Exploring Gravity, Gravitational Waves and Anomalies

November 8, 2025
|In Physics Theory
|By Tim Ventura

If gravity is more than mass tugging on mass—if it can twist, ripple, and feed on its own motion—then buried in a handful of strange experiments might be the blueprint for new physics and new propulsion. That’s the gamble behind Paul A. Murad’s two-part exploration of “Gravity and Gravitational Wave Dynamics,” a journey that starts with anomalies most physicists ignore and ends with a bold attempt at a new, wave-friendly gravity model with spin at its core.

When Newton Isn’t Enough

For ordinary celestial mechanics, Newton’s law of gravitation remains astonishingly effective. It predicts planetary orbits, satellite paths, and ballistic trajectories with a precision that made it the backbone of both classical astronomy and the space age. Yet Newton’s formulation treats gravitational influence as instantaneous and strictly potential-based, with no explicit place for waves, retardation, or curls in the field. That limitation becomes hard to ignore once you admit that gravity must, at some level, transmit information at a finite speed.

Einstein’s general relativity stepped in as the conceptual upgrade, replacing force with curvature and embedding gravitational influence in the geometry of spacetime itself. This framework not only allows for gravitational waves but demands them, and their direct detection has validated a central prediction of the theory. Still, general relativity’s mathematical elegance does not map easily into the kind of field equations and engineering intuition that Maxwell’s equations provide for electromagnetism. For many would-be gravity engineers, the geometric language feels powerful but opaque.

Murad’s reading of the situation highlights a subtle dissatisfaction. While general relativity handles large-scale and strong-field phenomena superbly, the path from Einstein’s tensor equations to a practical, lab-scale wave or propulsion model is tortuous. The theory does not naturally foreground rotational effects, localized anomalies, or engineered configurations in the way that an experimentally minded researcher might hope. As a result, many reported anomalies are brushed aside as artifacts rather than treated as potential signposts.

Against this backdrop, Murad proposes a different stance: use the anomalies—however controversial—as heuristic constraints on what a more complete theory of gravity might look like. Instead of assuming every outlier is noise, he asks what kind of field structure could, in principle, reproduce both the well-tested Newton–Einstein limits and the puzzling hints from experiments involving rotation, superconductivity, strong fields, and dynamic mass flows.

Anomalies at the Edge of Gravity

Murad’s first step is to tour a series of claimed anomalies that appear to link gravity with rotation, charge, and exotic field configurations. He neither accepts them uncritically nor dismisses them outright; instead, he treats them as boundary conditions for theory-building, emphasizing recurring motifs of spin, thresholds, and nonlinearity across disparate experiments and historical accounts.

  • Podkletnov’s spinning superconductor. A large, magnetically levitated superconducting disk, spun at thousands of RPM and excited with RF fields, is reported to produce a small weight reduction above the disk and, in later work, a collimated “gravity impulse” beam. Attempts at replication often used smaller disks, slower rotation, or incomplete parameters, running head-first into nonlinear effects and brutal experimental sensitivities. Murad treats Podkletnov as a case study in threshold behavior: if the effect is real, it may only appear beyond critical geometry, field strength, and rotation levels—exactly where “simplified” replications tend to fall short.

  • Saxl’s charged pendulum. Placed inside a conducting shell, Saxl’s torsion pendulum showed period shifts correlated with electrostatic charge, seasonal changes, even eclipses. The data suggest some coupling between gravity and electromagnetism, but the experiment wasn’t tuned to directional or rotational dependencies, leaving it a tantalizing, incomplete clue.

  • Gyroscopes that fall “wrong.” Reports from Robert Forward, Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kosyrev, and later torsion-field proponents claim that spinning gyroscopes may alter effective weight depending on spin sense and orientation. Kosyrev, in particular, claimed gyroscope drop tests where upward or downward acceleration deviated from g depending on spin direction—suggesting an interaction between rotation and gravity not captured by simple mass attraction. Detailed, independently verified datasets are scarce, but the motif is clear: rotational asymmetry.

  • The Nazi Bell & liquid mercury legends. Murad recounts the controversial “Die Glocke” stories: high-priority wartime experiments allegedly involving high-speed spinning cryogenic mercury, intense fields, severe biological effects, and postwar secrecy. Later discoveries, such as submarines transporting tons of mercury, reinforce at least that the material was strategically important. Firm physics data? Not really. But in Murad’s narrative, the Bell functions as an early pointer toward extreme rotation, exotic fields, and the possibility of mass-field interactions not yet mapped.

