Mach Effect progress

[DeltaV]

Flying cars or Bust! (Time and/or warp travel optional.)




Seriously, I'm still working through Wanser's paper, but, if he didn't make any mistakes, it should send a shock wave through the entire physics community.

CoM acceleration without external forces? From classical mechanics? Newton's Laws? Wow!

Let's see if the paper gets acknowledged by the mainstream, or if they would rather ignore it and continue dabbling in ever-increasing abstractions such as string theory.

[GIThruster]

Yes, well lets hope Wanser's paper makes it into peer review. That would open the flood gates for general understanding and acceptance of Woodward's work. What capable person, from a physicist in his senior years to a busy grad student, wouldn't pile onto that bus and dig in to see what they can make of Mach Effect physics?

[GIThruster]

Flying cars or Bust!.

Liechtenstein currently has the highest gross domestic product per capita of any country in the world, and unemployment at an amazing 1.5%. By comparison, unemployment in the US never goes below 4% due to transfer rates between jobs. Prince Hans-Adam II is an amazing banker as was his father, and has an astonishing personal wealth in the billions. His father is widely held to have been a strong proponent of flying cars, and is rumored to have offered to support their creation to the tune of a private $100 million investment if he could have found the technology for something Jetson like.

So you may see flying cars in your lifetime. . .

[birchoff]

GiThruster, So what does Woodward and Fern plan to do now? Think I asked you this question over the summer and I vaguely remember you saying that the Jim would decide his next steps when he gets back in the Fall. Since Fall is in full swing any crumbs of inside info on what the roadmap will look like?

[GIThruster]

Jim isn't sharing any detail in his general reading list since last March. I think he probably has had some sort of breakthrough since I can't make any sense of the change in any other way. I know he had planned to put the PMN on the balance last fall, and I have not heard a peep about what the result was.

[DeltaV]

Mach Effect Thruster Development
http://aspw.jpl.nasa.gov/files/ASPW2014 ... /Fearn.pdf

Theory & Experimental Work on Mach Effect Thrusters (MET)
http://aspw.jpl.nasa.gov/files/ASPW2014 ... /Fearn.pdf

Mach’s principle, Action at a Distance and Cosmology
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.5426v1

[birchoff]

thanks for those links. any idea when those files were uploaded to their referenced locations? Given the previously available information it would seem that the next steps are as follows

• Theoretically prove ME
• Refine the current thruster design to attempt to get closer to predicted thrust

P.S. Assuming the quote in the slide deck is accurate. I find it funny that Einstein though leaving Mach's principle out would be considered "incomprehensible" to a future generation.

DeltaV any idea on how to get access to the original slide deck. It looks like there are a bunch of animations in it. Would love to know if that piture of the minature car/cart looking device was the beginning of animation showing that minature car/cart moving via a current gen MET device.

[GIThruster]

thanks for those links. any idea when those files were uploaded to their referenced locations? Given the previously available information it would seem that the next steps are as follows

• Theoretically prove ME
• Refine the current thruster design to attempt to get closer to predicted thrust

The trouble with this is as I've said on many occasions, science doesn't ever prove anything. All it can do is disprove the alternatives. Most people with real science training will note this, but then speak as if the opposite is true, and I'll admit even I do this. For instance, we often speak of "proof of science" as opposed to "proof of technology" but this is not a literal use of the term "proof" and it does tempt us to think wrongly about the task.

All of the lab work Jim has done over the last 20 years is involved in providing the kind of evidence you're here asking about--proof of science or evidence that M-E is real. It's not that Jim isn't trying. The real trouble, IMHO; is that working with a hobbyist's budget, he has simply not had the resources to build and run more commercial designs. My contention is that what is really needed at this point, is proof of technology. So if I may, I'll just note to you what I believe is called for, since I am involved in trying to put together a startup to do just this.

First off, the design needs to be capable of much more thrust. In fact it needs to deliver what we can call "commercial grade" thrust, of at least 20 mN so that it is in the same class as the Hall Effect thrusters found on things like geosynchronous orbit telecommunications satellites. It also has to be capable of continuous operation, be smaller and lighter than a Hall thruster, consume less power, have a longer lifetime, operate across sufficient thermal bandwidth that it can be used in space in direct sunlight at Venus' orbit and in shade, and be reversible. IMHO, a thruster that cannot do all these things is not a commercial grade thruster and any work to improve these thrusters needs to make direct approaches to all these requirements.

Now you can approach these issues one at a time, or several at a time, but you need to know where you're going especially if you are rethinking the design of the device. And I would note, this is not what Jim is doing. He knows for example, that PMN has such a narrow thermal bandwidth that it is not suitable for continuous operation in space, because it would require more power to cool it than to run it, and all that power is added to the power dissipated by the thruster that then needs to be rejected from a spacecraft. There is simply not sufficient utility in a material with a 2*c thermal bandwidth. Also, PMN can't be scaled for higher frequency use, because its k drops off a cliff at about 1 Mhz. The same is true of PZT. So neither of these materials can be used in a commercial grade thruster.

Hence Jim's problem: he can't get serious development funds without more thrust and he can't get more thrust without more serious development funds. The funding is really the issue, and before I can approach that issue, I have to put together a world-class team. That's what I've been working toward for about 9 months now and it is only starting to look promising. Perhaps I'll know something better by January.

