Mach Effect progress

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

Moderators: tonybarry, MSimon

djolds1
Posts: 1296
Joined: Fri Jul 13, 2007 8:03 am

Post by djolds1 »

Error. Deleted.
Last edited by djolds1 on Fri Aug 24, 2012 6:24 am, edited 2 times in total.
Vae Victis

CaptainBeowulf
Posts: 498
Joined: Sat Nov 07, 2009 12:35 am

Post by CaptainBeowulf »

Someone might want to build a time machine :lol:

Doesn't matter whether you would want to, if the physics make it possible, then the paradoxes also can arise. So, at some point your theory will have to address paradoxes - is there cosmic censorship/chronological protection mechanism; do paradoxes never actually happen (ie. history as it exists is actually the result of time travelers going back and trying to change it); do paradoxes result in the universe instantaneously "splitting" into two new timelines of a multiverse; or do paradoxes just happen and the universe doesn't care (ie. you go back and kill your grandfather and never get born, but you're just still here anyway)?

Seriously, there are reasons people might want to try to pull this off. Send a ship off through regular spacetime at high sublight speeds "into the future," then bring it back. Your future operative could then observe the world, collect data etc., and come back through the wormhole to tell you, say, all the winning lottery ticket numbers for the next ten years. Or the winning sports teams for the Super Bowl, Stanley Cup etc., so you know who to bet on.

But assuming you need quite a bit of money/resources to pull off a near-FTL-through-regular-space-ship, and just some private citizen who wants to win a bunch of lotteries can't do it, there are still reasons. Say you're a powerful state, and you're going to start a war. You send someone into the future to observe the after-effects and then come back and tell you what happens. Now you know exactly what the enemy is going to do to counter your offensives, and you can preempt every plan they have. Or, you can simply find out that the situation was much riskier than you thought, you way underestimated the resources you would need, you were going to lose one way or another, and so you just don't start it in the first place.[/i]

AcesHigh
Posts: 655
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 3:59 am

Post by AcesHigh »

ScottL wrote:I'm assuming ME applies to the traditional though of wormholes, from A to B, folded paper exercise. If this is the case, traversing a wormhole has nothing to do with time travel. You aren't going any faster or slower, just bending/warping space. Furthermore, why would you create a near or at C ship if you have wormholes that will always be "faster?"
putting the wormhole inside a ship travelling at near C speeds is only an exercise of imagination to better visualize the travel in time problem, since you get such a huge difference in the measured clock time.

but the effect will be the same (albeit the time difference will be much smaller) if one wormhole is orbiting the Earth (I am not sure wormholes can orbit something, whatever) and the other wormhole is near some massive gas giant. There are still small deformations in space time caused by nearby gravity from bodies as well as movement through space time.

THUS, the problem of travelling to the past still exists, although we would be talking of microseconds here.

ScottL
Posts: 1122
Joined: Thu Jun 02, 2011 11:26 pm

Post by ScottL »

AcesHigh wrote:
ScottL wrote:I'm assuming ME applies to the traditional though of wormholes, from A to B, folded paper exercise. If this is the case, traversing a wormhole has nothing to do with time travel. You aren't going any faster or slower, just bending/warping space. Furthermore, why would you create a near or at C ship if you have wormholes that will always be "faster?"
putting the wormhole inside a ship travelling at near C speeds is only an exercise of imagination to better visualize the travel in time problem, since you get such a huge difference in the measured clock time.

but the effect will be the same (albeit the time difference will be much smaller) if one wormhole is orbiting the Earth (I am not sure wormholes can orbit something, whatever) and the other wormhole is near some massive gas giant. There are still small deformations in space time caused by nearby gravity from bodies as well as movement through space time.

THUS, the problem of travelling to the past still exists, although we would be talking of microseconds here.
I guess I pictured always as a punch through so to speak. The event horizon would be the vector into space and the distance would be related to the origin's power. I never thought of it as having to hold 2 mouths open to acocmplish.

