Could Anti-gravity Really be Possible?

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]This video is sponsored by me.

[00:00:04]Over the decades, anti-gravity has been the stuff of science fiction.

[00:00:08]But with the recent government releases of videos showing UAPs doing things that we cannot explain, and even congressional meetings on the subject, one of the fundamental features of these craft, objects, or whatever they may be, is their seeming ability to manipulate gravity in a way which we simply have no clue about.

[00:00:28]Now, this may be just coming from the fevered imagination of AI, or just the latest form of disinformation or perception management, possibly using UAP stories as a cover narrative. But what it does do is to make us look again at gravity and the seemingly gaping holes in our knowledge of what it really is, and the attempts to try and make it work for us like other fundamental forces of nature, like electromagnetism.

[00:00:59]Almost everything so far which has been claimed to be a form of anti-gravity is just really using other known forces.

[00:01:07]Though there is a very interesting effect which, if verified, could be the closest we have come so far, and we'll look at that later.

[00:01:15]A plane could be said to be an anti-gravity machine because it can lift you up and away from the surface of the earth and the gravitational pull. But it's actually using the pressure differential of a wing traveling through air at speed create lift.

[00:01:31]A rocket does a similar thing by burning fuel which expands, creating thrust and pushing it along. With enough thrust, it can overcome the pull of Earth's gravity, but it's nothing more than a chemical reaction.

[00:01:45]And magnets can lift objects and vehicles so that they float above a surface.

[00:01:51]But this is just the effect of repulsive magnetism, like when you try and force two magnets together with the same poles on each. It's just the electromagnetic force.

[00:02:02]In the '80s and '90s, gyroscopic inertial thrusters were seen as potential sources of reactionless thrust.

[00:02:10]When seen in action, they appear to be able to generate lift and defy gravity.

[00:02:16]They use various methods of leverage against the support of a large flywheel or gyroscope. And this appears to generate lift when the angle of the gyroscope is changed, but after years of theoretical and laboratory testing by NASA and others, no thrust or anti-gravity forces in free space were found to be produced.

[00:02:37]Other so-called anti-gravity lifters using the Biefeld-Brown effect are in fact using the propulsive force of ion flow.

[00:02:45]By charging a very lightweight object or lifter, usually with a positive high voltage, the surrounding air is ionized.

[00:02:54]As the ions are attracted to the opposite negative electrode, usually the ground, they interact with the neutral air molecules, creating an air flow with enough force to levitate the lifter.

[00:03:06]Some claimed that the effect works in a vacuum and therefore must be some form of interaction between the electric field and the Earth's gravity field, and implying that it could be used to create an anti-gravity effect. When NASA tested it in a vacuum equivalent to that found in the lower Earth orbit, the effect disappeared, proving that it was caused by the propulsive force of ions pushing against the air.

[00:03:32]Gravity is one of the fundamental forces, and thus anti-gravity, in theory, would be impossible.

[00:03:39]It has been proposed that if another force could attract matter or repel it like a theoretical anti-gravity, then maybe a machine could be made to simulate that effect.

[00:03:52]One of the simplest possible loopholes used to be antimatter. If antimatter fell upwards in Earth's gravitational field, then it would have been a real form of repulsive gravity and a major crack in our current theories.

[00:04:07]But in 2023, CERN's Alpha G experiment directly measured [clears throat] the motion of antihydrogen and found that, within the limits of the experiment, antimatter falls downward like normal matter. That does not explain why the universe contains so little antimatter, but it does make the most obvious form of anti-gravity much less likely.

[00:04:30]So, what about gravity shielding, similar to a Faraday shield for radio waves? Electromagnetic fields are easy to shield because they have both positive and negative charges. By arranging these charges in a conductor, like the Faraday shield, you can cancel out an external field.

[00:04:50]To see if any material does have an effect on the weak equivalence principle, this has now been tested to an extraordinary level of precision. The weak equivalence principle, or WEP, aka the universality of free fall, states that all uncharged, structureless test particles fall with the same acceleration in a gravitational field, regardless of their mass or composition.

[00:05:16]This is very similar to the hammer and feather test that the Apollo astronauts did on the moon to see if in a vacuum they both fall at the same rate.

[00:05:25]Universal attraction, according to WEP, says that all mass energy acts as a single type of gravitational charge.

[00:05:33]Because there is no known negative mass, you cannot create a configuration of matter that cancels out the gravity of, say, a nearby object, like another planet, by adding more matter. The only thing it does is it just increases the total gravitational pull.

[00:05:52]From 2016 to 2018, the Microscope satellite compared how different materials fall in Earth orbit and found no violation of the WEP down to one part in a quadrillion, or one with 15 zeros after it.

[00:06:11]If ordinary materials could block or alter gravity in any simple way, that was the kind of experiment where the difference might have started to show up.

[00:06:21]Now, this episode's sponsor is me.

[00:06:24]I've mentioned occasionally that I'm a bit of a synth head, and I've been into electronic music since I was 12, way back in 1974.

[00:06:32]That was the year that Tangerine Dream released Phaedra. Kraftwerk released Autobahn, and Isao Tomita released Snowflakes are Dancing, three landmark electronic albums from pioneering artists that had a huge influence on me.

