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

80 The Hunt for Zero Point
I chewed over the words of Young's speech, according it a respect I
hadn't given it on the night it was given. Now I wished I had.
I recalled the elegant marbled hallway and the low hubbub of
conversation as I'd drifted among the attendees—a hodgepodge of MoD
men and aerospace industry executives, some of whom were familiar to
me—waiting for the doors to open into the auditorium.
Young had kicked off his talk by reiterating our general state of
ignorance about gravity. "It is an incredibly weak force," he'd said,
"although it probably didn't seem so to the Wright Brothers and I
suspect most mountain climbers would disagree violently.
"But really gigantic quantities of matter, about 6x10 (to the power of
21) tonnes in the case of the Earth, are required to produce the gravity
field in which we live. If you think of a simple horseshoe magnet lifting a
piece of iron, then, as far as that piece of iron is concerned, the magnet
weighing a few ounces is outpulling the whole Earth."
He flashed up a set of artist's impressions showing how three different
kinds of antigravity vehicles might look assuming engines could be built
for them.
One, a "heavy-lifter," looking much like an airship, was depicted
effortlessly transporting a giant section of roadbridge through the air.
Young made the assumption that the antigravity engine of the heavylifter
not only canceled the weight of the craft, but its underslung load as
well.
Another, saucer-shaped, craft, described as being like a bus for "city
hopper" applications, used a "toroidal" or doughnut-shaped engine to
allow it to skip between "stops" in a futuristic-looking metropolis.
The third showed a combat aircraft with a green-glowing antigravity
lift engine on its underside for vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) and
conventional jet engines for forward propulsion.
But all these things were fiction, he stressed, so the designs were
simply conjecture. "The more I have read and thought about antigravity
and its terrestrial applications, the more I have become convinced that as
it stands today it is going nowhere. Whatever name the press may give
experiments, either in someone's garage or in Geneva, most of the real
work is trying to uncover basic knowledge and few people really believe
it will lead to gravity control.
"To the contrary, a view I have seen expressed is that if gravity control
is ever discovered it will be as an unexpected by-product of work in some
completely different field."
To which he'd added a rider. Were he to have gotten it all wrong, were