Reactionless Propulsion Said Real By NASA

[primemignonite]

‘Impossible’ space drive tested by NASA foretells future of deep-space travel - RT

http://rt.com/usa/177204-nasa-space-drive-emdrive/

So, it would seem that yet another Establishment Physics "It's IMPOSSIBLE!!" sanctimonious puff goes down in flames? We'll see.

"X-rays are a hoax!" - Lord Kelvin of The Royal Society, the greatest of all the great classic foot-in-mouth excess statements ever! (One would think they'd LEARN after enduring enough of such flowing mouth diarrhea but, that old dynamic duo hubris and will-worship simply cannot allow for it, such being an act of necessity of which the particular class of arrogant, pronouncing snottiness, is seemingly incapable.)

This time, seemingly, it's to be Newton's Third, along with key aspects of the Laws ("Laws"?) of Thermodynamics, that are now up for some trouble, veracity-wise.

"Existence is and always shall be according to IT'S realities rather than any guesswork 'laws' as proposed by some few to represent it. At very, very best it is but weak attempting; at worst an end dead, which was believed a thing vital." - As consistent, demonstrated reality would have it, indeed most wise advice.

Continuing . . .

"NASA has conducted long-awaited experiments to prove that the fabled space drive, capable of generating its own thrust and breaking a fundamental law of physics, works. . . ." - RT

"Works"!!

So, apparently we arrive at viability for a reactionless force producing proposition. (What next, energy as produced from NOTHING? Yes, if this, then maybe that !)

"An independent, peer-reviewed Chinese team was the first to try and replicated the results, and confirmed that their own EmDrive worked in papers published on three occasions between 2008 and 2012. But the skepticism didn’t end there. So, to test the technology on different soil, NASA was brought in. " - RT

I'll just bet it did not abate; absolute destruction of 'holy' paradigms being here at stake. (Hope and beliefs are not reality even if coming from "scientific" quarters.)

So, what did the NASA boys and girls find?

"Test results indicate that the RF resonant cavity thruster design, which is unique as an electric propulsion device, is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma," the space agency states in the paper."

Assuming this to be so, then certain "Laws" good before will be found to not apply universally? Given this 'revolting development,' are they now to be relegated to being but 'advice' holding good only in some cases?

And finally we arrive at coup de gras territory . . .

The one thing the paper does not wish to do is explain how the drive works, instead offering quantifiable results and the procedures used to achieve them. - RT

". . . wish to do . . ."

I'll just bet!

Ah yes, that one little thing, the Three Wise Monkeys Syndrome very common in Science, so-called.

(With care, with great care study the careers throughout history antient and near, of both Necessity and Scientia. These two must forever be kept separated for if when combined for action will wreak Hell itself down upon citizens' and their governance's. Behold! Nearly everywhere on Earth, to one degree or another, this has now come-to-pass! http://art.famsf.org/hendrick-goltzius/ ... 9633012446 )

And finally . . .

However, given that we now have several tests all confirming that thrust can be generated out of thin air, a radically different future awaits humanity. - RT

Yes, no doubt "different" it is to be, for better or worse. The Sci-Nec gas bags will have much with which to deal, so it now seems. Good for them. (And now, let's re-examine The Dean Drive for something missed, possibly?)

"TRUTH WILL OUT" - The Merchant of Venice, 1596

As the Austrian Emperor exclaimed to Salieri . . . etc, etc, and etc.

James

". . . Brann was a journalist known for the articulate savagery of his writing. . . ." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cowper_Brann

[MrVibrating]

I've also been following Shawyer's progress, ever since his drive debuted in New Scientist magazine (for which they got no end of stick). The possibilites, if real, are truly paradigm changing.

Coupled with a PM-type of powerplant, the mind boggles.. i'm not even sure it'd be subject to lightspeed constraints - since no reaction mass is required at all, let alone infinite quantities, and the motor's reference frame is either itself, or the vacuum, depending on how you look at it. In other words, it appears to be 'velocity agnostic'...

