I think this link more or less speaks for itself
http://janes.com/aerospace/civil/news/jdw/jdw020729_1_n.shtml
Is this for real?
Probably not. Evgeny Podkletnov has a history of making wild claims which somehow never pan out when anyone else tries the technology.
I get a blank page at Jane’s. This BBC article: Boeing tries to defy gravity refers to the same story.
Here’s more:Q&A: Boeing and anti-gravity
Robert Park of the American Physical Society has mentioned him a fair amount in his column What’s New
http://www.aps.org/WN/WN98/wn051598.html
is one example that lets you link back in time to previous columns. In a nutshell, as AndrewL said Podkletnov makes claims that others cannot replicate. NASA’s tried on several occasions, but has always called the tests ‘inconclusive’.
Anti-gravity sure would be a neat trick since I think it is impossible. Of the four fundamental forces gravity is by far the weakest but it is also the only one you can’t shield youself against. Gravity bends space itself so any antigravity device would effectively have to bend space back the other way. The only way I can think of to do that is to provide an equivalent mass or energy (E=MC[sup]2[/sup]) source to counter an existing mass or energy source. So, to negate earth’s gravity you’d need something with the same amss as the earth or its energy equivalent…not an easy task and kinda defeats the whole purpose.
This looks pretty hokey.
First this:
Notice that they say “IF”. No doubt about it, it would be a big deal if it is true. But, the if is clue one that they are just admitting to covering their bases. As in, they don’t really think there is something to this, but don’t want to be left behind if they are wrong.
And next:
If he has a beam that repells objects a kilometer away, why is he talking about the 2% weight loss right above his apparatus a couple lines later? This indicates that it is quite possible that the first part of the paragraph is highly exagerated if not completely fabricated. If I was a scientist and had developed a beam that would repel things at a distance of 1000 meters, I would be demonstrating that, not showing some 2% weight loss above a spinning superconductor. Pretty fishy.
This paragraph is interesting:
Propellentless propulsion is also another word for reactionless thruster. Reactionless in the Newtonian sense of “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. - First law of physics to be overturned. Free energy, hmmm… another name for perpetual motion device. That there is no such thing as perpetual motion is a general statement of the Law of conservation of energy. - Second law of physics to be overturned. A lastly, what we know about gravity so far precludes using it as a repulsive force. (That is without evoking things with negative mass for instance). Gravity is considered to act by actually distorting space around an object and that things with a real mass will always attract and never repel.
Now, maybe he is on to something, but if he (the Russian physicist) is really onto to something, our current understanding of the laws of physic will need substantial revision. That would be a pretty exciting idea. I would love to find out that it is accurate. But, as mentioned by AndrewL, his credibility is pretty strained. If I had to bet on it, I would bet against it without any real hestitation.
I’m not familiar with Dr. Podkletnov’s work, except what I’ve heard today. What other wild claims beside this anti-gravity experiment(s) has he made?
The same kind of thing reported in the article. Long-range repulsor beams, anti-gravity effects, and free energy machines, none of which have ever been reproducable by anyone else. NASA spent several years unsuccessfully trying to reproduce an anti-gravity effect he claimed involving spinning superconducting disks.
It would be really cool if Boing made something work out of this, but don’t hold your breath.
"propellentless propulsion "
Man- that makes my head spin
Prof. Byron P. Roe at the University of Michigan seems to think there’s something to the claims of anti-gravity, but he told me that we’re a long way from anything more than idle speculation.
He’s also excited about the possibility of creating mini-black holes in the laboratory, so take his thoughts with the appropriate grain of salt. 
I see the part where Boeing says it hopes this technology will be used in applications such as free-energy machines, but I can’t find anything stating Podkletnov is actually working in that field. All I found was a line on a page from Project Greenglow that laments the only people who seem to take Podkletnov’s work seriously also believe in UFO’s and free-energy machines.
Do you have a link that reports Podkletnov is working on free-energy machines?
A paper on the subject by ** Evgeny Podkletnov** and Giovanni Modanese was discussed here last year in the apropriately named thread: Antigravity??
I think that the names Modanese and Podkletnov will enter the same hall of shame as Fleischmann and Pons, as schoolbook examples of unrepeatable breakthroughs.
Their paper can be found at: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/0108005
The first part is pretty straightforward, but when they start trying to explain the theoretical mechanism of their ‘gravitational anomaly’ it gets a bit dodgy…
Modanese used to have the domain gravity.org, but it has since been snatched by cybersquaters.
This reminded me of an entry from the USENET sci.skeptics FAQ in the section on “Free Energy and Anti-Gravity”
[Snigger] [giggle] [snort] 
I’m probably just defending this because I so much want to believe technology like this is possible, but here goes. Of course Boeing is going to say IF, even if they have stunning success in duplicating the experiments you won’t hear anything about it for a very long time. The single biggest customer for an advanced breakthrough technology like this would be the military and the fact that Boeing’s Phantom Works is heading this just underlines that. This isn’t black helicopter conspiracy stuff, it’s just aeronautical history. What I took the article to mean about the whole 1 kilometer thing is that the device was capable of exerting the same amount of force at 1 km as it would directly over the apparatus, which would be a 2% reduction in weight. Repelling an object need not mean you’re physically throwing it across the room, the far reaching implication is that the effect of this device us undiminished by distance. That said, it’ll probably all come to nothing… too good to be true and all of that.
Heck, I can make a long-range device which repells an object at a distance of 2 km. Any laser pointer will do that. Heck, any light bulb will. Sure, it’s not very much repulsion, but then, they never said there was a lot, did they?
When Einstein was asked if an anti-gravity machine would ever be built, he said it already had. It’s called an elevator.
It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with free energy. This guy (James Woodward) supposedly has got a prototype device that “rows against space-time” by taking advantage of Mach’s principle. Mach’s principle states that enertia arises from the gravitational attraction of all other objects in the universe pulling against a mass. His math works out and so far I haven’t seen much to discredit him. And this doesn’t need any anti-gravity device.
http://www.inetarena.com/~noetic/pls/woodward.html
http://chaos.fullerton.edu/Woodward.html
These are two separate experiments. The 2% weight loss one was done in 1992. The impulse gravity beam is a totally different setup and was only performed recently.
When pigs fly!
Oh, wait…
This scared me when I looked at it. For a second I thought it said JDT, and had a brief but unpleasant mental image of an anti-gravity TugAhoy… :eek: