The story of how a large aerospace company, BAE Systems, began a secret project to counter the force of gravity while NASA simultaneously ran a similar Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program.
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LearningTranscript
00:00This is the story of an incredible scientific adventure, of an unlikely
00:12collection of scientists and engineers, dreamers and schemers, who attempted the
00:19impossible, to control gravity. Gravity is the fundamental force that holds us to
00:31the earth and binds the universe together, yet we still don't fully understand it.
00:37Gravity is the most mysterious of all the fundamental forces. The ultimate
00:43challenge I can think of as a scientist is to control gravity. The scientific
00:48quest triggered a race between rival corporations, governments and military.
00:54It can destroy the missiles or remove them from their trajectory. Fueled by the
01:02paranoid fear of missing the greatest technological advance in history. If just
01:08one idea works even only partly, you won the jackpot. If the dream of gravity
01:15control ever came true, it would revolutionize the world and could send us to the
01:21the stars.
01:28In the late 1980s, aerospace engineer Ron Evans was working in the defense industry in Lancashire, England.
01:34In the late 1980s, aerospace engineer Ron Evans was working in the defense industry in Lancashire, England.
01:44He'd been trying to find a way to detect stealth bombers using fluctuations in gravity.
01:50And he wondered if he could take it even further. Could he use gravity to levitate a plane?
01:54In the late 1980s, aerospace engineer Ron Evans was working in the defense industry in Lancashire, England.
02:00Of course, it was impossible, but Ron did something a bit reckless. He asked his employer if they'd let him try.
02:06Ron's employer was the biggest defense and aerospace contractor.
02:10He was trying to find a way to detect stealth bombers using fluctuations in gravity.
02:14And he wondered if he could take it even further. Could he use gravity to levitate a plane?
02:17Of course, it was impossible, but Ron did something a bit reckless. He asked his employer if they'd let him try.
02:23Ron's employer was the biggest defense and aerospace contractor in Europe, BAE Systems.
02:36And instead of telling him to have a cup of tea and a nap, they listened.
02:41I had to go to the head of the technology board, it's a panel, and persuade them that it was worth doing.
02:50Now, clearly, it was very speculative. I had to go away and come up with some concepts and come up with some ideas
02:58that could actually feature an anti-gravity or a gravity-type propulsion system.
03:03Well, this was one of the designs that we came up with.
03:07For a start, it wouldn't be limited just flying in the air. It could fly anywhere, into space, even into water.
03:14Of course, it was a vertical takeoff design because it had a gravity engine inside.
03:19But it didn't look very exciting. And so we asked the artist to put some green rays underneath.
03:25That made it look far more futuristic.
03:28Let's be clear that not everyone in the company thought we should be doing it.
03:34There were quite a few that felt, we make aircraft, we're good at it, and that's what we should be doing.
03:40But there were a few, and some very senior people, that felt, okay, let's just have a little look at the future.
03:47And the concept became known as GreenGlow.
03:50As head of Project GreenGlow, Ron's job was to find and develop advanced propulsion systems to overcome gravity.
04:04The potential was enormous if it happened. It would totally change aerospace.
04:10And Ron was not alone.
04:18At around the same time in the U.S., NASA began a parallel project headed by aerospace engineer Mark Millis.
04:26It was around 1996 when I was asked to lead the breakthrough propulsion physics project.
04:35Things like non-rocket space drives, interstellar propulsion, manipulating gravity, things like that.
04:43For that project, the idea was to think radical, think big.
04:46Today, NASA says it has moved on and doesn't want to look back.
04:56We can't go in there to talk about it now because NASA's not doing that work right now.
05:08At BAE Systems, the same situation. The company no longer wants to discuss Project GreenGlow.
05:15We asked them whether we could go there and talk to them about it, and they just said no.
05:24Gravity control is a dark and dangerous science.
05:28But, like modern-day alchemy, it promises a glittering prize, but it can destroy your reputation.
