Could ME thrusters be used to produce torque?

[chrismb]

I do think that the amount of time it must have spent you to compose that string of choice words could have been better spent trying to understand the concept you were ridiculing.

nah! it came very easily. I'm in the mood today for a word-fight, by virtue of all the people in 'high office' that I'm currently sparring with.

[chrismb]

If m is dependent on the rest of the universe you have left out some important terms in your simplified equations.

Tell that to Einstein. It's his formula.

I guess he did start thinking he'd left out a constant. But, no, this equation is as solid as one's undersanding of reality may permit.

[93143]

An M-E drive is a reaction engine. Except that you don't have to pass the propellant through the engine; it interacts with it at a distance. The net momentum of the matter in the universe isn't changed by this, just the relative momentum of the stuff that makes up the thruster and the much more abundant stuff that doesn't (with the effect presumably being much larger on matter near the thruster's velocity; P = Fv and all that).

You don't need to concern yourself with relativity unless you care about the mechanism. The upshot, assuming the drive just works, is entirely Newtonian. Momentum and energy are conserved globally.

nah! it came very easily. I'm in the mood today for a word-fight, by virtue of all the people in 'high office' that I'm currently sparring with.

No problem. I've been failing abjectly to get a simulation to converge (got a complete stall about one order down using Newton-Krylov-Schwartz!) so I'm being a bit humourless.

[chrismb]

You don't need to concern yourself with relativity unless you care about the mechanism. The upshot, assuming the drive just works, is entirely Newtonian. Momentum and energy are conserved globally.

Nothing in our Universe is Newtonian. On a small scale it may appear so, but on a large scale it is certainly not so. You're talking 'universal' scale. So it would be highly non-Newtonian. Perhaps therein lies the essential theoretical error.

[paulmarch]

You've started insulting people now

Who, me?

Who have I insulted? I've insulted a 'creation', this being the 'subject' of my statement. If someone infers that the idea they hold so dear to them is shot down by me, I'm not shooting them down, only their love for the idea.

Energy cannot be preserved in the way that you claim, because 'the rest of the universe' is a 'null' inertial frame and you cannot give back to that universe the same energy, you have to give it back to a specific inertial frame that the energy transfer occurs in. KE=mc^2 - m[o]c^2, so you have to have a frame in which the m[o] is referenced.

As I understand it ME theory says there is no null inertial frame. Just as there are no "fixed stars" . Both are convenient fictions. Well at least one is. For the other the experiments so far are inconclusive.

If m is dependent on the rest of the universe you have left out some important terms in your simplified equations.

Now it is more that possible that ME is wrong. But right now we don't know that. So what we do is ask "if it is true what would we expect to see?" Then design the experiment accordingly.

ChrisMB:

Woodward uses the “causally connected universe” as the Mach-Effect’s cosmological frame of reference, which in this epoch has a radius of ~13.7 billion light years. This is based on the assumption that there really was a “Big Bang” that started the universe we currently find ourselves in and that the mass/energy created at that moment of creation is still inertially “entangled” per Mach’s Principle. If you don’t buy into Mach’s Principle as the origins of inertia, then we can part company now.

However, if the origins of inertia does rely on Mach’s Principle as conjectured by Dennis Sciama in his 1953 and 1969 papers on same and then refined by several first rate physicists in the intervening years including Jim Woodward, the M-E based momentum and energy (Momenergy) interactions between the laboratory frame and this inertial cosmological frame is then conserved via field based inertial radiation reactions that are effectively instantaneous. These transactions could occur thru higher dimensional (> than 4D) connections as proposed by the 11 dimensional String theory folks. Or they could be mediated through the Quantum Mechanical (Q/M) inertial analog of E&M radiation reactions forces as penned by Wheeler/Feynman in the late 1940s or more lately by John Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of QM interactions where the radiation reaction forces are transmitted via forwards and backwards in time transactions. (First reflect on J. C. Maxwell’s E&M propagation derivation solution with that plus/minus quadratic equation solution and the physical implications of that negative root that nobody wants to talk about, and then see the John Cramer Symposium web site at: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~lisa ... Symposium/ and take a look at the program page’s listed presentations, especially those in regards to retrocausality.)