[primemignonite]

M.V., I do not know of Shawyer and his progress. ' Will investigate.

"Velocity agnostic" whatever that may be, sounds intriguing.

We are long overdue for some nice mind bogglings, rather than the same old boring Nothing Doing Bar.

J.

[MrVibrating]

Roger Shawyer is the brains behind the EM drive (above).

One of its many interesting properties is that upon approaching lightspeed, a spaceshp using conventional thrusters would have to increase the amount of ejection matter being fired out of its nozzles exponentially, to reach successively higher speeds, because its effective mass is increasing along with its kinetic energy. This dynamic culminates in a bottleneck in the amount of reaction mass (propellant) that can be carried and ejected from the thrusters, since the faster you go, the heavier you get, and hence the more propellant you'd need to kick out in order to maintain the same rate of acceleration.

It is generally believed that because of this ever-burgeoning propellant requirement, actually reaching or exceeding lightspeed is impossible in practical terms because it would ultimately require infinite propellant to overcome the infinite inertia of your infinite mass spacecraft. Like the hare racing the tortoise in Zeno's paradox, you'd never quite be able to catch up with a photon.

The EM drive sidesteps this whole quagmire by doing away with propellant entirely. Its reaction mass is purely relativistic, and so all it needs to keep accelerating is input energy. The drive's effective mass (and that of any spaceship it's propelling) still increases as a function of speed, as any rest mass would, however so long as it has input energy it'll continue accelerating indefinitely. Obviously, this is where breakthrough energy techs come into the equation - coupled with say a Bessler wheel, where the continuous acceleration of the craft would create an effective gravity to power the wheel, it'd keep accelerating forever, in principle.

Quite what happens as one attains or exceeds C is open to speculation, however it's tempting to imagine a situation where the rate of acceleration continues climbing, thus increasing the g-force acting on the Bessler mechanism, in an infinite feedback loop - at least, within the constraints of its material strengths. In principle though, an infinitely-heavy overbalancing mass would generate infinite energy as it fell. In the wildest-possible extrapoltion, a craft powered this way could arrive at its destination long before it left its point of origin...

And that's what i mean by "velocity agnostic"! If it knew that C is widely thought to be the ultimate speed limit, it probably wouldn't have any strong feelings on the matter. In short, its continuing and uninterruptable acceleration would be powered by that very same acceleration. If Shawyer and Bessler's principles both work, then they're made for each other.

[Art]

.

" coupled with say a Bessler wheel, where the continuous acceleration of the craft would create an effective gravity to power the wheel, it'd keep accelerating forever, in principle. "

-------------------------


A Hah Ahhh

I'm getting all tingly again ! : )

[primemignonite]

Most elegantly and clearly explained, M.V.

Thank you.

James

[eccentrically1]

http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/no-nas ... drive.html

plenty of links to the "research" , ahem.

if we're going there, theoretically it would make more sense to teleport ourselves around.

http://phys.org/news/2014-09-quantum-teleportation.html

[AB Hammer]

eccentrically1

The link you posted on quantum teleporting doesn't seem complete for some reason.

http://phys.org/news/2014-09-quantum-teleportation.html

Maybe the fact fiber optics have been used for years now have have been used to transmit information and from what I read it is still information to the crystal. Crystals have been known for storage. It just seems incomplete for a breakthrough. IMHO

[MrVibrating]

@eccentrically1

That guy's a sceptic - like most folks who encounter this device and its claimed properties. And of course, in the absence of incontrovertible proof or any understanding of its means of operation, scepticism, of the reserved variety, is the proper response.

Rank cynicism - a la pseudoscepticism - is however just a knee-jerk naysaying of the claims without really tackling the issues. Johnston, in his blog post above, is being intellectually dishonest in 'refuting' outright NASA's findings in his article title - NASA (and the Chinese space agency) - say they've measured positive results from such EM drives, while he (Johnston) is simply saying that they haven't validated anything impossible - which of course, they themselves (the space agencies and Shawyer himself) agree with. Rather, they're claiming that the thrust is only 'reactionless' insofar as the propellant has no rest mass. This is NOT a violation of Newton's 3rd, as there's no reason in principle that the reaction mass cannot be purely relativistic, which IS of course what they're claiming.

