Mach Effect progress

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

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chrismb
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Post by chrismb »

Thanks for posting, Paul. Glad to see people backing up their ideas in person. I'm all for people running with their crazy ideas - it's the crazies that change the world!

I can't really say much more than that as I think the whole concept is bonkers and the idea stems from a fundamental misunderstanding and belief that "forces" actually exist (rather than being derivative from "system-state" - viz. inertia is thermodynamic in origin). But I can say that I find myself very assured by your rational treatment of the experiment you have illustrated here.

Particularly I am glad to read;
paulmarch wrote: If someting of interests is expressed under those conditions, I'll then go to the trouble of building up a battery powered 60W, one MOSFET HF transmitter module that I already have the parts for, mount it on the Faraday Shield with its battery, and repeat the above weight delta measurments.
I have seen a few experiments now where folks seem to think "hey, this works, and all it's got is a power lead plugged into it" - at which point I wonder over their understanding of electrical currents. But if you follow this plan and get results with on-board battery power, then I'll go buy a hat and eat it! Good luck, and keep at it!

Diogenes
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Post by Diogenes »

Has Dr. Woodward's health issues improved then? It is something that I, and perhaps others have been wondering about. If you cannot, or chose not to remark on it, I understand.

In any case, Good luck.

kcdodd
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Location: Austin, TX

Post by kcdodd »

Can someone point me to something explaining how this is supposed to work? And I don't mean wikipedia. This seems to blatantly violate conservation of momentum, unless the aim is to propel these things via EM radiation.
Carter

Coolbrucelong
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Location: PA USA

Capacitance measurment at 2-4 MHz

Post by Coolbrucelong »

Hi Paul:
Bruce here.
I suspect your capacitance measurements that show a reduction in capacitance at 2-4MHz with respect to 1 kHz could be spurious. A little series inductance in the leads or from the internal structure of the capacitance produces this effect. Comes in handy some times if you need a really low impedance bypass capacitor at a specific frequency but is just confusing in your experiment.
best wishes....bruce
Optimist: Glass is half full
Pessimist: Glass is half empty
Engineer: Someone made that glass twice
as large as it needs to be.

tomclarke
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Post by tomclarke »

chrismb wrote:Thanks for posting, Paul. Glad to see people backing up their ideas in person. I'm all for people running with their crazy ideas - it's the crazies that change the world!

I can't really say much more than that as I think the whole concept is bonkers and the idea stems from a fundamental misunderstanding and belief that "forces" actually exist (rather than being derivative from "system-state" - viz. inertia is thermodynamic in origin). But I can say that I find myself very assured by your rational treatment of the experiment you have illustrated here.

Particularly I am glad to read;
paulmarch wrote: If someting of interests is expressed under those conditions, I'll then go to the trouble of building up a battery powered 60W, one MOSFET HF transmitter module that I already have the parts for, mount it on the Faraday Shield with its battery, and repeat the above weight delta measurments.
I have seen a few experiments now where folks seem to think "hey, this works, and all it's got is a power lead plugged into it" - at which point I wonder over their understanding of electrical currents. But if you follow this plan and get results with on-board battery power, then I'll go buy a hat and eat it! Good luck, and keep at it!
Any experiment to do this will have high frequency high amplitude mechanical, electrical, magnetic oscillation. Since the observed effects (from Paul's experiment) are small extreme care is needed to ensure they are real:

enclosing the entire system, with power source.
Insulating mechanically to avoid vibration
Insulating thermally to avoid convection forces, or use of vacuum.
Insulating electrically & magnetically to avoid e-m forces.

Note that you might think that vibrational effects cannot change when the phases of the capacitor & coil currents are changed, whereas the M-E effect does, so this can be used to disambiguate any signal.

I don't think this is the case. The vibration includes capacitor PZ effects as well as Lorentz force, and therefore its amplitude will change when phases of capacitor drive and Lorentz coil drive change. Also second order effects may mean that this changing phase alters the drive voltages. Rectified vibration can lead to apparent unidirectional force so this is an issue.

It is an interesting experiment (and therefore we are doing it) precisely because any analysis of the extraneous effects must be very subtle. In order to get useful positive results you need to eliminate these extraneous effects, not just argue that they remain constant with phase change. Hence the merit of a fully contained double-wall system.

We are thinking of using solid-liquid phase transition energy to absorb the heat generated by the experiment over say a 10 minute period within a small thermally isolated container! (Freezella bags).

But the experimental difficulties are quite high - not sure we will be able to get decent results.

My own opinion as to the theoretical justification follows chrismb, but nevertheless it is worth doing the experiment, even for negative results.

Paul has a very different approach from ours, much higher frequency but equally much smaller Lorentz forces. We have a severe risk of breaking the capacitors due to very high (10000g) high frequency acceleration even though the distance moved is small (2um). Our approach is less unknowable because the acceleration is external.

Anyway, either one, working, and very carefully enclosed, should resolve the matter!

Betruger
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Post by Betruger »

kcdodd wrote:Can someone point me to something explaining how this is supposed to work? And I don't mean wikipedia. This seems to blatantly violate conservation of momentum, unless the aim is to propel these things via EM radiation.
This argument is made and answered at least once, in detail, at the NSF Advanced Concepts subforum.. "Propellant-less propulsion" and "Gravinertial propulsion - shape of things to come" (or something like that). IIRC it was also made here and P.March wrote at least one concise answer to it.

There's no violation of CoM. You're tugging at the rest of the universe.

