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Leaked NASA Paper Suggests The 'Impossible' EM Drive Really Does Work (sciencealert.com)
A source close to NASA Eagleworks has leaked the test results of the 'impossible' EM Drive. While it's important to note that the results that have been leaked haven't been published in an academic journal, they do suggest that the system works and is capable of generating force of 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt in a vacuum. ScienceAlert reports: The paper concludes that, after error measurements have been accounted for, the EM Drive generates force of 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt in a vacuum. That's not an insignificant amount -- to put it into perspective, the super-powerful Hall thruster generates force of 60 millinewtons per kilowatt, an order of magnitude more than the EM Drive. But the Hall thruster uses fuel and requires a spacecraft to carry heavy propellants, and that extra weight could offset the higher thrust, the NASA Eagleworks team conclude in the paper. Light sails on the other hand, which are currently the most popular form of zero-propellant propulsion, use beams of sunlight to propel them forward rather than fuel. And they only generate force up to 6.67 micronewtons per kilowatt - two orders of magnitude less than NASA's EM Drive, says the paper. The NASA Eagleworks team measured the EM Drive's force using a low thrust pendulum at the Johnson Space Centre, and the tests were performed at 40, 60, and 80 watts. They were looking for any sign that the thrust could be a result of another anomaly in the system, but for now, that doesn't appear to be the case. "The test campaign included a null thrust test effort to identify any mundane sources of impulsive thrust, however none were identified," the team, led by Harold White, concluded in the paper. "Thrust data from forward, reverse, and null suggests that the system is consistently performing with a thrust to power ratio of 1.2 +/- 0.1 millinewtons per kilowatt." But the team does acknowledge that more research is needed to eliminate the possibility that thermal expansion could be somehow skewing the results. They also make it clear that this testing wasn't designed to optimize the thrust of the EM Drive, but simply to test whether it worked, so further tweaking could make the propulsion system more efficient and powerful.
Because if Trump wins, we need a way to leave this planet...
Mostly random stuff.
The physical laws went out the door months ago.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I need to see more than this article to convince me this works.
They are directly related. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20110023492
I thought the science was settled on Newton's laws...
Ran some numbers. Assuming the power generator and thruster itself has zero mass (obviously not, but it lets us set an upper limit), the energy available in 1kg of U235, at 1.2 millinewtons/kw, would accelerate that 1 kg mass to about 0.35 C, over the course of about 1000 days.
Add in mass of ship, generators and thrusters and you're looking at considerably less acceleration and top speed, but if this thing works at all (a big IF, granted), manned starships are just within the range of possibility. It'd still be a multi-year (probably multi-decade) trip, but hey.
I would of said the same thing about quantum entanglement. Sometimes odd things happen that push what was previously thought possible.
Eagleworks is NASA's "check weird shit and see if its real" department, so they are exactly the place to check this.
How is this any different from "magical force that synchronizes photons across space and time.... but only if I pre-filter the results of my experiments before shoving them into my statistical test"?
Higher physics is absolutely full of magic pseudo science shit, and this might be something real and simple, that just isn't understood by the current bogus nature of magic fluffy physics.
You can't just "use the name" of any government agency unless you are properly affiliated, or the man will drop the hammer on you hard.
And if they pump in 1.21 Gigawatts, they're going to see some serious shit!
I thought the science was settled on Newton's laws...
Firstly, Newton's laws are based on observation and assumptions.
The observations gives us formulas that seem to fit, but there's no guarantee that those formulas describe all situations in the universe.
The assumptions, from Noether's theorem stating that symmetries imply conservation laws, are that the universe is smooth, in the mathematical sense of smooth being that space is infinitely divisible. We know that last part isn't true: you cannot measure position to an arbitrary precision in the universe.
It is therefore seen that Newton's laws become increasingly inaccurate when the scale is very large (relativity), or very small (quantum mechanics).
You might check out the Casimir effect some time.
It's not predicted by Newton's laws, but measurable and predictable using QM.
Anyone who says "EM drive cannot work because it violates my understanding of physics" should really check out the Casimir effect.
If your understanding of physics does not predict the Casimir effect, you probably shouldn't be commenting on the EM drive, or results from NASA rocket scientists.