[D Tibbets]

From my perspective, at least at this time, the level of thrust is not the issue. What is critical is vetting the early results. Trouble shooting and modifying the test approach to gain more confidence in the results- or disproving them, is necessary. The "tentative" positive results should be perused vigorously to eliminate doubts. I suspect this could be done at very reasonable costs and short time frames. Much like the Polywell, etc. the cost as a percentage of current budgets in similar fields is trivial.

Theory is nice, but accepted theory can also be an impediment. Incontrovertible real data is the key.

Dan Tibbets

[AcesHigh]

Flying cars or Bust!.

Liechtenstein currently has the highest gross domestic product per capita of any country in the world, and unemployment at an amazing 1.5%. By comparison, unemployment in the US never goes below 4% due to transfer rates between jobs. Prince Hans-Adam II is an amazing banker as was his father, and has an astonishing personal wealth in the billions. His father is widely held to have been a strong proponent of flying cars, and is rumored to have offered to support their creation to the tune of a private $100 million investment if he could have found the technology for something Jetson like.

So you may see flying cars in your lifetime. . .

better to have fully autonomous robotic cars before that.

people cause thousands of deaths every year in USA alone driving in 2D. Imagine driving in 3D. I can picture lots of deaths while PARKING flying cars... parking over people.

[birchoff]

From my perspective, at least at this time, the level of thrust is not the issue. What is critical is vetting the early results. Trouble shooting and modifying the test approach to gain more confidence in the results- or disproving them, is necessary. The "tentative" positive results should be perused vigorously to eliminate doubts. I suspect this could be done at very reasonable costs and short time frames. Much like the Polywell, etc. the cost as a percentage of current budgets in similar fields is trivial.

Theory is nice, but accepted theory can also be an impediment. Incontrovertible real data is the key.

Dan Tibbets

After reading Woodward's book, plus reviewing the results of the papers from about 2010 to present. I find it hard to believe anyone could argue that the results have not been vetted. The only thing left from my perspective is to either increase the thrust magnitude in the manner the theory predicts and/or go on a campaign of sorts to elicit other labs to duplicate the results. Given the breadth of work that Jim, Heidi, Wasner, March, Bullini have published what else could be done to vet the results.

[birchoff]

Just got around to reading "How long will it take to make starships?" and noticed that at the end Woodward said

Since STAIF II concluded, an evaluation of the project was initiated at Aerospace Corp, and the members of the evaluation team (led by Greg Meholic) have made a number of helpful suggestions to advance the work.

How long will it take to make starships?

GiThruster any insight on where this evaluation project ended up?

[GIThruster]

The only contribution I'm aware of that the Aero team made was they identified the possibility that what Jim had sensed with the balance was not thrust, but the change in the center of mass as the thruster ceramic extended. Jim and Heidi immediately responded to this new possibility of spurious signal, and showed both through calculation and in a lab experiment that the changing COM could not have produced the results shown. I would note to you, that this is exactly what happened a decade ago when DOE's guys from Oak Ridge National Lab got involved. They posited a source of error and argued theory, and Jim and Tom completely answered their objections. It didn't matter.

IMHO, the problem is not the proof of science. It is that Jim does not produce commercial grade thrusts over extended periods of time that essentially demonstrates mastery. He swings the thruster through electrical and mechanical resonances and gets significant thrusts only momentarily, and this begs people to wonder what is happening.

When I have talked with NASA's point man for advanced propulsion investigations, Chief Scientist Dr. Dennis Bushnell of NASA Langley; he has been quite clear: the trouble is NASA does not have anyone aboard who can do the theoretical analysis because NASA is composed of engineers, not physicists, and even when they hired the Aero team to do an evaluation, that team did not include the necessary physicists for a real theoretical evaluation. In light of this trouble Dennis' hope is to see more thrust. Basically, what he is asking for is something beyond "proof of science" which is what we can call "proof of technology". He wants to see something useful. And who can blame him? To know what's on the balance is incontestably the result of Jim's theory, you want to be able to run the thruster on resonance, both mechanically and electrically, for extended periods of time, switch the relative phase between the 1w and 2w components and see the thruster reverse thrust according to theory, etc. These are reasonable requirements to bet the farm. Now of course NASA and DARPA and even some private investors can afford to provide support for something less than a sure thing. They've done this with QVF, but Sonny only got that support because he is part of the good old boys club inside NASA. Woodward is not going to see that kind of support unless and until he gets more thrust and demonstrates more mastery.

[prestonbarrows]

He wants to see something useful.

As someone who has basically only glanced over the wikipedia page for this:

It seems like the three main possibilities are
1) they are missing something in the math/science and the whole idea flops
2) their theory is correct and works in the real world but has scaling 'gotchas' similar to those seen in tokamaks etc. that prevent scaling up into a useful machine
3) they are currently swamped by noise simply because it is too small and would work perfectly when scaled up

If the theory is all worked out on paper and it is 'merely an engineering problem', what parameters need to be scaled up? Power input, physical size, dimensional precision, material properties; what are the scaling laws? How many orders of magnitude is what they claim to currently see now lower than something indisputable like an ion thruster?

In essence, what would a 'useful' device look like in terms of size, cost, and difficulty? What is holding them back from building a proof-of-concept that is clearly out of the noise?

Even if what they are seeing is real, at this point it feels like this could go the way of space elevators and tokamaks; nice on paper but impractical/impossible to actually build and use.

[GIThruster]

It's not impossible and we already know how to improve the thrust, the thrust/mass and the thrust/power at least 100,000X. To say what all the changes need to be would be to hand over the trade secrets when I'm actively seeking cofounders--not exactly a bright idea. Suffice it to say, none of this can be done on a hobbyist's budget.