Eugene Podkletnov
Encyclopedia
Dr Yevgeny Podkletnov is a Russia
n engineer, formerly affiliated with the Materials Science
Department at the Tampere University of Technology, Finland
, who is best known for his controversial work on a so-called gravity shielding
device. Born in Russia in the mid-1950s, Podkletnov graduated with a master's degree from the University of Chemical Technology, Mendeleyev Institute, in Moscow; he then spent 15 years at the Institute for High Temperatures in the Russian Academy of Sciences. Later he received a doctorate in materials science from Tampere University of Technology, and worked at the university, on superconductors, until 1996.
Podkletnov published a paper in 1992 reporting that the weight of an object directly above the disk was decreased. He concluded that the superconducting disk was shielding the Earth's gravitational force above it.
.
On September 1, 1996, Matthews's story broke, leading with the startling statement: "Scientists in Finland are about to reveal details of the world's first antigravity device." In the ensuing furor, the director of the laboratory where Podkletnov was working issued a defensive statement that Podkletnov was working entirely on his own. In a bizarre twist, Podkletnov's supposed coauthor disavowed prior knowledge of the paper, but some have found this disingenuous. Podkletnov himself complained that he had never claimed to block gravity, only to reduce its effect.
By 1997, Podkletnov had withdrawn his second paper (after it had been initially accepted), was no longer allowed into his former lab in Tampere and had returned to Moscow, where he quietly took an engineering job. (In 1998 he was however reported to be working on superconductors at Tamglass engineering Oy in Tampere.)
, Podkletnov told Platt that he was continuing to work on gravitation, claiming that with new collaborators at an un-named "chemical research center" in Moscow he has built a new device. He said:
More recently, in collaboration with Italian
physicist
Giovanni Modanese
, Podkletnov has reported on a similar device which he claims generates a coherent
gravity repulsion beam. (See the citation below.) Supporters claim it has been seen to move a pendulum located 150 meters away in another building. Allegedly, Podkletnov has observed that the "backside" of this second device emits "radiation" (not otherwise specified) which seems to be dangerous to biological tissue
s.
physicists, Douglas Torr and Ning Li, had predicted that superconducting magnets might reduce the effect of gravity. After Podkletnov's apparent confirmation of this prediction, Torr persuaded David Noever, a colleague at the nearby Marshall Space Flight Center
in Huntsville, Alabama
, to attempt to reproduce the gravity shielding experiment.
Torr soon moved to the University of South Carolina
and commenced work on a most unusual device. According to Platt, Torr describes this device as a "gravity generator" that can create a force beam in any desired direction. Officials of the University of South Carolina, however, apparently disavowed association with this work (in an interview by reporter Charles Platt), and it seems that Torr is seeking private funding to continue his research.
James Woodward, an adjunct professor of physics at Cal State in Fullerton, CA, claims to have constructed a device which achieves time varied changes in mass using rather ordinary capacitor
s.
Marcus Hollingshead, a British inventor, claimed in 2002 to have invented a device with similar gravity-modifying effects, though more related to the non-superconducting spinning S.E.G. configuration proposed by John Searl
.
In 2006, Martin Tajmar
and several coworkers at the Austrian Research Center (ARC) Seibersdorf
announced their claim to have measured the gravitomagnetic
London moment
of Cooper pair
s in a superconducting ring spinning at 6500 rpm. Despite the similarity to the apparatus used by Podkletnov, the authors carefully state in their eprint (see citation below) that their claimed result should not be confused with the claims of Podkletnov; specifically, they measured a tangential gravitomagnetic force created by Type I superconductors, (Elemental Lead and Niobium rings at liquid helium temperatures) but failed to measure an axial force from Type II superconductors (YBCO and BSSCO ceramics at liquid nitrogen
temperatures) as described by Podkletnov. Thus, their results suggest a magnified form of 'frame dragging' rather than gravity reflection. However, there are major differences between the experiments, such as the method of driving the ring. (In the ARC experiments, the ring was physically driven by a motor, while Podkletnov's experiment levitated and spun the ring using magnetic fields.)
and Sheffield
, but none have come forward to acknowledge this. The Sheffield work is known to have only been intended as partial replication, aimed at observing any unusual effects which might be present, since the team involved lacked the necessary facilities to construct a large enough disk and the ability to duplicate the means by which the original disk was rotated. Podkletnov counters that the researchers in question have kept quiet "lest they be criticized by the mainstream
scientific community". Podkletnov, in fact, visited the Sheffield team in 2000 and advised them on the conditions necessary to achieve his effect - conditions that they never got close to matching.
