
geographical and national barriers.
Meanwhile, space travel is now safe, cheap, and fast.
Resources can be mined in the asteroid belt and shipped to factories
relocated in orbit around Earth, freeing our planet from pollution and
greenhouse-gas emissions. Ultimately the old dream of colonizing other
worlds may be realized, not just for a handful of highly trained
astronauts but for millions of everyday
people.
Far-fetched? Indeed. Most physicists laughed at
Podkletnov's report. Riley Newman, a professor of physics at UC Irvine
who has been involved in gravity research for 20 years, typified the
reaction when he commented, "I think it's safe to say gravity
shielding is not conceivable." Like many scientists, he felt that
Podkletnov must have made a mistake, measuring
magnetic fields or air currents instead of genuine weight reduction.
And yet, few of Podkletnov's critics actually bothered
to read his description of his work. Their reaction was so dismissive,
it almost sounded like prejudice. From their perspective he was an
outsider, a nonmember of the "gravity establishment." They couldn't
believe that a major discovery in
physics had been made by such a no-status dilettante fooling around at
some obscure lab in Finland.
True, Podkletnov wasn't a physicist - but he did have a
doctorate (in materials science) and he knew how to do careful lab
work. When he wrote up his results, his papers were accepted for
publication in some sober physics journals, and at least one
theoretical physicist - an Italian named Giovanni
Modanese - became intrigued. Modanese didn't dismiss the whole idea of
gravity shielding, because on the subatomic level, we simply don't
know how gravity functions. "What we are lacking today," according to
Modanese, "is a knowledge of the microscopic or 'quantum' aspects of
gravity, comparable to the good microscopic knowledge we have of
electromagnetic or nuclear forces. In this sense, the microscopic
origin of the gravitational force is still unknown." At the Max Planck
Institute in Munich, he developed a theory to explain the shielding
phenomenon.
In the United States, scientists affiliated with NASA
were thinking along similar lines. They obtained funding to replicate
Podkletnov's experiment - but still the skeptics remained cynical and
unimpressed. The concept of gravity shielding has an aura of
science-fictional weirdness; it sounds like something out of The
X-Files. Indeed, Podkletnov's experiment was actually mentioned in an
episode of The X-Files, virtually guaranteeing that most scientists
wouldn't take it seriously.
Podkletnov now claims that his results have been
verified by researchers at two universities - but he won't name these
people for fear that they'll be ridiculed and ruined by the gravity
establishment. The team at NASA make no secret of their work - but
they have no definite results, yet. And so, at this time, the only
credentialed scientist claiming to have witnessed
gravity modification is Podkletnov himself.
For almost a year I've been wrestling with this story,
which is a journalistic nightmare, because nothing can be verified.
Podkletnov may have made one of the great breakthroughs of the 20th
century, or he may be suffering from a severe case of hubris coupled
with wishful thinking. In darker moments I wonder if he even exists;
the whole gravity story could be a prank by a bunch of hackers using a
fake email address and a Finnish phone
number that autoforwards calls to a dorm at MIT.
These thoughts run through my mind as I pull off Highway
3 into a rest area, crack a screw-top bottle of Vichy water, and check
my map. It's now an hour after dawn, but the light is still so dim,
the scenery outside is all in shades of gray - as if I'm trapped
inside a monochrome TV with the
brightness control stuck near zero. In Finland in the winter, when the
sky is totally choked with clouds, the country becomes one big
sensory-deprivation tank.
On the car radio some nameless station plays authentic
American bluegrass, except that the lyrics are in Finnish, which is a
head-bending experience, the last thing I need right now. Still,
having come 5,000 miles I am determined to see this through. In just a
few hours I am scheduled to meet
Eugene Podkletnov in person, in the town of Tampere, where his
gravity-modification experiments took place. I will verify, if nothing
else, that he does exist ... assuming of course that I can find
Tampere in this drizzle-soaked wilderness of undifferentiated gloom.
Gravity shielding isn't a new idea. H. G. Wells explored
its potential for spaceflight almost a century ago in his classic
novel The First Men in the Moon, and Wells also foresaw an avalanche
of applications on Planet Earth, creating an uneasy conflict between
pure science and pure greed. In his
novel, a lone mad scientist says he isn't in it for the money; he just
wants some recognition, and maybe a prize or two. But then he starts
to realize just how much money could be involved. "I suppose," he says
thoughtfully, "no one is absolutely averse to enormous wealth."
Eugene Podkletnov must be aware of this - but so far, he
has reaped more pain than profit. After publishing a preliminary paper
in 1992, he wrote a more thorough paper that was rejected by more than
a dozen journals till finally it penetrated the peer-review process at
the respected British
Journal of Physics-D. This seemed to offer the recognition he was
hoping for, yet instead it initiated a career-destroying nightmare.
The trouble started when Robert Matthews, science
correspondent to the British Sunday Telegraph, got hold of the story.
Matthews, like any journalist, relies on contacts, and he's
disarmingly honest about it. "You don't get stories by digging for
them," he now says with a laugh. "This isn't like Sherlock Holmes,
that's a lot of bollocks. It's like, you hope a
little brown envelope turns up in the post, and if it does, you're in
luck."
In his case the little brown envelope contained page
proofs of Podkletnov's paper, leaked by a man named Ian Sample who
worked on the editorial staff of the Journal of Physics-D. Although
Podkletnov's paper hadn't been published
yet, Sample and Matthews decided to break the story in the Sunday
Telegraph, which printed it on September 1, 1996. The first sentence
was key: "Scientists in Finland are about to reveal details of the
world's first antigravity device."