In fact, according to his article, Johnston's biggest objection is to the NASA guys' tentative suggestion that the drive is pushing against the relativistic mass of virtual particles - dismissing this only insofar of his own ignorance of the vacuum's nature.

And yet, the activity of the vacuum is the most fundamental founding principle of both QED and QCD, the two most complete and accurately-predictive theories we have of the fabric of the universe. All of the fundamental forces are held to be mediated by gauge bosons, coopted and rectified from the vacuum. The virtual photons mediating the EM force, for instance, are not emitted by electrons themselves (how would THAT square with conservation of energy?), and yet electrons do not interact with one another directly, but via the intermediary of force carrier particles; a property of the vacuum, and not of the electrons. Gluons mediate the force binding quarks into hadrons, leptons and baryons, but again are not emitted by quarks, which are by definition irreducible (so again, CoE forbids this). And so on for the other two forces (gravity and the weak interaction) - granted, gravitons, whatever their nature, remain experimentally elusive, but where, pray tell, are these other three force mediators coming from, if electrons and quarks are elementary quantised particles?

So as you can see, CoE itself leaves no option but an active vacuum.

As if this wasn't proof enough of such an ambient background potential, we have the Casimir force and often-replicated twin-plate Casimir effect. Here, the fleeting EMF's induced by the instantaneous appearance and disappearance of virtual photons causes a net magnetic attraction between the two surfaces. This is different to a Van Der Waals effect and has been validated, in line with predictions, multiple times in labs all over the world.

Researchers have even devised experiments generating real, measurable photons, from virtual ones - again, in apparent defiance of CoE, if there were no virtual plasma there in the first place.

While this might seem an arcane and dark corner of the physics world to initiates, it's nonetheless a founding cornerstone of the current Standard Model - nay, a keystone; its existence every bit as incontrovertible as any other accepted lynchpin of quantum reality such as W/P duality, Heisenberg uncertainty, the value of an electronvolt or constancy of lightspeed.

And since none of these apparent fait accompli run counter to Einstein (quite the contrary in fact, being direct developments of GR), we must also accept that these virtual photons also possess relativistic mass - to wit, that there is a constant and all-pervasive, if usually amorphous, radiation pressure inherent to the vacuum's roiling evanescence. In their ephemeral comings and goings, these ghostly virtual particles nevertheless present an effective mass, against which these NASA researchers presume their device must be pushing.

So yes, mometum IS conserved alright - and if it works, the EM drive is wholly dependent upon this fact. Far from violating N3, it is an ultimate validation of the principle, applying it universally and not exclusively to rest mass.

In fact, according to his article, the only aspect of all this Johnston regards as "Star Trek-style technobabble" is the researchers reference to it as a 'plasma' - and yet, what is ionised matter if not disembodied fundamental particles? It's not exactly a controversial neologism to ascribe to the vacuum's activity, and IMHO an entirely fitting surmisal, if not de facto reality.

Speaking of radiation pressure, another of Johnston's reservations - indeed, his most severe criticism, is that the measured thrust exceeds the value of the raw radiation pressure of the resonating cavity if it were left open at one end... Seriously? Talk about 'unqualified opinion'.. the least he could've done was to familiarise himself with the supposed means of oeration. The clue is in the word 'resonating'... The trapped photons are rebounding inside the cavity at lightspeed, and power is energy times time... so the power (thrust) of the device increases linearly with the Q value - the amount of resonance that the waveguide can accomodate.

In the current test apparatus, the copper waveguide has a high electrical conductivity and low relative internal reflectivity, hence all of the microwave photons generated are quickly absorbed via the photoelectric effect, inducing minute eddy currents which in turn produces prodigious heat via Joule's 2nd law. In short, the current waveguide doesn't allow the photons to bounce around much before converting to heat. It appears sufficient however as a proof of principle as a small but significant thrust is being consistently measured.

