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User: kelseymh

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  1. Evaluating the claimed effect on Hyperdrive Propulsion Could Be Tested At the LHC · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A colleague of mine asked if I thought this was possible or hokum. The authors own "paper" (unpublished preprint, linked above) contains a rather lot of self-references to other unpublished preprints, usually a sign of some level of crack-pottedness. Also, his own numbers in the abstract for this idea (an acceleration of 3 nm/s^2 for 2 ns) make this completely unworkable. That corresponds to a displacement of a test mass of 1.5 x 10^-35 m. The most sensitive displacement detectors are the laser gravitational wave observatories, each of which are a pair of perpendicular 10km Fabry-Perot cavities. These detectors have a sensitivity of about 10^-18 m. That's seventeen orders of magnitude difference. On an amusing note, that displacement is actually the same order of magnitude as the "Planck length". I can't help but wonder whether the author engaged in some silly numerology in order to get it to work out that way.