She refused to say if Douglas Torr was involved, but on the university's Web site I found an Annual Report to the Faculty Senate which listed his name on a patent application for the gravity generator. This was totally bizarre; a respected university supposedly looking for commercial partners to develop a gadget straight out of a s science-fiction novel.
Surely, nothing could be weirder than this - but no, there was more in store. Through my physicist friend John Cramer I learned of a scientist named James Woodward who claimed to have found a way to reduce the mass of objects. Mass, on the other hand, is an innate property of matter; it exists even when an object is in free fall. Nevertheless, Woodward had written a paper claiming that he could adjust the mass of an object Foundations of Physics Letters, vol.
I called him at his office at Cal State Fullerton, where he's been affiliated for 25 years and is currently an adjunct professor of physics. He turned out to be a jovial, amiable man who was more than willing to talk on the record, probably because his work has remained so obscure, no one has had a chance to ridicule it yet. The equipment he uses is relatively simple, which is just as well, since he's had to pay for a lot of it himself. If you want to reduce the mass of an object in the privacy of your own basement workshop, here's how it's done: Obtain a high tech ceramic capacitor a standard electronic item and attach it to the speaker terminals on a stereo amplifier.
Feed in a steady tone perhaps from one of those stereo-test CDs while using some kind of electromechanical apparatus maybe the guts from an old loudspeaker to vibrate the capacitor up and down. According to Woodward, the capacitor's mass will vary at twice the frequency of the signal, so you will need a circuit called a frequency doubler to drive your vibrator at the correct rate.
If the vibrator lifts the capacitor while it's momentarily lighter and drops it while it's heavier, you achieve an average mass reduction - which sounds as if you're getting something for nothing, except that Woodward believes that in some mysterious fashion you are actually stealing the energy from the rest of the universe. I asked him why no one had ever noticed that the weight of capacitors varies in rhythm with their energy level. He claimed that so far he's measured a reduction of up to milligrams; just a fraction of an ounce.
Still, practical applications could be developed. For spacecraft, all you'd need would be big solar arrays instead of rocket fuel. I asked him if there was any chance that his discovery might turn out to be bogus, like cold fusion. But, it won't go away. I asked his opinion of the team at NASA. Clearly, it was time to call NASA.
He seemed to be the key figure trying to replicate Podkletnov's work, and he invited me to see for myself. The Marshall Spaceflight Center is a box-shaped story office building with a s pedigree. Alas, poor NASA! Formerly the favorite child of federal legislators, now nickel-and-dimed half to death.
Upstairs I found utilitarian government-style offices with cheesy rubberized floor tiles, ancient gray steel desks, and file cabinets that seemed to have been repainted by hand. The place was almost Soviet in its austerity. I entered the office of Whitt Brantley, chief of the Advanced Concepts Office, and found five people waiting around a wood-grain formica conference table.
David Noever was one of them: a tall, brooding figure with intense eyes and dark brown hair in need of a trim. Behind a desk at the far end sat Brantley, a genial Santa Claus who joined NASA back in , when he worked on von Braun's wildly ambitious scheme to put men on Mars, before the Apollo program had even test-launched its first capsule.
Even this seemed relatively normal, though, compared with gravity shielding. I asked him how he had raised the money for such a wacky idea. He backed up a step or two, then said he thought NASA should spend a little money on work like this. So, we wiped the sweat off our brows and continued. Tony Robertson, another member of the team, leaned forward, a lot younger and more earnest that Brantley. I turned to David Noever, who looked tense and restless, as if he'd rather be in his laboratory.
I asked how he felt about amateur gravity enthusiasts. We had to meet him outside on a park bench. We also invited Podkletnov to come to Huntsville, back in January We said we'd pay his way, but he said he didn't see any value in it.
They think even if we did discover something, we'd cover it up. You know, Roswell and all that -". By this time, Noever was definitely ready to go. He led the way outside to an enclave of austere, ugly concrete buildings that looked as if they might have been left over from World War II.
