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

NICK COOK 105
* * *
On the flight down to Texas, I picked through a pile of clippings I'd
managed to track down during my brief stopover in Washington. From
the little that was known of Podkletnov's Tampere experiments, it was
apparent that the superconductors needed to be spun at around 5,000
rpm inside a large steel container filled with liquefied gas for cooling.
Electromagnets were used to make the superconductors levitate and get
them up to speed. In the absence of any firm data on Podkletnov's discs,
though, attempts by NASA to duplicate his work were inconclusive as far
as gravity shielding was concerned. A couple of times, the readings had
blipped—a little like Dr. Evans' experience with the Kidd inertial thrust
machine at BAe—but they were never consistent enough to be taken
seriously.
If Podkletnov knew all this, I thought—and somehow or other, I
guessed he probably did—then he was more than likely pissing himself
laughing.
Either he had perpetrated a fantastic confidence trick, or he really had
pulled off one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century.
So, where the hell was Podkletnov?
The best and only clues to his whereabouts had been provided by
an American journalist named Charles Platt who had documented his
attempts to track down Podkletnov in a lengthy article for Wired
magazine. After the Sunday Telegraph story, Platt managed to get a
phone number for Podkletnov and they spoke a couple of times, but only
on the basis that Platt wouldn't publish anything without the Russian's
consent.
"He told me how he made his discovery," Platt wrote more than a year
later, quoting the Russian: " 'Someone in the laboratory was smoking a
pipe 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 non-magnetic
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.' '
When Platt suggested that huge amounts of energy would be required
for this to be remotely so, Podkletnov reportedly became irritated.
"We do not need a lot of energy," he'd snapped back. "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."