Antigravity? Podkletnov never used that word; he said
he'd found a way to block gravity. Maybe this seemed a trivial
distinction, but not to the staid professors at the Institute of
Materials Science in the University of Tampere, to whom "antigravity"
sounded like something out of a bad Hollywood
movie.
The director of the institute promptly denied any
involvement and declared that Podkletnov was working entirely on his
own initiative. Then the coauthor of Podkletnov's paper claimed that
his name had been used without his knowledge - which was highly
implausible, but he stuck to his story, presumably because the
institute told him to. In the end Podkletnov had to
withdraw the paper from publication in the journal, he was abandoned
by his friends, and his credibility was impaired.
At this point I obtained Podkletnov's phone number in
Tampere and gave him a call. He turned out to speak fluent English but
was reluctant to say anything, claiming that irresponsible journalism
had ruined his career. I gave him various assurances, faxed samples of
my work, made more calls - and finally, on November 10, 1996, he gave
me a telephone interview.
He told me how he had made his discovery. "Someone in
the laboratory was smoking a pipe," he said, "and the pipe smoke rose
in a column above the superconducting disc. So we placed a ball-shaped
magnet above the disc, attached to a balance. The balance behaved
strangely. We substituted a
nonmagnetic material, silicon, and still the balance was very strange.
We found that any object above the disc lost some of its weight, and
we found that if we rotated the disc, the effect was increased."
I had no way to evaluate the truth of this, so I
contacted John Cramer, a physicist who was familiar with the story. "I
don't believe he has discovered a shield for gravity," Cramer told me,
insisting that huge amounts of energy would be required.
I checked back with Podkletnov. "We do not need a lot of
energy," he said, sounding irritable, as if I were wasting his time
with dumb, obvious questions. "We don't absorb the energy of the
gravitational field. We may be controlling it, as a transistor
controls the flow of electricity. No law of physics is broken. I am
not one crazy guy in a lab, we had a team of six or
seven, all good scientists."
So who should I believe? Maybe if I met Podkletnov in
person, I could assess his plausibility - but a few days later, he
told me this was impossible. In fact, he said, he had decided that he
wanted no further publicity of any kind.
This put me in an impossible position. Podkletnov had
talked to me, originally, because I pledged to publish nothing about
him without his consent. Now that he had withdrawn his consent, I
simply had to honor my pledge. Temporarily at least, I abandoned the
story.
Months passed. Once in a while I sent email to the
Italian physicist, Giovanni Modanese, who seemed to know where
Podkletnov was hiding, but Modanese just confirmed that the reclusive
Russian still wouldn't talk. Finally, by chance, I read a Usenet
message from a 34-year-old software developer in Oregon named Pete
Skeggs, who turned out to be a pivotal figure in a newly emergent Net
phenomenon: the gravity-enthusiast underground.
Skeggs had a BS in electrical engineering, a BS in
computer science, and he loved to tinker with things. In his own
little workshop he had tried to replicate Podkletnov's experiment
using some homemade electromagnets and a 1-inch superconductor that he
ordered from the Edmund Scientific mail-order catalog for US$24.95. He
didn't get any results, but decided to start a
gravity-modification Web page. Soon it was a huge repository of
abstracts, speculation, and references, along with reports of work by
other amateurs, some of whom claimed amazing results. A man named John
Schnurer, at Antioch College, Ohio, said that his homemade setup could
reduce the force of gravity by 2 percent on a reliable, repeatable
basis.
I sent email to Schnurer; he replied enigmatically,
refusing to divulge his home or office phone numbers and insisting
that I must page him, after which he would call me back. On September
17, 1997, he returned one of my calls.
Aged 45, Schnurer said he had a "strong science
background," though he admitted he had no college degree. He claimed
to have coauthored "more than 12 peer-reviewed papers" and had spent
"more than nine years providing tech support for Armstrong Aerospace
Medical Research Labs at Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base," where they had been trying to find ways for pilots to
control airplanes via brainwave sensors. "We had a flight simulator,"
Schnurer said. "You could sit in it and make it roll with your
brainwaves." However, he'd been laid off in 1995 because of budget
cuts, and he was frank about his current problems. "I don't have any
money," he said. "Most of my
equipment I built myself, or borrowed, or resurrected." Still, he
claimed that his redesigned version of Podkletnov's setup was working
on a routine basis and could be used onboard Earth satellites to make
small orbital corrections.
Was Schnurer for real? He agreed that I could visit him,
so I arranged for Wired photographer Norman Mauskopf to meet me in
Ohio. A couple of days before my trip I contacted Schnurer just to
check that there were no snags, and he assured me his apparatus was
still up and running. "I have enough liquid nitrogen for one run,
maybe two," he said.
This made me suspicious. Two demos would be just enough
to show some results, while preventing a more thorough investigation.
I sent email asking Schnurer to obtain more liquid nitrogen. I even
told him that if he didn't have enough money, I'd pay for it myself.
Two hours later, he called me. "Can you wire me the cash
via Western Union?" he said. "I need $150."
Well, I'd been dumb enough to make the offer, and I was
determined to witness a thorough trial; so I sent the money. Two days
later I was in a rented car with Norman Mauskopf, driving across the
flat farmland of Ohio to Antioch College, just south of Dayton.
