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No, NASA Did Not Accidentally Invent Warp Drive
StartsWithABang writes: As Slashdot has previously reported, NASA Spaceflight has claimed to have vetted the EM Drive in a vacuum, and found there is still an anomalous thrust/acceleration on the order of 50 microNewtons for the device. While some are claiming this means things like warp drive and 70-day-trips-to-Mars are right on the horizon, it's important to view this from a scientist's point of view. Here's what it will take to turn this from a speculative claim into a robust one.
hah HAH! they INTENTIONALLY invented warp drive!!! now make it so!
The Vulcans will be here soon, swooping in like a returning Jesus Christ to save us from ourselves at long last, show us the true path of wisdom, and help us complete the application (an on-line PDF form, no doubt) for membership in the United Federation of Planets.
And then we will all live happily ever after.
Warp drive would involve fielding to warp space, not seeing the connection with this device. Would have been nice to have had a nice platform to test this kind of stuff in a zero G environment like the original JFK space program. Maybe they'll build a rocket for it.
If all goes through, what will it mean?
If I understood correctly, it allows you to pre-warp some space ahead in your journey, so that you can begin your journey later. For example, to go to Alpha Centauri A, where light takes a few years, you may start the warp drive, wait for a year, then jump into the ship and travel there (taking 1 year less time).
It will not save you anything going to new places you did not plot a course to.
I am also not sure about the speed limits that warp drive imposes. Possibly beyond light speed if it squeezes space enough? (By light speed I mean compared to flat space).
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Really why not just sample facebook find a post that says something crazy and then extrapolate to a large group of people.
You might as well complain about the new cult that thinks mankind was created by spaghetti.
The drive may or may not work, pretty hard to mismeasure a newton + of thrust, we will see. There is no doubt it's positively insane to go all guilt by association.
>> anomalous thrust/acceleration
Must have been a Trekkie that posted this. There would be no ST:TNG without a Federation shit-tonne of anomalies to investigate.
Now if we can only shrink ourselves down to atoms we can ride the micro ship to Mars.
NASA did not invent a warp drive. Roger Shawer might have. The title should read, "NASA has not been robustly proven to have built a warp drive" Three teams have reported the same effect from three different devices. And these aren't teams of hacks. Furthermore the test duplicates our best prediction of the cause of the thrust. It's premature to throw a Singularity party but it's definitely premature to declare the device to not be a warp drive.
Skepticism is a good thing. This isn't proper skepticism.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
From the article [numbers added for clarity]:
So let me ask you this, aspiring (or armchair) scientists: what would be the criteria you'd demand as the extraordinary evidence necessary to convince you that this is real? For myself, here's what Iâ(TM)d demand at minimum:
* I would certainly demand #4 - this combined with #3 (or a substitute - see below) is the gold standard for "there is really something here even if we don't know what it is".
* I would demand #5 or a similar process of independent peer review
* I would allow "enough reproductions over enough diverse environments to rule out environmental factors" as a substitute for #3.
* As for #2, the less the measurement error could lead to misleading results, the better, but a result that is "at least many standard deviations above the measurement error" may not be necessary to declare that we have an interesting, publishable result worthy of further study.
I would let #1 go: If the phenomenon was caused by something that did NOT scale with input power, it could still be interesting. It might not get us to space, but it would be worth publishing and studying.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It doesn't imply the power range to be infinite. Everything has a working range. But, although the claim that it's a necessity is dubious, it's pretty well universal. If you supply an LED with less power, it will light less. We tend to PWM them in order to do this digitally with only one voltage on a digital circuit, but - for a certain range - their brightness correlates to the power supplied to even LED's, yes.
Because I don't think that's how standard deviations work, and I'd love to know what "gravitational effects" are, and how we can isolate our experiments from them.
I'm probably not alone in being sick and tired about hearing the endless back and forth on this.
On the one hand we have people calling this a Warp Drive and making fantastic flights of fancy and on the other side we have people who think the entire thing is rubbish and anyone even remotely involved deemed a crackpot.
