I asked him if he ever got the feeling that anyone was working on this stuff elsewhere; that there may even have been breakthroughs — ten, twenty, maybe forty years earlier. His reply was more candid than I had anticipated.
"That's always a possibility. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but we've learned about things that governments and organizations have been involved in in the past." He paused and rubbed the bristle hairs at the back of his head. I waited. "It would be extremely frustrating to think that we're duplicating what was done maybe decades before. We like to think we're on the cutting edge, at the forefront of knowledge. It would be very discouraging to think that everything had been determined before and we were just sort of… here for show. I hope that's not the case. But you never know. Maybe in some aspects it is." It was then that my PR escort interjected. "You know," she said, "I really don't think this is anything that we can comment on in any depth." I knew that the topic of conversation had taken an unwelcome turn.
Now, I had intruded far enough. "I'm simply trying to get a feel for the kind of capabilities that are out there — on both sides of the fence," I replied. "Then maybe you should go talk to the Air Force," she said crisply. In any case, I was talking to the wrong people at NASA, she added. Huntsville was where the big picture behind the interstellar vision came together. But, she said, the "breakthrough physics" that would one day lead to the engineering of a "device" was being managed by the NASA Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field in Cleveland. It was from there, not here, that NASA was actively in the process of handing out contracts that aimed to prove or disprove whether there was any substance to the theory.
If I wanted to know whether the physics was doable, get up there, she told me. Talk to a guy called Millis. Marc Millis.
Before I left, I had one last question for Schmidt. I asked him if he genuinely believed that a wormhole might one day give man the ability to cross the universe.
"Yeah," he said, smiling but serious at the same time. "If you can build a wormhole, certainly. Who knows? But you've gotta be careful to make sure you've got the right end point. Who knows where you'll end up if you just generate it? You could end up anywhere in the universe. So that's something to be very careful about."
Six hundred miles to the northeast in Cleveland, Ohio, but a world away culturally, Marc Millis had indeed just received a half-million-dollar contract to test whether there was any theory out there, anything at all, that might one day enable a propulsion device to be built with the energy to take man out of the Solar System and into interstellar space.
Millis ran the NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program, referred to in the trade as BPP. "This is it," he told me, gesturing to the modest office he shared with another NASA official whose head was just visible on the other side of the screen that set the boundaries of Millis' work space. It had taken some hard negotiating after Huntsville, but I had managed to secure a visit to the Glenn Research Center, NASA's "center of excellence for aeropropulsion research and technology," on my way to Washington, where I was due to conduct some interviews for the magazine before heading on down to Puthoff's place in Austin, Texas.
With his half a million dollars, Millis had awarded five contracts, any one of which might lead to the breakthrough that gave BPP its name.
The first contract, placed with the University of Washington, Seattle, was designed to test theory which maintained that a change in inertia was possible with a sudden energy-density change, induced, say, by a massive jolt of electricity. Manipulate inertia — an object's innate resistance to acceleration — and apply it to a spacecraft and you had the ability to reduce, if not negate altogether, its need for propellant. If the sums were right, it would continue to accelerate until it reached light-speed.
The second experiment was tasked with examining the reality of the so-called zero-point energy field and whether it existed at anything like the magnitudes that had been postulated by some scientists. If these people were even half right, Millis said, zero-point energy held enormous significance for space travel and offered entirely new sources of nonpolluting energy on Earth. What, I asked, was zero-point energy? For some years, Millis replied, there had been a developing understanding that space was not the empty vacuum of traditional theory, but a seething mass of energy, with particles flashing in and out of existence about their "zero-point" baselines. Tests indicated that even in the depths of a vacuum chilled to absolute zero (minus 273.15 °C) — the zero point of existence — this energy would not go away. The trouble was, no one knew quite where it was coming from. It was just there, a background radiation source that no one could adequately explain. With millions, perhaps billions, of fluctuations occurring in any given second, it was theoretically possible to draw some — perhaps a lot — of that energy from our everyday surroundings and get it to do useful work. If it could be "mined" — both on Earth and in space — it offered an infinite and potentially limitless energy source.
The third experiment, he continued, would set out to examine the unproven link between electromagnetism and gravity and its possible impact on space-time. Perturbations of space-time not only promised a propulsive antigravitational effect, but opened up other more esoteric possibilities, such as time travel.
I asked Millis if this stuff was for real and for a moment he looked unsure. The mere mention of time travel and we were suddenly into science-fiction territory. It was enough to put any serious scientist on the defensive.
"The immediate utility is not obvious," he said stiffly, "but it's like a foot in the door."
The fourth experiment looked at "superluminal quantum tunneling" faster-than-light speed. Recent laboratory tests had shown light pulses accelerating beyond the speed of light, thereby shattering Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which said that the light-speed barrier was unbreachable. If a light pulse could arrive at its destination before it left its point of departure, the theory said a spacecraft might be able to as well.
"How it translates into space travel," Millis said, anticipating my next question, "is way down the pike."
Again I was presented with a failure of fit. If NASA was still struggling with the theory now—40 years and a world of knowledge after the pronouncements of George S. Trimble and his colleagues in 1956—what on earth had led them to believe they could crack gravity then?
Something I'd written down tugged me back to the present. I flicked back over the list of experiments and did a quick inventory count.
"You said there were five contracts. I've only got four. What's the fifth?" He looked momentarily taken aback. "It's conducted under the auspices of the Marshall Space Flight Center itself," he said. "Since you'd just come from there I rather presumed they'd briefed you on it." I shook my head. "Briefed me on what?" Millis reached into a drawer and pulled out a file full of newspaper clippings and magazine articles. He rifled through them until he found what he was looking for, a clipping from Britain's Sunday Telegraph dated September 1,1996. The headline read: "Breakthrough As Scientists Beat Gravity."
"I'm surprised you didn't know about this," he said, pointing to its source.
I said nothing. I had a photocopy of the same story in my files at home. I'd not taken much notice of it because it had seemed totally outlandish.
The story detailed the experiments of a Russian materials scientist called Dr. Evgeny Podkletnov, who claimed to have discovered an Breakthrough as scientists beat gravity antigravity effect while working with a team of researchers at Tampere University of Technology in Finland. What made the claim different from "so-called 'antigravity' devices put forward by both amateur and professional scientists," wrote the paper's science correspondent, was that it had survived "intense scrutiny by skeptical, independent experts." It had been put forward for publication in Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, published by Britain's Institute of Physics. When the Telegraph hit the streets, Podkletnov's world turned upside down. He was abandoned by his friends, ostracized by the university, which claimed that the project did not have its official sanction (and later threw him out), and the journal pulled his paper. Leaving his wife and family in Tampere, Podkletnov returned to Moscow to lick his wounds until the furor had died down.