If you use 1 kW to generate photons and use them as your rocket exhaust, then you produce (1 kilowatt / speed of light) = 0.00334 millinewtons. This EM drive produces 360 times more thrust, so it can't be explained that way.
Here's the thing people that don't really understand the physics don't get. Mass is energy energy is mass. If you're throwing photons out the back that you are creating then you are ejecting mass.
While a photon rocket is efficient in terms of mass it's actually terrible in terms of the energy required to accelerate something.
They are directly related. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.j...
As the NASA document you cite (HTML FTW!) says, it's "an advanced propulsion physics laboratory, informally known as "Eagleworks"" being implemented by NASA Johnson Space Center (NASA/JSC), so it is part of NASA.
Can someone clued up here, please explain to me more about the figures of this thing in regards to propulsion?
It's obviously generating very little propulsion, but it's "free" if electricity is free, right?
So if we had a massive reactor shoveling power into it, would it generate more, or the device need to be larger or we need more of them?
Could we build a ship with the existing one, assume again unlimited power reactor somehow and then fire the thing up, would I be right in thinking this thing would incredibly slowly start moving the ship and over a ridiculous amount of time, eventually be moving very rapidly and in theory (?) just keep on accelerating?
I get the no fuel and I get the very little force but I can't imagine the implications for it.
That's not why the EM drive is neat. The force provided by emitted radiation is a fairly well understood and predictable phenomenon. The EM drive has a sealed microwave cavity, so it doesn't emit many photons, and those that it does through thermal radiation are measured and accounted for. Despite that, the EM drive appears to produce an additional force, that is what makes it neat.
Yes I understand that. I probably should have made it clearer, but I was replying to the original poster explaining to him why his idea of "just bouncing around photons/internal solar sail" isn't what an EM "reactionless" drive would be since it would still be ejecting mass and the rocket would be getting lighter just like any kind of rocket would.
I was about to do a back of the envelope calculation on the energy requirements of a traditional photon rocket, but it looks like a poster ahead of me just did. 1kW = 0.00334 millinewtons..
Here's the thing people that don't really understand the physics don't get. Mass is energy energy is mass. If you're throwing photons out the back that you are creating then you are ejecting mass While a photon rocket is efficient in terms of mass it's actually terrible in terms of the energy required to accelerate something.
Argh. More people who think they understand physics without ever having studied it.
Light does NOT have mass. But it does have momentum. And that momentum is what can be used to produce force.
But how can it have momentum without having mass? To understand that, STUDY PHYSICS. I mean the hard mathy stuff, not the hand wavey stuff.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
You read it here first!
The
Except NASA doesn't have the budget for lawyers... (que super sad music)
I'm no physicist myself, and physicists don't understand this thing anyway, but here's my understanding:
Yes, appears that the only input is electricity, and it seems to produce thrust. So if electricity is free, a tiny amount of thrust is free. I say it APPEARS that the only input is electricity- many reactions which we now understand include oxygen from ambient air as an input, and that might have easily go unnoticed in an experiment before the reaction was understood. Similarly, it's possible that this thruster is using some non-obvious input, such as ambient radiation.
We don't know if one could be built much larger, or what the current capacity is for a given size. Maybe a 100,000 watt one could be small, maybe it would need to be very large. Maybe it would be far more efficient, maybe far less. We're still trying to confirm that the thing works at all.
> would I be right in thinking this thing would incredibly slowly start moving the ship and over a ridiculous amount of time, eventually be moving very rapidly and in theory (?) just keep on accelerating?
Yes, in theory, up to near the speed of light. Or maybe not. 1500 years ago someone discovered that if you burned charcoal mixed with livestock poop in a bamboo shoot, you got a similarly weak thrust. Later we figured out it was the dried pee, not the poop, that mattered and adding sulfur helped. So a thousand years ago they had black powder rockets, which kept accelerating through the air as long as the engine kept burning. Now we know that a rocket won't keep accelerating forever in air, but it took a thousand years to figure that out. We're still in the "poop in a tube" stage of EM drives, so we really don't know what the potential is.
If it really does work (and extraordinary claims do require extraordinary proof) we have absolutely no idea how. The current explanations do not make any sense within known science. Who knows, maybe we have stumbled onto a way of directing dark energy. At this stage, I am not dismissing the possibility that it is the science discovery of the century, though I still consider it more likely than not that further study will debunk it.
