Re:  http://english.pravda.ru/society/2001/07/25/10987.html

Several things come to mind as possible candidates.  Noting that Dr. Sobolov is the Director of the Institute (for) Science of Materials of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, then very probably the breakthrough is in materials in new states just as he states.

First, view the material in the supersystem sense, not used in the West. The "supersystem" consists of the physical system (in this case, the material with all its internal structures and dynamics), the active vacuum, and the local curvatures of spacetime.   All three components of the supersystem continuously interact, contrary to normal classical EM theory that erroneously assumes an inert vacuum and a flat spacetime.  Also, consider not just the Poynting energy flow theory, but the much better Heaviside energy flow theory.   The latter contains Poynting's divergent component of energy flow, and also contains a huge, tremendous extra energy flow component that is a curl vector field form.  Since the divergence of the curl (in flat spacetime) is zero, then usually the Heaviside component does not interact with anything, to speak of, and so it just roars on out into space and is lost.  But it does mean that every generator and battery (and dipolar power source) outputs enormously greater energy than the energy that we account as being input to it (e.g., than the mechanical energy input to the shaft of a generator, or the chemical energy dissipated in a battery).

Circa the 1890s, Lorentz arbitrarily discarded the huge but worrisome Heaviside nondivergent component of energy flow. Stating that it does nothing so has no physical significance, Lorentz assumed a closed surface surrounding any volume element of interest, and integrated the entire energy flow vector (containing both the diverged and nondiverged components) around that closed surface.  That neatly disposes of the huge Heaviside nondiverged component, while retaining the Poynting diverged component that is many orders of magnitude smaller.  Today, engineers dutifully continue to utilize that same little integration trick, resulting in the odd fact that the Poynting energy flow is NOT the energy flow in space through a unit surface. A good electrodynamicist knows that; many EEs do not.

Anyway, the Heaviside flow is still there, but has just been long ignored and unaccounted.  My crude back-of-the-envelope estimate made some time ago was that the Heaviside component in a simple circuit is some 10 trillion or so times as great in magnitude as the Poynting energy flow.  I would welcome a much better estimate or calculation by a skilled theorist.

From the Russian description, the characteristics of the material are substantially altered electrodynamically.  When the Heaviside energy component is also considered, a considerable curvature of local spacetime can be had electromagnetically. I nominated that curvature mechanism (due to the long neglected Heaviside energy flow component accompanying every Poynting energy flow component) as producing the extra gravity in the arms of the spiral galaxies, holding those arms together.  When a persistent Dirac Sea Hole is considered as a negative energy source charge, I nominated it with its negative energy EM fields and potentials and therefore with negative energy Heaviside energy flow, as occurring in sharp gradients in astronomical explosions, etc., and thereby producing the excess antigravity that is responsible for the acceleration of the expanding universe.

Note that the divergence of the vector curl is not necessarily zero at all in a curved spacetime!  The Bohren experiment (negative resonance absorption of the medium) in my view proves the existence of the Heaviside flow component.  One puts in some energy, the material absorbs it, and then the material outputs 18 times as much energy as one input by Poynting calculations.  However, if one brings in spacetime curvature and accounts the Heaviside component that one also inputs unknowingly, the Bohren experiment is readily understood. It is real, and replicated and in the hard literature.  The Bohren experiment is performed in the IR (insulating resonant particles) and in the UV (conducting resonant particles).  It's just that our own scientists and DoE do not seem to appreciate what a COP = 18 heater would mean for all those boilers making steam for running steam turbines cranking the generators at our fossil-burning and nuclear-powered power plants.  Even a COP = 4.0 heater would be of enormous importance. Since the experiment proving it can be done is already in the hard nonlinear optics literature, one wonders why the national laboratories in DoE are not ordered and funded to develop just such heaters. Suppose a present heater were only 50 % efficient, and with a COP = 0.5, and one replaced it with a COP = 10.0 heater.  Then one could burn only one twentieth of the fuel presently being burned, and use only one 20th of the nuclear fuel cells presently being used.

So considering the Heaviside component and curved local spacetime, it is understandable that a material --- as a supersystem sufficiently nonlinear to warp spacetime to utilize some of its usually neglected Heaviside energy --- could and would produce a magnetic monopole.  Contrary to standard dogma, it is perfectly possible for a magnetic monopole to exist in a curved spacetime though not in a flat one.  A magnetic dipole whose poles are very close and equal in flat spacetime, can be observed as a net monopolarity (as if one of the poles were stronger than the other) in curved spacetime.