[00:06:47]But it was Tomita's work that really fascinated me. Over nine albums from 1974 to '84, he took classical works by composers like Debussy, Mussorgsky, Stravinsky, Holst, and many others, and recreated them electronically using synthesizers such as the Moog modular.

[00:07:04]Now, this was similar in concept to Wendy Carlos' Switched-On Bach, but Tomita's music was more colorful, surreal, and flamboyant.

[00:07:12]Back then, I knew almost nothing about classical music, and the sounds Tomita created were completely new to me and everyone else.

[00:07:21]That combination of classical composition and the strange, beautiful, otherworldly electronic sound was utterly fascinating.

[00:07:30]It followed the original scores, but somehow sounded like nothing else.

[00:07:34]Since 1998, on and off, I've been making electronic music inspired by that same approach.

[00:07:41]I'm not covering the same pieces Tomita did, but reworking other works by some of those composers using a mixture of hardware and software synthesizers.

[00:07:52]Last year, I finally had an album's worth of material that I felt was good enough to release.

[00:07:57]This is what I'm promoting today.

[00:08:00]As I've [music] been speaking, you've been hearing snippets of the music from the album.

[00:08:05]This is made very much in the spirit of Tomita, classical pieces reimagined through synthesis with dark, bright, strange, colorful [music] sounds and a deliberately electronic character.

[00:08:18]So, if you're a fan of Tomita-styled music, or you're into the more eclectic electronic music, you can hear the whole thing for free on my Bandcamp page, paulshelitommusic.bandcamp.com.

[00:08:32]If you enjoy it, you can purchase the album or individual tracks for the price of a coffee or two.

[00:08:38]It helps support the channel, and it also helps keep this slightly unusual corner of electronic music alive.

[00:08:52]In scientific papers published between 1991 and '93, American scientist Ning Li claimed that anti-gravity effects could be achieved if the ions in a Bose-Einstein condensate, that's a state of matter where all the atoms in it can act like one, could be trapped into a high-temperature superconducting disk with a time-varying magnetic field. A huge amount of energy could be stored in its lattice structure in this way.

[00:09:23]As each ion would spin rapidly, it would create a tiny gravitational field.

[00:09:28]However, because all the ions in the Bose-Einstein condensate would be aligned, the effect would be magnified by the billions of ions in the disk.

[00:09:39]The theory is that this would create a gravity-like field that could either increase or decrease the effect of gravity, which Ning Li called AC gravity because it could be attractive or repulsive in nature.

[00:09:51]She said that the experiments in the lab had created a beam-like effect above the disk, which affected matter for some distance and this backed up her theories.

[00:10:01]Even though it had created a lot of interest at the time, in 1997 she published another paper saying that using new measurements with a more sensitive gravimeter had shown the effect to be either very small or non-existent. In 2000 Ning Li left the University of Alabama and set up her own company, AC Gravity LLC. And in 2001 she was awarded a grant worth just under $450,000 from the Department of Defense to investigate it further.

[00:10:31]Since then she has all but disappeared and nothing more has been heard about her research but the company, AC Gravity LLC, apparently was still in business.

[00:10:41]Ning Li died in 2021 and as of now there is still no public, independently repeated demonstrations of her AC Gravity idea. So her work remains one of the more intriguing anti-gravity claims to come from the 1990s and early 2000s but it is not a confirmed technology.

[00:11:02]Experiments carried out by Evgeny Podkletnov in the early 1990s using rotating superconducting disks in a magnetic field claimed to decrease the effect of gravity by about 2% on objects placed above the disk and again it appeared to act like a beam above the disk for a considerable distance.

[00:11:22]However, these results had not been able to be verified by other scientists. He claimed that the other researchers had not used the same setup and that's the reason why they could not reproduce the same results.

[00:11:33]And when NASA was about to complete the experiments they ran out of funding and the research was taken over by the Department of Defense and he was shut out of any further research in the US because of his Russian citizenship.

[00:11:47]This and Ning Li's work is said to have prompted Boeing to investigate the effect of rotating superconductors with Project GRASP, Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion.

[00:11:59]With potential uses including space launches, artificial gravity on spacecraft, aircraft propulsion and fuel-less electricity generation.

[00:12:09]Although others have pointed out that if the effect could be proven and directed into a beam, it would be able to be weaponized creating steerable artificial gravity forces to destabilize missiles, planes and satellites.

[00:12:23]Since the information was released, Boeing has backtracked and said it was offered the proposal but chose not to fund it with company money but refused to comment if this was a black project on the company books.

[00:12:37]This is also where the story starts to overlap with the more controversial subject of classified aerospace work and UAP claims.

[00:12:46]To keep the known science separate from speculation, there is no public evidence that Boeing, NASA, the Department of Defense or any private contractor has demonstrated working anti-gravity propulsion.

[00:12:59]What does exist are historical proposals, rumors and claims around black projects, some of which use the same language of superconductors, field propulsion, gravity beams or inertial mass reduction.

[00:13:14]These and others are based on the idea of gravit electromagnetism which looks at the analogies between Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism and Einstein's equations of relativistic gravitation.

