Mach Effect progress

[93143]

Darn it, I explained this to you guys already.

Theoretically, it doesn't matter what the thrust-to-power ratio of a Mach-effect thruster is - with a sufficiently high rotor tip speed (ie: thruster speed), you can generate net power.

Don't try to compare force and power directly; physics doesn't work that way. 1 N/W is not some magical universal threshold. It's just the thrust efficiency at which a perfectly efficient flywheel generator will break even with a tip speed of 1 m/s.

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Putting rockets on the flywheel will work too. It's just a goofy way to build a heat engine. And if the tip speed is greater than half the exhaust velocity (assuming 100% efficient rockets here), you can get more gross work than the chemical energy of the propellants.

The catch is that accelerating the propellants up to that speed takes energy, which is where the extra comes from. Once the tip speed is high enough, pumping losses match thrust work and you don't generate any net power at all. A Mach-effect device, on the other hand, doesn't require propellant to be fed to it...

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With a Mach-effect thruster, the device description combined with Lorentz invariance (or, heck, Galilean invariance) implies that the power required to produce a certain force is independent of the velocity of the device.

Now, this is true of an ion engine too. But the ion engine, viewed from a "stationary" reference frame in which it is moving faster than its exhaust velocity, gets excess energy over and above its power input by stealing it from the exhaust, which slows down in the "stationary" reference frame.

A Mach-effect thruster does this too, except that its propellant is all the mass-energy in its light cone. This raises an interesting question - if the thrust efficiency of a Mach-effect device is in principle unlimited, how does the average velocity of the stuff being pushed on always match that of the thruster?

It's possible there's some funky long-range physics involved that I don't know about. I haven't had the time to sit down and go through the literature on this topic.

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Yes, GoatGuy is full of it. Maybe he's just too invested in his public disparagement of M-E to admit that his argument has been destroyed; I don't know. (He does seem to have a fairly accurate understanding of the civilizational implications.) But the argument regarding entropy appears to have more validity.

You aren't increasing entropy globally and decreasing it locally when you use an M-E thruster to generate power. You are decreasing entropy globally (because you are removing energy from a thermal system, which will then re-equilibrate at a lower temperature) and doing basically nothing to local entropy, since ordered kinetic or electrical energy has little to no entropy associated with it.

So unless my understanding of how this device interacts with distant matter is fundamentally incorrect, which it may very well be, or an M-E device has some sort of inherent entropy-generation mechanism, this seems to constitute a perpetual motion machine of the second kind.

Even if it is, that's not to say it won't work - the Second Law doesn't seem to be quite as fundamental as the First, and anyway "experiment is the only sure guide in such matters"...

It seems to me that, whether it works or not, the way it manages to always push on matter with the same average velocity as itself constitutes a sort of Maxwell's Demon...

[Skipjack]

There are however dozens upon dozens of cases that cannot be explained by conventional means. . Too many to list. Here's an example:

http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case665.htm

Rally?
http://home.comcast.net/~tprinty/UFO/SUNlite4_1.pdf

[GIThruster]

That explanation at top is good but you;re right, the correct audience is over at NBF.

I'm not following your question where you write: "This raises an interesting question - if the thrust efficiency of a Mach-effect device is in principle unlimited, how does the average velocity of the stuff being pushed on always match that of the thruster? " Can you rephrase this?

I think you are misunderstanding the entropy generation mechanism. Jim and his grad student Tom Mayhood have been very clear on this pint for more than 15 years--using M-E devices hastens the end of the universe. It decreases entropy locally by increasing it globally. That is what facilitated the famous quip "Tomorrow's momentum, today!"

[GIThruster]

I skimmed it Skippy and can't say its worth the time. Just another self important skeptic who talks a lot and doesn't say anything useful. The answer is the same standard shabby answer we see time and time again from skeptics. The eye witnesses, the readings on all the ECM equipment, the ground radar signature. . .they're all wrong and the skeptic is right because . . .em. . .just because.

