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Antigravity, we all know, is just a science fiction dream. Now it appears
that NASA thinks there may be something in the idea after all, and they are
about to spend US$600,000 on trying to duplicate the controversial experiments
of a Russian scientist who claims to have invented a device that blocks the
force of gravity.
E. E.
Podkletnov, a materials scientist at the Moscow chemical Scientific Research
centre, reported several years ago that a spinning, superconducting disc
lost some of its weight. Since then, he has indicated, in an unpublished
paper on the weak gravitation shielding properties of a superconductor, that
the disc can lose as much as 2 per cent of its weight.
While this is still a long way from the antigravity that supposedly powers
UFOs, any device that shields a rocket from the Earth's gravity is of great
interest to NASA. Think of the payload advantages if you only needed a gentle
push to get a rocket up through the atmosphere and into space.
It is unlikely that they will get something for nothing. The logic of standard
science, of course, says that you need to put as much energy into the raising
of the rocket as you can get back from dropping the rocket back to Earth.
of course, rockets are inefficient, and it may well prove to be a great deal
more efficient to rely on Podkletnov's method, using a smaller amount of
energy to set up the superconducting disc, and then to set it spinning.
NASA first tried a ''small disc, four to five inches in diameter,'' but found
no gravitational effect that could be distinguished from background noise
in the nanogee range. Now they say they will be trying a twelve-inch (30
cm) disc, to see if they have any better luck that way. The researchers will
be trying to set it up to put radio-frequency signals into the disc. The
RF signals used by Podkletnov varied from 100 to 1000 megahertz, and they
believe that if they are to test his claims properly, they will need to replicate
his methods. Many physicists think that the logic is all wrong, ''because
gravity comes from
mass, not from quantum
effects,'' but science never progressed by people saying ''this cannot
work, so we will not try it.'' Rather, it works by people trying out the
consequences of strange and bizarre effects.
©WebsterWorld Pty Ltd/contributors 2002