Re: starship-design: Check out the latest (May 99) Discover Magazine for an article on antigravity.

["Kyle R. Mcallister" <stk@sunherald.infi.net>]

Kevin Houston wrote:
> 
> And get ready to eat some crow you guys, Kyle gets a free "I told you so!"

Heheheh...well, I had the feeling it could be done. Podkletnov seemed
quite believable, rejection by other scientists notwithstanding. For
instance, on a post to sci.physics, one physicist said that there was no
reason to discuss antigravity results because antigravity cannot exist.
Arrogant, eh? There is bad on both sides though. Worse on the
pseudoscience side, they are the ones who give antigravity and FTL
researchers a bad name. As morbid as it is, a PhD friend of mine may
have put it correctly: we may have to wait for the old generation to die
before progress can be made. I hope this isn't so, and this article
seems to bring a little hope to the matter. I'm not going to belittle
anyone here though, after all, Steve was right many times. You can't
just come up with some half-cocked theory and expect it to be true. You
must do replicable research. 

> Article is about superconductivity and antigravity (or "gravity
> modification" for the politically correct).  Basically the same things that
> Kyle has been talking about.  

Oh, I talked about it, but not very well. Back in '97, I was still about
75% kid, 25% scientist, so I was understandably weird ;) Now, I hope
that the ration of kid to scientist has changed. First rule of
experimenting: "What did I do wrong this time???"

> NASA is taking it seriously, and the results
> *have* been reproduced.  Right now they are concentrating on eliminating
> all sources of possible error, making very detailed measurements (current
> weight loss is about 2%.  Is it real or is it error?), and trying to
> understand the underlying science.

Yes, I have the article right here. Quite an interesting read. Too bad
they did not mention John Schnurer, he has made much headway in the
research of this effect. He has worked with Podkletnov. In my book,
those two will always be the ones who did it first, not the established
NASA scientists. They did good replications, but I have been critical of
their work. For one thing, they should have hired Podkletnov to show
them exactly how to get it to work. But they had to do it their way.
That is probably why it took them so long to get results. I have dabbled
in the superconductor research of Schnurer, and it does work. It does
*something*. Anyone could probably build it if you wanted to. Search for
John's patent for a gravity modification device. As far as my research
on these subjects, I do a little here and there. As it is 'alternative',
as the NASA antigravity research is, I keep to myself about most of it.
Until I get great results of course... ;)

Kyle R. Mcallister