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New schemes to float free aren't just science fiction
In her laboratory at the University of Alabama, Ning Li tinkers time and again with a device she believes will transform the world. Tanks of liquid nitrogen and a clumsy array of plumbing surround a chamber in which the temperature has been reduced to 390 degrees below zero. Inside, a disk of an exotic ceramic material that's about the size of a phonograph record spins rapidly. Levitated by powerful magnets, the disk floats in midair. The contraption may not look like much, but Li insists that the data she is gathering could rid mankind of the shackles that bind us to the planet. "It could change everything," she says. "Current industry will vanish from the face of the Earth!" A practical antigravity device could allow rockets without propellant or power plants that run without fuel. Li hopes to pave the way by designing an antigravity car-and thinks she can do it in a decade.
Ever since an apple conked Sir Isaac Newton on the head, sober thinkers have tended to sneer at anyone who proposed to defeat gravity. Li herself jokes, "I am not a normal scientist." Nor is she a crackpot. NASA funds some of her research on the gravity-altering properties of superconducting materials-a phenomenon first reported nearly a decade ago by a Finnish researcher-and three years ago the agency set up an antigravity program of its own at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Research on gravity modification (the preferred term in scientific circles) has been gaining credibility, and physicists now speak increasingly of how little we know about what gravity can and cannot do. "The number of anomalies is growing," says Michael Martin Nieto of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Japanese researchers were the first to claim some success-however slight-at breaking gravity's hold in the laboratory. A decade ago, Hideo Hayasaka and Sakae Takeuchi of Tohoku University noticed intriguing signs of liftoff while studying the behavior of high-speed gyroscopes with metal flywheels spinning several thousand times per...