We found Schnurer in a fine old red-brick residence with
white-painted casement windows and a big front porch. This turned out
not to be his home; the place had been divided into offices.
Schnurer's workshop was in a long, thin sunroom where a white-painted
wooden bench left barely enough space for people to squeeze past each
other. The bench was strewn with components,
tools, computer circuit boards, books, and looseleaf binders. At the
far end stood the Gravity Modification Machine.
A long wooden rod was pivoted on a nail, supported by a
wooden yoke glued to a block of plywood. A piece of string dangled
from one end of the rod, tied around a lump of scrap metal. At the
other end a tangle of fine wires ran down to some coils underneath a
1-inch black disc - a superconductor that
had been donated by a local manufacturer, thus saving Schnurer the
$24.95 charged by Edmund Scientific. When I asked why he had to
economize so stringently, he muttered something about his family not
fully sharing his enthusiasm for gravity research.
The wires from the electromagnets snaked back to a
12-volt power supply, via a "switching system" consisting of bare
copper contacts that had to be maneuvered by hand. "You can't
photograph that," Schnurer said firmly. "That's an integral part of my
patent application."
I stared at his apparatus in dismay. Even straining my
creative powers to the limit, clearly there was no way to portray this
as cutting-edge science. The components looked as if they'd been
salvaged from a dumpster.
Schnurer, however, was eager to begin. He showed me his
"target mass" (a bundle of seven glass rods), which he placed
ceremoniously on a borrowed digital scale. He noted the readout: 27
grams. Then he picked up a small tank of liquid nitrogen - my liquid
nitrogen, I realized, feeling a bit pissed about it - and he poured a
portion into a Dewar flask. The liquid hissed like oil in a hot frying
pan as it boiled violently at room
temperature. We waited a few minutes for the clouds of white vapor to
die down.
"Now!" said Schnurer. He lowered the electromagnets,
disc, and target mass into the Dewar flask, to cool the disc so that
its electrical resistance would diminish to zero. Then he placed the
lump of scrap metal on the scale,
to read the difference in weight between it and the assembly in the
Dewar flask. The numbers flickered wildly, responding to thermal
currents in the liquid, air currents in the room, vibration from a
truck passing on the road a couple hundred feet away, and a dozen
other random factors. Still, a substantial weight reduction would make
these small fluctuations irrelevant.
"We'll call the weight 20.68," Schnurer said, scribbling the figure.
He went to his copper contacts and started manipulating
them to send pulses to the electromagnets. I watched the scale - and
suddenly felt as if reality was warping around me, because the numbers
began changing. According to the scale, the target mass was getting
lighter.
"Write down the peak value!" Schnurer alerted me.
The numbers were still jumping, but I averaged them as
well as I could. Schnurer grabbed his scrap of paper, did a
subtraction, divided the result by the original weight of the target
mass, and got his answer: here in this funky little workshop, the
force of gravity had just been reduced by 2
percent.
"Let me try that," I said, pointing to the copper
contacts. Schnurer stepped aside, looking somewhat reluctant; but when
I did what he had done, the results were the same.
"Maybe you should take a look over here," Norman
Mauskopf remarked, nodding toward the superconductor where it dangled
in the liquid nitrogen. I realized with chagrin that I had been
totally hypnotized by the red LEDs on the scale. When I turned my
attention to the flask, I saw what I should have
seen before: electricity flowing through the submerged coils was
creating heat that made the frigid liquid boil. Just as eggs bounce
around when you boil them in a saucepan, the superconductor and its
target mass were being lifted by bubbles. We weren't measuring gravity
reduction, here, we were conducting an experiment in cryogenic
cookery!
I pointed this out to Schnurer. He looked annoyed - then
indifferent, and I realized that there was still no doubt in his mind,
because he was a True Believer. He knew he was modifying gravity. "So
we'll lift it out of the liquid nitrogen," he said. "It'll stay cold
enough for the effect to work for 15 or 30 seconds. And you'll see, it
will still get lighter."
We tried it, and sure enough the assembly lost weight.
But it had dragged some liquid nitrogen with it from the flask, and
was steaming madly. This was now the source of weight loss, just as
damp clothes become lighter as they dry on a washing line.
"John, you're not measuring gravity fluctuations," I
told him. "You're measuring the effects of boiling and evaporation."
Schnurer was now visibly agitated. He wanted to run the
experiment again. And again. He varied the target mass, scribbled more
numbers on odd scraps of paper - after a while there were so many
scraps, he lost track of which was which. For several hours he tried
every conceivable configuration.
While waiting patiently to see how long it might take
him to admit defeat, I noticed a page from Business Week lying on his
workbench. It was an article about gravity modification, mentioning
Schnurer's work, illustrated with a
photograph taken right here in this cramped little hobby-den -
although false color and a wide-angle lens made the place look like a
futuristic laboratory. Then I scanned the text and realized that this
writer possessed the creative powers that I so sadly lacked. He seemed
cautious and objective yet made Schnurer sound like a fully qualified
scientist, even identifying
him as "director of physics engineering at Antioch College."
I queried Schnurer about this. Gruffly he told me that
he has never been employed by Antioch University; his workshop just
happens to be near Antioch. With several partners, he runs a very
small company named Physics Engineering, of which he's a director.
Only in this sense can he be termed a director of Physics Engineering.
Around 9 p.m., we called it quits. I didn't enjoy being
a heartless skeptic, questioning John Schnurer's credentials and
debunking his dreams of refuting Einstein. I just wanted to go home.
