Breaking the Law of Gravity

Skeptics had a field day when a scientist claimed in 1996 that gravity could be negated. Now his findings are being investigated in laboratories worldwide.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. - Lord Kelvin, ca. 1895, British mathematician and physicist

I'd like to see a source for this. Certainly Kelvin knew that birds and insects were heavier than air.

Didn't Al Gore invent anti-gravity shortly after inventing the Internet?

It wasn't that hard either, when you have as much hot air as he has.

Fascinating subject matter. Podkletnov is an engimatic figure rivaling Tesla. Very well written article. I give this a 9, it has a good beat and I can dance to it. Thanks!!

"Claims of anti-gravity in the early 21st century were found out to be merely attempts to cause speculation in the price of high temperature superconducting materials."

The anti-gravity experiments are much older than 5 years. I remember buying and reading a book in the early 1970's detailing experiments by a group of Canadian scientists doing very similar experiments. And they had pretty much the same results. They used high speed rotating disks and spheres and documented reduction in gravitational forces above them. If there is any truth in anti-gravitation, then sooner or later someone will succeed in proving it.

After all, theories about atomic bombs and actual research preceded the 1st a-bomb by decades. Same for some other fantastic devices we now take for granted that were formerly dismissed as crackpot ideas.

What about Coral Castle at Homestead, Florida, which was built with some 20 and 30 ton coral blocks by a small Latvian man (Edward Leedskalnin) using gravitational levitation?

It is a known fact that magnetic points exist on the earth where this is possible.

Eugene Podkletnov

Schnurer is ready to perform a run of his experiment.

NASA DeltaG Team

A very interesting article. It's too bad that respected scientist feel the need to react in a knee-jerk fashion when confronted with radical new ideas. The subject of gravity, and how to master it, is serious enough to be researched as it would truly mean a technological revolution. Someone with more money than they can spend should give this man a few years and a big check. Are you listening Bill Gates?

Einstein described gravity as a property of mass and space; there's no way in which to believe gravity could be attenuated if that were actually the case.

A number of more recent theories describe gravity in terms of electromagnetic and electrostatic forces. The most interesting such theory describes gravity as an electrostatic dipole effect, and would easily allow one to believe that it could be attenuated in the manner your article describes.

If you're really interested, here is a link to a web page that contains information on how to build your own lifter. http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://jnaudin.free.fr/
It's kind of cool. A few high school students have made their own lifter. One basic design uses the capacitor from an old color monitor.

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