05:35Years earlier, Ron had watched a gravity experiment bring down one of Britain's best-known scientists.
05:48This time, I call for a volunteer.
05:51Professor of Engineering at Imperial College London, Eric Lathwaite.
05:55And then we're going to spin up the biggest gyro of the day, which is here.
06:00Like millions of others, Ron had been spellbound by Lathwaite's Christmas lecture at the Royal Institution in 1974.
06:08I can make him raise it.
06:12Now, Lathwaite suggested that by spinning a heavy wheel, he could make it counteract gravity.
06:19Ron has returned to the Royal Institution to try and recreate the effect.
06:25Does it feel light?
06:26It does. It feels very light.
06:28With the help of fellow engineer, Dr. Adam Wojcik.
06:31If I slow down, it feels...
06:32What I think was at the back of Lathwaite's mind was that there was a force in one direction more than in the other.
06:39And so the gyro will start to rise up.
06:41And that gives you the illusion as though it's losing weight. It isn't. It's just an illusion.
06:50But is it lighter?
06:52When the gyroscope is rotated in the same direction it's spinning, it's given an upward lift.
07:01And if I rotate in the opposite sense...
07:04Oh, that does look heavy.
07:05Oh, careful, careful, careful.
07:08When it's rotated in the opposite direction, the opposite happens. And it seems to get heavier.
07:15Still hoping to make gravity control a subject of serious research, Lathwaite acknowledged his mistake.
07:23Yet his reputation was permanently damaged.
07:26He was snubbed by the academic establishment.
07:31And felt compelled to leave his position at the Royal Institution.
07:34Professor Lathwaite got into a lot of trouble with this, really because of the claim that it got lighter,
07:43which is anti-gravity. And academics jump on any anti-gravity device as being impossible.
07:50Well, it's not impossible. It's just we don't know how to do it.
07:54But we should look.
07:56It's like flight in the last century.
07:58In those days, anybody that said they could fly was looked upon as a lunatic.
08:09The difference is that before humans could fly, we knew birds could.
08:14We could study aerodynamics.
08:18But there was nothing we knew of that could actually overcome gravity.
08:28The dream of lifting effortlessly from the Earth is not confined to engineers.
08:46Despite being so contentious, many academics are rather seduced by the idea.
08:53Dr. Tamara Davis is among them.
08:55From a little kid, I always wanted to go and visit other planets and go up into space.
09:02And to be able to have a form of propulsion that could get me there easily would be fantastic.
09:07But we don't yet know whether we can manipulate gravity or have any control over it.
09:14There is one fundamental force we know we can control, which we've used to build our modern world.
09:21Electromagnetism.
09:25It gives us a tantalizing illusion of gravity control when we levitate a magnet.
09:36Electromagnetic repulsion balances the weight of the magnet by using the same magnetic polarity in the base.
09:43We know that like charges repel. So here we just have a magnetic field that's levitating a magnet.
09:52So this is nothing mysterious. This is just electromagnetism.
09:55Let's see if I can get this close.
09:56The power of control we get from electromagnetism lies in the fact that we can change its polarity and make it either repel or attract.
10:13So in electromagnetism, we have positive charges and negative charges and they tend to attract each other.
10:20If you have a positive charge and a positive charge, it will repel from each other.
10:26But wouldn't it be great if we could get gravity to work in reverse and be able to levitate things using gravity?
10:36Only problem is there isn't any negative gravity. There isn't any anti-gravity that pushes.
10:42Gravity always pulls as far as we know.
10:51The reason seems to be that unlike electromagnetism, gravity has only one kind of polarity.
10:58Positive. One mass is simply attracted to another.
11:06Gravity and electromagnetism are completely different forces.
11:10There's a very special property of gravity. That is that it adds up.
11:17Inside an atom, there's a positive nucleus surrounded by negative electrons.
11:24So the electromagnetic value cancels out.
11:28Whereas there's nothing to cancel out its mass.
11:33So the force on one atom adds to the force on another atom.