Back in New York, three pieces of email from John
Schnurer were already waiting for me. With urgent sincerity he claimed
there had been a series of unfortunate errors. The superconductor had
become degraded! The results I'd witnessed were invalid! He begged me
to return to Ohio right away, to
witness a whole new series of experiments with a brand-new disc.
Well - thanks, but no thanks. I didn't relish another
session of Skeptic versus True Believer. I felt sure that it wouldn't
work out any better the second time around, and it wouldn't make
either of us very happy. Instead, I followed up another reference from
the indefatigable Pete Skeggs, and
learned the strange history of NASA's involvement in gravity-shielding
research.
In 1990 a senior scientist at the University of Alabama
named Douglas Torr started writing papers with a Chinese woman
physicist named Ning Li, predicting that superconductors could affect
the force of gravity. This was before Eugene Podkletnov made his
observations in Tampere, so naturally Li
and Torr were delighted when they heard that Podkletnov had
accidentally validated their predictions. Their university enjoyed a
good working relationship with the Marshall Spaceflight Center in
Huntsville, where they eventually persuaded NASA to start a serious
long-term investigation. Ning Li remained involved, while Douglas Torr
relocated to South Carolina.
Skeggs now forwarded to me an amazing document
suggesting that Torr had ventured into even stranger territory. The
document was Antigravity News and Space Drive Technology, an amateur
zine that looked like a 1970s counterculture manifesto, generated on
an old daisywheel printer, pasted into pages, photocopied, and stapled
down the left edge. This science-oriented samizdat was a hopeless
muddle of wacky ideas and grandiose claims, but on its back cover it
reproduced an announcement from the Office of Technology Transfer at
the University of South Carolina.
Incredibly, this text described a "gravity generator"
that would create a force beam in any desired direction. The
announcement concluded: "University seeks licensee and/or joint
development. USC ID number: 96140." At the bottom of the page was a
phone number for William F. Littlejohn at the
Office of Technology Transfer, so I called it, and reached an
assistant named Frances Jones. Sounding not very happy, she confirmed
that the announcement was genuine. "But Mr. Littlejohn says it was
presented prematurely, it got wider distribution than we intended, and
we're - still working on the technology, and would prefer not to
receive any publicity."
She refused to say if Douglas Torr was involved, but on
the university's Web site I found an Annual Report to the Faculty
Senate which listed his name on a patent application for the gravity
generator. This was totally bizarre; a respected university supposedly
looking for commercial partners to develop a gadget straight out of a
1950s science-fiction novel. Surely, nothing could be weirder than
this - but no, there was more in store. Through my physicist friend
John Cramer I learned of a scientist named James Woodward who claimed
to have found a way to reduce the mass of objects.
"Mass" doesn't mean the same thing as "weight." You'd
weigh less on the moon than on the Earth, because weight depends on
the force of gravity. Mass, on the other hand, is an innate property
of matter; it exists even when an object is in free fall.
Nevertheless, Woodward had written a paper claiming
that he could adjust the mass of an object (Foundations of Physics
Letters, vol. 3, no. 5, 1990), and he even managed to get a US patent
for his device (number 5,280,864, issued January 25, 1994).
I called him at his office at Cal State Fullerton, where
he's been affiliated for 25 years and is currently an adjunct
professor of physics. He turned out to be a jovial, amiable man who
was more than willing to talk on the record, probably because his work
has remained so obscure, no one has
had a chance to ridicule it yet.
The equipment he uses is relatively simple, which is
just as well, since he's had to pay for a lot of it himself. If you
want to reduce the mass of an object in the privacy of your own
basement workshop, here's how it's done: Obtain a high tech ceramic
capacitor (a standard electronic item) and attach it to the speaker
terminals on a stereo amplifier. Feed in a steady
tone (perhaps from one of those stereo-test CDs) while using some kind
of electromechanical apparatus (maybe the guts from an old
loudspeaker) to vibrate the capacitor up and down. According to
Woodward, the capacitor's mass will vary at twice the frequency of the
signal, so you will need a circuit called a frequency doubler to drive
your vibrator at the correct rate. If the vibrator lifts the capacitor
while it's momentarily lighter and
drops it while it's heavier, you achieve an average mass reduction -
which sounds as if you're getting something for nothing, except that
Woodward believes that in some mysterious fashion you are actually
stealing the energy from the rest of the universe.
I asked him why no one had ever noticed that the weight
of capacitors varies in rhythm with their energy level. "Well," he
said, "people don't normally go around weighing capacitors."
He claimed that so far he's measured a reduction of up
to 150 milligrams; just a fraction of an ounce. Still, practical
applications could be developed. "If someone decided to put
substantial amounts of money into this, you could have something
within three to five years. For spacecraft, all you'd need would be
big solar arrays instead of rocket fuel."
I asked him if there was any chance that his discovery
might turn out to be bogus, like cold fusion. "Of course!" he said,
laughing cheerfully. "I have biweekly paranoia attacks, and then I try
something else to see if I can make this effect go away. But, it won't
go away."
I asked his opinion of the team at NASA. "Serious and
competent, sensible folks," he said - though he seemed to find gravity
shielding a bit implausible, even compared with mass reduction.
Clearly, it was time to call NASA. I contacted David
Noever, a theoretical physicist and former Rhodes scholar who started
working with NASA in 1987 after getting a PhD at Oxford University,
England. He seemed to be the key figure trying to replicate
Podkletnov's work, and he invited me to see for
myself.
