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Hyperdrive Propulsion Could Be Tested At the LHC
KentuckyFC writes "In 1924, the influential German mathematician David Hilbert calculated that a stationary mass should repel a particle moving towards or away from it at more than half the speed of light (as seen by a distant inertial observer). Now an American physicist has pointed out that the equal and opposite effect should also hold true: that a relativistic particle should repel a stationary mass. This, he says, could form the basis of a 'hypervelocity propulsion drive' for accelerating spacecraft to a good fraction of the speed of light. The idea is that the repulsion allows the relativistic particle to deliver a specific impulse that is greater than its specific momentum, an effect that is analogous to the elastic collision of a heavy mass with a much lighter, stationary mass, from which the lighter mass rebounds with about twice the speed of the heavy mass. Unlike other exotic hyperdrive proposals, this one can be tested using the world's largest particle accelerator, the LHC, which will generate beams of particles with the required energy (abstract). Placing a test mass next to the beam line and measuring the forces on it as the particles pass by should confirm the theory — or scupper it entirely."
I think most/all of us take the term "hyperdrive" to imply FTL speeds.
This technology doesn't claim to achieve that.
It could be tested at the LHC if it ever manages to stay working for more than a month at a time, that is. :(
"calculated that a stationary mass should repel a particle moving towards or away from it at more than half the speed of light"
So, how do I slow down while going half he speed of light?
I see the advent of a new industry: space crash landings
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
One step closer to Revelation Space
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
With something so simple as to elastic collision, who would have thunk it?
Theoretically it makes sense, and what's cool about it is that it can be done with today's technology.
Pretty cool.
Next thing you know we'll have Romulans visiting. I'm liking all of this already..
Previewing comments are for sissies!
There's a hyperdriven black hole careering all around Northern Europe? That's a hot mess waiting to happen.
Our problem with space travel has been our propulsion systems. Our major tech advances across the board tend to hinge on a single key break-through that then opens the door for subsequent refinements till we have a viable technology. If this pans out it may no longer "locked" to shuttling around the Earth and moon, and if someone's willing to make a likely one way trip to Mars.
Apart from being a potential nifty space drive, it would also provide a new test of General Relativity. This is far more likely to get it done as a real experiment at the LHC, than a new space drive.
KE = 1/2m*v^2
There's no way around that one, and I don't care WHAT you use to accelerate your object. Rocket, ion drive, hyperdrive - you are always going to need a source of fuel, which is going to increase your mass, which is going to increase the amount of fuel you need, etc.
It doesn't matter how efficient your engine is, your top speed (and thus your range) will ALWAYS be limited by the mass of fuel you need to drag along with you to get there (and hopefully decelerate too). Never mind the perfect ecosystem required to keep a crew alive for decades/centuries. (Cue magical "suspended animation")
The ONLY exception to this is the "solar sail" concept, which relies on an external source of propulsion. However THAT is limited by your only being able to accelerate for a limited time until you get far enough away from a star that the particle density is essentially nil and acceleration stops.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
And now they're getting the theory down for building it.
Its only a matter of time (pun intended) till this plays out and turns into the world's first hyperdrive.
Has that thing got a Hemi in it?
then duct tape a lawn chair on top of it
interstellar travel here we come!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
While testing this on the ground, just make sure you're not actually moving the Earth...
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Where hyperspeed was possible unless there were ships or asteroids nearby. In that case you became "mass locked" So it turns out that more than just a gimmick to skip the boring bits of the game, mass does indeed interfere with fast moving objects.
At those accerelations.
Perhaps useful for robotic exploration.