Look -- we have had three different successful reproductions of predicted results. The tests have been done by respected members of respected agencies. And there will be many more tests on the way, I've even heard talk of actually conducting tests in outer space.
So why can't we just wait for more tests? Seems to me that that's the only think to do.
Either way, it will either succeed or it will fail. If anything we MUST conduct these tests to understand the anomalous effect we are seeing here.
Because even if it does fail further tests, it could lead to an understanding the documented and so far anomalous effect which could lead to further advances in science or, if just bad testing could help us understand how to better setup tests and instrumentation.
Above all, it's the complete lack of desire to understanding the cause of the documented effect while focusing on a shouting match that makes both sides look more like religious zealots better suited to jihads than any sort of educated members of the modern society.
Momentum can be transferred by electromagnetic radiation alone - we don't need propellant other than photons. But such an intensity of photons is - unrealistic.
Another possibility: wear and tear. Producing microwaves may tear loose a few atoms from the cavity, which are then accelerated by the microwaves and expelled. In this case, it is weak rocket using debris as propellant. and as any rocket, it will run out of "propellant" after some time.
I was thinking the same thing. There's no reason for the scaling to be easily predictable before there is a model to base the prediction on.
While some are claiming this means things like warp drive [...] are right on the horizon
Who are these "some"? The article linked to by the sentence makes no mention of any claims of it being a warp drive.
And then this from the Forbes article:
When you come across an announcement like the one made by NASA Spaceflight a week ago: that NASA has made a successful test of the EM Drive — a propulsion engine that uses no propellant, seemingly violating one of the most fundamental laws of physics, while warping space in the process — you’d better make sure you aren’t fooling yourself.
The linked announcement makes no mention of warping space, so the bolded section seems inaccurately disparaging.
It sounds to me like the guy who wrote the article has fooled himself into believing that someone has claimed it's a warp drive for the purpose of being able to find something to write indignantly about.
Come to think of it, the writer doesn't even seem to be sure of who's who in this scenario. "When you come across an announcement [...] you'd better make sure you aren't fooling yourself." Why would I be fooling myself by simply reading an announcement? Surely it's the people who make the announcement that should make sure they're not fooling themselves. Which I might think they were, if they'd said anything about warping space. Which they didn't.
So just who are these apparently imaginary people that the summary/article is railing against?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
http://www.enemygadgets.com/stellar.html
Nearly doable with off the shelf electronics components.
we either have
1. another cold fusion debacle
2. groundbreaking fundamentally new science
do i understand the em drive status quo correctly?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The computer code also shows that the efficiency, as measured by the thrust to input power ratio, decreases at input powers exceeding 50 kiloWatts.
They also predicted thrust levels would be around 1,300 Newtons @ 100kW.
Is this any different than Crookes radiometer? I think they may have been scooped by over 200 years.
Why not a warp drive by accident?
Problem we have here is that we do not understand how dark matter interacts with the universe as a whole. It could be possible we have found a device that can propel itself via an interaction however weakly with dark matter.
Still fast travel means you have to develop deflectors or some way to know what's in front of you in time to maneuver away from it.
Also, at light speeds passing a massive object might liquidate organic beings. Need to be able to negate gravity.
Obviously they didn't invent warp drive.
Warp drive works by warping space-time. An artificial inertial drive is something completely different.
Unless it turns out it isn't...
Do the Slashdot authors get their science news from anyone other than Ethan Siegel these days?
If anything this would be the Star Trek Impulse drive.
I don't know who the "some" are in that sentence, but no one at the link provided in the story is saying this means NASA created a warp drive.
Stop, already.
You are welcome on my lawn.
i'm giving her all she's got captain and it not what you want.
Would save allot of useless blabber once and for all if it does (and figure later exactly why) or doesn't work.
Because not one of its components is a mug of hot tea. Where are they going to get the source of brownian motion from otherwise?
NASA was just messing around, you see, they had an experimental EM drive... and next think you know they accidentally the whole spacetime.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
Actually this is the one criterion missing from the list of "what would it take to convince you that it is real": a viable theory as to how the drive works which makes a prediction that can be tested by another experiment. If this is a real effect then we need a theoretical framework which can be used to explain and predict the size of the effect under different conditions which can then be tested.
