Technol Rep Tohoku Univ: GENERATION OF ANTI-GRAVITY ...

118 The Hunt for Zero Point
the cold side of my training, the part I kept separate from the muffled
wing beats of the creature let loose upon my thinking by Marckus, said
antigravity had something to do with the shared origins of the two most
powerful weapons of the 20th century—stealth and the atomic bomb.
Have Blue would never have happened, but for the work of a retired
Lockheed math guru named Bill Schroeder and a Skunk Works software
engineer named Denys Overholser. Schroeder revisited a set of mathematical
formulae originally derived by Maxwell and refined by a turn-ofthe-century
German electromagnetics expert called Arnold Johannes
Sommerfeld. Between them, these two physicists predicted the manner
in which a given geometric shape would scatter or reflect electromagnetic
radiation. A Russian, Pyotr Ufimtsev, honed their work into a more
simplified set of equations in the early 1960s, but Ufimtsev could only
apply the equations to the most basic geometric shapes. Schroeder's and
Overholser's breakthrough had been to take Ufimtsev's concept and
apply it to the inherently complex form of an aircraft, rejecting the
regular smooth, curved lines of aerodynamic aesthetics in favor of a set
of ugly flat, angled panels. If an aircraft could be broken down into
hundreds, maybe thousands of these two-dimensional shapes, if each flat
surface or "facet" could be angled in a way that would reflect an incoming
radar beam away from its source, and if the combined shape could still
create lift, then a true "stealth" aircraft was possible.
The irony, of course, was that stealth was in part a Soviet invention.
The Soviets had allowed Ufimtsev's paper to be published, because no
one east of the Iron Curtain had entertained the idea that such a complex
set of equations could ever be applied to an aircraft. It had taken
Overholser to pick it out from hundreds of other ponderous Soviet
science texts and draw the necessary conclusions.
Stealth, like the bomb, then, had owed its genesis to algebraic
formulae. In a sense, it was pure accident that it had been discovered
within the nuts-and-bolts world of the aerospace industry.
Podkletnov's apparent discovery of gravity shielding in Tampere,
Finland, had been an accidental by-product of the Russian's work with
superconductors.
What they all shared was their origins in pure math and physics.
That thought gnawed at me as, working through a decade's worth of
my files, I began to reimmerse myself in the world of the F-l 17A Stealth
Fighter, Have Blue's operational successor.
Lockheed was used to black programs. It had built the U-2 spy plane
that the CIA had used to overfly the Soviet Union on reconnaissance