Suppression of Inconvenient Facts in Physics - 4

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Suppression of Inconvenient Facts in Physics - 4

Podkletnov's claims received major publicity in 1996, when a British newspaper reported that a followup paper was about to be published in the British Journal of Physics D. Podkletnov later withdrew the paper under curious circumstances:

But Podkletnov has now withdrawn the paper, just weeks before it was due to appear. His decision follows a bizarre series of developments triggered by media interest in the device. Earlier this month Tampere University issued a carefully worded statement denying all knowledge of the antigravity research. While admitting that it had been involved in some preliminary experiments done by Podkletnov in the early 1990s, the university said he was no longer on the staff.

Suspicions deepened when Vuorinen, the supposed coauthor of the paper, issued a statement denying that he had ever worked on antigravity with Podkletnov.

The furore appears to have surprised Podkletnov, who insists that the claims made in the paper are genuine. But he says the university is correct in denying the existence of any recent research, as the paper centers on experiments carried out in 1992.

On the key issue of Vuorinen's denial of involvement in the work, Podkletnov says that there must have been some confusion over names, and that another Petri Vuorinen was the true coauthor. Podkletnov does have an unpaid affiliation with Tampere's Institute of Material Science. However, inquiries have failed to uncover anyone with a similar name at the university who admits to working on the antigravity research.

The controversy also appears to have shocked the Institute of Physics, which publishes the Journal of Physics D. Three referees failed to find any major flaw in the paper's claims, which if confirmed would rate as one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in history.

Gravity is the most ubiquitous force in the Universe, and no one has ever found any way of shielding matter from its effects. The discovery of a shielding effect would have huge theoretical and commercial implications.

Faced with Tampere University's statement, and Vuorinen's denial that he was involved, Richard Palmer, managing editor of the journal, decided to put the paper on hold pending further inquiries. Three days later, on 9 September, Podkletnov solved the institute's dilemma by withdrawing his paper. He gave no reason. But he stands by his claims: 'This is an important discovery and I don't want it to disappear,' he told New Scientist.

The paper may now never appear in any physics journal: Podkletnov is said to have been put under pressure from unknown 'funding agencies' not to reveal any more, pending patent applications.

Even so, the mystery of the antigravity machine lingers. What is known is that the paper had passed scrutiny by independent experts in superconductivity, and had been accepted by a reputable journal. Tampere University itself concedes that Podkletnov has a good reputation for research, and refuses to pass judgment on whether the antigravity machine actually works." (53)

Podkletnov was subsequently thrown out of the university. But despite the controversy, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama decided to investigate his claims (54). The first attempt at replication failed, but it had been conducted without sufficient knowledge of the original experiment (55). A second replication attempt was never completed due to lack of funding.

Podkletnov now says that he can generate repulsive force beams. Journalist Nick Cook reported the following in a 2002 London Financial Times article:

Meanwhile, Mr Podkletnov, now based at the Moscow Chemical Scientific Research Center, has taken his ideas further. Last year he published another paper - backed by Giovanni Modanese, an Italian physicist, detailing work on an 'impulse gravity generator' that is capable of exerting a repulsive force on all matter.

Using a strong electrical discharge source and a superconducting 'emitter', the equipment has produced a 'gravity impulse', Mr Podkletnov says, "that is very short in time and propagates with great speed (practically instantaneously) along the line of discharge, passing through different objects without any observable loss of energy".
The result, he maintains, is a repulsive action on any object the beam hits, that is proportional to its mass. When fitted to a laser pointing device, Mr Podkletnov says, his laboratory installation has already demonstrated its ability to knock over objects more than a kilometer away. The same installation, he maintains, could hit objects up to 200km away with the same power." (55)

These claims caught the attention of aerospace company Boeing which has been reported to be researching antigravity.

Whether antigravity will ultimately be proven to exist or not, one thing is already clear: mainstream physics is unwilling to investigate antigravity claims in good faith. Robert L. Park, the spokesman of the American Physical Society made a typical comment in his What's New column in 2002 that illustrates the unscientific "theory overrides evidence" modus operandi of the physics establishment:

Why would Boeing choose to spend millions to test a ridiculous claim by an obscure Russian physicist that has failed every test and is a physical impossibility to begin with? (56)

The reason that antigravity and gravity shielding are considered "physical impossibilities" is of course the dictate of general relativity that gravity is not an ordinary force, but an effect of curved space-time.

In dismissing the evidence for such phenomena, mainstream physics is engaging in circular reasoning rivaling that of fundamentalist theology: since no experiment has ever contradicted general relativity, general relativity must be true, and anti-gravity and gravity shielding effects cannot possibly be real, since they would contradict general relativity."

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

The second law of thermodynamics, in simple language, says that in a closed physical system, useful energy decays into waste heat, and one can't win it back. A machine that produces, say, electrical energy from ambient heat is impossible according to the second law, and termed a "perpetuum mobile of the second kind".

But the second law is under siege, and it may turn out that this alleged rock-solid law of nature is only a reflection of the limitations of 19th and 20th century engineering.

In a paper titled A Solid-State Maxwell Demon (57) D.P. Sheehan and A.R. Putnam of the departments of Physics and J.H. Wright of the department of Mathematics and Computer science of the University of San Diego have proposed a semiconductor device that would generate useful energy from the thermal noise of an electronic circuit. The authors successfully tested their model on a commercial semiconductor simulator and estimate that the technology necessary to construct a laboratory model will be available by 2007. In their introduction, they write:

Over the last ten years, an unprecedented number of challenges have been leveled against the absolute status of the second law of thermodynamics. During this period, roughly 40 papers have appeared in the general literature, representing more than a dozen distinct challenges; the publication rate is increasing. Recently, for the first time, a major scientific press has commissioned a monograph on the subject and a first international conference has been convened to examine these challenges.

One would think that given the implications (defeating the second "law" means nothing less than solving the human energy crisis permanently), governments, corporations and the scientific establishment would be interested. But there is very little interest. The prevailing (circular) reasoning remains that machines that violate the second law are impossible because they would contradict the second law (58).

Conclusions

There is widespread belief among physicists and non-physicists alike that physics has essentially understood the universe. According to this "end of science" belief (59), all that remains is to connect a few dots and to do some fine-tuning. But the evidence discussed here suggests that this satisfactory state of affairs is a mere illusion created by a failure of the self-correcting mechanisms of modern science. The current consensus view of physical reality which is based on relativity, quantum mechanics and big bang cosmology may turn out to be more social construct than eternal truth. An unbiased, honest reevaluation of this consensus in light of anomalous evidence is sorely needed, but it will require fundamental reform of the peer review and funding mechanisms of modern science.
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