This is an example of "scientism" which is to say, an empiricist who requires every sort of claim meet the criteria of science, including repeatability. Note, these same people never seem to have a problem with things like the spontaneous generation of life from non-life despite this has never been observed nor repeated. Evolution gets a free ride by such people because they don't want to face a lynch mob. Skeptics are cowards.

People like this are never consistent--they're just pulling a sneaky trick by saying that things like eye witness testimony are never enough. Well, they're enough to get people a death sentence, or life imprisonment.

If you ever take a grad class in epistemology, you'll see that that field is completely dominated by such jokers. Skeptics make their own rules about what is "intellectually justified" as basically that which cannot be doubted. Skepticism is parlour room magic, strutted out to impress but completely useless in every day life. Can you "prove" you love your children? Can you "prove" Washington was the first President of the United States? Can you "prove" you're presently looking at a computer screen reading? Of course not. Are those warranted beliefs? This last is the proper question to ask.

The question is, what is the reasonable accounting for the facts as we know them? What passes warrant for belief?

To be useful, skepticism needs to have limits. It is a tool, not a way of life. It's not reasonable to claim that everyone involved in this RB-47 sighting was mistaken in all their claims. It's not reasonable to suggest that tens of thousands of people were mistaken when they together saw the Phoenix Lights. There are truly dozens if not hundreds of these sorts of sightings corroborated by multiple witnesses, and it's not reasonable to say everyone witnessing the event is wrong, simply to support the skeptical view. That's just not reasonable nor rational.

[93143]

I'm not following your question where you write: "This raises an interesting question - if the thrust efficiency of a Mach-effect device is in principle unlimited, how does the average velocity of the stuff being pushed on always match that of the thruster? " Can you rephrase this?

In order to exert a force F on a reaction mass moving at a given velocity v relative to the device exerting the force (like a car on a road), the minimum required power in the frame of reference of the device is P = F·v. Therefore, if a Mach-effect thruster has a thrust efficiency η [N/W], which implies ηP = |F|, the maximum possible average velocity difference between the thruster and its reaction mass is 1/η in the direction of the applied force.

If η is in principle unlimited, the average velocity difference between the M-E thruster and its reaction mass must be zero. Even if there's a limit, the observed thrusts on the order of 10 μN imply that the maximum velocity difference is on the order of 100 km/s, which isn't very big; I suppose it's plausible, but if Paul March's experimental results hold up, that number shrinks by more than two orders of magnitude. And wouldn't a fixed reference point like that make inertia behave differently than it does?

Hence my postulate: if the thruster is pushing on something, the velocity difference between it and what it's pushing on should somehow remain zero regardless of the velocity state of the device.

I think you are misunderstanding the entropy generation mechanism.

That's very possible. My issues stem from the obvious physical interpretation of "pushing on distant matter", which could be an oversimplification. It is this basic idea, of using all matter in the light cone as reaction mass, that I have analyzed using Newtonian physics; if something more complicated is involved that invalidates that analysis, very well.

Right now, testing the thing seems to be the best way to go...

[GIThruster]

I'm only partly sure In understand what you're saying. There is no V between the reaction mass and the thruster. It'd be better to say between the active mass and the reaction mass, since the thruster includes both. The average v is set by the ionic response of the material used and the emf applied, so n us not "essentially unlimited" if I'm following.

[93143]

The momentum acquired by the thruster needs to have a partner somewhere to satisfy Newton's 3rd. Something, ultimately, acquires an equal and opposite momentum, and it isn't part of the thruster. That's the whole point of this exercise. Let's call it the "far-off active mass".

The minimum amount of energy required of the thruster in order to perform this momentum transfer is simply the dot product of the momentum transfer and the vector average velocity difference between the thruster and the far-off active mass.

Unless it's tapping energy from somewhere else again to assist it, all of this work has to come from the electrical energy supplied to the thruster.

