Project Greenglow - The Quest for Gravity Control Horizon

This is the story of an incredible scientific adventure.

Of an unlikely collection of scientists and engineers,

dreamers and schemers, who attempted the impossible.

To control gravity.

Gravity is the fundamental force that holds us to the earth

and binds the universe together, yet we still don't fully understand it.

Gravity is the most mysterious of all the fundamental forces.

The ultimate challenge I can think of as a scientist

is to control gravity.

The scientific quest triggered a race between rival corporations,

governments, and military...

It can destroy the missiles or remove them from their trajectory.

..fuelled by the paranoid fear of missing

the greatest technological advance in history.

If just one that here works, if only partly, you won the jackpot!

If this ever happened, it's going to change aerospace.

The potential is so great, if I did not bring this to

the attention of the Pentagon, oh, I would have been fired!

The search for gravity control

ranges from Washington to the streets of Eastern Europe,

from the deserts of America to the furthest reaches of the cosmos.

Dark energy has some sort of antigravity.

We still don't know whether it's something that we can ever harness.

Someone might wonder, why can't we build a machine with it?

We just need to find the trick.

Unlikely as it may seem,

the story begins in a corner of Lancashire, near Blackpool,

with a humble engineer who had a dream.

It's only another force field, but wouldn't it be good

if we could actually control it and do more?

If the dream of gravity control ever came true, it would

revolutionise the world and could send us to the stars.

PEOPLE WHOOP AND SCREAM

In the late 1980s, aerospace engineer Ron Evans

was working in the defence industry in Lancashire.

He'd been trying to find a way to detect stealth bombers

using fluctuations in gravity...

..and he wondered if he could take it even further.

Could he use gravity to levitate a plane?

Of course, it was impossible, but Ron did something

a bit reckless - he asked his employer if they'd let him try.

Ron's employer was the biggest defence

and aerospace contractor in Europe - BAE Systems.

And instead of telling him to have a cup of tea and a lie down,

they listened.

I had to go to the head of the technology board -

it's a panel - and persuade them that it was worth doing.

Now, clearly, it was very speculative.

I had to go away and come up with some concepts

and come up with some ideas that could actually feature

an antigravity or a gravity-type propulsion system.

Well, this was one of the designs that we came up with.

For a start, it wouldn't be limited to just flying in the air.

It could fly anywhere - into space, even into water.

And of course, it was a vertical takeoff design

because it had a gravity engine inside

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.

Let's be clear that not everyone in the company

thought we should be doing it.

There were quite a few that felt, we make aircraft,

we're good at it and that's what we should be doing.

But there were a few - and some very senior people - that felt,

OK, let's just have a little look at the future.

And the concept became known as Greenglow.

As head of Project Greenglow, Ron's job was to find

and develop advanced propulsion systems to overcome gravity.

The potential was enormous, if it happened.

It would totally change aerospace.

And Ron was not alone.

At around the same time, in the US,

NASA began a parallel project headed by aerospace engineer Marc Millis.

It was around 1996 when I was asked to lead

the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project -

things like non-rocket space drives,

interstellar propulsion and manipulating gravity,

things like that.

For that project, the idea was to think radical, think big.

However, today,

NASA says it has moved on and doesn't want to look back.

We can't go in there to talk about it now

because NASA's not doing that work right now.

At BAE Systems, the same situation.

The company no longer wants to discuss Project Greenglow.

We asked whether we could go there

and talk to them about it and they just said no.

Gravity control is a dark and dangerous science.

Like modern-day alchemy, it promises a glittering prize,

but it can destroy your reputation.

Years earlier, Ron had watched a gravity experiment

bring down one of Britain's best-known scientists...

'This time, I call for a volunteer.'

..professor of engineering at Imperial College London,

Eric Laithwaite.

'And then we're going to spin up the biggest gyro of the day,

'which is here.'

Like millions of others, Ron had been spellbound

by Laithwaite's Christmas lecture at the Royal Institution in 1974.

I can make him raise it.

Now...

Laithwaite suggested that by spinning a heavy wheel,

he could make it counteract gravity.

Ron has returned to the Royal Institution

to try and recreate the effect.