11:37And so they generate an attractive gravitational force.
11:42So if you get enough of those atoms together, like in a planet or in a star,
11:47then the gravitational force is very strong.
11:52So gravity is different.
11:54It adds up as you increase the amount of matter in a way the other forces don't.
11:58It adds up as you can.
12:10In 1996, a Russian scientist working in Finland claimed to have done the very thing the skeptic said was impossible.
12:18To control gravity.
12:25Dr. Eugene Potklatnov had been using a machine called a Christostat to cool electrical superconductors
12:32when something very strange happened.
12:35One evening we were working with our Christ and one of my colleagues who was living at that time
12:43just came to the laboratory and said, guys, what are you doing here?
12:48And we said, just working.
12:50And he was smoking his pipe.
12:52A very interesting person.
12:53It is, by the way, not allowed to smoke a pipe at the laboratory.
12:58But it was late in the evening.
13:01And he blew his pipe over the cryostat.
13:05And the smoke went close to the cryostat, hit some unseen barrier and very fast went up.
13:15And it was pretty amazing.
13:17He repeated this several times and said, you are working with magic things.
13:23And he left.
13:24So that was the beginning.
13:27After months of investigation, Potklatnov concluded that what he'd created was an anti-gravity field.
13:35So we have a vacuum chamber with a disc which can be rotated over 10,000 rotations per minute.
13:43And this is a weight sample which can move freely over the disc.
13:50And when the disc reaches a certain speed of rotation, it exerts a repulsive force on the weight sample.
13:57And pushes it up.
14:00In fact, this is a direct demonstration of the gravity fields.
14:05This gravity field is, in our case, repulsive.
14:09And as you can see, the repulsive force is pretty big.
14:15Hearing about the experiment, Ron Evans organized a team at GreenGlow to try to recreate Potklatnov's breakthrough.
14:22But they didn't have the budget to work with the highly specialized superconductor.
14:27We couldn't replicate what he'd done, so we couldn't say, yes, he had found her in effect, or no, he hadn't.
14:33By now, Mark Millis at NASA also wanted to know if there was something in Potklatnov's claim.
14:45And he had a much bigger budget.
14:47We found people who replicated the experiment with Potklatnov's help.
14:52And they even had 50 times the detection sensitivity that Potklatnov had had, and did not find any effect.
15:03Despite exhaustive tests, no one seemed able to reproduce Potklatnov's so-called gravity field.
15:09I think Potklatnov had jumped to a conclusion, had seen some things, and did not take the
15:16rigor to go through and make sure that he wasn't misleading himself.
15:22Meanwhile, news of Potklatnov's breakthrough had been leaked to the press.
15:28And the resulting media storm ultimately forced him to leave his university position.
15:32So Potklatnov went back to Moscow to work in secret.
15:40And by late 2001, he had claimed he had a new way to manipulate gravity.
15:47Wary of the Western media, he contacted the one man he trusted to give him a fair hearing.
15:54Ron Evans at Green Glow.
15:56Because of his security concerns, Potklatnov was only prepared to tell Ron the basic concept.
16:05I presented to him my latest works with impulse gravity generator, which gives a very short impulse of gravity waves.
16:16It's really a giant spark plug, really.
16:19But according to Dr. Potklatnov, someone way away, a kilometre away, on the balcony of some flats in line with the beam,
16:29was still able to detect a slight effect.
16:34That was incredible.
16:49For years, the gravity pulse concept remained shrouded in secrecy and stayed unproven.
16:58But by the early 2000s, a new generation of scientists had picked up the baton from Project Green Glow.
17:07Including Dr. Martin Tajmar, Professor of Space Systems at Dresden University.
17:12If you look for a challenge, always look for a big challenge.
17:19The ultimate challenge I can think of as a scientist is to control gravity.
17:24That's maybe the most difficult thing there is, right?
17:28Martin is about to comprehensively test Potklatnov's concept once and for all.
17:33His claims are that they can drill holes into brick walls and this kind of stuff, which is an extraordinary claim.
