Scientists 'beat gravity' using a gyroscope
By Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent
A TEAM of scientists backed by a leading Japanese multi-national company claims to have found a way of generating "anti-gravity" using nothing more than a spinning gyroscope. Although the claimed effect is extremely feeble -- amounting to a loss in weight of just one part in 7,000 -- the team insists that it cannot be explained away as experimental error.
Such claims have been circulating for at least a decade and have always been surrounded by controversy. According to conventional physics, it is impossible for any object to generate anti-gravity, or even screen out its effects...
Now new fuel has been added to the antigravity controversy by Hideo Hayasaka and colleagues at the Faculty of Engineering, Tohoku University, Japan, together with Matsushita, the Japanese multinational. The team has carried out a new set of experiments aimed at detecting anti-gravity generated by a small gyroscope.
The principle behind the experiment is very simple. After spinning up the gyroscope to 18,000 revolutions per minute, it is put inside an airtight container and allowed to fall between two laser beams. These record how long the gyroscope takes to fall nearly 6ft between the two beams. Any reduction in the strength of the gravity reveals itself in a slight increase in the time it takes to fall the 6ft.
In a series of 10 runs, the team found that the gyroscope took about 1/25,000 of a second longer to fall when it was spinning than when it was stationary - equivalent to an anti-gravity effect of just one part in 7,000...