SIGHTINGS



Serious Progress Hinted
In Secret Anti-Gravity Projects
By James Meek - Science Correspondent
http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,151331,00.html
3-27-00
 
 
 
MAX: There are scientists in Finland who say that they've detected antigravity over the surface of a spinning superconducting disc. (He laughs.)...
 
X-Files episode, March 1997
 
The cameo appearance in the TV sci-fi series of the "gravity shielding" experiments of the Finland-based Russian scientist Yevgeny Podkletnov summed up the reaction of the physics world to his work: it belonged in the realm of fantasy.
 
But not everyone sneered. The military wing of the hi-tech conglomerate BAe Systems took the Podkletnov experiment so seriously that it has launched an anti-gravity research programme, Project Greenglow (www.greenglow.co.uk). If the technology could be made to work it would make existing forms of transport obsolete.
 
BAe last week confirmed that the project, led by the mathematician Ron Evans, existed but would give no further details. Like many of the few scientists around the world exploring gravity shields and gravity beams, Dr Evans is believed to be fearful of ridicule. The cold fusion debacle, when scientists' claims to have created a solution to the world's energy problems in a lab flask were discredited, casts a long shadow.
 
Dr Evans, at BAe's stealth and electronic warfare department at Warton, Lancashire, is understood to be working with scientists at Lancaster University. There is a sparse website, www.greenglow.co.uk, which describes the project as "a speculative research programme - the beginning of an adventure which other enthusiastic scientists from academia, government and industry might like to join, particularly those who believe that the gravitational field is not restricted to passivity."
 
In 1996 Dr Podkletnov claimed to have discovered a way to shield objects from gravity by placing them over a superconducting disc which, in turn, rotated above powerful electromagnets.
 
His findings were to be published in a British physics journal, but news leaked out and, after press stories that scientists had made an anti-gravity device, he was booed by peers who accused him of breaking the laws of physics.He withdrew his paper and went into a huff. The unversity that had sponsored him, in Tampere, Finland, withdrew its support, and he has returned to Russia.
 
But the notion of a machine that could gently lift objects - people, freighters, spacecraft - with a hum of electricity gripped some people. A few serious scientists and engineers have been trying to reproduce Dr Podkletnov's results.
 
This month he slipped into Britain to give a lecture at Sheffield University, where he claimed that the latest Russian gravity shielding experiments had made objects 5% lighter, compared with 2% in the Finnish study.




 
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