I think the next logical step is to test "fire" an EM drive in the vacuum of space and see if it is still producing thrust when moving around the earth in both zero gravity and zero atmospheres.
A positive (speaking) result in that instance would go a long way to proving whether or not it was capable of driving future space exploration
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
Actually, more likely that it's emitting some more common particle such as electrons, protons, nuclei or neutrons, which is what's providing the force, but they just aren't set up to detect that in their experimental setup.
The
queue, not que (which is spanish for what).
Comey said it wouldn't work, then he said it would, then it wouldn't.
Or is it the other way around? I lost track.
Table-ized A.I.
In this context, it's actually "cue", not "queue".
The Eagleworks paper has already been accepted by the AIAA, which could fairly be described as "reputable". It will appear in the December 2016 issue.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Any time we discover something that defies science we know, someone might unlock what is going on and we have a new hypothesis or law or something. It could lead into a chain reaction of discoveries, or we might make the thruster more efficient.
God spoke to me
Rat's! my Note 7 Drive has serious competition now. (Gotta change my sig, too)
Table-ized A.I.
queue sort of works, but only if you're willing for the current song to finish playing first.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Excellent - that's far more useful info than a fake leak. I'd like this to be true, but after so many scams...
Wouldn't it just be cheaper to pop one of these out of an Internal Space Station window and see if it works?
Well they already paid for the performance rights for it, so they may as well get their money's worth.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Mass is energy
Technically speaking, no. Mass is mass and energy is energy. The T-shirt-based truth "mass is energy" is just an over-simplification (of the already-over-simplifying tools we use to understand our surrounding reality), to highlight that static mass is also associated to energy (only understandable within dynamic conditions) via the tremendous amount of interactions at the microscopic level. So, it basically means that a macroscopic mass is the aggregation of innumerable microscopic masses under dynamic conditions (= with energy) and, consequently, is associated with energy even in absence of movement.
If you're throwing photons out the back that you are creating then you are ejecting mass.
In order to apply the "mass is energy" idea to photons, they should be formed by other constituent parts (under dynamic conditions). In any case, photons are always moving (= have energy), so the applicability of the aforementioned idea to them is wrong for various reasons.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
I believe your math is wrong. U235 releases 202.5 MeV per atom undergoing fission, so that means 1 kg can generate 83.14 TJ from fission. Assuming 100% efficiency, a massless drive, and no mass loss from propellants, that means there is enough energy from fission to reach a velocity of 0.043 c relative to the rest frame.
dE = (m - m') c^2 = m' c^2 (gamma - 1) => m' c^2 = m c^2 (1 - dE/(m c^2)) = m c^2 (1 - rho)
rho = dE/(m c^2) = 83.14 TJ / 89.88 PJ = 9.25e-4
rho = (1 - rho) (gamma - 1) => gamma = 1/(1 - rho) = 1/sqrt(1 - beta^2)
(1 - rho)^2 = 1 - beta^2 => beta^2 = rho (2 - rho) = 1.85e-3
beta = sqrt(rho (2 - rho)) = 0.0430
The bipartition energy/momentum seems to be the consequence of a not-perfect answer to a very complex reality which has been built over many years by many people across different fields. Both magnitudes (and what they imply, like the conservation laws) are mathematical representations of the overall valid phenomenon "movement can only be transmitted".
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Here in Europe (specifically Germany) we always say a photon has mass because E=mc^2
No it isn't. It's E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2. For a photon, the first half is always zero.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
No. As per our current knowledge, there is no way to justify that something is moving unless a force was applied at some point in the direction of the movement. In space without friction, the most logical way to accomplish such a goal is via reaction (i.e., force backwards).
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
If it turns out that this does work, I think it's much more likely that, rather than being a violation of Newton's 2nd law, it's due to production of some hard-to-detect particle such as neutrinos.
Newton's second law was violated just over 110 years ago when Einstein discovered relativity because the very concept we have for acceleration is not actually how the universe works (although it works fine for everyday speeds). The problem with this drive not that it violates Newton's second law but that it violates a far, far more important principle: conservation of momentum.
