Mach Effect progress

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TDPerk
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by TDPerk »

"one can't verify momentum exchange against the universe." Why are you asking me what my point is?"

Because it's a pointless point. It is beside the point. If the WoodwardEffect/MachEffect thruster produces thrust in accordance with Woodward's math, then it will be up to someone else to falsify it to show there is some other, better explanation for how that aspect of the universe--inertia--works.

The for now unforeseeable test of the universe's momentum doesn't change that.
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chrismb
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by chrismb »

hanelyp wrote:Looking at another angle, would a ME thruster be operationally any different from a reactionless thruster?

Example, could you fit a probe with such a thruster, and accelerate indefinitely so long as the power source holds (and you don't hit a speck of space dust loaded with BAM! due to relative speed)? WMD potential if you could.
GIThruster wrote:Hanley, yes and no. Yes, it acts just like any propellantless thruster however, almost always when people do the math concerning what you envision, they neglect the fact that the thruster produces constant stationary thrust. When people do the conservation analysis you envision, they treat the thruster as with constant thrust efficiency despite it is accelerating and this is incorrect. This is one of two regular errors people make.

And I would note to you, this mistake yields conservation violations when done with any thruster, including chemical rockets.
It is entirely false to claim that any ordinary thruster 'also' violates conservation.

A correct handling of the mathematics of ordinary thrusters is given in;
viewtopic.php?t=4190

It also transpires that there is no conservation violations from ME thrusters. However, there are some other ramifications that appear to be 'unphysical'. The mathematics of ME thrusters is here;
viewtopic.php?t=4228

GIThruster
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

I did not say that any thrusters violate conservation. I said that when you make the mistake of treating the constant stationary thrust of any thruster as constant when it accelerates, you get what appears to be a conservation violation.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

93143
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by 93143 »

But that's not why, as I've explained before. The math works fine when you account for the energy of the propellant.

This is because the kinetic energy of a single mass is not a true energy, as can be seen from the fact that it is not frame-independent. Kinetic energy accounting can only be done in a conservative sense for a system of masses that interacts only with itself.

This is not a hack; it's simply the right way to do it. If you think Woodward said differently, you probably misunderstood him.

GIThruster
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

It's entirely possible I misunderstood something Woodward has said, but just noting, you and I are saying the same thing. When you say "the kinetic energy of a single mass is not a true energy, as can be seen from the fact that it is not frame-independent" you're saying in different terms what I'm saying when I say that energy is not "invariant". In other words, energy varies frame to frame.

When one talks with Woodward about something like this, he uses the tools of GR to answer the questions--Lorentz transforms, summing instantaneous frames of reference, etc. This is not to say one can't somehow transform without these tools. I have never tried to check chris' math and can't say that is it wrong. Same with your method of accounting for the energy in the propellant. Either way though, if the thruster is accelerating, you have to do a transform of some kind because the constant--stationary thrust--is only constant when stationary.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

93143
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by 93143 »

I don't think that last part is right. Forces don't transform; they're absolute.

This is the core of Woodward's argument against the Oak Ridge fallacy, wherein the v*dm/dt term is alleged to cancel out the Mach effect.

GIThruster
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

Yes, but we're not talking about just force. We're talking about thrust efficiency, which is thrust per unit energy (actually power when you look at things like N/W) input and energy (power) is not invariant. It's the denominator of the term that has to be transformed. If not you get a seeming conservation violation with all forms of thrusters.

Without bludgeoning my way through both your and chris' maths (which I do no feel myself adequate to judge), it appears to me you both figured out ways to do transforms other than those Lorentz invented. Kudos for that!
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

GIThruster
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

rj40 wrote:Thanks. Building something that works as advertised (repeatedly) would be pretty convincing, but I was thinking about tests along the line of what was done with relativity. You know, explaining the orbit of the planet Mercury better than any other theory or the precise and accurate amount that light is bent as it goes past the sun. All sorts of things can go wrong, but as scientists begin to repeat tests (with occasional screw ups) a picture begins to emerge. And not just one test, but many different tests. I thought 3 to 5 might be a good start to help me understand and to help organize my thoughts. And not the two tests mentioned above, but tests specific to this theory.
If I understand your question, something similar to what Sonny planned at Eagleworks ought to have an M-E corollary. I'm not a physicist but I'll indulge in a little guesswork in hopes that this is actually true. Let me note however, that as I am NOT a physicist, I do not know that this necessarily follows from Jim's work. It appears to me it does, but things like this need to be run past real physicists.

To your example of light bending based on GR: it appears to me that light should bend when exposed to large positive and negative masses, toward the source when positive, and away when negative. Actually the light is going straight and the space itself is warping. This seems to me would appear as curved light from outside the warp, but you certainly need to run this by a physicist to know for sure. In any event, we do know that light appears to bend when viewed from outside when passing through large gravity wells because as you've noted, we've made this observation.

So lets take the case of an M-E device producing an arbitrarily large mass fluctuation--enough to noticeably bend spacetime. M-E devices that have not had their mass fluctuations "rectified" into thrust by pushing/pulling at 2w, still ought to bend spacetime. What would that look like from outside?

Since to get a very large spacetime distortion one could measure, one supposes you'd need to operate at very high, ultra high or microwave frequencies, it would take some pretty fancy high speed photography to catch the beam moving back and forth--bending in when the mass is positive and out when the mass is negative. What I suppose one would perceive with the naked eye, is the beam appearing to thicken. That would be a noteworthy observation though I'd note to you, you'd have a really hard time convincing an engineer at NASA just to look for thickening. Rather, they'd probably want to look at high speed and see the beam in different places at different times corresponding to the projected spacetime distortion at any given instant, as that would be a very convincing phenomena--at least IMHO.