-Does it feel light?

-It does.

-It feels very light.

-With the help of fellow engineer Dr Adam Wojcik.

'What I think was at the back of Laithwaite's mind'

was that there was a force in one direction more than in the other,

and so the gyro will start to rise up.

And that gives you the illusion as though it's losing weight. It isn't.

It's just an illusion.

But is it lighter?

When the gyroscope is rotated in the same direction it's spinning,

it's given an upward lift.

-And if I rotate in the opposite sense...

-Oh! That does look heavy.

-Ooh, careful!

-Wow!

-Careful, careful!

When it's rotated in the opposite direction,

the opposite happens, and it seems to get heavier.

Still hoping to make gravity control a subject of serious research,

Laithwaite acknowledged his mistake.

Yet his reputation was irreparably damaged.

He was snubbed by the academic establishment

and felt obliged to leave his position at the Royal Institution.

Professor Laithwaite got into a lot of trouble with this,

really, because of the claim that it got lighter, which is antigravity.

And the academics jump on any antigravity device

as being impossible.

Well, it's not impossible.

It's just we don't know how to do it. But we should look.

It's like flight in the last century.

In those days, anybody that said they could fly

was looked upon as a lunatic!

The difference is that, before humans could fly,

we knew birds could. We could study aerodynamics.

But there was nothing we knew of

that could actually overcome gravity.

The dream of lifting effortlessly from the earth

is not confined to engineers.

Despite being so contentious,

many academics are rather seduced by the idea.

Dr Tamara Davis is among them.

From a little kid, I always wanted to go and visit other planets

and go up into space.

And to be able to have a form of propulsion

that could get me there easily would be fantastic.

But we don't yet know

whether we can manipulate gravity or have any control over it.

There is one fundamental force we know we CAN control,

which we've used to build our modern world - electromagnetism.

It gives us a tantalising illusion of gravity control...

..when we levitate a magnet.

Ta-da!

Electromagnetic repulsion balances the weight of the magnet

by using the same magnetic polarity in the base.

We know that like charges repel.

So here, we just have a magnetic field that's levitating a magnet.

So this is nothing mysterious. This is just electromagnetism.

Let's see if I can get this across.

Come on!

The power of control we get from electromagnetism lies in

the fact that we can change its polarity

and make it either repel or attract.

So in electromagnetism,

we have positive charges and negative charges.

And they tend to attract each other.

If you have a positive charge and a positive charge,

it will repel from each other, but...

wouldn't it be great

if we could get gravity to work in reverse and be able to

levitate things using gravity?

Only problem is, there isn't any negative gravity,

there isn't any antigravity that pushes.

Gravity always pulls, as far as we know.

The reason seems to be that, unlike electromagnetism,

gravity has only one kind of polarity - positive.

One mass is simply attracted to another.

Gravity and electromagnetism are completely different forces.

There's a very special property of gravity - that is that it adds up.

Inside an atom, there's a positive nucleus surrounded by

negative electrons, so the electromagnetic value cancels out,

whereas there's nothing to cancel out its mass.

So the force on one atom adds to the force on another atom,

and so they generate an attractive gravitational force.

So if you get enough of those atoms together, like in a planet

or in a star, then the gravitational force is very strong.

So gravity is different.

It adds up as you increase the amount of matter

in a way the other forces don't.

For physicists like John Ellis, the dream of making a one-way force

behave like a two-way force remains just that - a dream.

The idea that you might be able to make antigravity

is, of course, incredibly seductive.

We particle theorists are also seduced by that, on occasion.

But don't think it's going to be possible within my lifetime,

your lifetime, anybody's lifetime.

Yet back in 1996,

a Russian scientist working in Finland claimed to have done

the very thing the sceptics said was impossible - control gravity.

Dr Eugene Podkletnov had been using a machine called a cryostat

to cool electrical superconductors

when something very strange happened.

One evening, we were working with our cryostat,

and one of my colleagues, who was leaving at that time,

just came to the laboratory and said,

"Guys, what are you doing here?"

And we said, "Just working." And he was smoking his pipe.

A very interesting person.

It is, by the way, not allowed to smoke a pipe in the laboratory,

but it was late in the evening.