The group at NASA in Huntsville did not finish their attempts to verify Podkletnov's original gravity shielding experiment. Two attempts were made to repeat the superconductor rotation experiment, one in-house and one through an SBIR. In both cases, large superconductor disks were fabricated. However, in both cases, the funding did not allow for the development of the rotation system needed for the completion of the test. No attempt has been made by NASA to repeat the second impulse experiment.
In a BBC news item, it was alleged that researchers at Boeing
were funding a project called GRASP (Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion) which would attempt to construct a gravity shielding device, but a subsequent Popular Mechanics
news item stated that Boeing had denied funding GRASP with company money, although Boeing acknowledged that it could not comment on "black projects". A possible solution of this contradiction has been suggested: it is alleged that the GRASP proposal was presented to Boeing, but that Boeing chose not to fund it.
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n engineer, formerly affiliated with the Materials Science
Materials science
Materials science is an interdisciplinary field applying the properties of matter to various areas of science and engineering. This scientific field investigates the relationship between the structure of materials at atomic or molecular scales and their macroscopic properties. It incorporates...
Department at the Tampere University of Technology, Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
, who is best known for his controversial work on a so-called gravity shielding
Gravity shielding
The term gravitational shielding refers to a hypothetical process of shielding an object from the influence of a gravitational field. Such processes, if they existed, would have the effect of reducing the weight of an object. The shape of the shielded region would be similar to a shadow from the...
device. Born in Russia in the mid-1950s, Podkletnov graduated with a master's degree from the University of Chemical Technology, Mendeleyev Institute, in Moscow; he then spent 15 years at the Institute for High Temperatures in the Russian Academy of Sciences. Later he received a doctorate in materials science from Tampere University of Technology, and worked at the university, on superconductors, until 1996.
Podkletnov's gravity shielding experiments
According to the account Podkletnov gave to reporter Charles Platt in a 1996 phone interview, during a 1992 experiment with a rotating superconducting disk,- Someone in the laboratory was smoking a pipe, and the pipe smoke rose in a column above the superconducting disc. So we placed a ball-shaped magnet above the disc, attached to a balance. The balance behaved strangely. We substituted a nonmagnetic material, silicon, and still the balance was very strange. We found that any object above the disc lost some of its weight, and we found that if we rotated the disc, the effect was increased.
Podkletnov published a paper in 1992 reporting that the weight of an object directly above the disk was decreased. He concluded that the superconducting disk was shielding the Earth's gravitational force above it.
Public controversy
Podkletnov's first peer-reviewed paper on the apparent gravity-modification effect, published in 1992, attracted little notice. In 1996, he submitted a longer paper, in which he claimed to have observed a larger effect (2% weight reduction as opposed to 0.3% in the 1992 paper) to the Journal of Physics D. According to science reporter Charles Platt, a member of the editorial staff, Ian Sample, leaked the submitted paper to Robert Matthews, the science correspondent for the British newspaper, the Sunday TelegraphSunday Telegraph
The Sunday Telegraph is a British broadsheet newspaper, founded in February 1961. It is the sister paper of The Daily Telegraph, but is run separately with a different editorial staff, although there is some cross-usage of stories...
.
On September 1, 1996, Matthews's story broke, leading with the startling statement: "Scientists in Finland are about to reveal details of the world's first antigravity device." In the ensuing furor, the director of the laboratory where Podkletnov was working issued a defensive statement that Podkletnov was working entirely on his own. In a bizarre twist, Podkletnov's supposed coauthor disavowed prior knowledge of the paper, but some have found this disingenuous. Podkletnov himself complained that he had never claimed to block gravity, only to reduce its effect.
By 1997, Podkletnov had withdrawn his second paper (after it had been initially accepted), was no longer allowed into his former lab in Tampere and had returned to Moscow, where he quietly took an engineering job. (In 1998 he was however reported to be working on superconductors at Tamglass engineering Oy in Tampere.)
Podkletnov's gravity reflection beam
In a second interview (1997) by Wired magazine reporter Charles PlattCharles Platt (science-fiction author)
Charles Platt is an author, journalist and computer programmer. He relocated from England to the United States in 1970, is a naturalized U.S. citizen and has one daughter, Rose Fox...
, Podkletnov told Platt that he was continuing to work on gravitation, claiming that with new collaborators at an un-named "chemical research center" in Moscow he has built a new device. He said:
- Normally there are two spheres, and a spark jumps between them. Now imagine the spheres are flat surfaces, superconductors, one of them a coil or O-ring. Under specific conditions, applying resonating fields and composite superconducting coatings, we can organize the energy discharge in such a way that it goes through the center of the electrode, accompanied by gravitation phenomena - reflecting gravitational waves that spread through the walls and hit objects on the floors below, knocking them over...The second generation of flying machines will reflect gravity waves and will be small, light, and fast, like UFOs. I have achieved impulse reflection; now the task is to make it work continuously.