And consistent with Shawyer's predictions, if the Q of the waveguide can be raised sgnificantly, the photons will bounce around even more times before dissipating away as heat, increasing the measured thrust as a function of odd bounces per unit time at the wider end. The resulting unbalanced radiation pressure can thus be raised by any number of multiples of the raw ejecta thrust. Far from contravening CoE or CoM, again, this fact is a perfect demonstration of ordinary conservation, and fully dependent upon it.

Shawyer has long predicted that with sufficient internal reflection, a device could produce enough force to levitate a family car. If total internal reflection can be achieved, or if thermovoltaics are applied to recycle the waste heat's energy radiating from the bell's outer surface, then the thrust efficiency as a function of input energy could be significantly better than any conventional techs such as internal combustion engines or jet turbines.

None of this do i proffer as evidence of the device's validity - i do not know if it works or not. But it is a direct criticism of Johnston's trite dismissals. By his own hand, he lacks sufficient understanding of the claim to justify his own critique, let alone assail the results of numerous respectable researchers or Shawyer himself.

As ever, it inevitably takes twice as much text to disassemble and counter the disingenuities of psuedoskeptics than their diatribes themselves; they invariably lack the knowledge to even grasp why their complaints are so ungrounded, it's an inherent disadvantage in tackling them. To show why someone's "not even wrong" you have to read them the fifth degree, and if here i've but scratched the surface, a fuller interogation of Johnston's 'review' would i think be unwarrented; he's just another vox pop who doesn't know what he doesn't know. Again, i don't know if Shawyer's right or wrong, but Johnston is, definitively, overextending himself. Masquerading as respectable comment by signing off his article in his 'full capacity' of "Science Education Director" is just the height of Chutzpah.

[MrVibrating]

It's also interesting, and a related point, to consider Faraday's paradox, in relation to Shawyer's claims.

Briefly, the thought experiment involves an axially-magnetised disc magnet, sandwiched between two copper discs, all of the same dimensions. The terminals of a volt or current meter are applied one each to the copper discs.

From this we consider three different conditions:

1) the two copper plates are made to rotate, at equal speed, while the magnet remains stationary

2) the copper discs are held still while the magnet is made to revolve

3) all three elements revolve together, at equal rate.

In the first condition, we have conductors moving through a magnetic field, hence current is induced.

In the second, we might anticipate the same result, as our everyday experience tells us that motion is merely relative between bodies. However, assuming the magnet is homogenously magnetised (ie. without imperfections), there will be no voltage or current registered, because the magnetic field is not rotating with the magnet - the implication being, that counter to intuition, the magnetic field is NOT a property of the magnet itself, but rather, something the magnet is inducing in its surrounding environment..

In the third condition, we might again wrongly try to apply the principles of mechanical motion to conclude, incorrectly, that because there is no relative motion between the copper discs and magnet, no current will be generated... however, because the magnetic field is an effect induced in spacetime - something the magnet does, and not something the magnet is, we again see current flowing. All that is required is that conductors moving through a magnetic field form a circuit with the meter - this satisfied, EMF is induced.

What this teaches us is the surprising and non-intuitive lesson that the magnetic field has its own reference frame, independent of the moving masses. This is the reference frame of the vacuum activity that is the field.

The magnetic field is entirely constituted by polarised vacuum activity, and so this is the frame of reference of masses interacting with it..!

So this is another respect in which the EM drive can be regarded as 'velocity agnostic' - at least until it reaches lightspeed, though perhaps even beyond. No matter how fast it goes, the vacuum it's pushing against is always effectively stationary. In this way, it's somewhat analogous to being able to push off against a brick wall, while dragging the wall along with you (seemingly lifting oneself by one's boot laces). Or perhaps, continuing to push against it even though it should be left far behind... depending on how you look at it.

Launched from Earth, we would regard the Earth as the frame of reference for our spacecraft, against which its speed is measured. From it's point of view though, relative to the vacuum activity, it's never really moving at all. Or else, it's taking its reference frame along for the ride. Again, depends on how you look at the situation.