The Marshall Spaceflight Center is a box-shaped 10-story
office building with a 1960s pedigree. The closer I came, the shabbier
it looked; when I walked up the front steps, I noticed cracks between
the faded gray panels of its façade. Alas, poor NASA! Formerly the
favorite child of federal legislators, now nickel-and-dimed half to
death. Upstairs I found utilitarian government-style offices with
cheesy rubberized floor tiles,
ancient gray steel desks, and file cabinets that seemed to have been
repainted by hand. The place was almost Soviet in its austerity.
I entered the office of Whitt Brantley, chief of the
Advanced Concepts Office, and found five people waiting around a
wood-grain formica conference table. David Noever was one of them: a
tall, brooding figure with intense eyes and dark brown hair in need of
a trim. Behind a desk at the far end sat
Brantley, a genial Santa Claus who joined NASA back in 1963, when he
worked on von Braun's wildly ambitious scheme to put men on Mars,
before the Apollo program had even test-launched its first capsule.
Even this seemed relatively normal, though, compared with gravity
shielding. I asked him how he had raised the money for such a wacky
idea.
"The first research proposal I wrote didn't have the
word 'gravity' in it anywhere," he said with a grin. "Then the Sunday
Telegraph article came out, and our administrator, Goldin, was going
to a Star Trek convention where the Trekkies might ask him about
gravity modification, so we decided to tell him what was going on. He
backed up a step or two, then said he thought NASA should spend a
little money on work like this. So, we wiped the sweat off our brows
and continued."
Tony Robertson, another member of the team, leaned
forward, a lot younger and more earnest that Brantley. "The way I see
it," he said, "NASA has a responsibility to overcome gravity."
"Right," said Brantley. "We've been building antigravity
machines since day one - it's just that they're not as efficient as
we'd like them to be."
Everyone chuckled at that.
"It's true we're pushing the edge," Brantley went on.
"But the only way to guarantee you don't win the lottery is, don't buy
a ticket."
I turned to David Noever, who looked tense and restless,
as if he'd rather be in his laboratory. I asked how he felt about
amateur gravity enthusiasts. "Well, we went to visit John Schnurer,"
he said. "But he wouldn't let us in. We had to meet him outside on a
park bench. We also invited Podkletnov to
come to Huntsville, back in January 1997. We said we'd pay his way,
but he said he didn't see any value in it."
"It's not uncommon for people to distrust NASA," said
Brantley, "because we're part of the government. They think even if we
did discover something, we'd cover it up. You know, Roswell and all
that -"
By this time, Noever was definitely ready to go. "Let's
show you the lab," he said.
He led the way outside to an enclave of austere, ugly
concrete buildings that looked as if they might have been left over
from World War II. Inside, past massive machinery for pressing ceramic
discs, I entered a lab about 20 feet square, with one wall of windows,
fluorescent ceiling panels, big white
cylinders of liquid helium and liquid nitrogen, and heavy-duty
rack-mounted power supplies in rectangular metal cabinets.
Noever explained that the team is trying several
different approaches. He showed an assortment of 1-inch
superconducting discs, made from every conceivable mix of ingredients.
He demonstrated a gravimeter: a beige-painted metal unit the size of a
car battery. Across the room was a tall insulated tank about a foot in
diameter, with a huge coil wrapped
around the base capable of taking 800 amps, though Noever said that
the current would create enough heat to melt the floor. The tank had
been designed to contain a 6-inch disc rotating in liquid helium, with
the gravimeter suspended above.
Meanwhile, the team was still struggling to fabricate
12-inch discs, which tend to fracture into pieces during pressing and
a subsequent baking process. "This is what Podkletnov says is the
heart of the matter," said Noever, "learning to make the discs. He
said it could take us one or two
years. He did reveal the composition -"
But not the step-by-step method for production?
Noever laughed sourly. "Of course not. At least, he
hasn't told us. He's very adamant about not talking to people about
some aspects of this work."
Already, though, Noever said he had achieved some
possible results with smaller discs. He showed one graph that
suggested significant changes in gravitational force. "We only saw
this a couple of times. We have to see it 100 times before we'll allow
ourselves to reach any conclusions. And then
we'll get the Bureau of Standards in here to check it out, and then,
maybe, we'll publish a paper."
Noever suggested that gravity may have a natural
frequency, far higher than X rays or microwaves, which would explain
why it penetrates all known materials. A superconducting disc could
resonate and downshift the frequency to a lower level where it could
be blocked by normal matter. "But this is all very speculative," he
cautioned, adding that it's just one of three
theories that could explain gravity shielding.
Ron Koczor, project manager of the team, had been
sitting over at one side of the lab looking amiable but diffident.
Koczor's background is in infrared and visible optics; his last
project was a space shuttle experiment to measure winds in Earth's
atmosphere using specially designed lasers. By
comparison, gravity shielding research is a labyrinth of
uncertainties.
"In this kind of research you go from depression to
elation, sometimes just from hour to hour," said Koczor. "But if this
is real, it's going to change civilization. The payoff boggles the
mind. Theories about gravitational force today are probably comparable
to knowledge of electromagnetism a century ago. If you think what
electricity has done for us since then, you see what controlling
gravity might do for us in the future."
Before going to Huntsville I had sent yet another
message to Giovanni Modanese, asking again if Eugene Podkletnov was
willing to talk to me. Naturally I didn't expect a positive reply -
but to my amazement Modanese wrote back saying that Podkletnov had
returned to Finland and was now ready to cooperate.
