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

disc's center to turn it mechanically, but Podkletnov specified 5,000
revolutions per minute. SCI's device barely pulls 30 rpm.
Why not just ask Podkletnov how to build the thing? SCI brought him over to
consult a couple of years ago, to little avail. "His excuse basically was that he
was a ceramics physicist, not an electrical or mechanical engineer, and other
people built the device for him," Koczor says. "Draw your own conclusions.
All I know is, if I were a principal investigator on something like this, I would
know the size and thread-depth of every screw in the damn thing. But you
know, the Europeans and the Russians, they're different. They're much more,
'this is your job and this is my job.' So it's plausible that he didn't know the
details." It might not matter. SCI's contract is ending, and Koczor's budget to
explore "way-out physics" is spent. He hasn't got the money to actually test
the device even if it did meet Podkletnov's specs.
But researchers outside NASA are working on the problem, too. This summer
Nick Cook, a writer for Jane's Defence Weekly, reported that aerospace giant
Boeing was pursuing antigravity research. Boeing denied it. "We are aware of
Podkletnov's work on 'anti-gravity' devices and would be interested in seeing
further development work being done," said a company statement. "However,
Boeing is not funding any activities in this area at this time." Note Boeing's
use of the Clintonian present tense. They never contacted Jane's to ask for a
correction, Cook says. Meanwhile, British aerospace company BAE Systems
says it's keeping an eye on the research, and that it had once funded its own
antigravity project, Greenglow.
Unfortunately, Cook strains his own credibility somewhat. A couple of weeks
after his Jane's piece appeared, Cook's book on antigravity research, The Hunt
for Zero Point, came out. In it, he claims that the Nazis built an antigravity
device during World War II. Its absence from present-day science, Cook says,
implies a vast "black" world of secret antigravity aircraft that might explain
the UFOs people see over Area 51. He's a careful investigative reporter, but
once you start talking about UFOs and Nazi antigravity you're not far from
hidden tunnels under the White House full of lizard-men disguised as
Freemasons.
Even without Nazis, there are plenty of reasons to doubt Podkletnov. My
e-mails to the account listed on his recent articles (not peer-reviewed) went
unanswered. Even more problematic, I can't find the institution he lists as his
affiliation in Moscow. "Eugene always expressed his worries that others could
copy his work, although as far as I know he never applied for a patent,"
Giovanni Modanese, a collaborator of Podkletnov's at the University of
Bolzano in Italy, wrote in an e-mail (using a Western version of Podkletnov's
first name). "Nonetheless, at the scientific level if one wants a confirmation
by others and a successful replication, one must give all the necessary
elements." Well, yeah. Modanese says that the current version of the device,
now called an "impulse gravity generator," is simpler and could be built "by a
big-science team of people expert in superconductivity." A Boeing
spokesperson didn't respond to follow-up questions. So, either there's nothing
going on here, or it's an X-File.
And the science? Ten years is a long time to go without replication. Combine
that with Podkletnov's cagey behavior and it's enough to make even sci-fi
geeks like me lose hope. But like the core of any good conspiracy, antigravity
research has the ring of plausibility. One of the outstanding problems in
physics and cosmology today involves the existence of so-called dark matter
and dark energy. They're by far the main constituents of matter in the
universe, and nobody knows what they're made of—researchers have only
inferred their existence from gravitational effects. Coming up with a new
theory of how gravity works might explain that, though it'd be a scientific
revolution on a par with relativity. "Changing gravity is in the cards," says
Paul Schechter, an astronomer at MIT. "But so far no one's been able to do