Claims about the invention of an anti-gravity machine are common on the fringes of modern physics and none has ever been taken seriously. Until now.
One of the world's most respected physics journals, Physical Review Letters, has published a report by two Japanese scientists who claim that when they spun a special gyroscope at speeds between 3,000 and 13,000 rpm, it lost a tiny amount of weight. The faster it spun, the more weight it lost.Weight is a measure of gravity's effect and although the weight loss was small - between 20 and 60 millionths of the gyroscope's 11.3 ounces - any provable loss would appear to violate the known laws of physics. Other physicists who have seen the report suspect it is almost certainly wrong, but no one, including several senior physicists who reviewed the research before the journal agreed to publish it, has yet discovered a source of any error. The report was published for other physicists to examine.
Unlike most claims of extraordinary phenomena, this one was published with full technical details so that others may try to reproduce the results. The scientists, Hideo Hayasaka and Sakae Takeuchi of Tohoko University in Sendai, appear to have designed their experiments to rule out many potential sources of error, other physicists say.