[00:13:27]Basically the premise is that just as a spinning electron creates a magnetic field, then a massive spinning object like the Earth will create drag on space-time, a bit like when you spin a ball in a viscous fluid like oil.

[00:13:42]Although this drag was predicted nearly a hundred years ago, Einstein called it frame dragging, it's taken the best part of a century to prove if it actually existed with several independent satellite missions which did indeed measure a small but noticeable dragging effect. This is important because our current theories of gravity are that mass curves the otherwise flat space-time and this deformation of space-time is gravity.

[00:14:13]This is shown quite well with the weight in a rubber sheet experiment that represents the Sun and pulls the sheet down in the center.

[00:14:21]A ball rolling in a straight direction follows the curve. This is like the Earth which is traveling in a straight line but is caught in the curve of space-time created by the Sun's mass and so long as the Earth's speed is constant, it orbits the Sun.

[00:14:38]If the frame dragging effect is real, then it is affecting gravity and a moving object near a massive rotating object would experience acceleration not predicted by Newtonian laws.

[00:14:51]It's been suggested that this effect might be behind the massive jets of gas that are ejected from quasars and galactic nuclei. Rotating supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies would also create enormous frame dragging effects.

[00:15:07]This is where the spinning superconducting disks in Ning Li's and the GRASP experiments come in to simulate this frame dragging and the gravitational warping effect but on a very much smaller scale.

[00:15:22]But the elephant in the room is that we still don't know what gravity really is.

[00:15:28]Yes, we have Newton and Einstein's laws which predict with amazing accuracy the effects of gravity but these theories don't tell us how gravity works or what the mechanism is that makes mass bend space-time. All we know is that gravity is a consequence of mass and the greater the mass, the greater the bending of space-time and hence the greater gravity.

[00:15:53]Although gravity works over huge distances on the grand scale of planets, stars and galaxies, we don't know how it really works on the very small things at the distances of atomic scale because its effect is then so weak and difficult to measure.

[00:16:09]Conversely, we don't know how it works where gravity is incredibly strong such as in a black hole.

[00:16:17]There are many theories as to how gravity actually works but none of which have been proven.

[00:16:23]In quantum mechanics, there is a prediction that a force-carrying particle called a graviton might exist even though there has been no proof found of their existence.

[00:16:34]But as all the other three fundamental forces, strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force have at least one force carrier, it's believed there must be one for gravity, too, if gravity is a true force.

[00:16:52]Another route is quantum gravity. There are now serious proposals for small laboratory experiments that try to test whether gravity can create quantum entanglement between tiny masses.

[00:17:04]If that is shown, it would suggest that gravity has quantum properties. But again, this would not be a gravity control device. It would just be a clue about what gravity really is at the smallest scales.

[00:17:19]Gravity appears to have virtually no interaction with any other forces and works on any form of matter, even ones which we can't currently detect, namely the still unknown dark matter.

[00:17:33]There is also no known way to shield against it because it bends space-time which is the underlying fabric of the universe and as such it's not really a force.

[00:17:45]We can only feel the effects of it when we are stopped from moving like when we're standing on the ground but being pulled by the mass of the Earth below us.

[00:17:54]If we were free falling in space just above the Earth, we would feel nothing at all.

[00:18:00]True anti-gravity would need something deeper, negative mass, negative energy, a new force or some way to manipulate the geometry of space-time itself.

[00:18:12]Then there are the observations of the physical universe that show that the rate of expansion from the Big Bang is speeding up instead of the expected slowing down under the effect of gravity.

[00:18:23]So either we have a major problem with our theories of gravity or there is something else out there that is providing a yet unknown force which is overpowering gravity and pushing the universe apart in all directions which we currently call dark energy.

[00:18:40]And like dark matter, we cannot detect it directly but only see the effect it has a bit like gravity itself.

[00:18:48]Dark energy is still one of the strangest parts of the story. It behaves on the largest scales like a repulsive effect causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate but it's not something that we know how to collect, focus or switch on inside a machine.

[00:19:06]If dark energy is a kind of anti-gravity, then it is a cosmic one and not an engineering tool.

[00:19:13]So given all this, is true anti-gravity or some form of gravity control a realistic proposition? We still don't know if anything has really come from the research by Ning Li and Project GRASP. It's been rather quiet on that front in recent years.

[00:19:29]A source at NASA said that the science appeared to be sound but the difficulty was in scaling it up.

[00:19:35]At some point in the future when we have a much better understanding of what gravity really is and how it really works, we might find a way to manipulate it as we want but unless a new breakthrough is announced, it appears to be in the realm of science fiction. As it stands, antimatter does not fall upwards. Simple gravity shielding looks like it's even less likely, and the old superconducting claims remain unverified.

[00:20:01]But some theories, namely warp drive mathematics, negative energy, quantum gravity, modified gravity, and dark energy all show that gravity is not yet a finished subject.

[00:20:13]But the gap between our theories and our understanding of the real-world engineering that will be required, however, is still enormous.

[00:20:24]So, if you enjoyed the video, then please thumbs up, share, and subscribe.

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