In physics all conservation laws are tied to symmetries (due to a beautiful piece of maths called Neother's theorem) and the symmetry in this case is that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the space. So for this drive to work either the laws of physics are different in different parts of space or there is some other explanation. However creating and emitting some new particle cannot be it because this would still follow conservation of momentum.
One idea which could possibly work and keep conservation of momentum intact would be interacting with Dark Matter. If the drive somehow gives the energy to DM particles which are believed to exist everywhere so they come shooting out of the end then this might work. Since it oes not involve creating new particles but only interacting with particles which are already there the momentum calculation is different. However if it was this easy to interact with DM via EM forces it is hard to see how we could not have already detected DM so there are still serious flaws even with this idea.
However a far more likely explanation is that the drive shoots out electrons or other charged particles and, while on earth, there is a mechanism to return the charge imbalance to the drive via interaction with the environment. In space this will not be possible and the charge will build up until the drive stops working. So until this is ruled out this seems by far the most likely explanation: it preserves conservation of momentum and only needs particles we already know about to behave in ways we already understand. So please lets rule simple explanations like this out before looking for the crazy stuff.
Here in Europe (specifically Germany) we always say a photon has mass because E=mc^2 but its rest mass is 0
No we do not say this in Europe and none of the Germans I have worked with at CERN have ever said this either because it is provably wrong. Photons have momentum but no mass. Either you had a really bad physics teacher or you did not understand what you were being taught. For a photon E=pc where 'p' is the momentum.
No, it really does. Conservation of momentum is a principle very deeply baked into physics and has had a vast amount of testing. It's reached the point where anyone claiming otherwise is quire reasonably considered a crackpot unless they have some quite amazingly compelling evidence.
object "moving" at the speed of light (the photon). Is it still moving?
I think that your question summaries perfectly the main contribution of certain theories (and people) to science: why just focusing on providing an efficient framework to understand reality when you can come up with a fantastic world full of made-up problems?
IMO, my original comment and the previous paragraph are more than enough to understand my position and why I don't want to continue a conversation on these lines.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
I meant "summarises".
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
There are a number of problems with fractional and near C travel that have been punted for another time because of the issues with just attaining those speeds. The most immediate being what happens when you run into something a significant fraction of the speed of light. Space is, as they say, big and the chances of you hitting something are very slim but it will happen occasionally (and is much more likely inside the solar system). Let's assume the mass of a grain of sand is 0.67 mg, if you hit that at 0.35 C you're looking at ~3e12 Joules (roughly equivalent to 737 tons of TNT). That's much kinetic energy would sink an aircraft carrier and it would vaporize any space craft we're capable building at this point... it would just cease to exist.
So you have one of two choices given our current technology, accelerate something significantly big enough that it can shrug off a 737 ton hit... a metallic asteroid would do the trick (not a rubble pile one)... or just go with the law of averages an accelerate several "inexpensive" unshielded probes assuming at least one will make it through. The second option isn't even that viable until we get significant production capability in LEO because there's no such thing as an "inexpensive" probe when you have to launch it from earth. Current prices are about $20,000/kg to achieve LEO which doesn't seem like that much until you start accounting for everything a space probe actually needs. An "amateur" Meade 16" LX600 Cassegrain telescope weighs ~170kg with a launch cost of ~$3.4 million. No one is sending that into space but it gives you an idea of the weight involved for just the imaging component of a probe. Most probes have multiple imagers. Then you need add on a power supply, thermal control, an antenna with a high enough gain to communicate with earth, a back up for that antenna, etc. Even "cheap" probes run into the hundreds of millions in costs. A that cost nothing is expendable.
So the thing apparently does work. We'll be rewriting physics books soon.
The EM drive does no such thing. This isn't a NASA analysis, it's a spin-off entity that has "NASA" in the name.
My understanding is that the Laws of Motion still apply at large scales, but that mass also increases with velocity (whereas Newton would have assumed that mass was constant). It's only Newton's Law of Gravity that was superseded by relativity. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Challenge accepted. Newton's laws of motion are an approximation which work at everyday scales and energies. Special Relativity replaces Newton's Laws of motion at high energies and at really large scales (cosmological) you need General Relativity to explain the bending of space-time which is what replaces Newton's Law of Gravity.