Inside, past massive machinery for pressing ceramic discs, I entered a lab about 20 feet square, with one wall of windows, fluorescent ceiling panels, big white cylinders of liquid helium and liquid nitrogen, and heavy-duty rack-mounted power supplies in rectangular metal cabinets. Noever explained that the team is trying several different approaches. He showed an assortment of 1-inch superconducting discs, made from every conceivable mix of ingredients. He demonstrated a gravimeter: a beige-painted metal unit the size of a car battery.
Across the room was a tall insulated tank about a foot in diameter, with a huge coil wrapped around the base capable of taking amps, though Noever said that the current would create enough heat to melt the floor.
The tank had been designed to contain a 6-inch disc rotating in liquid helium, with the gravimeter suspended above. Meanwhile, the team was still struggling to fabricate inch discs, which tend to fracture into pieces during pressing and a subsequent baking process. He said it could take us one or two years.
He did reveal the composition -". Noever laughed sourly. At least, he hasn't told us. He's very adamant about not talking to people about some aspects of this work. Already, though, Noever said he had achieved some possible results with smaller discs. He showed one graph that suggested significant changes in gravitational force. We have to see it times before we'll allow ourselves to reach any conclusions.
And then we'll get the Bureau of Standards in here to check it out, and then, maybe, we'll publish a paper. Noever suggested that gravity may have a natural frequency, far higher than X rays or microwaves, which would explain why it penetrates all known materials.
A superconducting disc could resonate and downshift the frequency to a lower level where it could be blocked by normal matter. Ron Koczor, project manager of the team, had been sitting over at one side of the lab looking amiable but diffident. Koczor's background is in infrared and visible optics; his last project was a space shuttle experiment to measure winds in Earth's atmosphere using specially designed lasers.
By comparison, gravity shielding research is a labyrinth of uncertainties. The payoff boggles the mind. Theories about gravitational force today are probably comparable to knowledge of electromagnetism a century ago.
If you think what electricity has done for us since then, you see what controlling gravity might do for us in the future. Before going to Huntsville I had sent yet another message to Giovanni Modanese, asking again if Eugene Podkletnov was willing to talk to me.
Naturally I didn't expect a positive reply - but to my amazement Modanese wrote back saying that Podkletnov had returned to Finland and was now ready to cooperate. I called Podkletnov right away. Yes, he said, it was true; he would talk. I could meet him in person. Four days later I was boarding a Finnair MD Nine hours after that I found myself in Helsinki Airport, waiting for my baggage to come off a carousel.
About Finns were waiting with me, looking stoic and withdrawn, like guests at a funeral. The only sound was the clanking of the conveyor belt, and I remembered a phrase from the Lonely Planet travel guide that I'd read on the plane: "A happy, talkative Finn does not inspire admiration among fellow Finns, but rather animosity, jealousy, or hostility. Being silent is the way to go.
Outside, it was almost noon but looked like dusk. In fact, back in the early s a Finnish scientist named Erkki Vaisanen discovered SAD - seasonal affective disorder, the type of depression caused by lack of sunlight.
He was tipped off by the rash of suicides that sweeps through Finland every September. I began to wonder why Podkletnov had chosen to relocate here. I drove to a grim little industrial park where all the buildings were painted gray, as if to emulate the weather and checked in at a Holiday Inn that looked like a small electronics factory. After exiting an elevator paneled in stainless steel, I struggled to open a massive metal fire door, walked past a sauna, and unlocked my tiny Euro-style room.
Shortly before sunset, around in the afternoon, I did some serious channel surfing in a dutiful attempt to locate and comprehend the core, the quintessence of Finland. The first thing I found was an ancient episode of hey-hey-we're-the-Monkees resuscitated from some godforsaken video archive and dubbed in French, " parce que nous monkee around. Finland's identity was proving elusive, and I could think of at least one reason why.