And he blew his pipe over the cryostat,

and the smoke went close to the cryostat,

hit some unseen barrier and, very fast, went up.

And it was pretty amazing.

He repeated this several times and said,

"You are working with magic things!"

And he left. So that was the beginning.

After months of investigation,

Podkletnov concluded that what he'd created was an antigravity field.

So we have a vacuum chamber with a disc which can be rotated

over 10,000 rotations per minute.

And this is a weight sample, which can move freely over the disc.

And when the disc reaches a certain speed of rotation,

it exerts a repulsive force on the weight sample and pushes it up.

In fact, this is a direct demonstration of the gravity fields.

This gravity field is, in our case, repulsive,

and, as you can see, the repulsive force is pretty big.

Podkletnov published a paper in a popular science journal

which caught the attention of Ron Evans at Greenglow.

By now, the scale of Podkletnov's claim had sent red flags

waving everywhere - including the Ministry of Defence.

Out of the blue, from the MoD, I got a letter...

..asking me what I made of the Podkletnov withdrawn paper.

Well, at the time, I didn't know what to make of it - not a lot!

Why should a spinning superconductor change gravity?

It was just so odd

that it never occurred to anybody before that it even should.

And, of course, many of the academics said, "Impossible!"

But what Podkletnov did was, having seen it, he explored it further.

If you spot an anomaly, then you go and investigate it to see why.

So we invited Podkletnov to come to BAE Systems at Walton,

but we had to get special permission from the Ministry of Defence

to allow him to come on site.

And I think he was quite taken that a Russian was actually...

The very first, and probably the only,

Russian that's ever been allowed at our Walton site.

Ron organised a team

to try and recreate Podkletnov's breakthrough. But they didn't

have the budget to work with the highly specialised superconductor.

We couldn't replicate what he'd done, so we couldn't say yes,

he had found an effect, or no, he hadn't.

By now, Marc Millis at NASA also wanted to know

if there was something in Podkletnov's claim.

And he had a much bigger budget.

We found people who replicated the experiment with Podkletnov's help,

and they even had 50 times the detection sensitivity

that Podkletnov had had, and did not find any effect.

Despite exhaustive tests, no-one seemed able to reproduce

Podkletnov's so-called gravity field.

I think Podkletnov had jumped to a conclusion,

had seen some things and did not take the...rigour to go through

and make sure that he wasn't misleading himself.

Meanwhile, news of Podkletnov's breakthrough

had been leaked to the press, and the resulting media storm

obliged him to leave his university post.

So Podkletnov went back to Moscow to work in secret.

And by late 2001, he claimed he had a new way to manipulate gravity.

Wary of the Western media, he contacted the one man

he trusted to give him a fair hearing - Ron Evans at Greenglow.

He offered to meet with Ron,

but it would have to be in secret at a hotel in London, specified by him.

It was a secret meeting because I did not want to attract

the attention of military people in Russia.

By now, Ron was getting concerned

his project was being dragged into a world of fantasy and subterfuge.

It really was like a John le Carre story.

And he said he could afford us just a little bit of time, if we wanted

to learn a little bit more about what he'd been doing in Moscow.

Because of his security concerns,

Podkletnov was only prepared to tell Ron the basic concept.

I presented to him my latest works with impulse gravity generator,

which gives a very short impulse of gravity waves.

It's really a giant spark plug, really.

But according to Dr Podkletnov,

someone way away, a kilometre away, on the balcony of some flats

in line with the beam, was still able to detect a slight effect.

That was incredible.

It can be used for propulsion in space,

but at the same time, 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.

What did I think? It was very...

Dr Podkletnov is a scientist, and, you know...

I don't know, is the answer.

It's very hard to say, yes, I believed it.

On the other hand, I wanted to know more, because it might be true.

Did you really think that was feasible?

We don't know, with gravity.

Gravity is a subject we don't know about.

That's why we're exploring it.

For years, the gravity pulse concept remained shrouded in secrecy,

and stayed unproven.

But by the early 2000s, a new generation of scientists

had picked up the baton from Project Greenglow...

..including Dr Martin Tajmar,

professor of space systems at Dresden University.