More recently, in collaboration with Italian
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
physicist
Physicist
A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...
Giovanni Modanese
Giovanni Modanese
Giovanni Modanese is a professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy.He is the author of several publications in General Relativity and Quantum Gravity....
, Podkletnov has reported on a similar device which he claims generates a coherent
Coherence (physics)
In physics, coherence is a property of waves that enables stationary interference. More generally, coherence describes all properties of the correlation between physical quantities of a wave....
gravity repulsion beam. (See the citation below.) Supporters claim it has been seen to move a pendulum located 150 meters away in another building. Allegedly, Podkletnov has observed that the "backside" of this second device emits "radiation" (not otherwise specified) which seems to be dangerous to biological tissue
Biological tissue
Tissue is a cellular organizational level intermediate between cells and a complete organism. A tissue is an ensemble of cells, not necessarily identical, but from the same origin, that together carry out a specific function. These are called tissues because of their identical functioning...
s.
Related work
In 1990, two University of AlabamaUniversity of Alabama
The University of Alabama is a public coeducational university located in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States....
physicists, Douglas Torr and Ning Li, had predicted that superconducting magnets might reduce the effect of gravity. After Podkletnov's apparent confirmation of this prediction, Torr persuaded David Noever, a colleague at the nearby Marshall Space Flight Center
Marshall Space Flight Center
The George C. Marshall Space Flight Center is the U.S. government's civilian rocketry and spacecraft propulsion research center. The largest center of NASA, MSFC's first mission was developing the Saturn launch vehicles for the Apollo moon program...
in Huntsville, Alabama
Huntsville, Alabama
Huntsville is a city located primarily in Madison County in the central part of the far northern region of the U.S. state of Alabama. Huntsville is the county seat of Madison County. The city extends west into neighboring Limestone County. Huntsville's population was 180,105 as of the 2010 Census....
, to attempt to reproduce the gravity shielding experiment.
Torr soon moved to the University of South Carolina
University of South Carolina
The University of South Carolina is a public, co-educational research university located in Columbia, South Carolina, United States, with 7 surrounding satellite campuses. Its historic campus covers over in downtown Columbia not far from the South Carolina State House...
and commenced work on a most unusual device. According to Platt, Torr describes this device as a "gravity generator" that can create a force beam in any desired direction. Officials of the University of South Carolina, however, apparently disavowed association with this work (in an interview by reporter Charles Platt), and it seems that Torr is seeking private funding to continue his research.
James Woodward, an adjunct professor of physics at Cal State in Fullerton, CA, claims to have constructed a device which achieves time varied changes in mass using rather ordinary capacitor
Capacitor
A capacitor is a passive two-terminal electrical component used to store energy in an electric field. The forms of practical capacitors vary widely, but all contain at least two electrical conductors separated by a dielectric ; for example, one common construction consists of metal foils separated...
s.
Marcus Hollingshead, a British inventor, claimed in 2002 to have invented a device with similar gravity-modifying effects, though more related to the non-superconducting spinning S.E.G. configuration proposed by John Searl
John Searl
John Roy Robert Searl is the self-styled inventor of the Searle Effect Generator , a supposed open system electrical generator capable of extracting clean and sustainable electrical energy from the environment, based on "magnetic waveforms that generates a continual motion of magnetized rollers...
.
In 2006, Martin Tajmar
Martin Tajmar
Martin Tajmar is a research scientist and project manager in the Space Propulsion group at Austrian Research Center Seibersdorf. He has research interests in new space propulsion systems, and possible connections between gravity and superconductivity....
and several coworkers at the Austrian Research Center (ARC) Seibersdorf
Austrian Research Centers
The Austrian Institute of Technology is an Austrian application-oriented R&D company, employing more than 850 people in various locations across Austria...
announced their claim to have measured the gravitomagnetic
Gravitomagnetism
Gravitomagnetism , refers to a set of formal analogies between Maxwell's field equations and an approximation, valid under certain conditions, to the Einstein field equations for general relativity. The most common version of GEM is valid only far from isolated sources, and for slowly moving test...