A key factor could be the 1,kilometer frontier that the country shares with Russia. How did the Finns cope with the ominous presence of that notoriously expansionist superpower during the fearful decades of the Cold War? They suppressed their separate national identity. They made their political system close enough to communism to placate the Politburo, and they traded actively, selling the Russians cheap wood products and electronic devices such as telephones. Thus, they made themselves far too useful to be worth invading.
Interestingly, the policy of appeasement paid dividends. Finland enjoys steady growth, with inflation down near 1 percent. It exports telecommunications products to the rest of Europe and steals shipbuilding contracts from the Japanese. Its infrastructure looks well maintained.
Its people seem healthy. Thus, Eugene Podkletnov's presence here is not such a mystery after all. Compared with Russia, Finland is a land of opportunity. As I drive in on Highway 3, the first thing I see is a huge smokestack and a rail yard with mercury-vapor lights on steel towers.
Another smokestack stands in the distance, trailing a white plume. Although the population is under ,, this is still the second-largest city in Finland, and a haven for industry.
Opposite the railroad I find the Hotel Arctia, where Podkletnov has agreed to meet, since he feels that his "modest apartment building" is not suitable. In a slightly rundown lobby paneled in varnished plywood, I sit on a couch upholstered in drab gray wrinkled fabric and wait as patiently as I can, very conscious that I have come 5, miles on this far-fetched, far-flung pilgrimage - at which point a man in a navy blue pinstriped business suit walks into the lobby.
Close up, though, his face shows a poignant mix of emotions. His mouth twists quixotically at the corners, as if, at any moment, he may display some unexpected response - pathos, laughter, or resignation. He sits beside me on the rumpled gray couch, and I ask why he decided to talk to me after almost a year of evasion. But he's not interested in small talk. He pulls out a wad of papers and starts a long monolog. First, he tells me, his work has been replicated by students in Sheffield, England, and scientists in Toronto, Canada.
No, he won't give me their names. He consulted by phone with the Sheffield students, and he went in person to Canada, where he stayed for several weeks. But if they want to follow their own way -" He shrugs. I wonder if there's a trace of Russian jealousy, here; a suspicion that well-funded Americans will stamp "NASA" on the side of the first fully functional grav-modifying flying machine, at which point everyone will forget about Eugene Podkletnov.
He claims, though, he's happy to share the glory. My aim in life is not to get money, not to become famous. I have 30 publications in materials science, and 10 patents, but -" His mouth twists with bittersweet humor. I don't dream about big money. I just want a normal existence, working for the Institute for Gravity Research.
That is my dream. He speaks rapidly and shows no hesitation, not the slightest sign of doubt. I get him to stop and back up a little, to tell me about his history. He says that his father was a materials scientist, while his mother had a PhD in medicine - just as he, now, is a materials scientist with a wife who is studying medicine. I was brought up surrounded by adults, spent very little time playing with friends in school, and even now I feel different from colleagues my own age.
My father had several inventions in his life, but at that time the Russians asked him like this: 'Does this method exist in the United States? In Tampere University's Institute of Technology invited him to pursue a PhD in the manufacture of superconductors, and after he obtained his doctorate, he continued working there - until the Sunday Telegraph news item appeared in Suddenly he was abandoned by his friends, unemployed, and fighting the scientific establishment much as his father had fought with the Russian government, except that in his case the stakes were higher, because he believed he had made one of the major discoveries of the 20th century.
Feeling beaten down and alienated, Podkletnov says he gave up in and drove the 1, kilometers back to Moscow, leaving his family in Tampere. But Moscow was not a good place for a scientist to be. In the s he had been able to borrow equipment freely from other scientists; in , when he asked for something they would say, "How much can you pay me? If you criticize the government, you may still go to jail. Gravity is what pulls us towards the earth in order to prevent us from floating away into space.