  • The Searl Effect Generator and Russian replication. John Searl’s legendary roller-and-ring SEG—said to generate power at low speed and lose weight or even fly off at high speed—remains unsupported by solid documentation. But what does interest Murad is the later attempt by Godin and Roschin to build an SEG-like “magnetogravitational converter.” Their device reportedly entered a self-running mode and showed a 35% weight reduction at specific rotation speeds in either direction, accompanied by concentric cylindrical magnetic “walls,” silent blue corona, and localized cooling around the apparatus.

Taken together, these cases are not presented as settled fact but as a pattern: again and again, the anomalies cluster around rotation, structured fields, and dynamic mass–energy distributions. Murad’s core wager is that if a consistent theory can be framed that naturally allows such behaviors while preserving conventional results where they are confirmed, then these “edge cases” become less like curiosities and more like experimental design notes for a new gravitational technology.

From Gravitational Charge to Co-Gravity

To lift the discussion out of folklore and into field theory, Murad turns to the Maxwell-like gravitation work of Oleg Jefimenko. Jefimenko’s equations recast gravity as a time-dependent field theory with both a primary gravitational field and a secondary “cogravitational” component, directly analogous to electric and magnetic fields. In this view, moving or changing mass distributions generate fields with retardation and induction terms, making gravitational radiation a natural outcome rather than a purely geometric abstraction.

The cogravity field in Jefimenko’s formulation is typically vanishingly small at low velocities, which is why it hides beneath Newtonian behavior in ordinary circumstances. But its structure is crucial: it introduces a velocity-dependent force term reminiscent of the Lorentz force in electromagnetism, implying that mass currents and moving bodies can, in principle, experience gravity-like forces beyond the simple inverse-square law. This opens conceptual space for rotational and dynamic effects that traditional Newtonian gravity simply forbids.

Murad and R.M.L. Baker adopt this template and push it further, bolting on additional source and current terms so that both the gravitational and cogravitational fields satisfy coupled wave equations. In their interpretation, what Russian researchers have long described as torsion or spin fields may be re-understood as manifestations of this cogravitational sector. Rotating superconductors, high-current plasma systems, and magnetically structured devices become candidate generators of these torsion-like modes, potentially explaining why so many anomalies emerge from spinning machinery under extreme conditions.

By reframing gravity and its companion fields in this way, Murad sets up a bridge between controversial empirical claims and a coherent theoretical structure. Instead of needing separate, ad hoc “mystery forces,” the anomalies are tentatively folded into a generalized gravitational framework that already expects radiation, directionality, and vorticity once mass flows become fast, dense, or structured enough.

A New Wave Equation for Gravity

In Part II, Murad narrows in on a central challenge: can one write a practical wave equation for gravity that naturally incorporates rotational effects and anomalous behavior without discarding the proven successes of Newtonian gravity? His approach is to modify the field equations directly, allowing the gravitational field to have a nonzero curl that depends on both gravitational currents—moving and rotating mass distributions—and on the field itself through a self-coupling term.

This move breaks with the traditional assumption of a strictly curl-free Newtonian field, but it does so in a controlled way. Ordinary gravity, as experienced in planetary systems and terrestrial laboratories, arises as the dominant static solution, while the dynamic, curl-supporting components only appear under special conditions. By separating the total field into a conventional Newtonian part and an anomalous component, Murad constructs a wave equation governing the latter: it becomes the “extra” gravity that shows up when masses are in motion, spinning, or organized into engineered structures.

The appearance of an imaginary contribution in the modified curl relation hints at deeper structure, which Murad interprets as suggestive of an additional effective dimension or internal degree of freedom in the gravitational field. While he does not fully specify the geometry of this extension, the result is a compact theoretical scaffold in which vortices, waves, and self-interactions are mathematically natural rather than forced. Importantly, this formulation allows dynamic sources—rather than just static mass—to play a leading role in shaping localized gravitational phenomena.

Murad also points to astrophysical implications, arguing that in this framework objects like black holes and other extreme compact bodies may be better understood as gravitational vortices where rotational and wave-like behaviors dominate. Though these claims are exploratory, they underscore his broader theme: once curl, current, and self-coupling are admitted into the gravitational field, a wide range of behaviors—some reminiscent of reported anomalies—arises without having to abandon the successes of established theory.

