Anti-Gravity: The Secret Space Race | Weird Science | Earth Science

[Music] the ultimate challenge i can think of as a scientist is to control gravity if you could control gravity the power you'd have is unlimited and potentially even deadly it is a very powerful weapon this is the story of the secret space race to control gravity i did not want to attract the attention of military people in russia and the scientists willing to risk everything to attempt the seemingly impossible well it's not impossible it's just we don't know how to do it and trying to achieve the impossible well that involves some pretty weird science we think of gravity as something that pulls us but what if we could use it to push us to propel us into outer space this story starts in the late 1980s this is when the cold war still dominated the global agenda and it's also when aerospace engineer ron evans started to wonder if he could use anti-gravity to levitate a plane it could fly anywhere into space even into water of course it was a vertical takeoff design because it had a gravity engine inside that's pretty out there most planes we think of are trying to overcome gravity and not only did he wonder about it he asked his employers if they'd let him try he worked for the biggest defense and aerospace contractor in europe bae systems and instead of sending him home to lie down they listened i had to come up with some concepts and come up with some ideas that could actually feature an anti-gravity or gravity type propulsion system well this was one of the designs that we came up with but it didn't look very exciting and so we asked the artist to put some green rays underneath that made it look far more futuristic not everyone in the company thought we should be doing it but there were a few and some very senior people that felt okay let's just have a little look at the future and the concept became known as green glow project green glow and the quest for gravity control sounds like it could be a fantasy novel but ron's job as the head of project green glow was just as fantastical to create anti-gravity and so glittering the prize so tantalizing the prospect that both moscow and washington soon joined the race to control gravity it was around 1996 when i was asked to lead the breakthrough propulsion physics project things like um non-rocket space drives uh interstellar propulsion to manipulating gravity things like that nasa's ultimate goal was to replace rocket fuel to travel further than ever before possibly even outside our solar system don't get me wrong rocket fuel is great but the sheer amount we need to break free from the earth's gravity is is kind of holding us back you wanted to go to our nearest neighboring star which is over four light years away and you wanted to do it with the kind of rockets that are on the space shuttle well the amount of propellant you need for that journey is about the mass of our entire sun others think anti-gravity has more direct uses closer to home it is a very powerful weapon and it can destroy the missiles or remove them from their trajectory so the interest from military people will be definitely big but needless to say the quest for gravity control proved somewhat challenging and many scientists swelling didn't think too highly of this mission crap that's hilarious and despite many attempts neither ron nor mark could make it work so when a russian scientist called dr eugene pcletnov claimed to have cracked it and actually created an anti-gravity field everybody took notice out of the blue from the mod i got a letter asking me what i made of the podclit market eugene pogletnov claimed that by spinning electrical superconductors at high velocity he could create a gravitational field so we have a vacuum chamber with a disc which can be rotated and when the disc reaches a certain speed of rotation it exerts a repulsive force on the weight sample and pushes it up its gravity field is in our case repulsive and as you can see the repulsive force is pretty big the problem was nobody was able to recreate eugene's experiment so we couldn't say yes he had found her in fact or no he hadn't i think pod clitonal had jumped to a conclusion had seen some things and did not take the rigor to go through and make sure that he wasn't uh misleading himself but eugene pclatnov was not going to be put off that easily in 2001 he claimed to have found a new way to control gravity and who did he trust to give him a fair hearing ron evans at green glow but he'd only meet him in total secrecy it was a secret meeting because i did not want to attract the attention of military people in russia i presented to him my latest works which gives a very short impulse of gravity waves it's really a giant spark plug but according to dr paul clettner someone way away a kilometer away on the balcony of some flats in line with the beam was still able to detect a slight effect that was incredible did you really think that was feasible we don't know with gravity again everyone tried to recreate eugene pcletnov's findings to see if they too could create an anti-gravity field if you have an extraordinary claim you must have extraordinary proof but that's the most sensitive sensor there is in the world and we don't even see something out of the noise so how can you make a claim to say that you move things meters away or that you actually push pendulums away so that's that's really outrageous came we haven't seen something not even remotely like that so unfortunately ultimately the russian research could not be replicated and with no luck in the uk and the us both bae systems and nasa shut down their anti-gravity research programs we asked that whether we could go there to talk to them about it and they just said no we can't go in there uh to talk about it now because nasa's not doing that work right now but that's not necessarily the end of the story new research into gravity still continues so might it be possible in the future [Music] ron good morning welcome to the defense science and technology this is the the heart of british defense science and portland down i've got some really interesting things i'd like to show you today so what we have here is our quantum gravity gradiometer it's a small system at the heart of the device we have a vacuum chamber this is quantum level physics and this sensor basically uses lasers to freeze a cloud of atoms and then amazingly this cloud reacts to disturbance in the earth's gravitational field caused by a moving mass as in caused by gravity the atoms are sensitive enough to detect the mass of my body at a range of about one meter so your gravitational field is affecting this device yes to me this is amazing technology getting into the quantum that's really allowing us to do things that were just unbelievable 30 years ago yes some people use the phrase they break the laws of physics i prefer to say they break the laws of physics as we understand them today a hundred years ago we didn't understand the quantum physics the idea of being able to measure changes in gravity science fiction could never happen today we can and possibly even gravitational propulsion might be a possibility in the future it may be yeah it could be that we've got something certainly i see this as a start there's still a very long way to go before we can even consider it possible to control gravity anywhere near the way that project green glow imagined and some still say never crap but the dream certainly isn't over yet i'm sure we will one day it's just a matter of time you

Channel: BBC Earth Science

Views: 1,015,181

Keywords: bbc earth lab, earth lab, science, chemistry, physics, why, biology, space

Id: 7mzMRVXts4U

Length: 9min 32sec (572 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 21 2021