Talk-Polywell.org

One supposed benefit of fractal (self-similar across many size ranges) antennas is frequency independence (wide bandwidth).

But I'm not going to follow this work until the retired physicist associated with it posts some sort of derivation from first principles. Could be a long wait...

djolds1 wrote:

GIThruster wrote:I can't say I think much of journalism that doesn't identify the theory being worked with, nor the background of the person doing the work. Obviously though, this guy is not a physicist and he is having delusions of grandeur. This is the norm for people in this field, and why there are so many dozens of bits of rubbish to sort though to get to the real work. This is not real work, and if electric fields were enough to warp spacetime, Dr. White would have found this during Eagleworks' interferometry experiments.

This guy is just wasting his time.

Theory is not a be-all end-all. It can quickly degrade into a self-sucking lolipop. Genuine anomaly is more important, as that is evidence, not rhetoric cloaked in math.

Tho in this case you are likely correct.

I can appreciate doing an experiment to see what happens. The trouble is when people have a "theory" they want to test that doesn't form the necessary connections to reality to be taken seriously. This guy obviously already knows Eagle measured no perturbation with their interferometer, so what is the point, except that he has some Bermuda Triangle theory he wants to pursue?

One of the troubles in this industry is there are far more people hunting anomalies based upon delusions of grandeur, than there are serious experimentalists doing science. Think of all the traction Searl has had over the years, even getting full funding for the Russian MEK project and the Daystar replication. John Searl is known to be a fraud, who has even been arrested for fraud. He has made all manner of ridiculous claims over the years and in hopes they might be true, people put money into these things.

Years ago, I was on a group distribution email list with the guy who funded the MEK exploration. Those who invited me asked what I thought and i told them. "There is no theory at all to explain why Searl would have built anything. He claims it came to him in a dream. Why would anyone spend money on this? And we have the personal eyewitness testimony of people who have investigated Searl, that he is a charlatan. So what excuse can one have to support this work?" It didn't matter. For all I know, this Russian American is still supporting the MEK effort in Russia, and they still have no plausible explanation for, nor validation of, the supposed "anomalies" they say they've observed. Well of course they say they've observed them. That's what pays their bills. Same thing with Eugene Podkletnov's gravity shielding and impulse generation--no theory and huge sweeping claims is no reason to invest. The fact Pod turned down Boeing to lead a real investigation ought to make it obvious to anyone who looks into the issue, that Pod is a fraud. The world is full of this nonsense and it's the charlatans who get the funding. People need to be more sensible. Even NASA has funded this crap. From the Dean Drives of the 70's and 80's, to Pod's work in the 90's, the Lifter nonsense, the Hungarian anti-gravity nonsense, the Searl, MEK and Daystar nonsense in the 0's, and QVF today--None of it makes any sense. In avoiding this stuff, it really helps to have a cogent theory that doesn't contradict Einstein or the Principle of Conservation.

GIThruster wrote:

djolds1 wrote:Theory is not a be-all end-all. It can quickly degrade into a self-sucking lolipop. Genuine anomaly is more important, as that is evidence, not rhetoric cloaked in math.

Tho in this case you are likely correct.

I can appreciate doing an experiment to see what happens. The trouble is when people have a "theory" they want to test that doesn't form the necessary connections to reality to be taken seriously. This guy obviously already knows Eagle measured no perturbation with their interferometer, so what is the point, except that he has some Bermuda Triangle theory he wants to pursue?

It isn't the basement tinkerer "theorists" that concern me. It was your apparently almost reflexive instinct to credit higher-level "theory," combined with the demonstrated ability of higher-level theory to go off on oddball tangents thanks to mob psychology among the scholarly class. Aristotelianism back in the day, and what looks to be an up and coming bastard love child of Strings and the Standard Model today. It concerns me that actual anomalies are disregarded and possibly to probably more accurate descriptions of physical reality abandoned (ME theory among other candidates) in the search for feel-good versions of groupthink among the intelligentsia.

And once such flawed feel-good groupthink is given the imprimatur of consensus among intellectual authorities (CAGW?), it is a PITA to dislodge. If the bastard lovechild takes root as THE authoritative version of a GUT, I expect it will ape Aristotelianism and take a millennium at minimum to displace, and only thereafter will new attempts to account for the anomalies of the physical world be able to begin afresh.

A thousand year/ 40 generation hiatus in understanding the physical nature of the universe and developing useful tools to manipulate that physical nature would irk me. Severely. Such a hiatus being due to eggheads falling in love with wrongheaded math that "must be correct, because its so beautiful" would be enraging to the point of:

djolds1 wrote:I expect it will ape Aristotelianism and take a millennium at minimum to displace

That's too far beyond horizon. Once/if humans go post-scarcity and scatter into cosmos, then all bets are off. You might not hear about it, but you can be sure at least one group somewhere will adopt something else than that erroneous paradigm. Real, practical evidence trumps everything else.

Betruger wrote:

djolds1 wrote:I expect it will ape Aristotelianism and take a millennium at minimum to displace

That's too far beyond horizon. Once/if humans go post-scarcity and scatter into cosmos, then all bets are off. You might not hear about it, but you can be sure at least one group somewhere will adopt something else than that erroneous paradigm. Real, practical evidence trumps everything else.

Sadly, no. Social conformity and the desire to hold status and the privileges thereof (sex inclusive) trumps everything. Those for whom evidence trumps all are a tiny, generally low-status and resource-limited subset of the population. Being resource limited, the NT-Rationals will not be building the great arks to scatter to the stars. Not unless those arks are cheap and easy. And if they are cheap and easy, everyone knows of them and the former intellectual status quo has already imploded. Up until the flawed intellectual status quo does implode, the heretics are would-be Zefram Cochranes in the basement; fit fodder for all to laugh at, with few to no threads connecting them so that they may form an intellectual critical mass.