17:41And if you have an extraordinary claim, you must have extraordinary proof.
17:46Anti-gravity is a kind of synonym for the impossible.
17:49But always be ready for the surprise.
17:53This, in effect, is Potklatnov's gravity pulse generator, recreated by Martin and his team.
18:00As Ron Evans guessed, it's based on a kind of giant spark plug.
18:06Essentially, two electrodes in a box.
18:08Basically, you have two electrodes, one here and one here.
18:13And you're running a very, very high electric current discharge for that.
18:22This discharge goes through a superconductor.
18:25According to Potklatnov, this somehow creates a pulse of gravity, which is picked up by a sensor acting like an electronic pendulum.
18:37And let's say if you have your pendulum here, that when this gravitational impulse hits the pendulum,
18:45you will actually get a deflection of the pendulum.
18:47And so the claim is that this is actually also creating not only an electric discharge,
18:53but a kind of a gravitational impulse, a push to something at a distance.
19:09The superconductor is cooled with liquid nitrogen to remove its electrical resistance.
19:14Potklatnov claimed the resulting massive electrical discharge creates the gravitational pulse.
19:27They switch on the power to charge up the system
19:31and wait for the discharge.
19:36Counting down.
19:44There is a reading.
19:54So here's the data.
19:56Gravity goes with the speed of light, so you should see an instantaneous peak.
20:00And then the sound from this bang, this takes some time until it arrives.
20:04So we should see two distinct peaks because we have such a high time resolution.
20:08So that's the acoustic impulse.
20:10And exactly here, that's where the gravitational impulse should be, where we don't see it.
20:16The sensor felt the sound wave from the spark.
20:20But no gravity pulse.
20:23That's the most sensitive sensor there is in the world.
20:26And we don't even see something out of the noise.
20:30So how can you make a claim to say that you move things meters away or that you actually push
20:35pendulums away?
20:36So that's really outrageous claim.
20:38We haven't seen something not even remotely like that, so unfortunately.
20:43But yeah, so far, no luck.
20:50None of Potklatnov's methods seem to be able to alter gravity in the lab.
20:55Could the reason be a simple problem of scale?
20:58There is one industry that has to deal with gravity on a planetary scale.
21:08The space business.
21:10They're always clamoring for some form of gravity-beating propulsion.
21:23Mark Millis ran NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Project.
21:31One of its long-term goals was to move away from using rockets.
21:37The problem with rockets is not that they can't beat gravity.
21:41It's the amount of thrust they need to do it.
21:43If you think about the Apollo spacecraft, and you imagine here's a Saturn V, the very tip of that
21:51and then a little bit below that was the actual spacecraft itself. And all the rest of this
21:57was the propellant and the rocket fuel. And that's just to the moon.
22:06NASA plans to get humans to Mars and back within the next 15 years.
22:10And maybe one day, beyond the solar system itself.
22:16But just the Martian step seems impractical with conventional rockets,
22:21because leaving the Earth's gravity takes so much fuel.
22:24The farther or faster that you want to go, or more that you want to carry,
22:28you need this extra propellant to do that. And then you need extra propellant for the extra propellant,
22:34and it adds up exponentially.
22:35You wanted to go to our nearest neighboring star, which is over four light years away,
22:42and you wanted to do it with the kind of rockets that are on the space shuttle.
22:45And say you want to do it in 50 years, you're having to go a tenth of the speed of light.
22:49Well, the amount of propellant you need for that journey is about the mass of our entire sun.
23:05For Mark Millis and NASA, the focus was less on controlling gravity itself,
23:13than finding ways to get to the stars.
23:17They didn't care how long, as long as it didn't need rocket fuel.
23:26Then in 2002, a new device appeared that seemed to offer a solution.
23:35Invented by a former defense research engineer, Roger Scheuer.
23:44The big advantage of M-Drive is that it's a device which creates a force,
23:50but it doesn't have to shoot out a propellant out of the back.
23:56Instead of using rocket fuel to create thrust, the M-Drive uses microwave energy,
24:02just like a domestic oven.
24:07Microwaves bounce around inside the box in waves, cooking your food.
24:12To stop that energy cooking you, there is a mesh on the door with holes in it.
24:18The diameter of these holes are so small that instead of going through it,
24:23microwave radiation is actually bouncing up and down vertically in the hole.
24:29The holes trap the waves, slowing them to a standstill.
24:37According to Roger, the narrow end of his M-Drive does exactly the same job.
24:42The waves are going faster at the large end than they are at the small end.
24:48This means that the force at the large end is greater than the force at the small end,
24:55which will cause the cavity to move in the opposite direction.
24:59It would only produce a small amount of thrust. But in space, that wouldn't matter.
25:07An M-Drive thruster with continuous electrical power gives you continuous acceleration,
25:13and therefore you can achieve very large velocities and travel very large distances.
25:20Roger believes that if he could make it big enough, it could potentially lift us from the Earth.
25:26You suddenly have a lift engine, which simply hovers there, or indeed accelerates upwards.
25:33So, we can obviously envisage launching large payloads into space on an M-Drive driven space plane.
25:41Essentially, we are no longer looking at ways that we can control gravity itself.
25:46We are beating gravity the smart way.
25:49If it works.
25:53Though he didn't claim to control gravity, Roger's M-Drive concept was rejected by a lot of theoretical scientists,
26:02who claimed the basic physics just didn't add up.
26:05To settle the argument between the theorists and engineers, Martin Tajmar had the perfect test facility in Dresden.
26:23A large vacuum chamber mounted on dampers to isolate it from the surrounding world.
26:28A carefully designed rig to hold the drive, with a finely tuned balance to record any thrust.
26:41And most importantly, a copy of Roger Scheuer's original M-Drive.
26:46Martin's version is small, but if the principle works, there should be measurable thrust.
26:52The vacuum chamber is sealed.
27:02The thrust recorder inside is so sensitive, it can detect Martin sitting down outside.
27:11We're here in a laboratory on Earth, so there's some seismic movement,
27:15so the balance in cells will move just a little bit.
27:18That's the noise we are seeing here.
27:22The M-Drive is switched on.
27:29Nothing appears to move.
27:34But on Martin's screen, there is a reading.
27:37When we return on the thruster, the balance in it reacts,
27:41and we measure something which looks actually like a thrust.
27:44What we measured here in this case is something like 25 micronewtons.
27:48That's very, very small.
27:51You can compare this, for example, to a tenth of the weight force of a grain of rice.
27:57Incredibly small, still, however, useful, for example.
28:00In space, we have thrusters, actually, which have this tiny amount of force,
28:05which is still useful to maneuver spacecraft, for instance.
28:08The first results seem positive.
28:15But when Martin experimented further, he discovered a problem.
28:19So where the thrust are pointing in that direction, we measured thrust in that direction,
28:24and when we tilted it 90 degrees higher, we still measured thrust in this direction,
28:29which we shouldn't have.
28:32There can still be some major influence from, for example, the power fading lines,
28:37that we still need to solve to find out what's the real thrust produced by the M-Drive,
28:42if there is any thrust produced.
28:51The great hope of the M-Drive was that, as a kind of propellantless rocket,
28:56it would at least power vehicles in space.
28:59NASA's dream.
29:00But NASA didn't pursue the idea any further, or any other gravity-defying concepts.
29:11Because in 2002, they discontinued Mark Millis' project.
29:17The project ended when the funding for all propulsion research was cut.
29:22It wasn't just breakthrough propulsion physics, it was a congressional earmark to build a building
29:28in a certain state, and that took all the funding. It happens.
29:33Main progress that we made is we took science fiction notions and evolved them to at least
29:39the first step of the scientific method. That step by itself is a degree of progress that
29:45if I don't accomplish anymore, it's like, yeah, that was pretty good.
