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

NICK COOK 231
I let my mind wander back to the day I'd ambled, innocent of all
knowledge on the subject, into the marbled hallway of the Institution of
Mechanical Engineers in the center of London eight years earlier to hear
Professor Young's lecture. Some of the faces in the audience today
looked familiar from that evening, though I couldn't exactly say who or
why. If I'd known then what I knew now, I wondered if I'd have ended
up where I was sitting today. It had been a long haul.
Podkletnov started by recapping the events that had shaped his life and
work over the past decade.
By using rotating magnets to spin up his superconducting doughnutshaped
discs to speeds of around 5,000 rpm, he had found that any object
placed in the area of influence above them was losing a part of its weight.
Weight reductions of between 0.3 and 2 percent were found to be
easily repeatable, he claimed. Five percent reductions had been recorded,
although not with the same repeatability. "For a physicist, this is an
enormous weight loss, for a practical engineer it is not," he noted. I
thought of the NASA engineers at Huntsville struggling to reduce the
cost of space access. For every hundred kilos of rocket, Podkletnov was
offering them a launch weight reduction of two kilos.
He was right. It wasn't a whole lot. But then again, gravity shields
weren't supposed to exist.
I jotted everything down as best I could, knowing that the better my
notes, the better Marckus' efforts at interpreting them for me in plaintalk
later. He was reluctant for us both to show in the same place,
especially with so many members of the establishment present. Once
again, I was acting as his eyes and ears.
The Russian peppered his talk with references to General Relativity
and Quantum Theory, the unique properties of superconducting materials
and his admiration for other pioneers in his field, among them Hal
Puthoff, whose idea that gravity might be a "zero-point fluctuation
force" Podkletnov professed, with characteristic Russian understatement,
to find "rather interesting."
He started to talk about torsion fields, a term still fresh in my mind
from Marckus' analysis of the experiment down the mine. Igor
Witkowski, my Polish guide, had also talked of "vortex compression," a
term used by SS police general Jakob Sporrenberg in his deposition to
the Polish courts. Witkowski had remarked how this had linked in with
Podkletnov's gravity-shielding experiments.
"The observed effect," Podkletnov said, talking about his own tests,
"might be caused by a torsion field excitation of the physical vacuum
inside and outside the superconductor."