I do wish the world did work the way you thought. I spent a large block of my youth trying to puzzle out the path that would make the world work in such a rational and engineerable way. But the Third Way does not exist. Every attempt to build a Third Way collapses back into the old status games and dominant oligarchies post-haste.

There was a story I was told by an engineer friend of my father. The first portable cell phone call is made by Martin Cooper of Motorola to his research rival at Bell Labs, Joel Engel. Although mobile phones had been used in cars since the mid-1940s, Cooper’s was the first one invented for truly portable use. It was said that he was unaware that certain components could not but under a certain size according to the understanding of the theory of the time. So he made them smaller and then made the phone truly portable.
I love telling this story when people say it can't be done.
(the usual disclaimers apply)

GIThruster wrote:... the Lifter nonsense...

I have to differ with you here. "Lifters" actually work. I built one. It's just an ionic air moving device.


Alexander de Seversky was making this stuff back in 1964.



http://youtu.be/0S-Ieb7LsGA

Betruger wrote:

djolds1 wrote:I expect it will ape Aristotelianism and take a millennium at minimum to displace

That's too far beyond horizon. Once/if humans go post-scarcity and scatter into cosmos, then all bets are off. You might not hear about it, but you can be sure at least one group somewhere will adopt something else than that erroneous paradigm. Real, practical evidence trumps everything else.

Nature tries everything. It has always used a shotgun approach. That's why a billion sperm are sent after one egg. Throw enough biological units at the problem, and one of them is bound to get through.

Diogenes wrote:Nature tries everything. It has always used a shotgun approach. That's why a billion sperm are sent after one egg. Throw enough biological units at the problem, and one of them is bound to get through.

Nature tries everything, sort of. Yes, 100 million sperm bumrush for that one ovum. But there is only one ovum at the end of the race course. Structure and chaos exist in a tension, as well illustrated via thermodynamics, systems theory, and Ilya Prigigone's Complex Adaptive Dissipative Systems.

Mother Nature is also a nasty b***h, red in tooth and claw. She has only one method of testing her babies - she tests us to destruction.

LOL yeah mother nature sure is a bitch....

djolds1 wrote:

Betruger wrote:

djolds1 wrote:I expect it will ape Aristotelianism and take a millennium at minimum to displace

That's too far beyond horizon. Once/if humans go post-scarcity and scatter into cosmos, then all bets are off. You might not hear about it, but you can be sure at least one group somewhere will adopt something else than that erroneous paradigm. Real, practical evidence trumps everything else.

Sadly, no. Social conformity and the desire to hold status and the privileges thereof (sex inclusive) trumps everything. Those for whom evidence trumps all are a tiny, generally low-status and resource-limited subset of the population. Being resource limited, the NT-Rationals will not be building the great arks to scatter to the stars. Not unless those arks are cheap and easy. And if they are cheap and easy, everyone knows of them and the former intellectual status quo has already imploded. Up until the flawed intellectual status quo does implode, the heretics are would-be Zefram Cochranes in the basement; fit fodder for all to laugh at, with few to no threads connecting them so that they may form an intellectual critical mass.

I do wish the world did work the way you thought. I spent a large block of my youth trying to puzzle out the path that would make the world work in such a rational and engineerable way. But the Third Way does not exist. Every attempt to build a Third Way collapses back into the old status games and dominant oligarchies post-haste.

I don't think so. But I guess we'll never live to see what actually happens then.

Diogenes wrote:

GIThruster wrote:... the Lifter nonsense...

If someone wants to use ion wind for propulsion I have no trouble with that. I would note to them this is a hopelessly inefficient method for producing transportation. The trouble with Biefield-Brown Effect is when people claim it is a form of anti-gravity, electro-gravity or some such. It's not. It's just ion wind. There has been a fantastical amount of experimentation done here in spite of the appropriate theory that explains the ion wind. Every tinkerer wants to be able to claim they have solved the problem of space propulsion, regardless of the facts when they don't even understand what could possibly explain what they hope to find.

Wave the ZPF magic wand over any anomaly and you'll find a dozen whackos rushing forward to claim they have an antigravity device.

Just as a thought experiment, how high can a ion wind thruster provide a usable amount of "push"

Betruger wrote:

djolds1 wrote:Sadly, no. Social conformity and the desire to hold status and the privileges thereof (sex inclusive) trumps everything. Those for whom evidence trumps all are a tiny, generally low-status and resource-limited subset of the population. Being resource limited, the NT-Rationals will not be building the great arks to scatter to the stars. Not unless those arks are cheap and easy. And if they are cheap and easy, everyone knows of them and the former intellectual status quo has already imploded. Up until the flawed intellectual status quo does implode, the heretics are would-be Zefram Cochranes in the basement; fit fodder for all to laugh at, with few to no threads connecting them so that they may form an intellectual critical mass.

I do wish the world did work the way you thought. I spent a large block of my youth trying to puzzle out the path that would make the world work in such a rational and engineerable way. But the Third Way does not exist. Every attempt to build a Third Way collapses back into the old status games and dominant oligarchies post-haste.

I don't think so. But I guess we'll never live to see what actually happens then.

Actually, I suspect we shall live to see another such a collapse, and relatively soon. Arguably, we already have seen one, a mere 25 years ago.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy always wins. And the nice ideas rarely last for long in the face of self-interest.

paperburn1 wrote:Just as a thought experiment, how high can a ion wind thruster provide a usable amount of "push"

I would say "till it runs out of air". Probably the efficiency would degrade to the point of un-usability long before it hit vacuum.


So far as I know, no one has ever been able to build one capable of lifting it's own power supply, so until someone works out a power to weight solution the thing remains an interesting toy.