AcesHigh
Posts: 655
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 3:59 am

Post by AcesHigh »

anyway, I suppose it wouldnt be healthy to travel with a warp drive inside a planet´s atmosphere... it would rule out too the assumption aliens use craft that use warp inside the atmosphere (which would allow them the thousands of Gs maneuvers)

http://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw81.html
And there is also the question of writing the environmental impact statement. What would happen to external objects (space dust, rocks, other ships, asteroids, planets, ...) that happened to lie in the path of an Alcubierre ship and entered the region of distorted space-time at the leading edge of the warp, where space is rapidly being collapsed? The nuclei of any matter transiting that region would first experience enormous compressional forces, probably form a quark-gluon plasma reminiscent of the first microsecond of the Big Bang, and then explode in a flood of pi mesons and other fundamental particles when the compression forces were released, stealing energy from the warp field in the process.

A ship traveling in an Alcubierre space warp should be equipped with plenty of radiation shielding. Perhaps that is not a problem, since the equations for the metric and the energy density of the warp do not seem to depend on how much mass is placed in the flat-space region which is given an FTL velocity.
sounds like a fun weapon.

GIThruster
Posts: 4686
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Post by GIThruster »

ScottL wrote:I'm assuming ME applies to the traditional though of wormholes, from A to B, folded paper exercise. If this is the case, traversing a wormhole has nothing to do with time travel.
Actually it does. Wormholes connect disparate space-times, which means they're just as able to connect different times as they are different spaces.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

GIThruster
Posts: 4686
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Post by GIThruster »

djolds1 wrote: Yes, transit is instantaneous once the wormhole mouths are on station. But getting them in position in the first place takes time.
We don't know that one can't generate the second mouth when one generates the transit between. There's just too little understood about this to date but I think once Jim's book comes out in November we can expect the dawning of serious discussion of these things and perhaps we'll see some more concrete wormhole theory emerge as result.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

djolds1
Posts: 1296
Joined: Fri Jul 13, 2007 8:03 am

Post by djolds1 »

AcesHigh wrote:anyway, I suppose it wouldnt be healthy to travel with a warp drive inside a planet´s atmosphere... it would rule out too the assumption aliens use craft that use warp inside the atmosphere (which would allow them the thousands of Gs maneuvers)
Going by the paper Paul referenced yesterday:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.3706

there is no reason why a warp drive could not be used in-atmo. The acceleration of instantaneous velocity acquisition would not be perceived within the warp bubble, despite the instantaneous jump to any selected velocity up to 2.50c. OTOH, a "starter" velocity is needed to establish a vector of travel, all this neglects practical problems like frictional heating, and the referenced concept is related to but not identical to negative-mass Alcubierre warp drives.
AcesHigh wrote:sounds like a fun weapon.
Instant RKKS. Terrifying. Mobile space-based city-ships may become necessary because planetary civilization is a suicide pact.
GIThruster wrote:
djolds1 wrote:Yes, transit is instantaneous once the wormhole mouths are on station. But getting them in position in the first place takes time.
We don't know that one can't generate the second mouth when one generates the transit between. There's just too little understood about this to date but I think once Jim's book comes out in November we can expect the dawning of serious discussion of these things and perhaps we'll see some more concrete wormhole theory emerge as result.
Thorne wormholes are as I described. Unless I've overlooked something in either of Jim's wormhole papers, his concepts follow the Thorne wormhole guidelines. "Punch through" wormhole generators/ "stargates" would be game changers, but are not part of standard wormhole theory to the best of my knowledge, leaving warp drives as the only option for arbitrary-destination rapid FTL travel.

Or maybe tachyonic states - tho those have dropped off the map for the last 20 years or so.
Vae Victis

AcesHigh
Posts: 655
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 3:59 am

Post by AcesHigh »

Djolds, I was not talking about relativistic weapons or acceleration inside the warp bubble, but to what happens to matter from the atmosphere (or from the planet itself) when it enters in contact with the borders of the warp bubble.

"The nuclei of any matter transiting that region would first experience enormous compressional forces, probably form a quark-gluon plasma reminiscent of the first microsecond of the Big Bang, and then explode in a flood of pi mesons and other fundamental particles when the compression forces were released"

at vacuum there would be little enough matter being compressed and then exploded as pi mesons and other fundamental particles. But inside an atmosphere? Or if the warp bubble touched the ground of a planet...