This is how the solar neutrino problem was solved. For decades experiments measuring the flux of solar neutrinos had come up short by a factor of 1/3 to 1/2 of the expected value. Initially people thought the experiments were somehow wrong, then focus switched to the solar models predicting the flux but these were confirmed as correct so ultimately nobody had a clue as to why there was discrepancy. People were split between inaccurate experiments, inaccurate prediction or new physics. The problem was solved only when the model which theorists had proposed as a possible solution - that neutrinos changed their flavour as they move through space - was tested by the SNO experiment which measured both the total neutrino flux and the electron neutrino flux separately.
You need both theory and experiment to agree to get understanding and without that clear understanding I would not expect the 'warp drive' effect to be resolved. No matter how much you repeat and verify the experiment there will always be questions raised about some effect which is not accounted for (assuming the effect remains so small). After a few decades you might get to the point where people will admit that the effect is not understood but even then many will ascribe it to some subtle experimental effect rather than new physics. The only way you will change minds is by having a new theory whose predictions are verified by further experiments.
The Forbes article lists five criteria that would make it a more plausible claim. One stands out in particular: the thrust scales with power. The drive reportedly creates on order of 30-50 microNewtons (uN) at 100 W input power. 1 KW power at microwave frequencies really isn't that hard (most kitchen microwave ovens operate near or at this scale), and 10 KW shouldn't be beyond the skills of a decent microwave engineer. Beyond that and it gets into Serious Engineering.
This idea came to me in a matter of seconds, so I must assume that the people currently testing it at NASA should also have thought of it as well and are working at testing the device at a range of power levels to plot out the power-vs-thrust relationship. Should be a piece of cake for at least one order of magnitude.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
You'll have port and starboard nacelle. Guess which one doesn't work...
This is more like the "limp home mode Impulse Drive we use at 1% power because the warp core had to be ejected in order to defeat an enemy who was kicking our ass until Spock came up with a way to dump the core and create a small rip in space-time fabric which ripped them to shreds."
Yes,
we have something here as exciting as cold fusion or polywater. it seems to violate newtons second law so people are looking for the escape clause. If it's real it's a huge deal because it means the fundamental problem of space travel--- bringing your propellant--- is permanently solved modulo the nitty gritty of making it more efficient.
On the otherhand, like polywater and cold fusion it's likely a reproducible experimental error that's not been identified yet. 3 groups have independently observed it so far.
My guess: it's just ions sputtered off the walls and accelerated or it's attraction towards an induced dipole in the room, neither of which would be exciting.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I thought, a StartsWithABang that doesn't point to his medium.com site. Wow! Still I'm not sure I want to read a science article at Forbes.com, but I give it a shot. Finally, at the end we learn that StartsWithABang, Ethan Siegel, is the author of the article. More self promotion.
If StartsWithABang ever writes something worth reading, he won't have to submit it himself. Someone will submit it for him.
The operating frequency is 1946 MHz. Right smack in the middle of the 1900 GSM cell phone band.
As everyone creates one to try it in their garage we will probably loose cell service.
Arrange two facing in opposite directions about the axis of a shaft (and wave-guide) on magnetic bearings in a vacuum then feed the microwave energy to the set-up without any physical connection and watch it start spinning faster and faster until the g-forces are so high that it suffers a structural failure. obviously you should make it so that it will not fail easily so that you get to see how much kinetic energy these systems can actually convert electromagnetic energy into.
At some point during this experiment you may come to the conclusion that these devices are simply transferring and converting the microwave photon's momentum to the kinetic energy of the mass that constitutes the device.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-VZdJu0bLU
d@3-e.net
This is possibly the best writeup I've seen of it:
http://blogs.discovermagazine....
A salient point: "Worst of all is this statement from the paper: ÃoeThrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust.Ã In other words, the Cannae Drive worked when it was set up correctlyÃ"but it worked just as well when it was intentionally disabled set up incorrectly. Somehow the NASA researchers report this as a validation, rather than invalidation, of the device."