If you look for a challenge, always look for a big challenge.

The ultimate challenge I can think of as a scientist

is to control gravity.

That's maybe the most difficult thing there is, right?

Martin is about to comprehensively test Podkletnov's concept

once and for all.

His claims are that it can drill holes into brick walls

and this kind of stuff, which is an extraordinary claim.

And if you have an extraordinary claim,

you must have extraordinary proof.

Antigravity is a kind of synonym for impossible.

But always be ready for the surprise.

This, in effect, is Podkletnov's gravity pulse generator,

recreated by Martin and his team.

As Ron Evans guessed, it's based on a kind of giant spark plug -

essentially two electrodes in a box.

Basically, you have two electrodes - one here and one here - and you are

running a very, very high electric current, a discharge through that.

The discharge goes through a superconductor.

According to Podkletnov, this somehow creates a pulse of gravity,

which is picked up by a sensor, acting like an electronic pendulum.

And let's say, if you have here a pendulum, here,

that when this gravitational impulse hits the pendulum,

you will actually get a deflection off the pendulum.

And so, the claim is that this is actually also creating

not only an electric discharge but a kind of gravitational impulse -

a push to something at a distance.

The superconductor is cooled with liquid nitrogen

to remove its electrical resistance.

Podkletnov claimed the resulting mass of electrical discharge

creates the gravitational pulse.

They switch on the power to charge up the system...

..and wait for the discharge.

Counting down.

BANG

There is a reading.

So here's the data.

Gravity goes with the speed of light,

so you should see an instantaneous peak.

And then, the sound from this bang, this takes some time

until it arrives. So we should see two distinct peaks

because we have such a high resolution.

So that's the acoustic impulse, and exactly here,

that's where the gravitation impulse should be, but we don't see it.

The sensor felt the sound wave from the spark...

BANG

..but no gravity pulse.

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 metres away

or that you actually push pendulums away?

So that's a really outrageous claim.

We haven't seen something, not even remotely like that, unfortunately.

But, yeah... So far, no luck.

So this guy had the idea that by,

you know, messing around with superconductors,

he could change the strength of the gravitational field.

Crap!

None of Podkletnov's methods seemed able to alter gravity in the lab.

Could the reason be a simple problem of scale?

For physicist Clifford Johnson,

scale is the big Achilles heel in any idea of gravity control,

because at human scales, there's almost nothing there TO control.

Most people think that gravity's an extremely strong force.

And indeed, it does seem to be - it binds us here to the earth.

But actually, of all the forces we know in nature, it's the weakest.

I'm actually going to show you something.

We can see exactly how weak gravity is in this way.

I have this fridge magnet - just an ordinary fridge magnet.

And look - it sticks. It doesn't fall. What does that mean?

It means that this electromagnetic force

between this magnet and the car

is beating the force of gravity due to the entire earth.

Let me give you a number.

It's 10 to the 40 times weaker than electromagnetism.

That's not 10 or 10 x 40. It's 10 to the power 40.

So that's a one with 40 zeros after it.

So that's going to be part of the difficulty

in any experiment that we might do that tries to modify gravity.

It's trying to tinker with something that, on that scale, is so tiny.

The real effects of gravity take place when you have

huge amounts of mass, like the mass of the earth or something like that.

That's the scale on which gravity is changing

in a significant, measurable way.

There is one industry that has to deal with gravity

on a planetary scale.

That has always clamoured for some form

of gravity-beating propulsion.

The space industry.

Marc Millis ran NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Project.

One of its long-term goals was to move away from using rockets.

The problem with rockets is not that they can't beat gravity -

it's the amount of thrust they need to do it.

If you think about the Apollo spacecraft

and you imagine here's the Saturn V,

the very tip of that and then a little bit below that

was the actual spacecraft itself

and all the rest of this was the propellant, the rocket fuel,

and that's just to the moon.

NASA aims to get humans to Mars and back

within the next decade and a half...

..maybe, one day, beyond the solar system itself...

..but just the Martian step

seems impractical with conventional rockets

because leaving the earth's gravity takes so much fuel.

