Ning Li (physicist)

Ning Li (January 14, 1943 – July 27, 2021) was a Chinese American scientist.

In 1983 she emigrated with her family from China to the USA.

She is known for her physics and anti-gravity research.

In the 1990s, Li worked as a research scientist at the Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research, University of Alabama in Huntsville.

In a series of papers co-authored with fellow university physicist Douglas Torr and published between 1991 and 1993, she claimed a practical way to produce anti-gravity effects.

She claimed that an anti-gravity effect could be produced by rotating ions creating a gravitomagnetic field perpendicular to their spin axis.

In her theory, if a large number of ions could be aligned, (in a Bose–Einstein condensate) the resulting effect would be a very strong gravitomagnetic field producing a strong repulsive force.

The alignment may be possible by trapping superconductor ions in a lattice structure in a high-temperature superconducting disc.

Li claimed that experimental results confirmed her theories.

Her claim of having functional anti-gravity devices was cited by the popular press and in popular science magazines with some enthusiasm at the time.

In 1999, she left the university to form a company, AC Gravity LLC, to continue anti-gravity research.

Li is reported to have left the University of Alabama in 1999 to found the company AC Gravity LLC.

AC Gravity was awarded a United States Department of Defense grant for $448,970 in 2001 to continue anti-gravity research.

The grant period ended in 2002 but no results from this research were ever made public.

No evidence exists that the company performed any other work, although as of 2021, AC Gravity still remains listed as an extant business.

In 1997 Li published a paper stating that recent experiments reported anomalous weight changes of 0.05-2.1% for a test mass suspended above a rotating superconductor.

Although the same paper describes another experiment that showed the gravitational effect of a non rotating superconductor was very small, if any effect existed at all.

In 2014 she was struck by a vehicle while crossing the street on the University of Alabama in Huntsville campus.

Li’s husband, seeing the accident, suffered a heart attack and died a year later in 2015.

For Li, this accident caused permanent brain damage that resulted in Alzheimer’s disease shortly after.

On July 27, 2021, Ning Li died at the age of 78.