Lastly mass does not increase with velocity, even in relativity it is constant because it is something called a 'Lorentz invariant'. The concept of 'relativistic mass' results from a misunderstanding of relativity which Einstein himself cautioned against. It arises from the fact that in relativity the momentum of a particle with a mass m and velocity v is no longer just 'mv' but 'gamma*mv' where gamma is a factor which depends on the particle's speed.
This unfortunately makes it appear that it is like Newton's momentum but just using 'gamma*m' for the mass. However the gamma factor comes from the velocity because in relativity space and time change with the observer. It is easier to see if we think of Newton's second law which in relativity is NOT 'F=gamma*m*a' because we have acceleration and the difference between relativistic and newtonian acceleration is more complex than a single 'gamma' term.
Newtons second law (F=m*a) was rewritten by Einstein as F = (m*a / ((1-v2)/c2)^(2/3)) where m is rest mass.
You are missing part of the formula for relativistic acceleration plus you have a bracket in the wrong place and the fractional power inverted. The full formula is:
F = gamma^3*m*a(parallel) + gamma*m*a(perp)
where gamma=1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) and parallel/perp refer to the acceleration components parallel and perpendicular to the velocity.
Looks pretty legit, but this an engineering paper - we tried this, that's the result we found. There're no physics or attempts to explain the devices' inner workings.
Second, everyone that does speculate about it agrees that to probe the existence of this discretization would require particle collisions with energy around the Planck energy, about 10^28 eV.
That's a rather strong statement considering that there are groups on ATLAS and CMS looking for evidence of Large Extra Dimensions which would reduce the energy scale for this to a few tens of TeV. Personally I don't think they will find anything but certainly they are clearly speculating about it at far lower energy scales.
To think that some lame tabletop experiment using only classical electrodynamics, running at most at 80 watts, somehow magically found a way to probe phenomena from an energy scale 15 orders of magnitude larger than the LHC scale, just shows a complete lack of knowledge of all the science involved.
Unfortunately again this is not really a correct thing to say because there are such experiments hunting for axion models of Dark Matter. The LHC is one way to get at high energy physics that is almost guaranteed to find new physics in our energy reach so it is worth the huge cost. However this does not rule out others trying lower budget approaches which can afford to be riskier and to only probe certain models. It is worth remembering that only a few years ago the Nobel prize was awarded to a group which essentially used scotch tape to separate graphite layers something which far more expensive approaches had failed to do.
Off to read the thing now.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I read the paper and it's interesting, one thing I would check is the weight of the cavity after running for a while to ensure they're not just somehow shooting copper ions out the back.
Well let's see what the engineers have to say. There should be enough information in the reports for someone to replicate the results. Though the availability of metre-plus vacuum chambers is not likely to be high.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Yay! More easy pickings! Off to Somalia to get a crew together...
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Get yourself over to Raqqua while you still have time.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
100% CORRECT. Why is this modded down? Eagleworks is a lab that ANYONE CAN RENT. This scam is being perpetuated by the false use of the NASA name to add legitimacy!
I can't believe Slashdot is still promoting this scam. For shame. NASA "Eagleworks" is a LAB THAT ANYONE CAN RENT. These scammers are using the "NASA" name to try and get legitimacy. Now they are "leaking" papers. Who the fuck "leaks" scientific papers? Fuck you new Slashdot owners for promoting this anti-science scam. Shame on you!
This junk-science would never be published by any respectable outfit. So they "leak" and make it appear like there is some conspiracy to suppress their "results". Same as most scientific frauds do. For example, the medical field is full of "miracle" cures that are "published" in this way as well. Or think of Rossie's "E-Cat", the free energy device (or was it ultra-low cost fusion without shielding or radioactivity?).
This is science-fraud and junk-science, plain and simple. And as in all such cases before, there are enough morons that want to believe against all odds and all scientific understanding and that keep the scam going. These people use "science" as a surrogate for religion, without any understanding of what science is, can do and what its limits are.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Simple: With any good scam, there are a lot of morons that want to believe (usually called the "marks"). These then fight (and here mod down) anything that puts their grand holy belief in the magic thing into question.
Hell, you can even scam half a nation, as Trump is currently demonstrating with his empty promises, lies and crude theories of how the world works. (Not that the other candidate is really much better...)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You most decidedly can use the name of a government lab that you can rent for your own research. It depends on how you do it (and that may also be a reason why this was "leaked" and not poperly published).