The farther or faster that you want to go

or more that you want to carry,

you need this extra propellant to do that

and then you need extra propellant for the extra propellant

and it adds up exponentially.

You wanted to go to our nearest neighbouring 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,

and say you want to do it in 50 years,

you're having to go a tenth of the speed of light.

Well, the amount propellant you need for that journey

is about the mass of our entire sun.

For Mark and NASA,

the focus was less on controlling gravity itself

than finding ways to get to the stars.

They didn't care how

as long as it didn't need rocket fuel.

And, in 2002,

a new device appeared

that seemed to offer a solution...

..invented by a former defence research engineer,

Roger Shawyer.

The big advantage of EmDrive is that it's a device which creates a force

but it doesn't have to shoot out a propellant out of the back.

Instead of using rocket fuel to create thrust,

the EmDrive uses microwave energy...

..just like a domestic oven.

Microwaves bounce around inside the box in waves, cooking your food.

To stop that energy cooking you,

there is a mesh on the door with holes in.

The diameter of these holes are so small

that, instead of going through it,

microwave radiation is actually bouncing up and down vertically

in the hole.

The holes trap the waves,

slowing them to a standstill.

According to Roger,

the narrow end of his EmDrive does exactly the same job.

The waves are going faster at the large end

than they are at the small end.

This means that the force at the large end

is greater than the force at the small end

which will cause the cavity to move in the opposite direction.

It would only produce a small amount of thrust,

but, in space, that would matter.

An EmDrive thruster with continuous electrical power

gives you continuous acceleration

and therefore you can achieve very large velocities

and travel very large distances.

Roger believes that, if he could make it big enough,

it could potentially lift us from the Earth.

You suddenly have a lift engine

which simply hovers there or indeed accelerates upwards.

So we can obviously envisage launching large payloads into space

on an EmDrive-driven space plane.

Essentially, we are no longer looking at ways

that we can control gravity itself.

We are beating gravity the smart way.

If it works.

Though he didn't claim to control gravity,

Roger's EmDrive concept was rejected by a lot of theoretical scientists,

who claim the basic physics just didn't add up.

So imagine I'm a particle of light

and I bounce off one side of a box.

I push off and I push the box that way, go this way,

but then I hit the other side of the box and I bounce off just as hard.

So the box doesn't go anywhere.

So, for it move, I would have to push off one side

and then escape out the other end the way that a rocket does.

So that's why we're not sure how the EmDrive works

because bouncing off both sides of a box you wouldn't get any thrust.

Newton told us that action and reaction are equal and opposite,

but, the EmDrive, nothing comes out

and so I don't see how you can generate momentum out of nothing.

My view is - who cares?

It's the experiment.

If the experiment works,

it's up to the theoretical people to put a theory round why it works.

From what we understand so far, it shouldn't work,

but if you have an open mind and say, "Well, what if...?"

If it does work, it's a revolution,

it's a new propulsion system.

To settle the argument between the theorists and engineers,

Martin Tajmar had the perfect test facility in Dresden...

..a large vacuum chamber mounted on dampers

to isolate it from the surrounding world...

..a carefully designed rig to hold the drive...

..with a finely tuned balance to record any thrust...

..and, most importantly,

a copy of Roger Shawyer's original EmDrive.

Martin's version is small

but, if the principal works,

there should be measurable thrust.

The vacuum chamber is sealed.

The thrust recorder inside is so sensitive

it can detect Martin sitting down outside.

We're here in a laboratory on earth so there's some seismic movement,

so the balance themselves will move just a little bit.

That's the noise we are seeing here.

The EmDrive is switched on.

Nothing appears to move.

But on Martin's screen there is a reading.

When we turn on the thruster,

the balance in it reacts

and we measure something which looks actually like a thrust.

What we measured here in this case is something like 25 micronewtons.

That's very, very small.

You can compare this, for example, to a tenth of the weight force

of a grain of rice. Incredibly small.

Still, however, useful.

For example, in space, we have thrusters actually

which have this tiny amount of force

which is still useful to manoeuvre spacecraft, for instance.

The first results seem positive.

But, when Martin experimented further,

he discovered a problem.

