cuddihy wrote:Here's some other ("wackier") concepts that Woodward relies pretty heavily on:
-gravitational attraction as the origin of inertia
-time-travelling reaction forces would cause inertial effects to behave "instantaneously"
-4-d ripples in space-time shielding a "mass fluctuating" source from gravitational attractions to change observed inertia
What these three concepts have in common is that they are all "wacky." (actually, the first two are a starting assumption and a leading question. The third is a theoretical result)
I think what you're saying above is true, but I'm not sure it amounts to "wacky". Einstein drew heavily from Mach's Principle and there are lots of reasons to suspect it is true. Woodward would argue that the matter is settled and it is true, based upon modern advances in physics. He's the gravity physics historian however, not me, and I can't make that argument. He made it himself however on the extended email list just a couple months or so ago, so I can say that this is indeed his position.
Time traveling waves aren't all that wacky either. There'a lots of empirical evidence for "time reversed effects" and if you search those terms, you'll find some cool papers. Additionally, Cramer's transactional theory that explains these time traveling waves should be tested by experiment sometime very soon. I know he's working on this.
4D ripples. . .hmm. I'm not sure how much of what you're objecting to is really Woodward's theory, and how much is Paul's attempt to explain Woodward's theory. I should remind that Woodward's theory is a pure field theory, just like GR, and does not need gravity waves nor particles, and I'm not sure "shielding" is necessarily the right term to use either. If however what you're saying is that you think mass fluctuations are wacky, well. . .I guess you could say that.
But hey. . .the notions that the Earth was round and traveling around the sun was pretty "wacky" too.
On conservation: I think the reason this issue comes up as often as it does is that all M-E thrusters hold out the possibility to harvest gravinertial energy or momentum. Because of this, they resemble so many "free energy" toys in the past. If one can tap into negative mass with negative inertia, exotic matter that self accelerates, then yeah. . .you're going to see what appears under other conditions to be a violation of conservation. However, once you look at what you're looking at--that items with negative inertia do self-accelerate, your conservation issues go away because you understand what it is that led you astray.