Lastly how does the universe balance the energy books when a local laboratory frame of reference power sink like the MLT extracts kinetic energy from the mass/energy contained within the defined M-E cosmological frame of reference? Simple, IMO the overall temperature of this causally connected universe is reduced by some very small percentage from the universe’s current ~2.725 Kelvin. And since the 5% of our universe’s mass/energy that makes up “normal” baryonic matter is composed of an estimated 1x10^80+ atoms & ions, speeding up ~1x10^30 atoms contained in a spaceship to some small percentage of the speed of light is not going to lower the temperature of the universe to any level measureable by our current state of the art IR instrumentation.

Now Chris, if you have heartburn with the foregoing train of reasoning you are more than welcome to it, for as 93143 has already mentioned, the experimental data directly supporting the M-E has not been conclusive enough yet to put all doubts aside. However, there is already enough positive data in our hands to indicate that the M-E conjecture may well be true, and if we are to ever develop interstellar flight that utilizes faster than light (FTL) travel based on GRT traversable wormholes and/or propagating Alcubierre like spacetime bubbles, something like the M-E will have to be developed to implement it. In this bargain, we probably also get the much sought after quantum gravity theory, where the MLTs and other implementations of the M-E Impulse drives come along for free.

[93143]

Nothing in our Universe is Newtonian. On a small scale it may appear so, but on a large scale it is certainly not so. You're talking 'universal' scale. So it would be highly non-Newtonian. Perhaps therein lies the essential theoretical error.

Aren't you thinking of non-Euclidean rather than non-Newtonian? Granted, universal expansion is going to produce relativistic effects when you compare two galaxies billions of light years apart...

More importantly, I think you're way off message with this stuff. It's like that thread I've been arguing in recently on nasaspaceflight.com (not the thread I linked to; a different one) where the Pendulum Rocket Fallacy was pointed out, and somebody noted that the explanation of the fallacy assumes a rigid body and brought up structural flex and fuel slosh as reasons why the explanation was invalid.

Sure, the rigid-body explanation is physically imprecise. But those second-order effects, even if they get large, don't change the main point, which is that you can't stabilize a rocket by putting the engines on the nose.

Your initial objection was that energy was apparently being created out of nothing. I pointed out that no, momentum and energy are being harvested from matter all across the universe (the magnitude and direction of this process at any instant obviously depends on the reference frame). You then started going on about relativity and rest mass and so forth as if it had anything to do with your initial objection.

If you can't explain how relativity invalidates my explanation, I don't see why I should try to rebut a non-argument.

[chrismb]

Your initial objection was that energy was apparently being created out of nothing. I pointed out that no, momentum and energy are being harvested from matter all across the universe (the magnitude and direction of this process at any instant obviously depends on the reference frame). You then started going on about relativity and rest mass and so forth as if it had anything to do with your initial objection.

If you can't explain how relativity invalidates my explanation, I don't see why I should try to rebut a non-argument.

I don't think you understand the issue of frame-specific entropy, then. For 'work' to be done, there has to be some capability for a change of state to occur 'exothermically', that is to say, entropy increases. If you have a well-defined (by position and momentum) set of particles then they have a given entropy, but only with respect to their inertial frame for it differs between frames. For example, if you were to take a look at a lump of granite, it is chemically very inert and all the SiOx consituents are thermalised and so it cannot do any 'work'. But only in its frame, for if it were actually a meteorite you were looking at, heading towards the earth at 30,000kph, then that meteorite-earth system now does have the capacity to do work. So you can't separate out inertial frames to see where 'work done' can go, or be subsequently made use of. If you invent an 'absolute universal frame' then what you are describing is a reducing entropy as the sum of all frames, which we presume to be falsifiable by our modern understanding of thermodynamics.

[MSimon]

Your initial objection was that energy was apparently being created out of nothing. I pointed out that no, momentum and energy are being harvested from matter all across the universe (the magnitude and direction of this process at any instant obviously depends on the reference frame). You then started going on about relativity and rest mass and so forth as if it had anything to do with your initial objection.