I called Podkletnov right away. Yes, he said, it was
true; he would talk. I could meet him in person.
Four days later I was boarding a Finnair MD-11. Nine
hours after that I found myself in Helsinki Airport, waiting for my
baggage to come off a carousel. About 200 Finns were waiting with me,
looking stoic and withdrawn, like guests at a funeral. The only sound
was the clanking of the conveyor
belt, and I remembered a phrase from the Lonely Planet travel guide
that I'd read on the plane: "A happy, talkative Finn does not inspire
admiration among fellow Finns, but rather animosity, jealousy, or
hostility. Being silent is the way to go."
Outside, it was almost noon but looked like dusk.
"Winter is the most hopeless time, when many people are depressed," my
guidebook warned me. In fact, back in the early 1970s a Finnish
scientist named Erkki Vaisanen discovered SAD - seasonal affective
disorder, the type of depression caused
by lack of sunlight. He was tipped off by the rash of suicides that
sweeps through Finland every September. I began to wonder why
Podkletnov had chosen to relocate here.
I drove to a grim little industrial park (where all the
buildings were painted gray, as if to emulate the weather) and checked
in at a Holiday Inn that looked like a small electronics factory.
After exiting an elevator paneled in stainless steel, I struggled to
open a massive metal fire door,
walked past a sauna, and unlocked my tiny Euro-style room. Shortly
before sunset, around 4:30 in the afternoon, I did some serious
channel surfing in a dutiful attempt to locate and comprehend the
core, the quintessence of Finland.
The first thing I found was an ancient episode of
hey-hey-we're-the-Monkees resuscitated from some godforsaken video
archive and dubbed in French, "parce que nous monkee around." Then
there was a 1990 Hong Kong action movie, dubbed in German, subtitled
in Finnish - maybe Swedish, it was hard to tell.
Finland's identity was proving elusive, and I could
think of at least one reason why. A key factor could be the
1,300-kilometer frontier that the country shares with Russia. How did
the Finns cope with the ominous presence of that notoriously
expansionist superpower during the fearful decades of the Cold War?
They suppressed their separate national identity. They made
their political system close enough to communism to placate the
Politburo, and they traded actively, selling the Russians cheap wood
products and electronic devices such as telephones. Thus, they made
themselves far too useful to be worth invading.
Interestingly, the policy of appeasement paid dividends.
Finland enjoys steady growth, with inflation down near 1 percent. It
exports telecommunications products to the rest of Europe and steals
shipbuilding contracts from the Japanese. Its infrastructure looks
well maintained. Its people seem healthy. Thus, Eugene Podkletnov's
presence here is not such a mystery after all. Compared with Russia,
Finland is a land of opportunity.
And so, finally: Tampere.
As I drive in on Highway 3, the first thing I see is a
huge smokestack and a rail yard with mercury-vapor lights on steel
towers. Another smokestack stands in the distance, trailing a white
plume. Although the population is under 200,000, this is still the
second-largest city in Finland, and a haven for industry.
Opposite the railroad I find the Hotel Arctia, where
Podkletnov has agreed to meet, since he feels that his "modest
apartment building" is not suitable.
In a slightly rundown lobby paneled in varnished
plywood, I sit on a couch upholstered in drab gray wrinkled fabric and
wait as patiently as I can, very conscious that I have come 5,000
miles on this far-fetched, far-flung pilgrimage - at which point a man
in a navy blue pinstriped business suit walks into the lobby.
This is Eugene Podkletnov.
He looks strangely similar to NASA scientist David
Noever, with sharp features and a restless intensity. Close up,
though, his face shows a poignant mix of emotions. His mouth twists
quixotically at the corners, as if, at any moment, he may display some
unexpected response - pathos, laughter, or resignation.
He sits beside me on the rumpled gray couch, and I ask
why he decided to talk to me after almost a year of evasion. "You seem
sincere," he says, choosing his words cautiously, "and you are polite,
and -" He smiles faintly. "You are very persistent."
But he's not interested in small talk. He pulls out a
wad of papers and starts a long monolog.
First, he tells me, his work has been replicated by
students in Sheffield, England, and scientists in Toronto, Canada. No,
he won't give me their names. He consulted by phone with the Sheffield
students, and he went in person to Canada, where he stayed for several
weeks. "If people follow my
experiments exactly," he says, "they succeed. But if they want to
follow their own way -" He shrugs. "I try to cheer them up, let them
do it, they may find things that I missed." He sounds skeptical -
sarcastic, even - and I think he's referring to the NASA team. I
wonder if there's a trace of Russian jealousy, here; a suspicion that
well-funded Americans will stamp "NASA" on the side of the first fully
functional grav-modifying flying machine, at which point everyone will
forget about Eugene Podkletnov.
He claims, though, he's happy to share the glory. "What
we should do is combine our efforts and organize the Institute for
Gravity Research. My aim in life is not to get money, not to become
famous. I have 30 publications in materials science, and 10 patents,
but -" His mouth twists with bittersweet
humor. "Russian people are never rich unless they are criminals. I
don't dream about big money. I just want a normal existence, working
for the Institute for Gravity Research. That is my dream."
He speaks rapidly and shows no hesitation, not the
slightest sign of doubt. I get him to stop and back up a little, to
tell me about his history.