So my point here, i guess, would be that if the EM drive works as advertised, as mind-boggling as that may seem, its success would only be a fairly trivial extension of the real showstopper that is Faraday's paradox, and, ultimately, the humble magnetic interaction.

Or rather, all force interactions, in fact - all fundamental forces are mediated by vacuum-generated gauge bosons....

[primemignonite]

Speaking of Johnston likely overextending himself, I officially take back what I suggested regarding Newton's Third and the Thermo laws. I stand as corrected. ( I guess their end times have yet to arrive but, one can only hope, I suppose, however the Kelvin business remains as-is.)

That the new contraption may well serve to validate some things further, seems really exciting as a prospect in-and-of itself.

Where you used ". . . an active vacuum. . . .", M.V., are we to take this as meaning as in a 'luminiferous æther' or, some thing other that is less passive and/or that has mass? If against those particles you cited, they must be awfully dense aggregations even though totally invisible?

Either way (speaking of confirmation possibilities) such new developments would be astounding and most upsetting to some, no? (Assuming it so, this last part would be titillatingly good for some others.)

All of this really, really is above my own pay grade but, one item I can illuminate upon is that of "Q," for any that might be by it baffled.

Q stands for 'magnification of resonance'.

There, I understand .01% of what you wrote!

We are lucky to have you commenting here, M.V., making much that is opaque newly clear. (Or, so relatively.)

James

[MrVibrating]

LOL cheers, and yes, the active vacuum is the return to favour of the aether, to all intents and purposes. No contradiction of Michelson & Morely or Einstein, and the 'mass' (or rather, relativistic momentum) of virtual particles is of the same kind as standard radiation pressure of real photons, albeit transient, fleeting and amorphous. The force felt between two magnets is vacuum activity - this is what accomplishes the 'action at a distance' between moving charges; they're interacting not directly with one another, but with the vacuum, which reacts back upon them. This ambient background momentum is manifested in packets of positive or negative-signed units termed 'h-bar' derived from the reduced Planck constant, with the sign dependent upon the direction of motion between the charges.

So all alectronic devices are manipulating this vacuum potential - all EMFs, from Voltage to the forces driving an electric motor, are manipulations of virtual photon interactions.. that's literally the 'stuff' of the EM force.

Again, consider carefully the implications of Faraday's paradox - the magnetic field cannot be a property of magnets themselves, but rather, is the product of their effect upon the 'aether'...!

[primemignonite]

Regarding Farady's Paradox, M.V., in the third condition, is there measurable drag resulting?

Well, either way, for the second and third, the implication IS huge!

How have the Establishment lab-coats handled this little wrinkle thus far? With the usual ignorance?

(Now really, if so, would this surprise The Iconoclast in-the-least?)

In his bewilderment, Horatio is silenced still !

James

[MrVibrating]

Gotta get to work, boss is giving me an earful...

No there's no drag - back EMF woud require the presence of an additional conductor acting as a stator, and yes, these things have been known for over a century; Maxwell thought of the field as being composed of 'vortices' but really, he and all other classical physicists since Newton (inc. Einstein) eschewed trying to ponder the seemingly-intractible question of what the fields were, for simply describing the phenomenological effects of what they did. It is only in the last few decades, since the development of QED and QCD, that the properties of the vacuum itself have been able to be divined.

Also, you asked about its density; if you've ever had a finger pinched between a pair of neodymium magnets, or recieved a hefty electric shock, there's your answer. The most powerful fields known are those of magnetars.. The vacuum potential derived from QED is sometimes said to be the 'biggest uncorrected mistake in modern physics', but then only because it's so humungous... so, basically, it's not infinite, but as near as, dammit..

[primemignonite]

Found this today regarding the FP matter:

http://www.gta.igs.net/~qbristow/Scient ... _text.html

It appears to be a serious stab (or better) at an explanation for it.

Mother Nature, We DEMAND something for nothing!!!

(Now she's shaking in her boots. I am sure of it.)

J.