I was reading some science fiction once (I'm thinking maybe it was Larry Niven? Don't remember for sure). Anyhow, the author described a ship which used some sort of large electromagnetic 'scoop' to gather hydrogen gas from space (remember, space isn't a complete vacuum, and, the Interstellar Gas is believed to be about 89% hydrogen), to use as fuel (basically, the scoop in this theoretical ship narrowed down to a cone, and at the extreme minimal point of the cone, achieved compression necessary to cause fusion of the Hydrogen). It was sort of an interstellar fusion ramjet
Because of the problem you've mentioned, I've always thought that, somehow, this has to be the answer to the long-distance fuel problem - gather your fuel as you go, don't 'pack it all' at the beginning of the voyage.
Also, because fusion releases so much energy, it has a much better 'energy density' than current, conventional fuels. So, you can get more acceleration from smaller amounts of fuel mass.
There's plenty of things all around us in the universe moving above the speed of light, including light.
I'm sure someone posting Anonymously on /. has the courage to stand up to thugs.
Not a typewriter
This sounds more like an "impulse drive" to me. I'm growing more convinced every day that Gene Roddenberry came to us from the future.
tell me the guy with the lawnchair and the balloons was not the inspiration for the movie "up"
but i loved that guy's plans for descent: just shoot the balloons with a bbgun one by one. i think i'd have some trepidation with that plan sitting in a lawnchair at 2,000 feet. lol
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you name it Hyperdrive now, what will you name a FTL drive? Full-speed Hyperdrive? Hi-Speed?
Windows: Hyperdrive 7.
Mac: Hyperdrive Snow leopard.
Ubuntu: Hyperdrive Jaunty Jackalope.
Fine, fine, I'm going...
A drive allows you to occupy a contiguous set of physical locations from origin to destination, optimally in a straight line.
A hyperdrive allows you to take a shortcut and skip some of the locations.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Hyperdrive is FTL. 1/2 Impulse is 1/2 the speed of light. Every treker, trekie, star trek fan, watcher of star trek, ..., knows that! Dah!
"The idea is that the repulsion allows the relativistic particle to deliver a specific impulse that is greater than its specific momentum, an effect that is analogous to the elastic collision of a heavy mass with a much lighter, stationary mass, from which the lighter mass rebounds with about twice the speed of the heavy mass."
How does one get a mass stationary anyhow? Just try and make a mass stationary in this Universe. What is zero velocity? With respect to what? Heck even space is "growing" so even if one is stationary space is growing around and in you and thus you're moving. The stars and even the galaxy are moving and rotating pulling all those stationary objects around. Just a question. Is it even possible to ever be stationary?
I totally agree! If it works - its historic.
General Relativity has only a few real direct tests: bending of light, perihelion shift (such as of mercury), gravitational waves, gravitational red-shift... Maybe a few more.
It also has some indirect supporting results such as the indirect discovery of black holes in the center of galaxies. No one has visited those holes, we believe they are there based on the behavior around them.
In cosmology, GR is the only theoretical model that is widely accepted; the main game in town.. But it has some challenges with the discoveries of the "accelerating expansion of the universe" and the dark matter & dark energy debates. Some people try to explain these mysteries with non-GR theories and who knows - they may be right.
Note that none of these are experiments you can do isolated in a terrestrial lab! They are all astronomical. So if this idea works, it would be the first purely terrestrial test of GR. Its Nobel-prize material.
OK. Me first. Got dibs on Andromeda. Poor chaps what will they do when they discover that we had filed the plans to build a highway through them and taped it to the underside of a sink in an unused bath room in a dark basement guarded by leopards?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Zephram Cochrane?
So hey, physics dudes... would this work? A space ship that's black on one side and white on the other. The white side reflects light, the black side absorbs it... besides being warmer than the white side would it slowly begin to move? Maybe a millimeter a century or so? :) Long range probes I guess.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
http://xkcd.com/162/
Orwell was an optimist.
"thereby achieving speeds greater than the driving particle's speed"
I'm pretty sure Hilbert didn't include that statement.
But we haven't even created astromech droids yet, how will we create a hyperdrive???
Placing a test mass next to the beam line and measuring the forces on it as the particles pass by should confirm the theory â" or scupper it entirely.