So, with the thruster pointing in that direction,

we measured thrust in that direction

and, when we tilted it 90 degrees,

we still measured thrust in this direction, which we shouldn't have.

There can still be some major influence

from, for example, the power feeding lines that we still need to solve

to find out what's the real thrust produced by the EmDrive,

if there is any thrust produced.

The great hope of the EmDrive was

that, as a kind of propellant-less rocket,

it would at least power vehicles in space,

NASA's dream.

But NASA didn't pursue the idea any further,

or any other gravity-defying concepts,

because, in 2002,

they closed down Marc Millis's project.

The project ended when the funding for all propulsion research was cut.

It wasn't just breakthrough propulsion physics,

it was a Congressional earmark to build a building in a certain state

and that took all the funding. It happens.

The main progress that we made is we took science-fiction notions

and evolved them to at least the first step of the scientific method.

That step by itself is a degree of progress

that, if I don't accomplish any more,

it's like, "Yeah, that was pretty good."

Ron Evans kept going for another three years.

But, when he retired in 2005,

BAE closed down Project Greenglow.

For more than a decade,

Ron had tried to find a way to control gravity.

He never managed it.

Is it a shame?

Yeah, I suppose so. I would like...

I would like to have worked at a company

that actually made this idea work.

It was a lovely idea.

When Greenglow ended,

the hope of mastering gravity seemed to end with it.

If that was ever going to change,

we needed to go much deeper into how gravity actually worked.

Our understanding of gravity

has come down from Galileo, Newton and Einstein...

..from observations rooted in the motions of the heavens.

Now, those same heavens seem to be showing us something

that looks remarkably like antigravity.

There are phenomena out there associated with gravity

that have led us to rethink a lot about our universe.

If you look at distant galaxies,

they're moving away from us as we expect

because the universe began with this big bang

and everything's being thrown outwards,

but one would expect that the gravity of everything

would eventually start slowing that down.

Instead, what's actually been measured, it's a huge surprise,

is that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

It's a puzzle that has stumped both theoretical physicists

like Clifford Johnson

and cosmologists like Tamara Davis,

because gravity seems to be doing

the one thing we always assumed it couldn't.

Gravity appears to be pushing.

Something's accelerating the galaxies away from each other.

That's as strange as if I took this ball,

just gently threw it in the air

and watched it accelerate off into space.

Scientists call the force that is doing this pushing dark energy,

estimated to account for roughly 70% of the universe.

So dark energy has some sort of antigravity

and it pushes the galaxies apart.

The idea that the universe has some inherent form of antigravity

is tantalising.

If only we could get our hands on it.

The problem is no-one knows what this antigravity force actually is.

Only that it seems to originate from space itself.

Although we think of space as this emptiness, the absence of stuff,

it actually isn't.

There is something that's intrinsic to the nature of space that

imparted an energy.

And one of the big mysteries is where has that energy come from?

A number of scientists think the answer to this big question

could lie-in the very small, the very, very, very small world

of subatomic particles. Quantum physics.

According to current quantum theory,

particles can spontaneously appear from nowhere.

Apparently they just pop into existence in the vacuum of space.

Matter and antimatter,

which because they are opposites cancel each other out in an instant.

The lifetime is 1,000th

of one billionth of one billionth of a second.

We are now in an ocean of particle-antiparticle pairs

permanently appearing and disappearing.

Dr Dragan Hajdukovic thinks something else happens to these

particles to produce an antigravity effect.

For the briefest moment of their existence,

these particles can be polarised like iron filings.

The trouble is to get it in a random orientation.

If there is a magnetic field, the random orientation will change. Yes.

According to Dragan, in the same way iron filings respond to a magnet...

..pairs of quantum particles respond to mass...

..with matter and antimatter pairs briefly orienting themselves

in relation to that mass.

Matter is attracted to the positive mass of a planet or a star

while antimatter is repelled by it.

Dragan believes this creates a halo of antigravity dark energy

around every mass in the universe.

All these haloes together has negative pressure,

what is exactly what we need

in cosmological equations to produce the accelerated

expansion of the universe.

It means that there are both positive

and negative rotational charges.

So far, we know that gravity is an attraction.

It may be that gravity is also a repulsion but not between matter

and matter but between matter and antimatter.