29:58It's like, yeah, that's what we're going to do.
30:01Ron Evans kept going for another three years.
30:05But when he retired in 2005, BAE closed down Project Green Glow.
30:14Is it a shame?
30:17Yeah, I suppose so. I would like to have worked at a company that actually made this idea work.
30:25It was a lovely idea.
30:33When Green Glow ended, the hope of mastering gravity seemed to end with it.
30:44If that was ever going to change, we needed to go much deeper into how gravity actually worked.
30:55When Green Glow ended, the hope of mastering gravity.
31:09Our understanding of gravity has come down from Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.
31:15From observations rooted in the motions of the heavens.
31:18Now those same heavens seem to be showing us something that looks remarkably like anti-gravity.
31:35The idea that the universe has some inherent form of anti-gravity is tantalizing.
31:42If only we could get our hands on it.
31:46The problem is, no one knows what this anti-gravity force actually is.
31:52Only that it seems to originate from space itself.
31:57Although we think of space as this emptiness, the absence of stuff, it actually isn't.
32:02There is something that's intrinsic to the nature of space that imparted an energy.
32:10And one of the big mysteries is, where does that energy come from?
32:14A number of scientists think the answer to this big question could lie in the very small,
32:25the very, very, very small world of subatomic particles.
32:31Quantum physics.
32:35According to current quantum theory, particles can spontaneously appear from nowhere.
32:39They just pop into existence in the vacuum of space.
32:49Matter and anti-matter, which, because they're opposites, cancel each other out in an instant.
32:54The lifetime is one-thousandth of one-billionth of one-billionth of a second.
33:05We are now in an ocean of particle-antiparticle pairs,
33:11permanently appearing and disappearing.
33:16Dr. Dragan Hadjukovic thinks something else happens to these particles
33:20to produce an anti-gravity effect.
33:29For the briefest moment of their existence, these particles can be polarized, like iron filings.
33:36The trouble is to get it in a random orientation.
33:40If there is a magnetic field, the random orientation will change.
33:47Yes.
33:51According to Dragan, in the same way iron filings respond to a magnet,
33:57pairs of quantum particles respond to mass.
34:03With matter and anti-matter, pairs are briefly orienting themselves in relation to that mass.
34:11Matter is attracted to the positive mass of a planet or a star,
34:15while anti-matter is repelled by it.
34:20Dragan believes this creates a halo of anti-gravity dark energy around every mass in the universe.
34:27All these halos together has negative pressure, what is exactly what we need in cosmological equations
34:38to produce the accelerated expansion of the universe.
34:42It means that there are both positive and negative gravitational charges.
34:50So far, we know that gravity is only attraction.
34:54It may be that gravity is also repulsion, but not between matter and matter, but between matter and anti-matter.
35:07It is actually going to be tested here in the world's biggest physics lab at CERN in Switzerland.
35:23Not in the famous Large Hadron Collider, but in the improbably named anti-matter factory,
35:33a team led by Jeffrey Hengst is building a machine that in a couple of years will answer one of the biggest questions in gravity research.
35:50Does anti-matter fall down or up?
35:56Hi, Dragan.
35:56Hi.
35:57Welcome to Alpha.
35:58Thanks again.
35:58Come on in.
36:00Let's take a look at this machine.
36:01Alpha is part of CERN's ongoing exploration into the nature of matter and gravity.
36:06So right now, what we're doing is we're routinely trapping anti-hydrogen.
36:10But for Dragan Hadjukovic, it will be make or break.
36:14Trapping anti-hydrogen to prepare for the...
36:16If he's right, creating anti-gravity on Earth is at least a theoretical possibility.
36:22From Einstein's perspective, a mass actually distorts the fabric of space and time, or space-time as it's called.
36:37That distortion is rather like a well.
36:39So here's another object that's moving nearby our mass that has bent space-time.
36:50And as it goes past, it bends towards the massive object.
36:56But a negative mass would be, in our analogy here, something like a mound instead of a depression.