...or launch the test mass into the wall of the LHC at half the speed of light.
calculated that a stationary mass should repel a particle moving towards or away from it at more than half the speed of light
Can't we test this using cosmic rays? Cosmic rays travelling in the direction of the Sun should be slower near the Sun and faster the further out you go. Or would the Sun's magnetosphere, heliosphere and other repulsive effects dwarf this Hilbert repulsive effect?
Whilst it's all good and well working out how to accelerate a spacecraft to half the speed of light, you have to consider a couple of big issues:
(a) the need for some kind of inertial dampening system to prevent the human body turning into a jam like substance at the back of the spacecraft...
(b) the minor problem of complete and utter structural integrity failure caused by the spacecraft coming into contact with another object say an atom sized particle whilst travelling at half the speed of light... i.e. the need for some kind of deflector system...
E=mc^2
Sounds like Tom's Repelatron ...
Not to mention that Hilbert was already preoccupied with the sphere packing problem, so at that time he had no spare balls which he could have employed in solving other problems.
Ezekiel 23:20
The 'hyperdrive' is basically just subspace drive. This will be helpful for short trips to Mars or Jupiter but would not be useful for interstellar trips. What is needed is Warp Drive where space-time is continuously folded 'warped' allowing the spacecraft to achieve relativistic velocities greater than the speed of light.
The Scientist's name is Felber, therefore the small fraction of light speed drive would likely be known as the Felber Drive.
If that doesn't sound sexy enough for you try the Hilbert-Felber Drive.
If you really want it to be metal, stick an umlaut in there somewhere.
Yeah, I'm thinking someone at the site is going to fall for the "hey, stick your hand in here" bit.
I think the real trick is getting outside the gravity well.
Then you can use chemical, nuclear, solar plus "stealing momentum from other celestial bodies" to build up to some decent speed whereby you could, I would assume, make good use of this so called Hyperdrive.
In terms of slowing down, I don't think any trick is needed, clearly all these things we used to gain speed could be used to help us lose it. E.g., slow down with a solar sail, give momentum to other celestails bodies, then use your limited on board fuel to "limp" into orbit (and become the overlords of some other planet)...
http://www.hawknest.com/
I looked some of the papers which include animations but am not a physicist. Would much appreciate if a competent one could check them out.
Test of relativistic gravity for propulsion at the Large Hadron Collider (the Oct. 9, 2009 paper)
and 'Antigravity' Propulsion and Relativistic Hyperdrive
presented at 25th International Space Development Conference, Los Angeles, 4-7 May 2006 (2006b as referenced on page 2 of the above paper).
What I get from it:
- He's been working on it for at least 3 years actually. And it matches with results others have found so far. Hilbert saw a hint of this in the 1920s. It comes from Einstein's work but until about 2005 it had only been solved for a slow driver source, and then only to first order approximation, so it looked like there was not much effect. For relativistic, time-dependent sources, even a weak gravitational field can be repulsive.
- According to the 2005 paper, any mass moving faster than 0.58c will repel any mass ahead of it. Under that speed and the ship gets sucked in towards the driver. (Oops!) I don't see this as a drive mounted on a ship myself yet but maybe I misunderstand it. Seems you could shoot a particle beam at the ship to accelerate it in roughly the same direction though.
- Such a relativistic driver would accelerate a ship standing in front of it through a gravitational repulsion field acting in a narrow cone within which the ship is found. Occupants would seem not to feel inertia. (This cone is not apparent from the older animations which seem to be more talking about passing a black hole.) From 2006b:
- The limit of acceleration can be calculated using equations of motion in a Schwarzschild field (like you are near a black hole). The repulsion field will be evident to a distant observer if the driver is a mass moving faster than 0.58c.
- If you look at Felber's 2005 paper Exact relativistic "antigravity" propulsion and download from that page the tar-gzip archive there are some cool video clips. The driver is similar to a black hole. You can see in v58 that if the driver is a black hole moving towards the ship at near the speed of light, the ship gets pushed ahead of it. (the animations don't show the kick to higher speed that is discussed in 2006b).