Propellantless Field Propulsion and application
GravInertial Spacecraft--the shape of things to come

A T-P thread with ME discussion, P.March contributes.
"Could ME be used to produce torque?"
NextBigFuture's coverage of ME developments

hanelyp
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Post by hanelyp »

There's no violation of CoM. You're tugging at the rest of the universe.
How is that observationally different from non-conservation of momentum?

Betruger
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Joined: Tue May 06, 2008 11:54 am

Post by Betruger »

I don't recall exactly, so don't take my word for it. It's probably wrong. I only remember that the ME gizmo is connected, as everything else, to the rest of the universe via gravinertial field. To really understand that (i.e. from A to Z, not just parroting), there's some reading required that I never got around to doing, so none of it every stuck. Only that one notional reference marker.

I do recall specifically that at least part of the way a Mach-Lorentz thruster works is to vary the mass of one of its elements, and push/pull at it when its mass is at max and min, so that you get net thrust. You're really better off reading straight from the source as linked to above and further on from those webpages than adding me as middleman..

A powerpoint presentation of ME and applications..

There's enough in all these links for you to understand enough of the conjecture to allow you to ask questions to just about anyone else who's up to date on the subject, probably including P.March who as far as I've seen welcomes useful criticism or insights of both theory and experiments.

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

Correct me if I am wrong, but from what I understand, the best way to view an ME thruster is as a wheel that rolls on the gravity of the rest of the universe. You still have to power the wheel to get foreward motion (to make the wheel roll), but you dont need to expell any mass.

kcdodd
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Location: Austin, TX

Post by kcdodd »

You could do that with electromagnetic radiation pressure.

I am looking for a physics explanation. Not hand wavy arguments. A published paper, perhaps?

I expect that IF the force is from gravitational field (which I doubt), the missing momentum would have to be expelled as gravitational waves. Gravity waves have not even been detected as of yet.
Carter

Betruger
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Joined: Tue May 06, 2008 11:54 am

Post by Betruger »

The papers and other explicit equations are in those links.

Yet more resources:
http://www.cphonx.net/weffect/alt.php
http://physics.fullerton.edu/~jimw/nasa-pap/

cuddihy
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Post by cuddihy »

chrismb wrote:
I think the whole concept is bonkers and the idea stems from a fundamental misunderstanding and belief that "forces" actually exist (rather than being derivative from "system-state"
Only a post-modern physicist could say this with a straight face and mean it.

;-)

(us fools who think that forces actually exist --and that they take us to work every morning too...)
Tom.Cuddihy

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Faith is the foundation of reason.

icarus
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Post by icarus »

Burtiger:
There's no violation of CoM. You're tugging at the rest of the universe.
Since you're serving up the interesting flavoured Kool-Aid (that has strange green glow) I'll ask you obvious question;

What happens to the center of mass of the universe when you do this 'tugging' thing on it that you are talking about?

chrismb
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Post by chrismb »

cuddihy wrote:Only a post-modern physicist could say this with a straight face and mean it.
Not at all. A description of the universe which excludes the use of the idea of forces is entirely consistent* - more so than with that idea. We, as humans, have an experience of reality that is 'macroscopic' and is the accumulation of underlying phenomena. We experience what we have come to term as 'force', but it is just an idea in much the same way it is only an idea that physics will behave in exactly the same way tomorrow, and that things are consistent and not subject to chance. So, our experience excludes us from properly understanding quantum physics, for example, in an intuitive way.

*[I'm not suggesting don't use forces in calculations, it would be far too complex to calculate only with 'energy', but recognise they are derivative of other 'real' physical quantities.]

When you go to work, what is happening is that the system-state is changing; you go from being not-at-work to being-at-work. A system-state change requires energy. Force, without dimensional displacement, isn't energy so you can't get to work using forces. You get to work by using energy, and as you use energy with respect to displacement so we, as macroscopic humans, call that 'force'.

Dropping the notion of 'force' immediately provides, for example, a complete description of gravity. We live in an expanding universe and so the space in which our planet and us reside is expanding. But the dimensional relationship we have with our planet doesn't change because matter doesn't expand along with the space it occupies. However, as there is a 'system-state change' [that we have gone, from one second to the next, from occupying a different fraction of space] so we experience that change of state as 'the force of gravity'. If you can drop the notion of 'force' and instead embrace my idea that force is fully explicable simply by looking at the of change of energy with respect to distance (in gravity's case; with respect to spatial expansion) so the origin of inertia and gravity becomes self-evident.

Just consider where you might disagree with me in the following sequence of axiomatic/ logical statements, and if you don't [and remain oper-minded] then you should get to the end of this and say "oh! I see...";
1) force is the derivative of the amount of energy converted with respect to distance
2) a change of state requires a change of energy
3) an expanding universe means that from one moment to the next, the universe has changed its state (else there wouldn't have been 'expansion'). So, by (2), there has been a change of energy in the unverse from one moment to the next
4) the change of energy experienced by the universe, as refered to in (3), is measured as a change of dimension and as there is a change of energy with respect to distance, so, according to (1), there must be some 'force' manifest somewhere.....

what do you think that force is... if it ain't gravity?....

chrismb
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Post by chrismb »

I should add, to reply to my own post, that this M-E mularky is of interest to me because it is [perhaps unwittingly] attempting to use a change-of-state (electrical) with a dimensional change (oscillatory). As I have shown above, there should be some 'forces' manifest here. Unfortunately, the system appears to return back to the same state each cycle, and as a corollary of the above is that force is the derivative of system-state change with respect to displacement, even if there is a displacement there is no state-change obvious here.

I would expect an out-of-phase force response to the electrical cycle, which may be useful in some scenarios but not, I think, in propulsion.

I would like to see someone analyse these systems, according to the above intalicised axiom.

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