EM Drive

[GIThruster]

Does is use air to make thrust? Absolutely. What's wrong with that?

They're proposing this as a space thruster to use for traveling to Mars. It's in the same paper, I believe. And no, they're not "just messing around". This is what these folks do for a living! They've had funding and 4-6 people working full time in the lab for years. There is no excuse for releasing results with no scientific controls. This was not sloppy and was not a mistake. It was very carefully planned and it got them what they wanted--further funding.

[Tom Ligon]

Does is use air to make thrust? Absolutely. What's wrong with that?

They're proposing this as a space thruster to use for traveling to Mars. It's in the same paper, I believe. And no, they're not "just messing around". This is what these folks do for a living! They've had funding and 4-6 people working full time in the lab for years. There is no excuse for releasing results with no scientific controls. This was not sloppy and was not a mistake. It was very carefully planned and it got them what they wanted--further funding.

Kind of a misplaced quote there. My friend who is using air reaction has no association at all with Eagleworks or their approach. I did recently forward the links to the Eagleworks paper to him, and he said he'd been meaning to look them up. My friend is looking for a way to get to LEO, not Mars, though getting from LEO to Mars would certainly be a fine goal for another electric thruster.

The jump from nanonewtons to planning Mars missions was amusing. I don't fault people working for NASA having their eye on Mars. Heck, that was what got Dr. Bussard up in the morning. He was planning Polywell-powered missions to Mars before got a handful of neutrons out of WB6. He was planning missions to the stars using the interstellar ramjet before I read about Enos the Astrochimp as a kid.

No scientific controls? The whole experiment is run by chopping power on and off, which turns thrust on and off. They've controlled for some factors. They admit that early tests had some false interactions, and there are things I'd do differently in the setup to minimize others. Could they be creating air thrust? Yeah, even if the air is at 5e-6 torr. Or water being blown off the inner surface of the cavity might do it.

The real two problems are that the thing is abysmally weak and they seem to have designed it with no clear concept of a mechanism, which makes it rather difficult to design an experiment systematically. What I'd say is unscientific is that they don't seem to have a hypothesis to test scientifically. That leaves them with messing around and hoping it does something. Not that I'm against that ... I've been known to myself, and Fermi's idea that "No experiment is worth doing unless it has at least a 50% chance of failure" would include well-considered messing around in the lab. And on occasion that does turn up something worth formulating a hypothesis and testing with an experiment.

[GIThruster]

Oh they do have an hypothesis. All the lab's funding is predicated on testing White's QVF conjecture. This is why though they had an MLT on the balance, they never powered it with AC. It was not their mission to look for thrust that supported any hypothesis other than Sonny's.

The fact that Sonny's model violates EEP, GR and the principle of conservation is just an inconvenient truth they don't speak of. I'm astonished DARPA would fund such stuff. It really is an example of how the good old boys take care of each other.

[Tom Ligon]

DARPA funds the weird and wild. Its their charter to look at wildly speculative projects. Mostly these don't lead to much. On occasion they pay off big-time.

What the heck, they funded our FA-18 model with the defective wing that kept falling off.

I'm recalling a little baby cruise missile we launched at Wallops Island in early 2002, funded by DARPA. We launched it from Aurora's corporate aircraft (Aurora is one of those rare companies with a corporate airplane rigged to launch 5" rockets). The thing flew a successful mission and parachuted into the recovery area. The DARPA rep was literally jumping up and down with glee, wondering when we could launch another one.

[GIThruster]

DARPA funds the weird and wild. Its their charter to look at wildly speculative projects.

Yes indeed. I find people will say the opposite very often, and paint DARPA as traditionalists unwilling to risk, but according to DARPA, they enjoy doing what they call "DARPA Hard". They don't like risk for the sake of risk but none of the risk takers do. Any real entrepreneur will tell you the art of handling risk is to reduce it. DARPA is like an entrepreneur in this regard. As soon as I find the proper cofounder I'm going this route. There will be a couple stops along the way to get DARPA funding since you do want to have a couple early wins under your belt before you look for free money, but I think DARPA is one of the great, mostly untapped resources in USG. Sonny is to be applauded for his work to get funding from them. It's just a shame he has deceived them so thoroughly. I have to wonder what the eventual outcome of this is going to be.

[kurt9]

More grist for the mill:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/02/more-e ... ation.html

[birchoff]

Definitely exciting news. Gives me hope that the next report will have some solid thrust numbers under very good controls. Especially if they can deliver on running the copper frustum in a null configuration versus using a dummy load.

[GIThruster]

All of the theories that pretend to explain thrust from the EM drive violate conservation. Sonny White even claims he is violating conservation in the lab. By way of contrast, Woodward's theory is guaranteed not to violate conservation by Noether's theorem, just as is GR. And it is just as skippy says, you are pushing off the universe's gravity field. If you couldn't do that, the devise would not work at all and again, conservation is obtained.

[birchoff]

All of the theories that pretend to explain thrust from the EM drive violate conservation. Sonny White even claims he is violating conservation in the lab. By way of contrast, Woodward's theory is guaranteed not to violate conservation by Noether's theorem, just as is GR. And it is just as skippy says, you are pushing off the universe's gravity field. If you couldn't do that, the devise would not work at all and again, conservation is obtained.