I suppose that in the area where the warp bubble is compressing space-time, matter may come close to neutron star levels in density and then its expanded again when it crosses the border...

djolds1
Posts: 1296
Joined: Fri Jul 13, 2007 8:03 am

Post by djolds1 »

AcesHigh wrote:Djolds, I was not talking about relativistic weapons or acceleration inside the warp bubble, but to what happens to matter from the atmosphere (or from the planet itself) when it enters in contact with the borders of the warp bubble.

"The nuclei of any matter transiting that region would first experience enormous compressional forces, probably form a quark-gluon plasma reminiscent of the first microsecond of the Big Bang, and then explode in a flood of pi mesons and other fundamental particles when the compression forces were released"

at vacuum there would be little enough matter being compressed and then exploded as pi mesons and other fundamental particles. But inside an atmosphere? Or if the warp bubble touched the ground of a planet...

I suppose that in the area where the warp bubble is compressing space-time, matter may come close to neutron star levels in density and then its expanded again when it crosses the border...
I stand corrected.

And... warp bombs. An intriguing idea. :twisted:
Vae Victis

GIThruster
Posts: 4686
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Post by GIThruster »

I don't think anyone really knows what happens at the boundary between two space-times. We don't know if matter can transition at all and energy is a second, separate question. If the Hyper theory of the Chung-Freese metric is correct, I would not be surprised that the barrier between space-times is impenetrable by EM, but rather than EM and matter passes around the bubble. This would provide no friction when moving a hyper bubble, even when moving though a planet or star. It would also make such hyper craft invisible, which is not too much a surprise if you're dealing with extra-dimensinal theory.

The link to Cramer is very old--so old in fact that it is still presuming the universe slows down in its expansion with time rather than the observed acceleration.

Just IMHO, we don't yet know what we don't know about warp and wormholes. When they were not thought possible to create, there was little reason to invest skull sweat on them. Now that the possibility to generate negative mass is arriving, these all become real and pressing questions.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

AcesHigh
Posts: 655
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 3:59 am

Post by AcesHigh »

better wait for that Woodward paper.

@GiThruster: just out of curiosity. If the bubble would be frictionless and matter would pass around it, would it be possible to go THROUGH a planet or star?

I wonder if light would go around it or cross it. If light wouldnt cross the barrier, the bubble would be opaque from inside. and outside.

GIThruster
Posts: 4686
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Post by GIThruster »

Aces, if Chung-Freese theory is correct, then I would think hyper-drives would enable travel through any matter, including stars. If Alcubierre is correct, then I would think warp drives cannot pass through matter as they're not extra dimensional craft. If Quantum Loop theory is correct, I think you have the same phenomenological results as Chung-Freeze in that matter-energy cannot penetrate the synthetic spacetime of the warp bubble.

I really don't know though. I don't think anyone does. We don't even know if Sonny's warp interferometer works yet. It seems to me if the Chung-Freeze theory is correct, Eagleworks could create a hyper bubble and yet not be able to detect it.

It's all a crap shoot for now except that we think we can generate negative mass.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

kurt9
Posts: 588
Joined: Mon Oct 15, 2007 4:14 pm
Location: Portland, Oregon, USA

Post by kurt9 »

paulmarch wrote:
And those warp bubble experiments commence here at the Eagleworks Lab as soon as we get our replacement laser delivered and installed. That should happen by end of next week if the vendor meets their current delivery schedule.

Best,
I thought you guys were planning to do the "Q" thruster experiments first.

paulmarch
Posts: 155
Joined: Tue Sep 08, 2009 7:06 pm
Location: Friendswood, TX USA

Post by paulmarch »

kurt9 wrote:
paulmarch wrote:
And those warp bubble experiments commence here at the Eagleworks Lab as soon as we get our replacement laser delivered and installed. That should happen by end of next week if the vendor meets their current delivery schedule.

Best,
I thought you guys were planning to do the "Q" thruster experiments first.
As it has turned out, we have bets as to which experiment will reach first light status. As of today we are still waiting on the replacement laser for the warp field experiment, but I'm also dealing with shorted coaxial RF power feed connectors for the Q-Thruster, and my other job at JSC, which is the development of nuclear electric power for space applications. That job consumed 4 hours of my day today, but either one of these advanced propulsion developments is going to need a portable high power supply to drive them...

Best,
Paul March
Friendswood, TX

Post Reply