I was under the impression that the thrust efficiency had no hard theoretical limit. If this is the case, and my assumption about where the energy to do the work comes from is correct (no idea where else it could come from; it's not coming from the stuff being pushed on), then there can be no positive velocity difference between the thruster and the far-off active mass. There could be a negative one, though; if F·v is negative, the far-off active mass could do work on the thruster. The problem with that is as follows:

If there were no selectivity, and the thruster just interacted equally with everything in its light cone, the achievable thrust efficiency would depend not only on the velocity but also on the orientation of the device. (It could even become negative; simple linear operation of an M-E thruster in a particular direction could produce net power.) This matches neither experiment nor what one would expect of a device that directly harnesses the underlying principle of inertia.

So the simplistic Newtonian model needs a rather weird assumption to work - namely that the local momentum induced by the thruster ends up cancelled by an equal and opposite momentum imparted either to some subset of the rest of the observable universe that somehow happens to have an average velocity identical to that of the thruster, or to the entire rest of the observable universe in a nonuniform weighted fashion that has the same net result. And I don't see that invoking relativity is going to help... though I'm not an expert in relativity, so I can't be sure...

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If it works, someone will figure this out. Maybe somebody already has, and I just haven't read the right papers...

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I should note that my explanation of how energy generation from a flywheel works does not depend on the above. It's a purely local Newtonian analysis, and is pretty ironclad assuming the M-E thruster does what it's supposed to.

[kunkmiester]

The momentum acquired by the thruster needs to have a partner somewhere to satisfy Newton's 3rd. Something, ultimately, acquires an equal and opposite momentum, and it isn't part of the thruster. That's the whole point of this exercise. Let's call it the "far-off active mass".

The rest of the universe gets the momentum. I'm vastly oversimplifying as I understand it, but that's the gist of it.

Something like that. Wish I had more physics.

[93143]

I just said that. The trouble is that one way or another it's more complicated than that, which is what my post is about.

[GIThruster]

So the simplistic Newtonian model needs a rather weird assumption to work. . .or to the entire rest of the observable universe in a nonuniform weighted fashion that has the same net result.

The entire rest of the universe would be the obvious answer, but you need to realize that this is not the same issue as the entropy issue, and that since a closed universe cannot rotate, there is no way to observe any force exerted against the entire universe. There is literally no standard by which one could measure. The same is not true of adding to the entropy which would cause it to accelerate in its expansion.

[93143]

I should go to bed, but it seems to me that it is in fact the same issue. If the force were exerted on a static background, no configuration could ever result in a PMM2. Linear operation as a 'cosmic MHD turbine' could generate power, but the flywheel idea wouldn't.

No, the velocity and orientation independence of the M-E thruster's operation is definitely what results in the apparent entropy condition violation. Unless I've royally confused myself somehow...

[Jded]

I should go to bed, but it seems to me that it is in fact the same issue. If the force were exerted on a static background, no configuration could ever result in a PMM2. Linear operation as a 'cosmic MHD turbine' could generate power, but the flywheel idea wouldn't.

No, the velocity and orientation independence of the M-E thruster's operation is definitely what results in the apparent entropy condition violation. Unless I've royally confused myself somehow...

Just a thought: do we take into account that movement (velocity) changes the light cone, so what constitutes the far-off distant mass also changes?

The "edge parts" that swap would be left with some net momentum.

[Skipjack]

I skimmed it Skippy and can't say its worth the time. Just another self important skeptic who talks a lot and doesn't say anything useful. The answer is the same standard shabby answer we see time and time again from skeptics. The eye witnesses, the readings on all the ECM equipment, the ground radar signature. . .they're all wrong and the skeptic is right because . . .em. . .just because.

Shakes head... Yeah, so I guess we dont require proof of the IMHO extraordinary claim that there are aliens flying arround appearing, disappearing at will (why?) and doing other pointless things.

[GIThruster]

Of course not, Skippy. In science there is no such thing as proof. This is an idiotic question. Reasonable people expect strong evidence that when evaluated warrants belief. All others are unreasonable, apparently including you.

[93143]

Just a thought: do we take into account that movement (velocity) changes the light cone, so what constitutes the far-off distant mass also changes?

The "edge parts" that swap would be left with some net momentum.

I thought of that, but as I understand relativity, it doesn't actually work that way, because the speed of light is frame-independent and relativistic foreshortening is symmetric...

Anyone else have a different/better understanding?