Well as far as the Emdrive work at Eagleworks is concerned I am more than willing to set aside theoretical disagreements till they have a complete device that not only works under a number of controls, but also can be tuned to a null configuration. Give me those things and theory no longer matters, for what we will have is a repeatable experiment demonstrating something that mainstream science claims is impossible. At that point we should lock all the theoreticians in a cage with no food till they figure out a proper explanation accepted by everyone.

[Diogenes]

All of the theories that pretend to explain thrust from the EM drive violate conservation. Sonny White even claims he is violating conservation in the lab. By way of contrast, Woodward's theory is guaranteed not to violate conservation by Noether's theorem, just as is GR. And it is just as skippy says, you are pushing off the universe's gravity field. If you couldn't do that, the devise would not work at all and again, conservation is obtained.

Well as far as the Emdrive work at Eagleworks is concerned I am more than willing to set aside theoretical disagreements till they have a complete device that not only works under a number of controls, but also can be tuned to a null configuration. Give me those things and theory no longer matters, for what we will have is a repeatable experiment demonstrating something that mainstream science claims is impossible. At that point we should lock all the theoreticians in a cage with no food till they figure out a proper explanation accepted by everyone.

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[GIThruster]

At that point we should lock all the theoreticians in a cage with no food till they figure out a proper explanation accepted by everyone.

This image just cracks me up!

[AcesHigh]

Paul March has posted a lot on Nasa SpaceFlight Forums these last days.

interesting tidbit from him:

BTW, IMO Jim Woodward's Mach-Effect (M-E) conjecture that is based primarily on SRT and GRT, is still in the running for a way to explain his and our test results to date. However the M-E also has its detractors since it requires that instantaneous Wheeler/Feynman radiation reaction forces being required between a local time varying mass and all the other mass/energy in the casually connected universe, since this mechanism is used to balance the M-E's energy & momentum conservation books. In the end analysis though I think that the ME will rest on the quantum nature of space-time, since in Woodward's eyes the gravitational field IS space-time, and in our eyes GRT's space-time is in reality the quantum vacuum that probably has at least 4 spatial dimensions and one time dimension!

Best, Paul March

[ScottL]

http://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comment ... asas_warp/

Cross posting from the Mach Effect thread as this article pertains more to this subject than that one.

[tokamac]

http://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comment ... asas_warp/

Cross posting from the Mach Effect thread as this article pertains more to this subject than that one.

Sorry but the paper the reddit post refers to (Eagleworks' Warp Field Mechanics 101) has nothing to do with the EmDrive, despite GIThruster's claim in the other thread.

In that paper from 2011, Dr. Sonny White calculated the Alcubierre warp drive metric could need way less exotic matter than originally thought, making interstellar travel even more possible, warping space-time around a spaceship. He proposed to verify this conjecture with an experiment involving a precise interferometer with a laser, which he tried and which didn't work.
[EDIT: Actually White proposed that experiment before, in 2006: The Alcubierre Warp Drive in Higher Dimensional Spacetime]

The EmDrive is a thruster invented by British engineer Roger Shawyer, yet to be theoretically explained, that uses a tapered microwave cavity to produce a thrust without expelling radiation nor propellant. It's not a priori a warp drive.

Besides, it is true Sonny White also has another conjecture involving Quantum Vacuum Fluctuations (QVF) from which he tries to explain ALL forms of propellantless propulsion or "impulse engines". For example: Woodward's Mach Effect Thruster, Shawyer's EmDrive, Fetta's Cannae drive, Serrano's Field Effect Thruster, etc. This speculation is simple: it claims you can push on the various virtual particles popping out from the quantum vacuum, with electromagnetic (Lorentz) forces. Like a magnetohydrodynamic thruster expelling a plasma.

White's QFV conjecture could be wrong, and the EmDrive could still work. YTBD.

Coming back to White's paper about the optimisation change in Alcubierre warp drive metric, it is indeed somewhat more related to Woodward's Mach Effect theory as you thought primarily, since both share the idea of warping spacetime with exotic matter (Woodward starts with impulse engines, but the second term of his equation could lead to the creation of exotic matter). The EmDrive does not (except if the EmDrive was finally proven to create negative energy )

[EDIT2: Well, I found the thread that is most suited to your finding on Reddit: NASA Starts WARP Drive Experiments]

[GIThruster]

I suggested this post go here because all the rest of Sonny's work has been reported here. Seemed better than starting a new thread when he's not even doing that work at present. NASA redirected him after he had the null results he had with the warp interferometry experiment. And note that both his warp model and his QVF thrust model are based upon virtual particles having mass, and using negative energy, as opposed to Woodward's work which uses negative mass.

And note please that there is a HUGE difference between access to negative mass and access to negative energy. These may have an E=MC^2 equivalent but technological access to them is NOT the same. Woodward proposes how to get negative mass. White's schemes require negative energy which he proposes to get from the vacuum in some sort of Casimir harvesting scheme. I believe Earthtech has currently has funds to investigate this.