UNTIL now, flying saucers and gravity shields have been the stuff of science
fiction. But NASA has just awarded $600 000 to a project that could
change all that. The space agency hopes to duplicate the controversial
experiments of a Russian scientist who claims to have invented a device that
blocks the force of gravity.
NASA鈥檚 interest in antigravity stems from the weighty matter of getting
rockets into orbit. If you could create a device that shields a rocket from the
Earth鈥檚 gravity, the spacecraft would need only a gentle push before it would
zoom out of the Earth鈥檚 atmosphere and into space. Most scientists think this is
impossible, but E. E. Podkletnov, a materials scientist at the Moscow Chemical
Scientific Research Centre, is not one of them.
Several years ago, in the journal Physica C, Podkletnov claimed that
a spinning, superconducting disc lost some of its weight. And, in an unpublished
paper on the weak gravitation shielding properties of a superconductor, he
argued that such a disc lost as much as 2 per cent of its weight. That鈥檚 when
NASA officials pricked up their ears and decided to get in on the act.
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NASA is paying an Ohio-based company, Superconductive Components, to build a
12-inch (31-centimetre) superconducting disc to continue a series of
experiments on gravity shielding. The first experiment didn鈥檛 work. 鈥淔or a small
disc four to five inches in diameter, we didn鈥檛 see any gravitational signal
much above the noise of tens of nanogees,鈥� says Ronald Koczor, a physicist at
NASA鈥檚 Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
However, Koczor and David Noever, also at Marshall, believe that the
experiments are worth pursuing. 鈥淲e鈥檙e trying to get a 12-inch disc. We
succeeded in pressing one last November, and we鈥檙e trying to set it up to put
radio-frequency signals into the disc.鈥� The RF signals used by Podkletnov varied
from 100 to 1000 megahertz.
According to Ho Paik, a gravitational physicist at the University of
Maryland, they are probably wasting their time. 鈥淕ravity鈥檚 produced by
mass鈥攊t鈥檚 not produced by quantum mechanics,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 can鈥檛 see why
you鈥檇 do an experiment based upon physics that鈥檚 completely wrong.鈥�
But the team seem undaunted. Eventually, Koczor and Noever hope to replicate
elements of Podkletnov鈥檚 experiment more faithfully. 鈥淭here will be an
exhaustion point, but in my opinion anyone who proves it鈥檚 not worth doing had
better have done it in the same way he did,鈥� says Noever.