We could all be driving vehicles like the Jetsons' in a decade or two if Ning Li's research at the University of Alabama comes along as well as she expects. The idea of blocking the effect of gravity might not be just confined to Star Trek episodes. Is this possible though? Can gravity be blocked? Had Einstein foreseen the effect, as some researchers maintain?
As of now, there are no direct answers to many of these questions. However, I will show you what we have so far.
It all began with a Russian guy in a lab smoking a pipe. He noticed that the smoke behaved very strangely when it drifted over the experiment.(How so?) This gave him an idea and he measured the mass of an object when it was above the experiment. Wow! The object appeared to have lost some of its weight!
What was the experiment and how could that happen, you ask? Well, that's the experiment that NASA still hasn't been able to duplicate, and the why of it is what many physicists are still hotly debating, or simply refuse to consider could happen.
No matter how many skepticals are out there, some groups, including NASA, think this is definatly worth checking out. One scientist, Ning Li, is even boasting of creating a levitating vehicle in the next ten years! Most of the scientists involved, however, are concentrating simply on confirming Podkletnov's results from his experiment.