However, just saying, this is again, the same kind of "proof of science" Jim did with the rotator, and no one much cared because this does not clearly demonstrate a tool. In order to go a step further and build a tool like this, you have to generate so much negative mass (remember, the theory dictates that the negative going fluctuation is always larger than the positive going one) that a pair of such negative mass generators running 90* off phase (90*, not 180* since the fluctuation is at 2w) would generate a time averaged negative mass for the complete system--that sums as negative at all instants. This is a negative mass/warp field generator one could build around a probe for example, and have a useful technology. You'll find this in Jim's book.

The shape of such a field to be useful, could be generated by a sphere, or the torus envisioned by Alcubierre, or if Sonny's maths are correct, a fatter torus that requires less negative mass.

And I would note to you, there is no unknown stuff here with the huge notable except that, no one has properly characterized the necessary dielectric for something like this yet, so there's no way to make an accurate prediction of what the necessary dielectric's electromechanical response would be at VHF, UHF or microwave frequencies. To make real quantitative predictions of what such a setup would produce, you'd first need to use an extremely high frequency scanning laser vibrometer to get the mechanical data on the dielectric.

If anyone wants to pony up for such a device please let me know. :-)

Anyway, hope that answers your question.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

GIThruster
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

Oh, and I forgot to mention. . .

For the garage hobbyist or entrepreneur wanting to generate evidence on a tiny budget, there does seem to me two possibilities worth exploring.

Though I can't do the math to tell, it seems to me at least possible (though unlikely) that some COTS transducers would generate a large mass fluctuation but not so large that we'd notice their time averaged loss of mass. It is possible that something like a 500 Mhz medical ultrasound transducer waved close enough to a $3 pocket laser would make the beam appear to the naked eye to thicken. It is even possible (though unlikely) one could wave a $30 3 Mhz ultrasound transducer next to a laser and see the beam thicken.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Photon-3-MHz-Ul ... 53f8cc57dc

Just saying, such things are not so far as I know outside the realm of possibility, but I would not expect a positive result with this. If I did I'd buy the transducer myself and give it a whirl. And noting too, if anyone wants to try such a thing, the immediate issue you face is that if you got a positive result, someone will claim you need to do this in vacuum because the air compressions might be causing the same effect. Even cheap and easy is never cheap nor easy.

Of course there are ways around vacuum too. If you could get a thickening and have room enough between transducer and beam to place any significant obstacle, especially one that absorbs acoustic energy; and still found what appeared the same magnitude beam displacement, one might make the case that vacuum is unnecessary.

But I don't think it will work. . .

And of course you could simply weigh a transducer and see if it looses mass when operating, but that is very complex as measuring small changes in weight on a heavy item, while isolating the transducer from the measurement device is much more difficult than one would at first guess.

But I do have a Mettler H20 for anyone so bold to play with it. Offer is open for anyone willing to confer with Woodward on what they think might work.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

hanelyp
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by hanelyp »

GIThruster wrote:Hanley, yes and no. Yes, it acts just like any propellantless thruster however, almost always when people do the math concerning what you envision, they neglect the fact that the thruster produces constant stationary thrust. When people do the conservation analysis you envision, they treat the thruster as with constant thrust efficiency despite it is accelerating and this is incorrect. This is one of two regular errors people make.
So a ME thruster exhibits motion frame dependence. Like a rocket is thrusting against the motion of its reaction mass, a ME thruster is acting against matter elsewhere in the universe. Implying that matter defines a local preferred frame from a ME perspective. Reminds me of a fan description of startrek warp drive.
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GIThruster
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

It doesn't suggest anything like a preferred frame. Keep in mind that this issue that imput power is variant is true of all thrusters.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

AcesHigh
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by AcesHigh »

how are Woodward´s experiments going?

GIThruster
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

He's still on break for the summer but Heidi has been working and Jim should be back in the lab in another few weeks. The 6 man team from The Aerospace Company is still doing their analysis of Jim's work as a precursor to any replication work by them or NASA. As I understand it, at least 2 members of that team were strongly predisposed against, having judged it as all hogwash well before looking at any of the details. Also, all Woodward's data is being reviewed by Creon Levit over at NASA Ames to be sure Woodward's claims are all correct. So I guess we'll hear something in the next month or so by the time Jim returns to Fullerton.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

hanelyp
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by hanelyp »

GIThruster wrote:It doesn't suggest anything like a preferred frame. Keep in mind that this issue that imput power is variant is true of all thrusters.
In a rocket you input power and propellant, and get out thrust that is invariant with frame of motion. The reaction mass being emitted has a fixed speed relative to the rocket. The frame variant is how the energy is distributed between rocket and exhaust.

Trying to read your description of a ME thruster, the thrust you get from a given power is a function of how the thruster is moving relative to the surrounding universe which serves as reaction mass. Which works for conservation of energy. But requires that ME be non-relativistic, which makes sense when the larger universe is an inseparable part of the system.
The daylight is uncomfortably bright for eyes so long in the dark.

GIThruster
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

hanelyp wrote:
GIThruster wrote:It doesn't suggest anything like a preferred frame. Keep in mind that this issue that imput power is variant is true of all thrusters.
In a rocket you input power and propellant, and get out thrust that is invariant with frame of motion.
The input power into the thruster is not invariant, be it a chemical thruster or a MET. In examples like this, people want to treat the input power as a constant, but it is not constant the moment you allow the thruster to accelerate. Fact is, the faster the thruster accelerates, the more input power is required to generate the same thrust, so if input power stays the same, the thrust diminishes as the thruster accelerates. It is when we ignore this, that we get one of the two main conservation objections found on the web.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

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