The bigger the mass of the planet, the stronger the gravity and the lower the jump. Therefore, the stronger the gravity the heavier it is to jump. Originally Answered: Does gravity affect the height of a man? Yes it does. Gravity is essentially a downward pulling force. Astronauts become taller in absence of gravity when they are in orbit, because the compressing force disappears. G is called Universal Gravitation Constant because its value i.
This is different from g, which denotes the acceleration due to gravity. As it turns out, it takes 26 dimensionless constants to describe the Universe as simply and completely as possible, which is quite a small number, but not necessarily as small as we like. The fine-structure constant, or the strength of the electromagnetic interaction. It is known that the Universe would be very different if these constants took values significantly different from those we observe.
A constant is a value that cannot be altered by the program during normal execution, i. Tides are the rise and fall of the ocean level as related to the shoreline. High tides occur when Earth and moon are facing each other, and the moon is exerting its greatest pull on the ocean waters.
To a lesser degree the moon also pulls on the rivers, lakes and land. When an object floats on the top of water, gravity is still in play, pulling objects toward the earth. For an object to float, it must displace enough water to make up the same mass as the object itself. Once that happens, the remaining mass then sits on top of the water.
For example: if a boat has a mass of 45 grams, it will displace 45 grams of water, and if that has happened before the whole thing has sunk below the surface level of the water, the boat floats. A ball of clay may sink right away, but if you flatten the clay out into the shape of a raft, it moves aside water equal to its mass, and floats.
Sir Isaac Newton — is the scientist credited with explaining gravity. According to the story, Newton was in his garden when he saw an apple fall from a tree. He began to wonder why the apple had fallen to the earth instead of just floating away. He came up with the idea that some unseen force must attract the apple towards the Earth. He named this force "gravity. You would think that gravity would have been a well-known concept before Newton.
After all, most of us played with gravity when we were toddlers in high chairs, dropping our spoons on the floor just to make mom come and get them. And no doubt kids from centuries ago played similar games with their mothers. But it wasn't until Newton published his ideas in a book in that the scientific world understood how gravity works as a universal physical law. In addition to his work on gravity, Newton is known for his Three Laws of Motion, which explain the relationship between an object and the forces acting on it and how it moves in response to those forces.
Balloons often seem to defy gravity. We've all lost a balloon when we have accidently let it go and watched it drift away in the sky. These balloons are filled with helium. Helium is a gas that is lighter than the other gases that make up our air.
Because this gas is so light, it tries to float to the top of our atmosphere and it takes our balloon with it. The poor balloon is not strong enough to hold on to this helium for the ride to the top and so it ends up popping long before its journey is done. Hot air balloons work on similar science. Hot air naturally tends to rise upward because it is less dense than cooler air. A hot air balloon has a heat source that fills the balloon's interior with warm air, allowing it to rise.
To come down, the pilot allows the air to escape or to cool down, and the balloon descends. Two forces working together keep the planets and their moons in orbit around each other. They work together to keep objects moving at a steady speed in a circular path. The word centripetal is from a Latin word meaning "towards the center. You might think of it like a weight tied to a string that you swing around your head. The force is coming from the tension in the string which is pulling on the weight from the center of the large circle you are creating with your motion.
Another example of centripetal force is the moon orbiting around the earth, where the force comes from gravity pulling it towards the center. Centrifugal means "fleeing from the center" in Latin. It is the outward push that a person in a car going around a curve feels toward the outside of the turn. Other examples are mud flying off of a spinning tire, or children being pushed outward on a merry-go-round as it spins. The force the children feel is centrifugal force pushing them outward.
Flying has been done by birds for millions of years. Yet flight is still an amazing science, as it seems to be about the ability of heavy objects to break away from gravity. For birds it is all about the structure of their bones, wings and feathers. For humans that don't have those structural positives, we have to design machinery that mimics the science that enables birds to fly. Airplane wings are designed after bird wings with a special curve in an effort for air to "lift" the plane.
As a wing moves through the air, the curve of the top of the wing speeds up the air as it flows across. This reduces the pressure of the air over the top of the wing. Air on the underside then pushes upward.
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