As to gravity:  All the particles of interest in the materials (the physical system) are spinning.  Once Professor Eric Laithwaite, in an invited lecture before the Royal Society, brought in a very large and heavy gyro to use as a demonstration for his lecture.  With the gyro turned off and not running, he could barely lift it with both hands and a real effort against the Earth’s gravitational field.  He plugged the gyro in, ran it up to speed, disconnected the power cord with the gyro running at speed, and then quite readily lifted the running gyro with one hand. He remarked to the audience that something very unique was going on here, and that Newton may be in trouble (meaning Newtonian gravity was in trouble).  The shocked Royal Society resulted in a grave damper placed on Laithwaite’s on his career from then on; that was the first invited lecture in some 200 years that was not reported in a special proceedings paper by the Royal Society.

See E. R. Laithwaite, “Oliver Heaviside ­ establishment shaker,” Electrical Review, 211(16), Nov. 12, 1982, p. 44-45.  Laithwaite knew of the extra Heaviside energy flow component. He also knew that, in his last years as a hermit, Heaviside recognized that this extra component had serious gravitational implications, and transformed that term into a gravitational term, thus uniting (for the purpose of gravity) EM and G.  Heaviside's draft notes with this transformation in them, were found years after his death, beneath the floor board of his little garret apartment in a cubbyhole he used as a convenient "filing place" or "keeping place".  The content of the draft papers is published in H. J. Josephs, “The Heaviside papers found at Paignton in 1957,” The Institution of Electrical Engineers Monograph No. 319, Jan. 1959, p. 70-76.

Laithwaite and Dawson filed at least one gravitational patent before Laithwaite died.  See E. R. Laithwaite and W. R. C. Dawson, "Propulsion System," U.S. Patent #5,860,317, Jan. 19, 1999.  See also his European patent WO95/30832, Nov. 16, 1995. Now to the Sweet vacuum triode amplifier, which was two barium ferrite magnets magnetized through their faces, with the flats separated and facing in attractive mode, kept apart by an aluminum or Plexiglas separator.  Two coils in quadrature were orthogonal to each other inside the magnet assembly. Sweet had discovered an "activation process" whereby he stimulated the barium nucleus into strong nuclear self-oscillation (self-resonance). Let us deviate a moment and note the COP = 18 from the Bohren experiment (and other experiments in negative resonance absorption of the medium) with particles in particle resonance, but with those particles very much  larger than a barium nucleus.  Note that, at the atomic nucleus level, the fields are tremendously larger than they are at the larger particle level used by Bohren and others.  So the Heaviside energy flow component at the nucleon level is far greater than the already enormous Heaviside energy flow component in the normal macroscopic world at the larger particle level. The gist was that Sweet's "particle resonance" conditioned magnets in self-oscillation at the nucleon level intercepted and output some 1,500,000 times as much energy as one input to the input coil.  This was independently measured and confirmed; e.g., by Walter Rosenthal, a professional test engineer of excellent ability and experience, and by other scientists and engineers.

But it is consistent with what should be expected in terms of “negative resonance absorption of the medium” where the “medium” is the nucleus consisting and its resonant particles are the nucleons in nuclear resonance. In short, probably Sweet’s “activation” was a means of shocking the barium nucleus into just such nuclear resonance with the nucleons in particle resonance, and with the negative resonance absorption of the medium yielding a COP = 1,500,000.

While in grad school to finish my MS in nuclear engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta in 1972, I had considered the Dirac Sea hole (prior to its interaction with a material to eat an electron and produce a lattice positron in the material) as a negative energy, negative mass electron.  I reasoned that its fields and potentials also were negative energy EM fields and potentials, and thus made reversed curvatures of spacetime. It seemed to me if sufficient negative power could be gotten by having sufficient source negative energy electrons, antigravity could be accomplished.  In other words, an object producing persistent negative energy electrons would also produce a reversed spacetime curvature that acted back on the source (the vehicle or mass of the object producing those holes) to produce an antigravity field. The object would still be in the earth's G-field (if on the earth), so it would be acted on by both G-fields in opposing manner. When the negative G-field was less than the Earth’s positive G-field, the object would just get lighter, but still exhibit normal type weight.  When the two G-fields were equal, the object would hover because it would not “feel” the earth’s gravitational field or respond to it.   When the negative G-field was larger, the object would lift or levitate against the Earth’s G-field.  But I went to Vietnam directly from Georgia Tech in that same 1972, and antigravity was very far from my mind for some years thereafter. I knew of no way to do such an experiment, or to get those persistent Dirac holes (output of negative energy).

