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

NICK COOK 83
down the aircraft's ladder, he reached the ground and was promptly
flattened by a sledgehammer blow to his back. The force, he realized, had
been transmitted from the gyroscope, which had reacted in some
inexplicable way as his feet had touched the ground.
In May 1990, BAe began a series of trials to test whether there was
anything in Kidd's claims, knowing full well that he wasn't alone in
making them.
In the mid-1970s, Eric Laithwaite, Emeritus Professor of Heavy
Electrical Engineering at Imperial College London, demonstrated the
apparent weight loss of a pair of heavy gyroscopes by lifting the whole
whirling contraption with one hand and wheeling it freely around his
head. When the twin rotors were not in motion, attempting this feat was
impossible. The gyroscopes were the size and weight of dumbbells. But
when the rotors turned, they became as light as a feather.
Somewhere along the line, the machine had lost weight.
The accepted laws of physics said that this was not possible, out of the
question—heresy, in fact. But Laithwaite's claims were supported by a
top-level study into gyroscopes published by NATO's Advisory Group
for Aerospace Research and Development (AGARD) in March 1990.
The authors of the AGARD report concluded that a "force-generating
device" such as Laithwaite's, if integrated into a vehicle of some kind,
could, in theory, counteract gravity. "Clearly if such a counteracting
force was of sufficient magnitude it would propel the vehicle continuously
in a straight line in opposition to said field of force and would
constitute an antigravity device."
The report went on to say that there was at least one "gyroscopic
propulsive device" that was known to work and that the inventor, E.J.C.
Rickman, had taken out a British patent on it. The trouble was, the report
concluded, the impulses generated by these machines were so slight they
would be useless for all practical applications—except, perhaps, to inch a
satellite into a new orbit once it had already been placed in space by a
rocket.
It was hardly a quantum technological leap. But that wasn't the point,
Dr. Evans told me. What was being talked about here was an apparent
contravention of the laws of physics; the negation, at a stroke, of
Newton's Third Law, of action-reaction. Which was why the BAesponsored
tests on the Kidd machine had a relevance that went way
beyond their immediate and apparent value.
If there were ways of generating internal, unidirectional, reactionless
forces in a spacecraft, and in time they could be refined, honed and
developed, the propulsion possibilities would be limitless.