He says that his father was a materials scientist, while
his mother had a PhD in medicine - just as he, now, is a materials
scientist with a wife who is studying medicine. "My father was born in
1896, he spoke six languages freely, he became a professor at Saint
Petersburg, we had the atmosphere of
scientific research at home all the time. I was brought up surrounded
by adults, spent very little time playing with friends in school, and
even now I feel different from colleagues my own age. My father had
several inventions in his life, but at that time the Russians asked
him like this: 'Does this method exist in the United States?' My
father answered no, so they said, 'Then this must be entire
nonsense.'" Again Podkletnov gives me
an ambiguous smile, tainted with bitterness. "Finally when he got a
patent in the United States and Japan, then they gave him a patent in
Russia."
Eugene graduated with a master's degree from the
University of Chemical Technology, Mendeleyev Institute, in Moscow;
then spent 15 years at the Institute for High Temperatures in the
Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1988 Tampere University's Institute of
Technology invited him to pursue a PhD in the manufacture of
superconductors, and after he obtained his doctorate, he continued
working there - until the Sunday Telegraph news item appeared in 1996.
Suddenly he was abandoned by his friends, unemployed, and fighting the
scientific establishment much as his father had fought with the
Russian
government, except that in his case the stakes were higher, because he
believed he had made one of the major discoveries of the 20th century.
Feeling beaten down and alienated, Podkletnov says he
gave up in 1997 and drove the 1,400 kilometers back to Moscow,
leaving his family in Tampere. But Moscow was not a good place for a
scientist to be. In the 1980s he had been able to borrow equipment
freely from other scientists; in 1997, when he
asked for something they would say, "How much can you pay me?"
"Russians claim they are happy now because they have
freedom," Podkletnov tells me, "but they are not happy, and they are
not free. If you criticize the government, you may still go to jail.
If you call an ambulance, it does not come. If you call the police,
they do not come. Even criminals complain
that they were better off under communism. College professors are
trying to live on $200 a month in a city where prices are almost as
high as in New York, and salary payments are delayed by six months.
So - I returned here. I have a job, now, in a local company, as a
materials scientist. It only uses perhaps 5 percent of my abilities,
but -" He shrugs.
He insists that he isn't embittered. "It is good for a
person to be unsatisfied in some way," he says. "You should be happy
in family life but not satisfied in your surroundings. This is a
source of progress. We have a proverb in Russia: The harder they beat
us, the stronger we become." He gives me his twisted smile. "The only
problem is, maybe they beat me so
much, I never have a chance to use the strength."
I ask how people at his laboratory would characterize
him.
"They say always that I am too serious. You understand,
here today, I am trying to speak with humor to make your job easier.
But in general I am a very determined person, very precise in
everything. I don't smile when I am working. When I work, I work."
I ask him what happened to his equipment at Tampere
University.
"Part of it is still there, but they don't work with
superconductors any longer, and I am not allowed to come to the
institute. But still, I can show you the outside of the building."
We walk out into the dark gray afternoon. "Now you are
going to be a very brave person," says Podkletnov, "to ride in a
Russian car." He unlocks a maroon Lada, which looks like a cheap
version of an old Volvo. With another key he removes a metal clamp
linking the clutch and brake pedals - a low
tech security device.
But I've been told that Finland has a low crime rate.
"Yes," Podkletnov agrees, "this is true. Still, there may be Russian
immigrants around."
I can't tell if he's serious or joking.
The car's seat backs are almost vertical, enforcing a
rigid military posture. We drive out to the university campus, which
is uncompromisingly modern - and of course, the buildings are all in
shades of gray.
Back in the hotel lobby Podkletnov shows me detailed
diagrams of the experimental equipment that he used. "We measured the
weight in every way," he says, adamantly denying that air currents or
magnetism could have caused spurious readings. "We used metal
shielding, we used nonmagnetic targets, we enclosed the target in a
vacuum - we were very thorough."
He claims that he placed a mercury manometer (similar to
a barometer) over the superconducting disc and recorded a 4-mm
reduction in air pressure, because the air itself had been reduced in
weight. Then he took the manometer upstairs to the lab above his and
found exactly the same result - as if his equipment were generating an
invisible column of low gravity
extending upward indefinitely into space, exactly as H. G. Wells
described it almost a century ago.
At NASA, David Noever feels that gravity reduction
should diminish with distance. Podkletnov, though, has proved to his
own satisfaction that the effect has no limit; and if he's right, a 2
percent weight reduction in all the air above a vehicle equipped with
gravity shielding could enable it to
levitate, buoyed up by the heavier air below. "I'm practically sure,"
Podkletnov says, "that within 10 years, this will be done." He gives
me a meaningful look. "If not by NASA, then by Russia."
But wait; there's more. He has news that hasn't been
reported elsewhere. Despite the hardships in Moscow, during the past
year he says he conducted research at an unnamed "chemical scientific
research center" where he built a device that reflects gravity.
Supposedly it's based around a Van de Graaff generator - a
high-voltage machine dating back to the earliest days of electrical
research. "Normally there are two spheres," he explains, "and a spark
jumps between them. Now imagine the spheres are flat surfaces,
superconductors, one of them a coil or O-ring. Under specific
conditions, applying resonating fields and composite superconducting
coatings, we can
organize the energy discharge in such a way that it goes through the
center of the electrode, accompanied by gravitation phenomena -
reflecting gravitational waves that spread through the walls and hit
objects on the floors below, knocking them over."
And this, too, can have practical applications?
"The second generation of flying machines will reflect
gravity waves and will be small, light, and fast, like UFOs. I have
achieved impulse reflection; now the task is to make it work
continuously."