Ok, so, strictly speaking, this is not the warp drive, it's the impulse drive. (Thrust to relativistic speed, not trans-light.) We're still waiting for the warp drive.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
All the proponents of this "device" are just an example of how incompetent and delusional humans can get. From the NASA publication abstract: "Thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust. Specifically, one test article contained internal physical modifications that were designed to produce thrust, while the other did not (with the latter being referred to as the "null" test article)."
Listen up kids, this means that they tested the "true em-drive" and a dummy and _both_ gave them thrust. The dummy is specifically designed so that it _cannot_ do this! This means the "thrust" comes from some other effect, not the "em-drive". That truly and utterly pathetic thing here is that NASA actually did sound science and people are missing the necessary reading comprehension skills to even understand the abstract.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
if it provides thrust without propellant we get the sci fi world we've dreamed of.
but then again, i just ran a conversion calculator for micronewtons to ounces and it's 1million micronewtons (currently we're getting 50) for a 3.5ounce push... sheesh.
Good science writing in from mainstream press is a rare and beautiful thing.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Perhaps it's you who needs to go back to reading school.
There were 3 devices and the 3rd that they tested didn't produce thrust.
A competent human would have known this.
A delusional troll, not so much...
Does this mean that women will get bigger tits?
...what I hope any breakthrough in this direction can lead to is artificially controllable gravity fields so that we can have (realistically) non-cylindrical spaceships that don't rely on rotation for creating artificial gravity.
I admit I know next to nothing about the real science in this area, but one of the biggest limitations for humans to explore space is that extended periods in zero gravity is unhealthy for the body. If we can artificially create (or diminish) gravity at our convenience, then the potential for space travel is far greater.
Does anyone even realize how little 50 micronewtons is? It is approximately the amount of force that a 5 microgram mass exerts on the ground due to gravity. It takes more force than this to discernibly move a speck of dust. The background noise in just about anyplace in the world exerts several orders of magnitude more than this on your eardrums. You can't feel it.
An error of 50 micronewtons has a name: it's called "noise".
www.wavefront-av.com
It was a British aerospace engineer Roger Shawyer, who founded the company Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd (SPR) (UK) in the year 2000 to develop his invention (wikipedia) But you know, whatever keeps the US relevant.
"They" not "The"
I've read the NASA post, it makes sense. It's breathtaking how absolutely wrong many of the second and third hand media reports have been. All they did was confirm the thrust of the EM drive in a vacuum. They then went a step further with a modified EM drive and tried their interferometer experiment, which DID show a signal. It's all pretty amazing, but calling this an accidental warp drive is pretty far off the mark.
It only shows that the protocol used showed some sort of effect. The effect could be an systemic error in the protocol, i.e. local de-gasing temperature differential for example improperly taken into account. Difficult to know at the moment. In fact they seem to state now that the thrust is proportional to the phase change, and not to the intensity to add to the weirdness. Once the protocol are clarified and paper starts to be published for others to reproduce, then we can start to speak. until then it is an interesting point , but that's it. There is no "proof" and people claim to reproduce stuff which turned later incorrect some time.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I've been following this for a while. Observations:
Only a small contingent are talking about warp drive, and only in the most hypothetical way, and not in direct connection with this.
The researchers aren't required to explain the effect, just demonstrate it. As for the explanation, the inventor has a hypothesis; it was that hypothesis that led him to design the machine, so there is a chain of reasoning involved. Not a random goose chase. The man just is being ignored, as he has little standing in that world.
Something seems to be happening. Without predjudice to their future careers or reputations, scientists should look into this if they like. It certainly is worth a bit of funding, considering the possible payoff. Science ain't a business. Shoot for the stars, avoid hitting London.
The people talking breathlessly about space drives should keep it in their pants for a while. It clouds the discussion. Scientists love to debunk; they aren't fans of real life science fiction. Oddly.
It is really fun to read about.
And, as Heinlein sadly noted in Expanded Universe in an essay, space travel is really stalled out because rockets are too damned complex, expensive, and dangerous. If we ever leave earth, we need X-drives of some sort. Even if they aren't possible, we need to make them anyway. The universe as-is doesn't get final say about what is possible. Quantum drives don't exist until intelligent life creates those. Same with space warp drives - non-existent, until clever little masses of carbon make them for the very first time.
