The Theory of Antigravity

In 1991 the journal Physical Essays published a short paper by Harold Aspden titled "The Theory of Antigravity." Its purpose was not to announce a new measurement but to argue that antigravitational weight loss is theoretically possible inside Aspden's own electrodynamic graviton theory, and that a handful of reported laboratory anomalies — chiefly a Japanese flywheel experiment — can be read as evidence for it. The paper is a proposal of mechanism, not a report of an experiment the author performed. Aspden states this plainly in his acknowledgment: he had not, at that point, engaged in any experimental work bearing on what he describes.

The claim that prompted the paper

Aspden opens by noting the media interest in antigravity devices and the awkward position of the theoretical physicist, who has no accepted account of gravity's true nature or of its unification with electromagnetism. Against that background he introduces the observation he treats as the primary support: a flywheel spinning in vacuum about a vertical axis reportedly lost weight in direct proportion to its speed of rotation, but only for rotation in one direction — clockwise as seen from above, in a laboratory in the northern hemisphere. Aspden attributes this result to the hayasaka-takeuchi-experiment and stresses that it was performed in a university laboratory in Japan, which he takes as a reason to take it seriously rather than dismiss it.

The directional asymmetry is a striking feature of the claim. A weight change that depends on which way the rotor turns, and on which hemisphere the apparatus sits in, implies a coupling to something with a handed sense — the Earth's rotation, or a preferred frame — rather than a simple dependence on angular speed. The paper does not develop a quantitative account of that asymmetry.

Force-precessed versus freely spinning gyroscopes

A central distinction in the paper separates the Japanese case from earlier antigravity claims. Aspden writes that previous reports of anomalous gyroscope behaviour concerned gyroscopes that are force-precessed — driven to precess faster than gravity alone would cause. The Japanese flywheel, by contrast, spins in a non-precessing mode. Aspden treats these as different situations requiring different explanations, and he uses the distinction to organise the evidence he cites. See force-precessed-vs-nonprecessing-gyroscope.

For the force-precessed case he relies on a demonstration he witnessed by eric-laithwaite, described as the effortless lifting of a heavy flywheel in precession. Aspden's reasoning is that the supporting shaft was itself quite heavy, so the lift could not have been possible unless the flywheel's weight was virtually zero at that moment. This is an argument from a witnessed demonstration rather than from instrumented measurement, and Aspden presents it as such.

The proposed mechanism: a nucleating vacuum lattice

The theoretical core of the paper asks how a "manipulated" mass could lose weight in a gravitational field that acts normally on an unmanipulated mass in the same position. Aspden's answer is that the question as posed is malformed, because it treats mass as isolated from the field. He reformulates it: if a mass affects the local field in such a way that something in that field, normally coupled to the mass, is acted upon by gravity, then the argument can proceed.

From there he proposes a local lattice in vacuum space with an affinity to form a structural association with the structured atomic nuclei of a particle. The analogy he offers is nucleation in a liquid crystal: the lattice structure can be minimal, broken into minute crystal units each nucleated on a microscopic element of nuclear matter, or it can spread until the boundaries of those units interface throughout the material and embrace the empty space between nuclei. An atom's associated structure might extend no further than the nucleus, or might reach some but not all of its electrons. This is the vacuum-lattice-hypothesis-aspden, and Aspden adopts it explicitly as a working hypothesis that lets him distinguish normal from abnormal gravitational behaviour.

The actors in the resulting scenario are the particle masses, the space lattices nucleated on them, the in-fill lattice of empty space, and transient gravitons created from the vacuum background near the particles, which decay as they transfer energy and momentum to the lattice system. In a normal body at rest or in steady motion, Aspden says, gravitation proceeds by the creation of gravitons of energy Mc² adjacent to a mass M; these gravitons fall under their mutual gravitational action and decay. The antigravitational effect is attributed to vacuum energy fluctuations arising from graviton decay and regeneration. This extends the programme behind graviton-decay-g-derivation-aspden, in which Aspden had earlier derived the gravitational constant G from graviton properties.

The third-law precedent argument

Aspden anticipates the objection that antigravity would breach conservation laws, and answers it with precedent. He notes that the Lorentz force breaches Newton's third law — a point he says is well known to experts on electromagnetism — and that beta decay breaches conservation of linear and angular momentum as well as energy. The neutrino, in his account, was invented as a hypothetical massless particle carrying exactly the qualities needed to restore the balance required by Newtonian or Einsteinian philosophy. In Aspden's opinion this was a way of folding vacuum properties, including vacuum energy fluctuations, into a physics that sought to avoid reference to the ether. The rhetorical move is that if conservation is already breached elsewhere, antigravity cannot be dismissed on conservation grounds alone. This is the third-law-breach-precedent-argument.

Mainstream physics does not treat either case as a genuine breach: the neutrino restores the conservation books in beta decay, and the Lorentz force on a system that includes the field conserves momentum. The disagreement is therefore about whether the precedents are real, not about whether antigravity would need one.

Speculative asides

Two further items appear briefly. The first is the Hutchinson effect, a reported phenomenon in which electromagnetic equipment including Tesla coils causes blocks of wood or metal to lose weight, captured on video. Aspden calls the footage disconcerting and incomprehensible in accepted physics, and speculates that powerful low-frequency electromagnetic oscillations might set up electrical vibrations not confined to one steady direction, breaking up lattice units and causing them to contract around their nucleating atoms. He offers this as a possible basis for the antigravitational phenomenon, not as a demonstrated result.

The second is a set of earlier gyroscope propulsion experiments, particularly in the patent literature. Aspden singles out Di Bella of the Institute of Naval Architecture at the University of Genoa, Italy, and a related U.S. patent, as the most informative. He also mentions machines built by Kidd and by Scott Strachan of Edinburgh, one of which was demonstrated at a symposium in Canada in June 1988 with its own precision balance and remote radio control. Aspden concedes the standard objection to such devices — that vibration interacting with nonlinear friction could produce the apparent propulsion — and argues that this is why one must either run precision integrated force measurements on devices immune to external friction, or focus on experiments with no vibration at all, such as Laithwaite's. He also quotes Massey on the possibility that matter and antimatter repel gravitationally, noting that it is not yet known whether antiprotons fall downward or upward.

Evidence boundary

The paper's evidential footing is thin and Aspden does not pretend otherwise. The experimental support is secondhand: the Japanese report, a test performed as part of a commercial investigation, and demonstrations he witnessed. No independent replication or quantitative data appears in the available text, and the acknowledgment states that the author had done no experimental work of his own on the subject. The mechanism — nucleating vacuum lattice, graviton decay and regeneration, vacuum energy fluctuations — is a proposal advanced to explain anomalies, not a derivation checked against measurement. The paper is best read as an attempt to give theoretical cover to laboratory claims that mainstream physics had not accepted, by an author whose aether-based gravitation programme already supplied the vocabulary.

The available text is also incomplete: several passages break off mid-sentence, including parts of the graviton description and the acknowledgment. The full paper likely contains further derivations and a complete reference list, so the absence of quantitative detail here should not be read as proof that the published paper lacked it.

Related work in this corpus

This paper sits inside the Aspden cluster. covers the same paper in an earlier pass; treats the broader aether-revival argument of Modern Aether Science; and covers the Power From Space material, where vacuum spin and vacuum energy claims recur. The pattern across these sources is consistent: a theoretical mechanism proposed to explain anomalous laboratory reports, with the author acknowledging the limits of his own experimental involvement.

Keep reading

• Standing Wave Interferometry — Adds context.
• Power From magnetism -- The Potter Debate — Adds context.
• Power From Space -- Inertia and Gravitation — Adds context.