RH:  And there has been zero reference to any of this in any of our esteemed media coast to coast.. It's like the real world doesn't exist for the USA, for CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN.

AB: It's true. It's true. I don't understand it. I mean, anti-gravity. Now Richard, that's a big story. I mean, if somebody has actually reversed the effects, to any degree whatsoever, of gravity, that's a gigantic story.

RH: It turns out this is not a new story. This is not a new story. And what is really remarkable is because the claim is so extraordinary, and because we have now found bonafide scientific refereed journal-level work, published in the scientific literature, and then reviewed independently by other researchers at world-class scientific institutions, what's fascinating to me is why we're not having this conversation four years ago. Because the first paper  is from September of 1992, published by this lead Finish researcher, Eugene Podkletnov ( Dr. P. from now on).

RH: He has a co-author named Neiman, who also published on this paper, and it was published in the Holland Journal of Physics, called Physica C, which is one of the world-class scientific journals on this planet. It's called, "A Possibility of Gravitation Force Shielding by Bulk YBA2CU3O7-V Superconductor."

AB: All right. What does that mean?

RH: All right. That's yttrium barium cupric oxide, copper and oxygen superconductor. It's one of these new discoveries in the last 8 or 9 years, beginning about '87, '88, that you could make a superconductor...and we're going to have to define all these terms, and we will. Don't worry, we will...out of the material that was much more akin to a ceramic than to a metal. And I'm going to get into some of the history of this and how you can do this at home, boys and girls, and that is not an overstatement.

AB: Really?

RH: This is such a stunningly simple experiment, and it is so easily replicated that the question that I want to ask  tonight, is because the paper is in a refereed journal and because none other than the Max Plank Institute of Physics in 1995 published a very detailed and elaborate analysis, and the title of that was, "Theoretical Analysis of a Reported Weak Gravitational Shielding Effect," by a Giovanni Modanese, who was a von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Plank Institute of Physics in Munchen, Germany in '95, what I want to know is why this didn't hit the fan, as they used to say, in '92, '93, '94, or '95?

AB: Can we define a term, now. You said, "a gravity shield." Is that another way, Richard, of saying anti-gravity?

RH: Yes, and both are wrong! Let's see. If you want to do anything interesting, how do you counteract this force? What is it, and if you want to fly, or if you want to move through the air, or you want to leave the surface of the earth, how could you counteract it? Well, of course, we have evolved a technology of aerodynamics, which doesn't really counteract gravity. What it does is it manipulates air pressures with airfoils and curved surfaces and wings and propellers and jets and reactive Newton's Third Law kind of stuff. Or rockets. But you're not really defying or counteracting or manipulation or changing the fundamental laws of gravity.

AB: No, you're applying greater force.

RH: That's right. And when you stop applying the force, it's gonna come down! So from the beginnings of the scientific revolution there was this extraordinary interest about what is this thing that holds us to the earth. In the 1890's, H.G. Wells wrote a story,  called "First Men to the Moon", where his protagonist discovered a material that could be put on a sphere and which shielded gravity (he called it caverite). He climbs into this sphere. He closes all the shutters, that are made of caverite. He basically cuts himself off. They shield themselves from the gravity field of the earth, and they're flung instantly into space because of the rotation of the earth. Bur protagonist was caverite, this substance which had the magical property of shielding, the upper part of it, the top side, from the effects of gravity pulling on it from below.
 

AB: What is, roughly, escape velocity for a rocket that leaves the atmosphere altogether?

RH: Seven miles per second, and eleven kilometers per second.

AB: If you had negative gravity, would you actually be able to get into a craft and slowly, if you wished, simply float up and out of the atmosphere? Or would you be required to attain an escape velocity?

RH: No. You would float. There all kinds of thought experiments about it.

AB: So you could float out?

RH: Yeah. In other words, if you imagine that you have a disk where gravity does not appear on the top of the disk, in other words, the disk somehow shields what's above it from the gravitational field of the earth, then if you were to plate a structure, a spaceship, with this substance, the idea is that is would become weightless and it would them be flung away from the earth, because of the rotation at whatever latitude you are. At the equator it would be flung away at a thousand miles per hour. It would float upward at a thousand miles per hour, and that would be adequate to eventually take you beyond the, well all the way to the moon, or even beyond. It would obviously be shielded from the sun's gravity, as well, so you would just keep going and going. Think of it as the Energizer spacecraft.

AB: All right. I've heard two theories of gravity, so that we're down with the basic gravity stuff here. Most people, I guess, feel it is a pull. Gravity is a pull. I've heard other people say, "Gravity is a push."

RH: There's a third.

AB: There's a third?

RH: That gravity is geometry. This is Einsteinian. This is relativity. That the reason that objects fall toward each other is because mass warps the geometry of the metric of space-time. You can kind of think of a great sheet of plastic? Held between four posts, and you dunk a bowling ball in the middle of the plastic sheet? And you get this huge dimple down. Now, if you fling a marble across the plastic sheet because you got this big bowling sitting there weighing down the plastic in the middle, even if you can't see the plastic, if it's very clear plastic, you will see the effect of the distortion of the plastic sheet by the bowling ball, by the trajectory, by the warped trajectory of the little marble flung across this sheet of supposedly flat plastic. That's the analogy of warping space-time, by means of mass. That's the third theory.

AB: Which one do you subscribe to?

RH: None of them.

AB: Aw, Richard

RH: (Laughs) Sorry. Later on in the morning we're going to give a recipe, you know, a step-by-step instruction of how high school physics classes and interested laboratories and private industry and any bright aggressive government guys out there, who are listening tonight that want to help build spaceships someday, how they can literally recreate Dr. E. P.'s results, and prove or disprove this thing once and for all, and we will then publish those on the Web, because it's beginning to look, Art, as if, not only do we have a discovery here, but we have also caught them red-handed in an attempted suppression of the discovery.

AB: Yeah. As you know, I've got some information on that. But, let us stick with the original discovery, Richard. What is it, basically, that the Finish are claiming?

RH: Well, Dr. Podkletnov claims that he has found "caverite." And his caverite is not a paint or a certain material. What it is is one of the so-called "high-temperature superconductors" that were discovered by people at the University of Texas (actually University of Houston), Dr. Chu and several others, IBM scientists working in Zurich in the late '80s, you know, were the first to actually tinker this stuff up and get a Nobel Prize for it, in record time by the way. There was a major industrial push launched by the Reagan administration to try to put a kind of federal program behind making lots of this and looking at all the technological benefits. So what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to go into the basis of superconductivity and define terms before anybody is going to get an idea of how easy this is to test and how revolutionary it can be.

AB: Let me, for the layman, try and help. Superconductivity. Imagine a wire, a copper wire. A copper wire conducts electricity. Electrons flow through this copper wire at a certain rate, and there is in that flow, a loss from point A to point B, the resistance of the wire. In other words, point A's electricity is less that point B's electricity because of the resistance of that wire. Now, as I understand superconductivity, it lowers, almost to the point of non-existence, theoretically, that resistance so that you get almost no loss between point A and point B. Is that a fair description?

RH: Almost, but no cigar. You're awfully close. The only difference is: It is no resistance. It is perfect transmission. It is lossless. That's what's the magic, and that's what is remarkably important and the signature of a physics we're going to talk about called hyperdimensional physics.

AB: Of course. All right, stay right where you are, and we're going to talk a little about superconductivity, so you might understand what's coming.