Reactionless Space Drives Taken Seriously

bjn writes "The Observer ran an article on Sunday about reactionless space drives running on zero-point energy. The article was a bit light, but it seems that the concept is now being taken seriously enough that they are organising international conferences." Well, anyone can call a conference. This seems like some very long-range research going on - interesting, but don't expect anything tangible for quite some time.

Comments

very long term? can you read, michael?

[CanadaMan]

According to the article itself, a scientist who is involved in the research that is currently taking place claims that it might be possible to have these propulsion methods in use for sattelite deployment and maintenance within five years, with other applications to follow soon. Five years is not such a long time; why is this technology very far away?

Re:very long term? can you read, michael?

[bcrowell]

Here and here are some more substantive NASA web-pages on this. One paper referred to there that pooh-poohs the whole idea is by Lawrence Krauss, who is a real physicist and not a nut. I have to be very skeptcial when they quote this guy Graham Ellis in the original article saying "If we are right, we should be able to build our first small rockets and use them to keep satellites in their correct orbit in about five years." This statement is obviously garbage if you know anything about physics. It sounds to me like NASA started a legitimate long-range academic study on this, but it has also attracted a lot of nut cases.

I hate to sound like a stuffy academic, but I have a PhD in physics, and the whole thing sounds goofy to me. I'm not an expert on this kind of zero-point-energy-of-empty-space stuff, but it seems to me that to release the zero-point energy of empty space, you have to leave that space in a lower energy state after you're done. We don't know if such a lower-energy state even exists.
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Re:very long term? can you read, michael?

[krlynch]

it seems to me that to release the zero-point energy of empty space, you have to leave that space in a lower energy state after you're done.

Indeed it would seem that way to me too, if you were truly "extracting" the zero point energy from the vacuum.

We don't know if such a lower-energy state even exists.

And we might hope that such a state doesn't, because it would mean that the current vacuum state is a "false vacuum" meaning that it is unstable and will eventually decay into the true vacuum....and in the true vacuum, physics as we know it may not hold, portending the end of a universe capable of sustaining life as we know it!

I hate to sound like a stuffy academic, but I have a PhD in physics, and the whole thing sounds goofy to me.

Sounds goofy to me too, and I haven't finished the PhD yet....but then again, most of the stuff I do for my research sounds pretty goofy to me as well :-)

Why long term?

[WhiskeyJack]

Because Puthoff and company are more than likely pseudoscientists and the technology they're so actively pimping is based on unrealisticly optomistic views of how much energy is available.

See this Scientific American article, from the December '97 issue.

Of course, I'd be very happy if I were wrong about this.... ;)

-- WhiskeyJack

Oh, yeah, that's right....

[alumshubby]

...this is how the UFOs are supposed to work, right?

We broke the Second Law

[Boronx]

set up two zero-point rockets welded nose to nose, turn em on and leter rip, and you've just created an eternal small star.

Terminology

[sconeu]

Not to nitpick or anything :-P, but they called the quantum fluctuations the "zero-points". I always thought it was called zero point energy because the vacuum had a net E of 0, and you could extract the energy from the quantum fluctuations (thank you Heisenberg!).

Of course, there are some theories that say our entire universe is a quantum fluctuation that just got a wee bit out of hand...

Voodoo science

[bcrowell]

This page by physicist Robert Park (of What's New fame) is very relevant. It was clear from the start that the guy predicting commercial applications within 5 years was reality-challenged, but I was inclined to take it a little more seriously as a long-range research topic since NASA was involved. Park has made a career out of studying abnormal science, so in his article he's able to trace how this particular piece of bad science relates to other bad science.

I'm almost done reading Park's excellent new book Voodoo Science. I've learned a lot from it about the psychology of pseudoscience, and I've also learned that no branch of the U.S. federal government is really free of it. I'd assumed NASA was run by people with good scientific training, so if they were studying a certain topic, it must not be 100% nonsense. Not true, as it turns out. In the book, Park documents how NASA panders to the politicians by betraying science. (It's also nice to see a cogent and knowledgeable presentation of the case against human space flight and the ISS.)

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