Slashdot Mirror
The 'Impossible' EM Drive Being Tested By NASA May Finally Be Explained (technologyreview.com)
MarkWhittington writes: The EmDrive, the so-called "impossible" space drive that uses no propellant, has roiled the aerospace world for the past several years ever since it was proposed by British aerospace engineer Robert Shawyer. In essence, the claim advanced by Shawyer and others is that if you bounced microwaves in a truncated cone, thrust would be produced out the open end. Most scientists have snorted at the idea, noting correctly that such a thing would violate physical laws. However, organizations as prestigious as NASA have replicated the same results, that prototypes of the EmDrive produces thrust. How does one reconcile the experimental results with the apparent scientific impossibility? MIT Technology Review suggested a reason why.
Have they tried analyzing this thing with an E-meter?
I'm afraid it's simulations all the way down.
All the way up too.
The ship stays where it is and the engines move the universe around it
Oh goddamnit now they have to change the datatype on inertia...give it some more bits. Hope they have online ALTER
It's true that a lot of comets are made of ice, but still I don't see the connection...
To be fair, assuming no race conditions, we'd never know if they took us offline. We could be running then stopping and running then stopping, and as long as the state was preserved, we'd never know (being part of that state).
"stop the world, I want to get off" just became a real thing...
Physicists get Hadrons!
> We'll eventually find out we really live in a simulation...
And only the soul programs that have been save()d will be uploaded to the next life.
If both time and space are quantised to the extent that we're the simulation, there's some interesting corollaries to do with numerical instability - basically that the computational steps in time have to be below a certain limit or spatial anomalies will occur, and vice versa.
And vice versa. :)
Physicists get Hadrons!
It also has a method such that when beings within one of the simulations start to figure out how the simulation works, it is immediately replaced with something more bizarre and inexplicable.
That's actually a quite decent explanation of quantum physics.
We'll eventually find out we really live in a simulation...
If you ever find yourself experiencing an uncontrollable urge to do something you wouldn't normally do, it's probably because you're being clicked-and-dragged.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Exactly. And this is the explaination of the effect. As you probably know, at the same time when EmDrive has been invented, there were experiments to verify if our universe is a simulation. In these experiments they tried to find a regular structure in the observations (aka modelling grid). Knowing this fact, those who run this simulation stopped the process and made some changes in the engine, so now it woks on an irregular (stochastic) grid.
As a side effect of this, the process of modelling of microwaves bouncing in a truncated cone introduces some calculation errors that eventually leads to the movement of the cone itself.
The hypothetical Unruh effect (or sometimes Fulling–Davies–Unruh effect) is the prediction that an accelerating observer will observe black-body radiation where an inertial observer would observe none. In other words, the background appears to be warm from an accelerating reference frame; in layman's terms, a thermometer waved around in empty space, subtracting any other contribution to its temperature, will record a non-zero temperature.
That just blew my mind. It blew my mind so much that I can actually predict the future. I predict that I'm going to be in a bar one day, pretty snookered, and I'm going to be yelling about how, if you can hypothetically put me in a glass-encased vacuum at 0 degrees with a thermometer and an asbestos glove, I'll be holding the thermometer with the asbestos glove and waving it around like I'm trying to signal a passing ship and I'll look at the thing at it's going to read 0.1 degrees. But I won't know the name of what I'm describing, nor why it works. I'll bet a drink on it, though.
I'm pretty sure I've been replaced with a simple shell script.
Sometimes I feel like I'm a dancing paper clip offering unwanted advice to people.
The lopsided nature of the cone causes the Ether Turtle's shell to become warmer than its belly. This difference is uncomfortable to reptiles and makes it shift around a bit, causing the turtle underneath to adjust to compensate, in turn triggering a similar re-shuffling of the turtle below it, and so on all the way down, causing the universe to shift position relative to the probe.
Table-ized A.I.
But of course we are living in a simulation. How else would you explain the apparently inborn feeling that there is a higher being or beings that controls the rules of the Universe, and observes us constantly even when we are alone or in the dark?
To quote Douglas Adams: "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.”
So it was literally the last thing that you read? You must have found it to be quite satisfying.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I hope you were not expecting a reply. The man clearly said he dropped the mic on reading, Kevin.
The laws are more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.
----
Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner.