This is true. Its just another piece of PR crap from a second-rate university. They have seen an already-observed phenomenon in a mew material...could have been predicted.
Mostly agree with what demachina says but the problem is: How do we retaliate against Al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization? As a superpower, we are supposed to eschew commando tactics, and have only used them when hostages were at stake. Other encumbrances of this status are that we are supposed to treat adversaries in a humanitarian way, and generally conduct military operations with something like public disclosure. So how does this 20-ton gorilla/kitten find a small group of assassins and bring them to justice? We declare war. Our hands then become tied by the same rules of engagement that we used sixty years ago in WWII. What we need is a rapid-reaction capability to conduct limited counterterrorist activities against terrorist groups who intentionally harm US citizens. Do it with fast with overwhelming force before the scum have time to run and hide.
By tracking back to the published articles --http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0505098 and citations--I found that there is nothing very useful about the critical velocity that Felber solved for. In fact, there was a Russian article several years earlier (Citebase is wonderful!) Blinnikov, S. I.; Okun, L. B.; Vysotsky, M. I. (2003-10-03) In USP.FIZ.NAUK 46 1131 (2003) that finds the same phenomena and derives it in a much simpler way that I can follow. No, it's not BS that the critical velocity exists, but the concept of space propulsion using it is pretty far from whole. The effect relies on two bodies being in high-speed relative motion, in a very narrow cone of angles, but disappears as 1/radius. So I figure that the net impulse delivered to a realistic traveler would be very limited, since the propeller mass will be near for a VERY short time. Perhaps someone would like to take this to the level of a for-instance calculation, but I would be much more interested in wormholes as a means of travel. YMMV As for arguments that we would have detected it already--nonsense. You would have thought that with 500 years since Ptolemy started precisely mapping the stars we would have noticed the bending of starlight by the sun, but we didn't. There are small effects and then there are SMALL effects and there is no bottom to the hierarchy. 20 years from now, some guy will get his PhD measuring this effect at Fermilab or CERN and nobody will see it as anything more than another confirmation of GR, perhaps the first on a laboratory scale. (If you can call an accelerator a laboratory. That's a lot bigger than they used to be!)
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This is true. Its just another piece of PR crap from a second-rate university. They have seen an already-observed phenomenon in a mew material...could have been predicted.
Mostly agree with what demachina says but the problem is: How do we retaliate against Al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization? As a superpower, we are supposed to eschew commando tactics, and have only used them when hostages were at stake. Other encumbrances of this status are that we are supposed to treat adversaries in a humanitarian way, and generally conduct military operations with something like public disclosure. So how does this 20-ton gorilla/kitten find a small group of assassins and bring them to justice? We declare war. Our hands then become tied by the same rules of engagement that we used sixty years ago in WWII. What we need is a rapid-reaction capability to conduct limited counterterrorist activities against terrorist groups who intentionally harm US citizens. Do it with fast with overwhelming force before the scum have time to run and hide.
By tracking back to the published articles
--http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0505098 and citations--I found that there is nothing very useful about the critical velocity that Felber solved for. In fact, there was a Russian article several years earlier (Citebase is wonderful!)
Blinnikov, S. I.; Okun, L. B.; Vysotsky, M. I. (2003-10-03) In USP.FIZ.NAUK 46 1131 (2003)
that finds the same phenomena and derives it in a much simpler way that I can follow. No, it's not BS that the critical velocity exists, but the concept of space propulsion using it is pretty far from whole. The effect relies on two bodies being in high-speed relative motion, in a very narrow cone of angles, but disappears as 1/radius. So I figure that the net impulse delivered to a realistic traveler would be very limited, since the propeller mass will be near for a VERY short time. Perhaps someone would like to take this to the level of a for-instance calculation, but I would be much more interested in wormholes as a means of travel. YMMV
As for arguments that we would have detected it already--nonsense. You would have thought that with 500 years since Ptolemy started precisely mapping the stars we would have noticed the bending of starlight by the sun, but we didn't. There are small effects and then there are SMALL effects and there is no bottom to the hierarchy. 20 years from now, some guy will get his PhD measuring this effect at Fermilab or CERN and nobody will see it as anything more than another confirmation of GR, perhaps the first on a laboratory scale. (If you can call an accelerator a laboratory. That's a lot bigger than they used to be!)