Podkletnov - Gravity Page

Podkletnov - Gravity Page

Reducing Effects of Gravity

The September 30, 1996 issue of Business Week page 42, has a story, "Take That Issac Newton". It describes the work done by a researcher in Finland who claims to have found a way to partially negate the effects of gravity by using a spinning disk made of a superconducting ceramic. "The claim has yet to be verified, but it's being taken seriously by NASA and scientist elsewhere."

Eugene E. Podkletnov was doing research on high-temperature superconducting materials at Tampre University of Technology and accidentally discovered the anti-gravity shield. The disk is chilled to -334 F and zapped with an electromagnetic field that causes it to spin. At around 3000 rpm anything placed above it loses some 2% of its weight. If two disks are stacked on top of each other the loss is 4%.

"A gadget that defies gravity would have profound business implications. Built into cars, trains, and planes it could drastically slash fuel consumption and open new vistas for designing vehicles with little concern for size and weight. And if a stack of 100 disks, each providing a 2% weight loss , can produce a cumulative 200% weight loss, that could launch a spacecraft."

Many people are skeptical. Others around the world are trying to duplicate the work now and the issue is expected to be settled in a few weeks.

For some great additional indepth coverage of this phenomena and Podkletnov see a recent issue of "Journal of Ideas" an online Australian magazine. The issue I have linked to has several great articles about the subject and they are posted in full text with some graphics as well.

Business Week followed up on the topic with a Feb. 17, 1997 article titled "Antigravity? Well, It's all Up in the Air" on page 97 by Otis Port.
This article featured a John H. Schnurer, director of physics engineering at Antioch College in Yellow Springs Ohio. Last fall he chilled a 1 inch diameter superconducting disk and established an electrical current through coils positioned around the disk. Above the disk was a plastic sample hanging from one end of a homemade balance containing no metal parts. The plastic sample rose slightly, - corresponding to a 5% loss in the weight of the sample.

Giovanni Modanese a physicist at the Italian National Agency for Nuclear and High Energy Physics in Trento thinks the behavior is that of a "gravity shield." Ning Li, a Sr. Research Scientist at the University of Alabama's Huntsville campus believes that under certain conditions, superconducting atoms can "couple" compounding in strength to the point they can produce antigravity. Li and Modanese have been debating each other since the early 1990's when Eugene E. Podkletnov, a Russian materials scientist, then at the University of Technology in Finland, reported strange gravity-attenuation effects in his experiments.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL and two national laboratories are setting up experiments. NASA physicist David A. Noever was so eager to get going he paid his own fare to Denver to borrow a gravitometer, a gravity measuring device.Schnurer has replicated his weight-loss experiment 12 times. He points out the balance doesn't move when he turns on the juice without the disk - or when the disk isn't in the Meissner state. He admits his setup is crude and is now making refinements.

To spread the word, Schnurer has formed the Gravity Society, with Podkletnov and Modanese as charter members. It has established a website for offering scientific papers by the trio at : http://www.gravity.org.

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