Example:
Perfectly legal: "Magic was discovered at NASA's Eagleworks laboratory!" (Done by some junk-scientists that rented the lab at that time...)
Illegal: "NASA discovered magic at its Eagleworks laboratory!"
See the difference? This is _not_ NASA doing the (junk-)science. This is somebody that rented the lab.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There're no physics or attempts to explain the devices' inner workings.
That is a central characteristic of a pseudo-scientific scam and of junk-science. Tried and true, works on a certain type of person every time. Current other examples: Rossie's "E-CAT" and and the D-WAVE "quantum computer". Although the latter has tried to move into legitimacy a bit. Pretty hard, because the D-
WAVE does nothing useful and is dog-slow compared to an orders-of-magnitude cheaper conventional computer. But both these scams have their followers.
It is really a case of "Of course you are the Messiah. I should know, I followed a few...". There is a class of people that have no problem with that argument, brain-dead as it is.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Hey, that's a weird looking 'stache over your lip...
A better and far more plausible explanation for what's happening is here.
And this fellow doesn't just do some hand waving. He has a theory, it is coherent, it is testable and falsifiable, and it also explains the galaxy rotation problem and the flyby anomaly accurately. As well as the EmDrive.
He's worth reading.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Eagleworks, like it or not, is independent verification. This is hardly like the "E-Cat" where Rossi was the only person ever to operate the device.
These guys sat in a lab, built the device and observed thrust that couldn't be explained. They weren't aiming for an explanation though.
Science was settled on Newton, until Einstein came along and noticed that there is an asymptote at c. Then we had to amend Newton.
Science is a history of amendments. There are plenty in the future that we will discover, just as there are plenty in the past we already discovered.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Marconi sending a radio signal across the Atlantic is a good example of an engineer doing something that the scientists said was impossible.
Since the earth is round and radio waves travel in a straight line, it should have been impossible to send a signal more than a few hundred miles.
In fact, they bounced off the ionosphere, which hadn't been discovered yet.
Marconi factoids:
In Newfoundland, the receiving end of Marconi's experiments, the undersea cable company, who had a legal monopoly on all trans-Atlantic communications, discovered or not, got an injunction forcing Marconi to stop his experiments and move elsewhere.
Marconi licensed, not sold, his radios, with a legal restriction prohibiting them from being used to talk to non-Marconi radios.
OTOH, in the 19th century there were several inexplicable observations, like the orbit of the moon. All except for the precession of Mercury eventually had classical explanations.
This sounds sort of like a scramjet.
"I am planning to get out while I can whichever candidate wins. They are all mentally ill, more than a few sociopathic,..."
Sure, but one of them is also yuugely stupid.
We need to crowdfund a SpaceX launch with a test platform. Enough with this endless ground-based testing that can easily live or die by politics.
No, seriously, this really cannot "be real" for exceptionally large values of confidence. But as you can see from the responses here, there are many stupid people that do not even have any real base-understanding of how science works (probably using "science" as a surrogate for "religion", and completely misunderstanding that these two are on entirely different levels) and that fall for the scam.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What, verification of their own findings and non-peer-reviewed and non-published? On that level, I can verify anything.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
No, "Eagleworks" is just a lab that these guys rent. Just stop.
Yawn. Let me know when they get the Improbable Drive going.
The paper does not prove that the EM drive works, it only proves that they were not able to find an experimental error that would account for the observed phenomenon. To prove that EM works, you would have to devise the theoretical framework explaining why it works and be able to make testable predictions based on that framework. The more of your predictions are proven correct, the better your hypothesis looks. I'm keeping an open mind about this but until there is actual evidence, Occam's razor should be applied and we should assume that it's all experimental error. That being said, can someone knowledgable comment on possible interaction with dark matter?
Yes, and none of the paper authors are related in any way to Shawyer or Fetta. You know, like in the definition of "independent".
Scientists claim to be all about logic and reason and testing and evidence and then they deny something when it's right in front of their face because it doesn't mesh with what can only be called their particular belief system. Absolute lunacy.
Well, amazing discoveries start with the impossible.
I bet they're downright ticked off about this.
Nice try, Adolph. Just like how the Jews were responsible for Holocaust. The same Holocaust that you deny.