London moment
London moment
The 'London moment' is a quantum-mechanical phenomenon whereby a spinning superconductor generates a magnetic field whose axis lines up exactly with the spin axis....
of Cooper pair
Cooper pair
In condensed matter physics, a Cooper pair or BCS pair is two electrons that are bound together at low temperatures in a certain manner first described in 1956 by American physicist Leon Cooper...
s in a superconducting ring spinning at 6500 rpm. Despite the similarity to the apparatus used by Podkletnov, the authors carefully state in their eprint (see citation below) that their claimed result should not be confused with the claims of Podkletnov; specifically, they measured a tangential gravitomagnetic force created by Type I superconductors, (Elemental Lead and Niobium rings at liquid helium temperatures) but failed to measure an axial force from Type II superconductors (YBCO and BSSCO ceramics at liquid nitrogen
Liquid nitrogen
Liquid nitrogen is nitrogen in a liquid state at a very low temperature. It is produced industrially by fractional distillation of liquid air. Liquid nitrogen is a colourless clear liquid with density of 0.807 g/mL at its boiling point and a dielectric constant of 1.4...
temperatures) as described by Podkletnov. Thus, their results suggest a magnified form of 'frame dragging' rather than gravity reflection. However, there are major differences between the experiments, such as the method of driving the ring. (In the ARC experiments, the ring was physically driven by a motor, while Podkletnov's experiment levitated and spun the ring using magnetic fields.)
Attempted verification
In his 1997 interview with Charles Platt, Podkletnov insisted that his gravity-shielding work was reproduced by researchers at universities in TorontoToronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
and Sheffield
Sheffield
Sheffield is a city and metropolitan borough of South Yorkshire, England. Its name derives from the River Sheaf, which runs through the city. Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and with some of its southern suburbs annexed from Derbyshire, the city has grown from its largely...
, but none have come forward to acknowledge this. The Sheffield work is known to have only been intended as partial replication, aimed at observing any unusual effects which might be present, since the team involved lacked the necessary facilities to construct a large enough disk and the ability to duplicate the means by which the original disk was rotated. Podkletnov counters that the researchers in question have kept quiet "lest they be criticized by the mainstream
Mainstream
Mainstream is, generally, the common current thought of the majority. However, the mainstream is far from cohesive; rather the concept is often considered a cultural construct....
scientific community". Podkletnov, in fact, visited the Sheffield team in 2000 and advised them on the conditions necessary to achieve his effect - conditions that they never got close to matching.
The group at NASA in Huntsville did not finish their attempts to verify Podkletnov's original gravity shielding experiment. Two attempts were made to repeat the superconductor rotation experiment, one in-house and one through an SBIR. In both cases, large superconductor disks were fabricated. However, in both cases, the funding did not allow for the development of the rotation system needed for the completion of the test. No attempt has been made by NASA to repeat the second impulse experiment.
In a BBC news item, it was alleged that researchers at Boeing
Boeing
The Boeing Company is an American multinational aerospace and defense corporation, founded in 1916 by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. Boeing has expanded over the years, merging with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. Boeing Corporate headquarters has been in Chicago, Illinois since 2001...
were funding a project called GRASP (Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion) which would attempt to construct a gravity shielding device, but a subsequent Popular Mechanics
Popular Mechanics
Popular Mechanics is an American magazine first published January 11, 1902 by H. H. Windsor, and has been owned since 1958 by the Hearst Corporation...
news item stated that Boeing had denied funding GRASP with company money, although Boeing acknowledged that it could not comment on "black projects". A possible solution of this contradiction has been suggested: it is alleged that the GRASP proposal was presented to Boeing, but that Boeing chose not to fund it.
Publications
eprint version. It appears from this paper that Podkletnov and Modanese have withdrawn their claim about gravity beams, claiming now only that their alleged beam is not electromagnetic radiation.- Evgeny Podkletnov and Giovanni Modanese, Impulse Gravity Generator Based on Charged YBa_2Cu_3O_{7-y} Superconductor with Composite Crystal Structure, unpublished eprint dated 30 Aug 2001.
- Evgeny Podkletnov, Weak gravitation shielding properties of composite bulk Y Ba2Cu3O7−x superconductor below 70 K under e.m. field, unpublished eprint dated 10 Jan 1997. This is believed to be substantially the same paper accepted for publication in 1996 by Journal of Physics D which was later withdrawn by the author.
External links
- Gravity's secret - New ScientistNew ScientistNew Scientist is a weekly non-peer-reviewed English-language international science magazine, which since 1996 has also run a website, covering recent developments in science and technology for a general audience. Founded in 1956, it is published by Reed Business Information Ltd, a subsidiary of...
, 11 November 2006 - Boeing tries to defy gravity - BBC News
- BBC News profile of Podkletnov
- Wired 6.03: Breaking the Law of Gravity, an entertaining account by reporter Charles Platt, from which the quotations and much of the information above was gleaned.