There was a news story circulating in the mainstream media two or three years ago suggesting that antigravity had successfully been demonstrated. IIRC, a Russian physicist had shown that an object could be made to lose 5% of its mass when suspended above some sort high temperature plasma field. There was some intense interest in this at the time, and the Boeing Co. had cut him a check for $500 thousand to finance future R&D. I haven’t heard anything about this since. What was the upshot of this? Did it fizzle out like cold fusion did, or were others able to replicate his results? If the Russian physicist’s research didn’t pan out, has antigravity ever been conclusively demonstrated by any other parties?
I don’t have time to dig up any cites tonight, but basically, no one’s been able to duplicate the results. There’s an ex-NASA engineer who thinks she’s got it figured out, but I haven’t seen anything on her research since the Popular Mechanics piece on her. There’s been a couple a threads on this, with relevant links, so if you do a hamster flail you should be able to turn something up.
From astro’s Nexus link:
Umm, that’d be the ficticious Dr Dan Marckus. Although Cook never says so in the book, “Marckus” is at best a heavily disguised source. It’s not even as if his opinions remotely matched those of any expert British physicist.
As for Podkletnov, yes, that fizzled. As always with such claims, there are no doubt still some people pursuing the notion out there, but it’s marginal stuff.
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If I were to put a piece of bacon over a “high temperature plasma field” I’m sure it would lose way more than 5% of it’s mass.
'Course, it could have come from an antigravity pig in the first place, but that’s about as likely as… well, you get the idea.
Another case of: "The same old ladies of the night in new kimonas."
A web search for Tom Bearden, Perptual Motion, Zero Point Energy, Overunity, Negative Resistance, John Bedini, etc. will turn up all kinds of pie in the sky crackpot proposals. Many of them generating $upport from naive and unsuspecting ‘investors.’
Boeing was too eager to take advantage of a 1st in line position to adequately look into the pool before jumping in. $500K Sheesh, :rolleyes:
But HEY it’s making a living or better! 
I remember similar claims based on spinning disks of superconductors.
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Not one but two people have beat me to this joke, and I’m still posting it.
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Previous thread on the topic. A google search failed to turn up anything new on the main researcher Dr. Ning Li.