I would think a space drive powered by experimental error would be quite useful, considering what a unlimited resource it could tap.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
That's relativistic mass.
I thought is was an outdated concept and that for most scientists mass means rest mass.
I will mostly leave this discussion to others, but I have a problem. I don't know in what circumstances I can use conservation of momentum. I used to rely on it all the time in physics classes, and now I can't. What should I do?
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
And it's much more likely to be an experimental error or a misunderstanding.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The paper suggests the mechanism towards the end. I'm not a physicist, but here's my summary (I'm sure full of errors, but I think this is roughly what they're proposing):
The paper attributes development of this engine to developments along the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave interpretation of Quantum Mechanics as opposed to the Copenhagen interpretation of Bohr and Heisenberg, which is more generally accepted. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theory. Einstein, for instance, never accepted Copenhagen.. famously saying God doesn't play dice). Their approach is called the "pilot-wave" hypothesis (nice simulation here https://youtu.be/nmC0ygr08tE), where a wave and a particle are both epiphenomenon of certain resonant frequencies (Chladni patterns/Faraday waves) in a more complex base wave (as in the video). This base wave is a normal acoustic wave in the "medium", but it wasn't understood for a long time what that medium could be. After all, the "ether" of the 1700-1800s had been rejected. Now, they're saying the medium is quantum foam, which is some electron-positron bubbling that it seems just permeates space (also responsible for zero-point energy/casimir effect), and that's what is responding to the photons in the chamber. The chamber reflects microwaves (photons of a certain frequency) back and forth, and in one direction they "push" harder than the other, due to expansion and contraction controlled by the shape of the chamber. By analogy, it's like paddling in water; you put the paddle in the water in one direction, and move it back through the air in the other; in both directions you're moving through a medium, but you control it so that you impart more momentum in one than the other. Except instead of paddle in water and air, here the momentum transfer is from the microwave photons to the electron-positron foam permeating space. That's why no propellent is needed.. it's pushing against something that's really there, in the chamber and all around. So, space isn't empty and we can row our space boats through it.
You are missing the point here. I agree the EM drive appears to be highly dodgy pseudo-science and has not provided evidence even vaguely commensurate with its outlandish claims. But that is WHY it is unbelievable: there is no convincing evidence and some very serious questions it has to answer.
Arguing that "everyone" agrees that this physics can only occur at the Planck scale is an appeal to authority equivalent to: "believe me because I am smart". That is not a scientific argument because even the brightest person can be wrong e.g. Einstein removing the cosmological constant or all the alchemical stuff Newton was into. The same applies to your argument about the tabletop experiment: there is no requirement that physics experiments have to be of a certain size or complexity to make new discoveries. Just because that's the only way we know of at the moment does not preclude someone else coming up with a smart idea or observing unexpected behaviour.
So I'm not saying that you should in anyway believe the outlandish, unsupported claims being made by the EM drive group just make sure that you reject them for the right reasons and not just because lots of other people have.
We have 100MW RF sources at SLAC. Should give about a million times the force they see, or several newtons - easy to see. No mucking about with careful torsion balances - this is enough to see with a bathroom scale. I'm happy to do the test if someone wants to fund it.
It is exceptionally unlikely to work. The frequencies / field levels are not at all unusual. The existing experiments very difficult to get correct. Its difficult to believe that a violation of conservation of momentum wouldn't have been seen in the wide rage of experiments done in E&M.
Curso NR 10 online curso NR 10 curso NR 10 online
The 'leaked' paper assumes a non-Quantum Theory -- a 'pilot wave' hypothesis to explain how their device might work. Quantum Theory has been tested repeatedly and found to accurately describe how the universe seems to be. No, I don't understand it, but transistors and lasers and so much more have resulted from Quantum mechanics. Scientific papers are peer reviewed by other scientists prior to publishing, and that is usually a good thing. A hallmark of science is test repeatability. Maybe this paper was rejected by the authors' peers and that's the reason they 'leaked' it. Now perhaps another curious scientist will replicate the experiment while eliminating some sources of error. Those results will help validate or repudiate the claims made in the leaked paper.
My understanding is that the main limitation for many satellites is
propellant/fuel for station-keeping and any other manoeuvering.
The Emdrive could eliminate moving parts like valves and give us
longer-lasting satellites, if nothing else.