If you can't explain how relativity invalidates my explanation, I don't see why I should try to rebut a non-argument.

I don't think you understand the issue of frame-specific entropy, then. For 'work' to be done, there has to be some capability for a change of state to occur 'exothermically', that is to say, entropy increases. If you have a well-defined (by position and momentum) set of particles then they have a given entropy, but only with respect to their inertial frame for it differs between frames. For example, if you were to take a look at a lump of granite, it is chemically very inert and all the SiOx consituents are thermalised and so it cannot do any 'work'. But only in its frame, for if it were actually a meteorite you were looking at, heading towards the earth at 30,000kph, then that meteorite-earth system now does have the capacity to do work. So you can't separate out inertial frames to see where 'work done' can go, or be subsequently made use of. If you invent an 'absolute universal frame' then what you are describing is a reducing entropy as the sum of all frames, which we presume to be falsifiable by our modern understanding of thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics is a statistical process. It doesn't hold on the very micro level. Now inertia according to ME is the result of big bang (maybe) entanglement. If that is correct why not draw energy from everywhere to here by taking advantage of entanglement?

I have to admit that if ME is true we have a very weird universe.

[paulmarch]

Your initial objection was that energy was apparently being created out of nothing. I pointed out that no, momentum and energy are being harvested from matter all across the universe (the magnitude and direction of this process at any instant obviously depends on the reference frame). You then started going on about relativity and rest mass and so forth as if it had anything to do with your initial objection.

If you can't explain how relativity invalidates my explanation, I don't see why I should try to rebut a non-argument.

I don't think you understand the issue of frame-specific entropy, then. For 'work' to be done, there has to be some capability for a change of state to occur 'exothermically', that is to say, entropy increases. If you have a well-defined (by position and momentum) set of particles then they have a given entropy, but only with respect to their inertial frame for it differs between frames. For example, if you were to take a look at a lump of granite, it is chemically very inert and all the SiOx consituents are thermalised and so it cannot do any 'work'. But only in its frame, for if it were actually a meteorite you were looking at, heading towards the earth at 30,000kph, then that meteorite-earth system now does have the capacity to do work. So you can't separate out inertial frames to see where 'work done' can go, or be subsequently made use of. If you invent an 'absolute universal frame' then what you are describing is a reducing entropy as the sum of all frames, which we presume to be falsifiable by our modern understanding of thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics is a statistical process. It doesn't hold on the very micro level. Now inertia according to ME is the result of big bang (maybe) entanglement. If that is correct why not draw energy from everywhere to here by taking advantage of entanglement?

I have to admit that if ME is true we have a very weird universe.

After the introduction of SRT, GRT, Quantum Mechanics, and the latest cosmological concepts and supporting data made their debuts in the 20th and early 21st Centuries, we didn't already know that we lived in a very weird universe? Newton and his ilk only grasped the edge of this weirdness, but the GRT, QM & cosmological data accumulated to date demonstrates this fact loud and clear to those who care to listen. Our universe is weirder than we CAN imagine! So we just have to deal with it…AND take advantage of it when we can.

[MSimon]

Paul,

OK let me rephrase that. It is weirder than I imagined last week.

I was just getting to be at home with QM and now I have to deal with inertia as cosmic entanglement rather than an intrinsic property of matter.

[ltgbrown]

Wow, this discussion has gone in a direction that I did not foresee. Glad to see that the trend of drifting from the subject line is going strong! Therefore:

I still do not understand how energy is being extracted for net power. How does .035 N/w efficiency turn into a net power device?

[chrismb]

Thermodynamics is a statistical process. It doesn't hold on the very micro level.

Exactly. So if it's drawing 'energy' on the whole universe then it will be statistically smoothed smoother than a smooth bowling ball at a 'smoothest bowling ball' competition for regional 'smoothest bowling ball' champions, rather than the granular entropy you're talking about.