Dragan's theory that the key to antigravity

lies in antimatter is actually going to be tested...

..here in the world's biggest physics lab at CERN in Switzerland.

Not in the famous Large Hadron Collider,

but in the improbably named Antimatter Factory...

..at its Alpha experiment.

A team led by Jeffrey Hangst is building a machine that,

in a couple of years, will answer one of the biggest questions

in gravity research.

Does antimatter fall down or up?

The first step is to make antimatter particles of hydrogen.

We start here with this beamline.

That provides the nucleus of the antihydrogen atom, the antiprotons.

They come through here at a reasonably high energy

and get stopped inside this magnet which is where the actual

antihydrogen will be formed and trapped.

The next step will be to test how antimatter reacts

to the Earth's gravity.

OK, so this machine can trap and release antihydrogen

but it's not ideal for gravity.

What we want to do now is take a machine like this

and turn it on its head so we can actually see

the freefall of the antimatter that is released.

If Dragan is right then the antihydrogen will fall up

and somebody wins a Nobel Prize,

that's for sure, and we have to rewrite a lot of textbooks.

Hi, Dragan. Welcome. Come on in. Let's take a look at this machine.

Alpha is part of CERN's ongoing exploration into the nature

of matter and gravity.

Right now, what we are doing is we're routinely

trapping antihydrogen.

But for Dragan Hajdukovic, it will be made or break.

If he is right, creating antigravity on Earth

is at least a theoretical possibility.

One of the big theoretical objections to gravity control was

always that, unlike electromagnetism,

gravity had no negative form.

Yet evidence from the cosmos seems to suggest that negative gravity

does exist.

To bring it down to Earth, however,

seems to require some form of negative entity.

Dragan Hajdukovic thinks it could be antimatter.

Whereas Dr Martin Tajmar believes the best option would be to use

negative mass.

So let's imagine something that we can all imagine.

Let's say we have positive mass.

Positive mass means if I'm pushing

positive mass, it always accelerates in the same

direction as I am pushing.

Let's imagine something magical.

Let's imagine we have positive

and we have negative mass.

They will attract each other.

Now, the positive mass is attracted here

and it accelerates in the very same direction.

The negative is attracted over there,

but because it is negative mass, it accelerates over there.

So they both would start to accelerate in one direction,

the direction of the negative mass.

According to Martin, negative mass is the perfect way to create

the ultimate gravity propulsion device -

a warp drive.

Imagine the positive and negative mass.

That together creates a self accelerating structure.

We can make a spacecraft with that, that can get any speed we want.

Now, if this is all sounding a tiny bit speculative,

Martin believes there is experimental evidence to back it up.

The principle of self acceleration has actually already been

demonstrated in the lab.

Here you see that positive and negative light particles

are coming together

and when they come together, they always move,

they self accelerate towards the negative position.

That's an optical warp drive.

It demonstrates that self acceleration is possible.

Is it impossible to go to the next star? I don't think so.

Impossible means it's not possible now.

We just have to invent the magic trick.

For Martin, the concept of negative mass is more than just

a clever theory.

It's the key to conquering gravity.

But even if negative mass could be manufactured and harnessed to

power a warp drive, many scientists think it would be

impossible to use...

..because of Einstein's theory of gravity.

From Einstein's perspective, a mass actually distorts

the fabric of space and time or space-time as it is called.

That distortion is rather like a well.

So here's another object that is moving nearby

our mass that has bent space time

and as it goes past,

it bends towards the massive object.

But a negative mass would be,

in our analogy here, something like

a mound instead of a depression

and then you run into problems.

The problem, according to Einstein, is that using a negative mass

would mean inverting space-time,

effectively turning the fabric of the universe inside out.

And what you end up with is something that is called

a runaway problem.

You have physics that is just running out of control.

It'll accelerate away arbitrarily with zero cost of energy

and, if that were really happening anywhere in the universe,

we'd see it spectacularly becoming an unstable situation.

That's been proposed by other people

as an actual solution to the problem.

That's hilarious.

If Clifford Johnson and other theoretical physicists are right,

antigravity propulsion will remain an unworkable dream.