Just put one in orbit.
I have a friend who teaches at Catholic colleges around the US half the year. One of the classes he teaches is "science for non-science majors". Some years ago, he went down the food chain of the majors that take the course: next to the bottom were the business majors, who didn't get it, but didn't let that worry them. At the very bottom were the communications majors, who didn't get it, and didn't know that they didn't get it. Those, of course, are the folks who go into "journalism" (and HR, and...), which explains why we get so many idiot headlines. And the way they through around "intergalactic" and warp drive, I wouldn't be surprise to see them refer to a small airport for small private planes only as an intercontinental airport for supersonic planes.....
mark
If the scale model was inconclusive. Increase scale.
700 Watts? Time to increase to 260 Kilowatts. It should be hard to ignore 250-300 HP results.
Either way, the result should be entertaining.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
http://www.reddit.com/r/Futuro...
We've a few things wrong in these threads. Two different (three, really) drives, two inventors. Interesting summation.
Yes, actual understanding comes from people like you who admit not reading the article. Reading someones bad summary, thinking you know what you're talking about and spewing rubbish onto the Internet.
What would we do without people like you who think they know everything?
It's clear you have no idea what the experiments showed or didn't show, but have invested too much into big-noting yourself to back down now.
People like you are even too stupid to go back and check for errors you may have made, even when others tell you where they are and how you misunderstood.
Nice. But as an AC, you have of course zero credibility and exhibit all the worst qualities of human beings. Your insistence I read the paper is quaint, but after having rejected something like 20 papers because they contained scientific fraud or were at least grossly misleading, I can spot the tell-tales from the abstract and from what people are saying about it. As to "telling me how I misunderstood", if you had actually done that with relevant facts, I might have gone back. The sad fact of the matter is that "research" like this and people like you are not worth listening to. The same patterns can be found in defenders of homeopathy, evolution-deniers, systemd-advocates and the like. It is always they that have all the truth and you have "misunderstood" or "no clue" or "are stuck in the past" and such things. Sure, I do not read such announcements carefully, and I may even make irrelevant factual mistakes, but the fact of the matter is that those of us who are scientists are terribly, terribly annoyed and bored with the "scientific" claims of those that are not. In addition, I can come up with a dozen ways to fake the results these people have seen, without even trying hard. So, no, I will not take things like this "research" and people like you seriously, because in order to deserve that you first have to understand how science works and how fraud works. And you have to stop sniping from the shadows, giving not even a pseudonym. Maybe then you deserve a bit of respect and consideration, but not before.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You wouldn't have to read the paper, you're too good for that obviously. But even if you had read a decent summary. Or the countless comments here telling you your interpretation of the bad summary (that you have put so much faith into) was incorrect you would realise how idiotic you are.
It's pointless showing you relevent facts, others have tried and you still insist you know better. It's a feedback loop with you people, 1 idiot misunderstands and writes a stupid comment and then the rest of you pile on. None of you had the slightest clue, but of course that never stops any of you.
Some background that you will also not read, because it may interfere with your delicate sensibilities. https://www.reddit.com/r/Futur...
Other people will see it and realise the errors in your 'analysis'
But I'm sure, not you.
They did smash a spaceship into Mars because of a mix up between Metric and Imperial units... I have no doubt that NASA testing knows how error works, however they are not immune to mistakes.
GOOD science you say? Well I just happen to know that the only scientists able to do GOOD science are the blokes from the University of Edinburgh. They all wear lab kilts just to make sure you know it!
Why do you want this to fail so bad? Why do you want this to not be reality. Why shouldn't we have warp drives?
You started the name calling. Just like you can't read, you also don't know how to insult. I'll ask again: Why do you want this to be false so badly? What do you stand to lose if warp drive IS real?
So which scientific fraud victimized you so badly that you want the rest of the world to do without warp drive? Did a warp drive rape your sister? Was your brother killed by a magnetron?