The idea that there is a force or particle that counteracts gravity is not new, but most scientists regard this idea as pure fiction. Nevertheless, some promising experiments have been carried out in recent decades that could one day pave the way for an anti-gravitational drive.
The scientific community is very cautious when a researcher claims to have made groundbreaking discoveries in the field of anti-gravity. Many discoveries touted as sensational have turned out to be unfounded on closer inspection or could be attributed to measurement errors or external sources of interference.
Nevertheless, in this special, we would like to report objectively and without prejudice on the current state of research, as some experiments could lead to a breakthrough in this field.
One researcher who made headlines in this field back in 1996 is the Russian chemist and materials scientist Dr. Eugene Podkletnov. He was conducting research at Tampere University of Technology in Finland and discovered an effect by chance during experiments with superconducting materials that he attributed to anti-gravity. [1]
Podkletnov claims to have found a 'clearly measurable weak shielding effect against gravitational force' and has also written a scientific paper on this. However, the story could have come straight out of a bad Hollywood movie, because after an article about Podkletnov appeared in advance in The Sunday Telegraph, there was a huge outcry in the scientific community and talk quickly turned to voodoo magic. An initial scientific paper that was to appear in the Journal of Physics D (of the Institute of Physics) was withdrawn by Podkletnov.
And the experiment would probably never have been reported on again if the BBC had not revealed in two articles [2] that various defense companies around the world were conducting research on this very experiment. But not only were companies such as BAE Systems and Boeing researching this experiment, the American space agency NASA was as well.
And after the outcry from the scientific community, this was a minor sensation, especially as NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center in Alabama founded 'Project Delta G' for this purpose and conducted research on it as part of the Breakthrough Propulsion Program.
However, there was a bigger problem, namely producing a superconducting disk that was anywhere near the size of Podkletnov's disk. According to Podkletnov himself, it took him almost three years to do this, and he had it rotating at 5,000 revolutions per minute during his experiment. Unfortunately, his experiment is said to have been destroyed by the management of Tampere University of Technology.
Together with the Austrian public broadcaster ORF, the German public broadcaster MDR filmed the martial-sounding report "Auf dem Weg zum UFO-Antrieb – Über Versuche zur Abschirmung der Schwerkraft" (English: "On the Way to UFO Propulsion – On Attempts to Shield Gravity") by Klaus Simmering, which was also broadcast on international channels.
In addition to Podkletnov and NASA employees, such as the chief engineer of the MSFC Ronald J. Koczor and L. Whitt Brantley from the Advanced Concepts Office, the Chinese scientist Dr. Ning Li (1943-2021) [3] from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the Italian quantum physicist Dr. Giovanni Modanese also have their say. And both have their own opinions on anti-gravity, which could not be more different. Li is convinced that the theory of relativity is compatible with this, while Modanese denies this and refers to the theory of quantum physics.
However, Podkletnov, who went on to work at the Moscow Chemical Scientific Research Center following his controversy, and the Italian Giovanni Modanese are considered suspect in scientific circles, especially as no one has yet officially succeeded in reproducing the aforementioned effect and both founded the Gravity Society together with the inventor John Schnurer, who also claims to have achieved a 2 percent shielding of gravity using a similar approach.
That is why we would rather point out another experiment that could have meant progress in this field, and this time the path leads us to Austria, more precisely to Seibersdorf. There, Martin Tajmar headed the Space Systems business unit at the Austrian research center Seibersdorf and he published his research results in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series with the title 'Gravitomagnetic Fields in Rotating Superconductors'.
As the German newspaper Zeit describes in detail in an article [4] from 2007, a niobium ring was cooled to -269 degrees Celsius by liquid helium and accelerated to 6500 revolutions per minute, and according to Tajmar, this is said to have led to a swirling of space-time. This phenomenon is also known as the Lense-Thirring effect or gravitomagnetism and was already predicted by Albert Einstein, but not on this scale. And this time not just once, but during several hundred test runs, which is why the results were occasionally presented on the website of the European Space Agency ESA.
However, Tajmar's assumption that the actually massless gravitons in superconductors have a mass, which would have meant a new revolution in the field of physics, could not be confirmed by other scientists.
In 2011, a team of scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder published a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters in which they reported on their attempts to repeat Tajmar's experiment. They found no evidence of an anti-gravity effect and came to the conclusion that Tajmar's results were probably due to experimental error.
In 2021, Hamdi Ucar from Göksal Aeronautics published an interesting scientific paper entitled: 'Polarity Free Magnetic Repulsion and Magnetic Bound State'. New Scientist published an article and a YouTube video [5].
Ucar demonstrated a unique form of magnetic levitation in which a magnet can rotate and levitate in the air when it is close to another rapidly rotating magnet, contradicting classical physics.
In late 2023, the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) published an article [7] 'How a spinning magnet causes other magnets to levitate' that resolved Ucar's observations. The study showed that the equilibrium position of the levitating magnet is due to magnetostatic interactions between the rotating magnets. The phenomenon is comparable to a spinning top, where the rotation holds the object in place and defies gravity or magnetic forces.
If that wasn't spectacular and mysterious enough for you, there's more speculation to come: award-winning British science journalist Nick Cook, who has long written for the respected Jane's Information Group, which specializes in military technology, claims nothing less than that anti-gravity technology has been available to and used by the US military for decades. This technology is said to be based on scientific breakthroughs made by the Nazis towards the end of World War II.
If you want to find out more about this, you should read this article from Die Zeit [6] or get the book "The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology".
Perhaps one day travel in spaceships and airplanes with an anti-gravity drive will be more than pure fiction after all.
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