It seems the laws of physics simply don't allow it.

At least, not as we understand those laws today.

Because, just as Galileo gave way to Newton

and Newton gave way to Einstein,

theories do change.

And, in the meantime...

well, the engineers get on with doing what engineers do -

build new kinds of propulsion.

Today, that includes NASA.

At the Glenn Research Laboratory in Ohio,

work is underway to produce new forms of space engine...

..ones that really could take us where rockets can't -

beyond our solar system.

What we have here is a high-powered ion thruster

and the way it produces thrust is ions are created inside this ring

and then we establish electrostatic potential

that accelerates these ions out

and produces large velocities

and what that does is it gives us very efficient production of thrust.

This is an ion thruster under test

putting out a constant stream of charged particles.

It's less powerful than a rocket

but capable of accelerating a spacecraft

almost indefinitely.

These systems are ideal for in space.

You know, we operate them purely in space because it's very gentle.

You know, the thrust level is low

but, over time, you can develop much higher velocities

than you can with chemical rockets.

NASA's focus is on space propulsion

beyond the Earth's gravitation.

Yet there is a propulsion concept

that aims to revolutionise all of aerospace,

resurrected from the days of project Greenglow.

It's Roger Shawyer's microwave thruster,

the EmDrive.

Ten years ago,

it was unproven technology.

This is a newer, bigger model under test.

Balanced on a pivot,

Roger claims it is moving

under its own steam.

The thrust is coming out in this direction

and it is pushing the whole rig in a counterclockwise direction.

It's moving 100kg of mass exactly as it would

if it was a satellite in weightless conditions.

According to Roger,

this model generates 9g of thrust,

equivalent to NASA's ion thruster,

but he hopes to make an EmDrive capable of generating

a thrust of nine tonnes.

Nine tonnes will be used to lift and accelerate vertically

any air vehicle we wish.

A true revolution.

EmDrive is still at the concept stage,

but, if it turns out it really does work,

no-one wants to miss out on its potential.

In the United States, a number of corporations and government agencies

have recently sat up and taken notice,

led by this man.

Colonel Coyote Smith is the former head of Dream Works.

Not the movie company

but something even more powerful -

a future concepts department

in the Pentagon's National Security Space Office.

The potential is so great,

if I did not bring this to the attention

of the scientific community inside the US

that works inside space programme,

oh, I would have been fired.

That's just absolutely the type of technology

that we have to track down,

these revolutionary breakthroughs.

Now, all the physicists disclaimed it

but the ironic thing is, when I took it to the engineering community,

they didn't care why it worked, they were just interested that it worked.

Ten years ago, Project Greenglow ended

and Ron Evans thought official gravity research had ended with it.

But today he's been invited to witness

a unique gravitational breakthrough.

When Ron first began his gravity research,

it started with a question -

could gravity be used to detect aircraft

that were invisible to radar?

In the 1980s, our complete inability to work with gravity

made it impossible.

But today Ron is meeting someone who says he's done it.

This time, there are no covert meetings.

He's going inside the Ministry of Defence research laboratory

at Porton Down.

Ron, good morning. Welcome to the Defence Science and Technology.

Neil Stansfield heads a department here

that looks at what they call disruptive technology.

And they have taken a potential step on the road to gravity control

using quantum engineering.

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.

The sensor uses lasers to freeze a cloud of atoms.

This cloud responds to disturbance in the Earth's gravitational field

caused by moving mass.

The atoms, they're sensitive enough to detect the mass of my body

at a range of about one metre.

-So your gravitational field is affecting this device.

-Yes.

This is the first time Ron has seen anyone actively using gravity.

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.

100 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.

-Yes.

And possibly even gravitational propulsion

might be a possibility in the future.

It may be. Yeah.

I have ideas.

It could be that we've got something.

Certainly, I see this as a start.

There's no doubt in my mind the UK is really at the forefront of this.

Ron Evans's mission to control gravity began here,

in a cold, wet corner of Lancashire

where people go to live their dreams,

where no-one ever worried about the word impossible.

For Ron Evans,

gravity control is just something we haven't learned to do...

yet.

I'm sure we will one day.

It's just a matter of time.