GIThruster wrote:
Reversing the thrust through phase is an important control, but so is the physical reorientation of the thruster on the balance arm. The ARC Lite was designed specifically so that any test items mounted can not only have their orientation switched left or right, but also up and down.
There is some very small horizontal to vertical coupling in the ARC Lite design, but it is so small it cannot be measured. When you have what appears a thrust signature and then rotate the test item so the supposed thrust is vertical (up or down makes no difference) any legitimate thrust signal should go to zero. This is just what happens. This protocol makes the test article itself a perfect "dummy load" to test for all sorts of spurious signals. If a signal were being generated through any sort of coupling, one would expect it to continue when the thruster is in a vertical position.
Just explaining one of the many protocols Jim uses because mischaracterizing him as a "kook" is really a fool's errand participated in only by those who are ignorant.
Folks:
Just to let everyone on this list know the latest, Dr. Woodward is now claiming that he and his associate, a Dr. Heidi Fearn at CSUF, have performed an updated analysis of the M-E derivation for the upcomming JPC conference that has a much better handle on the M-E bulk acceleration issue per his following comments posted to his e-mail distribution over this last weekend.
"There is a clean signal (SNR >= 10) in the 2 to 3 uN range. And in the data with the frequency sweeps, there's a power spike at the beginning of the sweep that really heats the device up -- but off resonance, so there is no prompt thrust response (as one would expect were the signal a thermal effect). It's the real deal folks.
Why would I say that it's the real deal when this signal is orders of magnitude smaller than the predictions suggest it should be? Because we've found these past two weeks that those predictions are wrong. Heidi and I have been working now for a while on the JPC paper that will go with the presentation I'll do at that conference in about a month. While working on the theory section of that paper, I decided to include a section on explicit acceleration dependence of Mach effects. While writing that out, I decided to derive the prediction based on full acceleration dependence -- rather than doing the prediction the way it's been done for years. It turns out that this calculation is not difficult at all. A bit tedious for an old duffer like me; but not difficult.
SI units are really scary. Completely unintuitive for me. So catching some arithmetic errors took longer than it should have. But the end result is a prediction of 10 uN for the present system -- whereas observation is ~ 3 uN. And that with the assumption that the electrostrictive constant is the same as the piezoelectric constant. It is surely smaller. But without allowance for mechanical resonance amplification -- which is surely present. These two considerations will be largely offsetting I expect. And the resulting prediction will likely be in the uN range."
To clarify, the electrostrictive coefficient for the PZT ceramic used in Woodward's shuttler experiments is about three orders of magnitude down from the d33 piezoelectric coefficient of PZT, so his above conclusions hold up in my eyes. So what Jim needs to do next IMO is to prove to the world of physics that the Wheeler/Feynman radiation reaction force IS the mechanism that really conveys gravitational forces around the cosmos and he will have completed his M-E mission.
Best,
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