Then working with Floyd Sweet some years later, his unit with a gain of 1,500,000 also put out mostly negative energy, and this was easily proven. When its leads were shorted, ice froze instantly around the shorted leads section and the leads, from the instant freezing of the moisture in the air. So suddenly I was looking at a unit that could possibly do antigravity, because it had to be outputting negative energy electrons (Dirac Sea holes), and they had to be persistent because experimentally they were.  The Sweet unit I'm referring to had 500 watts output (of mostly negative energy). After much arm wrestling and back-of-the envelope estimating, I concluded that if the output were doubled, a clear loss of weight of the power unit could probably be measured. If the output were pushed to about 1500 watts (too dangerous), it should hover.

I convinced Sweet to do that experiment.  He had to build a new output section with double the load capability, and with the load variable in 100 watt increments up to 1,000 watts.  We did not dare push past 1 kilowatt output, because the unit also deposited magnetic monopoles in the barium ferrite magnets, and when pushed carelessly too far the magnets would explode like hand grenades.  With no explosive facilities control, caution was mandatory to prevent Sweet’s injury or death.  Sweet did explode several magnets.

Anyway, Sweet did the experiment there in California, while I was here in Huntsville and on the phone with him.  He screwed in each 100 watt load in turn, and read the weight of the unit at that point.  With each new reading the unit's weight had reduced smoothly and controllably, in increments, until 90% of the unit’s 6-lb. weight was gone at full output of 1 kw.  The projected curve showed the unit would have levitated at about 1250 watts, so my early gut estimate of 1500 watts was not too shabby, all things considered!

Sweet told me later that his curiosity got the better of his caution, and later he did the experiments again with an increased load section and pushed it even further.  He claimed it did levitate on a tether, and he flew it around the room by merely tilting it a bit to develop a forward thrust component, then a rear thrust component, a side one, etc.  For the first experiment, I wrote up the results in a paper which was then published. I placed Sweet's name first, as was appropriate since he was the actual inventor, not me.  The paper is: Floyd Sweet and T. E. Bearden, "Utilizing Scalar Electromagnetics to Tap Vacuum Energy," Proceedings of the 26th Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference (IECEC '91), Boston, Massachusetts, 1991, p. 370-375.  Sweet's device produced 500 watts for a 330 microwatt input.  The highly successful anti-gravity experiment was also performed, and is reported in the paper.

Not long afterwards, a professional assassin fired at Sweet as he started up the front steps.  The assassin was firing a silenced rifle from about 300 yards or so.  As fate would have it, Sweet -- being aged-- stumbled on the steps and fell forward and down.  Just as his head moved forward in the fall, the bullet cracked right by his ear.  Sweet also began receiving all sorts of death threats and warnings, then, day and night, and odd and swarthy individuals accosted him and threatened him in the shopping center, etc.  The assassination attempt was reported to the FBI, but no one was ever caught.

Thereafter Sweet was frightened for his life (with just cause, in my opinion).  He would never again discuss those experiments, even with his backers.  He would turn away from the subject when I broached it.  I urged him many times to go to the leaders of the scientific community with that experiment, and show the results. He would not do it, because he feared to even consider it would mean his death.

Some years later he died, taking the magnet activation secret with him.  And that was that.

Anyway, the similarities to what Sweet did, to the materials work the Russians are reporting based on unusual characteristics induced in materials, appears to be marked.  I suspect the Russians do have what they are still quite not too clearly describing.  Further, I think it can be understood, and certainly plentiful electrical power directly from the vacuum can be had any time the U.S. scientific community will permit the sharp young grad students and post docs to work on it -- and will give them some funding, and not harass and destroy their careers for their daring to think new thoughts and do new work.

Sadly, the U.S. scientific community still accepts a very old classical Maxwell-Heaviside electrical engineering model that assumes every EM field, EM potential, and joule of EM energy in the universe is freely created by its associated source charges, right out of nothing at all, with no energy input to that source charge at all.  The model also assumes an inert vacuum (falsified in particle physics for quite a few decades), and assumes a flat spacetime (falsified since 1916).

Further, several areas in physics are already known to violate thermodynamics, even radically, by the thermodynamicists themselves. One is very thin media, another is strong gradients (about which Kondepudi and Prigogine point out, not much is known either experimentally or theoretically), and another is memory effects in materials.  Until the source charge problem -- where and how the charge gets the energy it continuously pours out in all directions, to establish and continuously replenish its associated fields and potentials --- is openly placed back into the physics agenda, and the supersystem used instead of just the system, then we will remain far behind the Russian nonlinear scientists who have always been the best nonlinear scientists on earth, and still are.

Best wishes,

Tom Bearden