ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

104 The Hunt for Zero Point
work at Marshall, she set up to pursue the experiments on her own. If she
was getting anywhere with them, she wasn't saying, all her most recent
tests having been conducted behind closed doors.
Since that time, according to Millis, the DeltaG group had found
cause to believe that something unusual was happening when gravity fields
were influenced by superconductors, although the precise nature of the
effect was a matter of conjecture. Podkletnov had claimed that two
percent weight reductions were being consistently observed during his
experiments—a result, if you could call it that, that was so close to the
Torr/Li prediction it was scary.
Like the whirling gyroscopes investigated by BAe, the low percentages
were, in a sense, immaterial. What was being talked about here—and
apparently engineered by Podkletnov—was a phenomenon that science
said was impossible.
The DeltaG experiments at Marshall continued, but, without
Podkletnov's input, Millis admitted that things had not gone as fast as
NASA would have liked. Part of the problem had been its inability to
reproduce superconductors of the size and fidelity Podkletnov said was
required to achieve gravity shielding—a term with which even Millis,
who was broader-minded than most, was uncomfortable.
"It's more accurate to call it an anomalous gravitational effect, but even
that is jumping the gun." It could, he said, simply be an experimental
error.
But what if it wasn't? If Podkletnov was right, if he had found a way of
altering an object's weight, aerospace was about to change—civilization,
too, maybe—and forever. Conscious, no doubt, that it might be staring
at the greatest scientific discovery since the bomb, I could see why NASA
was hedging its bets.
It had solicited a company in Columbus, Ohio, to try to develop
superconducting ceramic discs like those built by Podkletnov. Without
the Russian's secret recipe, however, it hadn't been getting on as well as
it might. At the time of my visit to Ohio, the Columbus-based company
had managed to build small discs, but it still hadn't acquired the knack
for turning out the larger variety—the type that Podkletnov said was
crucial to the success of the experiment. And this was the bittersweet
irony. Being a materials scientist, Podkletnov had an insight into the way
the discs were constructed that left NASA, with its $13 billion annual
budget, floundering in his wake. Tempting as it was to view Huntsville's
silence over Podkletnov as a deliberately misleading omission, I suspected
that NASA's impotence in the face of this irony was the real
reason no one had mentioned him.