37:02And then you run into problems.
37:06The problem, according to Einstein, is that using a negative mass would mean inverting space-time,
37:13effectively turning the fabric of the universe inside out.
37:18And what you end up with is something that's called a runaway problem.
37:22If you have physics that is just running out of control, it'll accelerate away arbitrarily with zero cost of energy.
37:31And if that were really happening anywhere in the universe, we'd see it spectacularly becoming an unstable situation.
37:52If Clifford Johnson and other theoretical physicists are right, anti-gravity propulsion will remain an unworkable dream.
38:03It seems the laws of physics simply don't allow it.
38:09At least, not as we understand those laws today.
38:15Because just as Galileo gave way to Newton, and Newton gave way to Einstein,
38:20theories do change.
38:37And in the meantime, well, the engineers get on with doing what engineers do.
38:42Building new kinds of propulsion.
38:46Today, that includes NASA.
38:47At the Glenn Research Laboratory in Ohio, work is underway to produce new forms of space engines.
38:57Ones that really could take us where rockets can't, beyond our solar system.
39:05What we have here is a high-powered ion thruster.
39:09And the way it produces thrust, our ions are created inside this ring.
39:14And then we establish electrostatic potential that accelerates these ions out and produces large velocities.
39:22And what that does is it gives us very efficient production of thrust.
39:28This is an ion thruster under test, pouring out a constant stream of charged particles.
39:34It's less powerful than a rocket, but capable of accelerating a spacecraft almost indefinitely.
39:42These systems are ideal for in space.
39:47You know, we operate them purely in space because it's very gentle.
39:51You know, the thrust level is low, but over time you can develop much higher velocities than you can with chemical rockets.
40:02NASA's focus is on space propulsion, beyond the Earth's gravitation.
40:06NASA's focus is on space.
40:09Yet there is a propulsion concept that aims to revolutionize all of aerospace,
40:15resurrected from the days of Project Green Glow.
40:22Ten years ago, Project Green Glow ended.
40:26And Ron Evans thought official gravity research had ended with it.
40:29But today, he's been invited to witness a unique gravitational breakthrough.
40:40When Ron first began his gravity research, it started with a question.
40:45Could gravity be used to detect aircraft that were invisible to radar?
40:51In the 1980s, our complete inability to work with gravity made it impossible.
40:57But today, Ron is meeting someone who says he's done it.
41:03This time, there are no covert meetings.
41:06He's going inside England's Ministry of Defense Research Laboratory at Porton Down.
41:12Ron, good morning. Welcome to the Defense Science of Technology.
41:15Neil Stansfield heads a department here that looks at what they call disruptive technology.
41:21And they've taken a potential step on the road to gravity control using quantum engineering.
41:32So what we have here is our quantum gravity gradiometer.
41:36It's a small system. At the heart of the device, we have a vacuum chamber.
41:41The sensor uses lasers to freeze a cloud of atoms.
41:45This cloud responds to disturbances in the Earth's gravitational field caused by a moving mass.
41:54The atoms are sensitive enough to detect the mass of my body at a range of about one meter.
41:59So your gravitational field is affecting this device?
42:02Yes.
42:04This is the first time Ron has seen anyone actually using gravity.
42:10To me, this is amazing technology. Getting into the quantum, that's really allowing us to do things that
42:16were just unbelievable 30 years ago.
42:18Yes. Some people use the phrase, they break the laws of physics.
42:22I prefer to say they break the laws of physics as we understand them today.
42:25A hundred years ago, we didn't understand the quantum physics.
42:28The idea of being able to measure changes in gravity, science fiction, could never happen.
42:33Today, we can.
42:34Yes.
42:35Ron Evans' mission to control gravity began here, in a cold, wet corner of Lancashire,
42:51where people go to live their dreams, where no one ever worried about the word impossible.
42:58For Ron Evans, gravity control is just something we haven't learned to do.
43:08Yet.
43:09I'm sure we will one day. It's just a matter of time.
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