He sounds completely sober, serious, matter-of-fact.
If he really wants knowledge to be freely shared, why
hasn't he written more about this? And why hasn't he been more open
with the people at NASA?
"I'm a serious person. If someone wants serious work, I
can provide this. If I was to relocate in the United States, I would
need five or six people and two years in a university or well-equipped
technical laboratory. I guarantee, if I am invited, I can reproduce
everything. But I am not selling
my experiment piece by piece. If your readers are serious, they will
be able to find me."
So here's a unique opportunity for the venture
capitalists out there. Track down the elusive Eugene Podkletnov, make
him an offer he can't refuse, and help to free humanity from its
pedestrian existence at the bottom of a gravity well.
Does Podkletnov really believe that this will come to
pass? He seems to. Does he see himself playing a central role? "I am
not a very religious person," he tells me. "But I do believe in God,
and of course there is a soul, you can feel it." He pauses, trying to
convey his convictions. "Most of all," he says, "like all Russians, I
have a sense of destiny. This is a
secret of the Russian soul that can't be explained to foreigners. Even
Russian people can't understand it. But - we feel it."
At the end of our meeting he strides out of the hotel
lobby, as brisk and purposeful as an ambitious businessman, looking
younger than his 43 years. I'm impressed by his intense focus, his
strict attention to facts and details, and his sincerity. I wonder,
though, if a vague sense of destiny is
really enough to get him where he wants to go. The history of science
is littered with casualties who ventured too far from the mainstream,
or seemed a bit - wacky, for their time. Nikola Tesla is a classic
example. Even Robert Goddard, the legendary rocketry pioneer, was
scorned and forced to work in isolation and poverty for most of his
life.
As one physicist told me, "New ideas are always
criticized - not because an idea lacks merit, but because it might
turn out to be workable, which would threaten the reputations of many
people whose opinions conflict with it.
Some people may even lose their jobs."
The man who said this is an eminent physicist who
started devising equipment to detect gravity waves 30 years ago.
Despite his secure tenure and respected status, he still wouldn't let
me quote him by name, because he suffered in the past when he promoted
radical concepts of his own.
Bob Park is a physics professor at the University of
Maryland. When he's pressed to say something about Podkletnov's work,
he comments: "Well, we know that we can create shields for other
fields, such as electromagnetic fields; so in that sense I suppose
that a gravity shield does not violate
any physical laws. Still, most scientists would be reluctant to
conclude anything publicly from this." Ironically, Park has made a
name for himself by debunking "fringe" science in a weekly column for
the American Physical Society's Web page. If scientists are reluctant
to "conclude anything publicly," it's partly because they know they
may be stigmatized by critics
such as Park.
Of course, reflexive conservatism isn't the whole story.
Many physicists are skeptical about gravity shielding because they
believe that it conflicts with Einstein's general theory of
relativity. According to George Smoot, a renowned professor of physics
at UC Berkeley who collaborated on an essay
that won a Gravity Research Foundation award, "If gravity shielding is
going to be consistent with Einstein's general theory, you would need
tremendous amounts of mass and energy. It's far beyond the technology
we have today."
On the other hand, theories developed by Giovanni
Modanese, Ning Li, and Douglas Torr portray a superconductor as a
giant "quantum object" which might be exempt from Smoot's criticism,
since Einstein's general theory has nothing to say about quantum
effects. As Smoot himself admits, "The general
theory is widely revered because Einstein wrote it, and it happens to
be very beautiful. But the general theory is not entirely compatible
with quantum mechanics, and sooner or later it will have to be
modified."
He also says that the nonlinear spin of gravity
particles - "gravitons" - makes calculations extremely difficult.
"When you add a spinning disc," he says, "the equations become
impossible to solve."
This means that gravity shielding cannot be disproved
mathematically. Even Bob Park, the resident skeptic, shies away from
describing it as "impossible," because "there have been things that we
thought were impossible, which actually came to pass." Gregory
Benford, a professor of physics at UC Irvine who also writes science
fiction, echoes this and takes
it a step further. "There's nothing impossible about gravity
shielding," he says. "It just requires a field theory that we don't
have yet. Anyone who says it's inconceivable is suffering from a lack
of imagination."
When I first started reading about gravity modification,
I was skeptical. Most likely, I thought, Podkletnov's experimental
procedures were flawed.
A year later, I'm not so sure. Having questioned him in
detail for several hours, I believe that he did his work in a careful,
responsible fashion. I'm no longer willing to write him off as an
eccentric suffering from wishful thinking. I believe he observed
something - although the exact nature of it
remains unclear.
And so, frustratingly, there's no conclusive ending to
this long, strange story - at least until someone provides independent
verification. In the meantime, there's only one thing we can do:
Wait.
Thanks to John Cramer for factual orientation and Robert
Becker for theoretical background. Pete Skeggs participated in my
visit to NASA and offered extremely generous help.
For additional information:
Pete Skeggs's gravity information page:
James Woodward's mass-reduction theory:
Antigravity mailing list: www.in-search-of.com/
John Schnurer's Gravity Society: www.gravity.org/
NASA's breakthrough propulsion physics program:
Copyright © 1993-98 Wired Magazine Group Inc. All rights
reserved.
Compilation Copyright © 1994-98 Wired Digital Inc. All
rights reserved.
Issue 6.03
www.inetarena.com/~noetic/pls/gravity.html
www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw83.html
www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/bpp/