Posted on 11/25/2002 5:15:47 PM PST by vannrox
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:
Copyright © 1993-2002 The Condé Nast Publications Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1994-2002 Wired Digital, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.03/antigravity.html?pg=1
Nobody has been able to figure out how he did move those stones. My father had a keen interest in this project, as he delivered some of the stone blocks to the work site with his truck. He thought the guy used the principle of magnetism in that like poles repel each other to move the stones. The builder wouldn't let anyone see how he did it. Neat mystery.
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