Propulsion in a Spinning Universe

Threaded through Murad’s analysis is a clear technological ambition: if gravity can be described in Maxwell-like terms, with well-defined fields, waves, and currents, then perhaps it can also be engineered. Within his modified framework, a spacecraft interacting with these generalized gravitational and cogravitational fields can be modeled in some regimes like a charged particle in an electromagnetic field, its motion guided not by expelled reaction mass but by tailored interactions with the surrounding field structure.

Murad explores configurations in which cleverly arranged charges, currents, and rotating masses might create localized gradients or vortices in the gravitational field. In principle, such gradients could partially offset weight, reduce effective inertia, or generate directed forces that serve as the basis for propulsion. What distinguishes this from purely speculative “antigravity” rhetoric is the insistence on embedding these possibilities in equations that still respect known limits, rather than invoking undefined exotic substances or arbitrary negative masses.

Within this conceptual space, historical devices like the Searl Effect Generator and modern experiments with rotating superconductors or magnetized plasmas are recast as crude, uncontrolled stabs at tapping gravitational–torsion coupling. If any fraction of their reported anomalies holds up under rigorous replication, they might represent accidental demonstrations of field configurations that Murad’s model can describe more systematically. That, in turn, suggests avenues for designing next-generation experiments with clearer diagnostics and better control.

At the same time, Murad acknowledges that bridging from theory to hardware is a formidable challenge. The coupling strengths may be extremely small, demanding carefully optimized geometries, high energies, or resonant conditions to produce measurable effects. But the narrative he constructs is unapologetically forward-leaning: in a universe where gravity supports waves, curls, and currents, propulsion may eventually be as much about field architecture as it is about fuel.

Between Bold Theory and Hard Data

Murad is candid about the uncertain status of many of the experiments he cites. Several key claims have not been independently replicated with modern instrumentation, and in some cases the original hardware has vanished or was never fully documented. Environmental factors—from subtle thermal gradients to electromagnetic interference and mechanical vibration—could mimic or mask the tiny effects under discussion, making rigorous interpretation difficult.

The theoretical framework he proposes, while compact and mathematically suggestive, is likewise incomplete. Parameters such as coupling constants, characteristic frequencies, and damping mechanisms need to be specified and tested against both astrophysical observations and high-precision laboratory measurements. Without that quantitative anchoring, the model remains a promising sketch rather than a competitor to general relativity in its established domains of success.

Yet this is also where Murad’s work is most productively provocative. By systematically aligning the alleged anomalies with a consistent set of field equations, he transforms them from isolated curiosities into potential experimental tests of specific theoretical features. If spinning-mass experiments, torsion balances, or superconductor setups fail to show the predicted behaviors at well-defined sensitivity levels, those null results feed back into constraining or refuting the extended model.

In other words, Murad invites the community to treat frontier claims about gravity the way good science treats any bold hypothesis: not as beliefs to be defended or dismissed on faith, but as opportunities for carefully designed experiments that can, with luck and rigor, push the boundary between the known and the unknown.

A Frontier Worth Mapping

In its final implications, Murad’s two-part study is less about certainties than about reopening a conversation. Gravity, he suggests, may not be exhausted by our current formalisms; what we know works extremely well where it has been tested, but our direct experimental grasp of dynamic, engineered, or small-scale gravitational phenomena is surprisingly thin. That gap leaves room both for mistaken claims and for overlooked discoveries.

By weaving together anomalies, Maxwell-like formulations, and modified wave equations, he sketches a picture of gravity as something capable of vorticity, radiation, and spin sensitivity, all nested within or alongside the familiar inverse-square law. Even if some of the historical or anecdotal material eventually falls away under scrutiny, the methodological takeaway stands: theory should be elastic enough to confront inconvenient data, not calibrated only to what is easy to explain.

For researchers in advanced propulsion and fundamental physics, Murad’s framework functions as a roadmap for where to look next. Precision gyroscope tests, rotating superconducting systems, structured plasma experiments, and gravitational wave detection technologies can all be tuned to probe the specific couplings and curls his equations imply. Each well-executed experiment, positive or negative, helps either to flesh out or to prune back the proposed extensions.

Whether this line of inquiry ultimately supports a new class of gravitational technologies or simply clarifies why certain seductive ideas do not work, it serves a crucial role in keeping gravitational physics a living, exploratory science. In that sense, Murad’s work is less a claim that “we have it” and more an argument that it is still worth looking—that between the rock-solid core of established theory and the noisy fringe of speculation, there remains a genuine frontier waiting to be mapped.

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