[93143]

I don't think you understand the issue of frame-specific entropy, then. For 'work' to be done, there has to be some capability for a change of state to occur 'exothermically', that is to say, entropy increases. If you have a well-defined (by position and momentum) set of particles then they have a given entropy, but only with respect to their inertial frame for it differs between frames. For example, if you were to take a look at a lump of granite, it is chemically very inert and all the SiOx consituents are thermalised and so it cannot do any 'work'. But only in its frame, for if it were actually a meteorite you were looking at, heading towards the earth at 30,000kph, then that meteorite-earth system now does have the capacity to do work. So you can't separate out inertial frames to see where 'work done' can go, or be subsequently made use of. If you invent an 'absolute universal frame' then what you are describing is a reducing entropy as the sum of all frames, which we presume to be falsifiable by our modern understanding of thermodynamics.

So now it's the second law, then? You're dodging all over the map. What happened to relativity?

I personally think you should forget paulmarch's comment about reducing the temperature of the universe; it seems to be unhelpful...

Did you read this like I asked you to? I haven't been playing fast and loose with reference frames like you seem to be accusing me of; this works out fine (to first order) with a simple Galilean transformation:

...from rest the energy associated with 0.1 m/s of delta-V is 0.005 J/kg. At 7.5 km/s, the energy associated with 0.1 m/s is about 750 J/kg. The key point is that the lower the velocity difference between an engine and its reaction mass, the lower the required energy output gets. This is the Isp principle.

The reaction mass is distant matter. Plenty of distant matter is moving at very close to whatever reasonable speed you want to go.

From the perspective of the drive, this means you do a small amount of positive work on that distant matter, causing it to move slowly in the direction opposite your thrust vector.

From the ground, the distant matter slows down slightly, doing a large amount of positive work on the already fast-moving M-E drive.

...paulmarch, have I really missed something critical here?

I will admit that the spinner idea seems to me that it might violate the entropy condition, but as I said in my original acknowledgement of this, I haven't done the math, and it's entirely possible I'm wrong. It's also possible, I suppose, that the M-E spinner acts as a kind of universe-wide Maxwell's Demon... but this has nothing to do with conservation of energy, which was your initial argument.

I still do not understand how energy is being extracted for net power. How does .035 N/w efficiency turn into a net power device?

Remember that a newton and a watt are not units of the same thing, and are thus not directly comparable. Then go revisit my earlier post where I calculated it out and see if you can understand the math. It's pretty basic; it shouldn't be hard.

The upshot is that if you can generate torque in the way you've described, you can run a generator with it, and with reasonably efficient M-E thrusters, the power required to produce the torque can be smaller than the power you get from the generator. The key requirement is that the speed of the thrusters at the edge of the device be high enough, since power is force times velocity. This means that the faster you spin the thing, the higher the gain becomes. Energy is not actually created; the M-E thrusters are getting it from the rest of the matter in the universe. As my quote above demonstrates, the faster the thruster moves, the more work is done on it by the force between it and the distant matter (again, P = Fv).

You can generate power this way with ordinary rocket engines too, but since you need to fuel them (and accelerate the fuel up to the flywheel speed) it doesn't come out over unity no matter how fast the flywheel turns, so this is simply a particularly impractical way to build a heat engine...

[TallDave]

And since the 5% of our universe’s mass/energy that makes up “normal” baryonic matter is composed of an estimated 1x10^80+ atoms & ions, speeding up ~1x10^30 atoms contained in a spaceship to some small percentage of the speed of light is not going to lower the temperature of the universe to any level measureable by our current state of the art IR instrumentation.

A good explanation. But I can already see you're going to have a problem with the environmentalists.

"STOP UNIVERSAL COOLING NOW!"

"STEALING MOMENTUM FROM OTHER GALAXIES IS WRONG"

"EXTRATERRESTRIALS HAVE RIGHTS TOO"

Al Gore will make a chart that shows the Universe is cooling at an unprecedented rate, Briffa will extrapolate from one star that we're all going to freeze to death in 50 years, and that will be the end.

[chrismb]

Fortunately, as it's just some cobblers then no-one will get so excited about it....ah...oh, yeah I see what you mean!!