- I read the driver as a relativistic particle beam aimed at a ship but maybe not so, there is speculation that an appropriate driver might be found in space. The idea (from 2005 paper below) is to discover an approaching relativistic black hole and maneuver near its trajectory while not too close to be hurt by its tidal forces. Sounds tricky, and depends on how broad that cone is.
- Reference [11] in the recent paper is here (Apr 18, 2006) and animations in the source seem to describe the ship's possible trajectories.
- You need a driver with a pretty strong field to be able to kick the ship way up toward light speed, otherwise not as much bang (can only then accelerate the ship from rest to the speed of the driver).
- Much stronger effects may be possible if you use a rotating compact driver mass, which would generate a strong Kerr field and could impart energy via inertial frame dragging.
My question: Are there any events that could be hypothesized that are likely to generate a signature easily detectable by radio or X-ray telescopes?
I though
Sure there's a lot of mass in space, but it's spread out quite a bit (read: space is a vacuum)
Gathering enough particles to move a stationary mass maybe doable in a lab experiment, but again, humanity fails us again: we create our own universe in lab experiments.
I would rather use gravity assist: much more reliable and predictable.
The point of the drive is not that it enables light speed, or that it saves energy, because it doesn't do either.
The point of the drive is that it would accelerate you and you *don't* feel it!
The drive would accelerate you by gravity. Just like the International Space Station astronauts are still falling towards the Earth, but they can't feel it- you can't feel relativistic gravity either.
So you could accelerate at 1000 times the Earth's surface gravity if you wanted, and not even spill your coffee (potentially, if it works, and it should do).
Of course scaling up an effect that is only faintly sensed on an accelerator the size of the LHC is left as an exercise to the reader ;-), but it's fundamental research and you never know where it could lead.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Comment removed based on user account deletion
A colleague of mine asked if I thought this was possible or hokum. The authors own "paper" (unpublished preprint, linked above) contains a rather lot of self-references to other unpublished preprints, usually a sign of some level of crack-pottedness. Also, his own numbers in the abstract for this idea (an acceleration of 3 nm/s^2 for 2 ns) make this completely unworkable. That corresponds to a displacement of a test mass of 1.5 x 10^-35 m. The most sensitive displacement detectors are the laser gravitational wave observatories, each of which are a pair of perpendicular 10km Fabry-Perot cavities. These detectors have a sensitivity of about 10^-18 m. That's seventeen orders of magnitude difference. On an amusing note, that displacement is actually the same order of magnitude as the "Planck length". I can't help but wonder whether the author engaged in some silly numerology in order to get it to work out that way.
Just because humans haven't discovered it yet does not mean it doesn't exist.
Amen to that.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
We push subatomic particles at relativistic speeds all the time and observe the mass change. Or maybe you think it works differently when it's lots of particles moving together?
Then there's the fact that the classical KE formula *just happens* to be the first order approximation of the relativistic formula for KE:
E = mc^2/(1 - v^2/c^2)^.5
which expands to: .5*v^2/c^2 + 3/8*v^4/c^4 ...) .5*mv^2
E = mc^2 (1 +
E ~= mc^2 +
Rest energy (RE) = mc^2
KE = E - RE ~= (mc^2 + .5*mv^2) - mc^2 = 1/2mv^2
But that's just luck. Those hundreds of physicists spending years of their lives double checking all of this obviously have it wrong.
"Placing a test mass next to the beam line and measuring the forces on it as the particles pass by should confirm the theory -- or scupper it entirely."
Golly Gee, Cmdr Taco, I was under the impression the LHC was already surrounded by "test masses" and measurement devices...
I filed patents on LINAC NLS propulsion 8 years ago and published papers in AIAA.
I also have patent filed on antimatter propulsion which blows the doors off LINAC. Nothing will
ever be published by me or USPTO on this very secret technology.