EM Drive

[JoeP]

... Let people follow there our beliefs and follow what they understand is truth without being judgmental.

I just want to poke my head in here and comment on this remark a little. The only problem with this is that I'd like to think there is an objective reality out there. As GI pointed out, we need to build on things we already understand as being true, or at least, close enough to the reality that we can extend on top of these discoveries. "Being judgmental," is not automatically bad. No, having good judgement is what weeds out the crap and keeps science on the level.

[birchoff]

@GiThruster

If one were to assume that the QV is mutable and destructable under some condition. Are you saying there is no way we could ever hope to maintain CoE & CoM? I am inclined to believe that our limited experience with reality would also mean we really have no way of knowing at this point in time if there is some compensating mechanism in nature that occurs when one places the QV under a condition sufficient to mutate and or destroy its contents.

So from my perspective I see no reason for Dr. White's conjecture to be dismissed completely when he seems to have a working experiment. Now we can call the experimental results into doubt. In reality if White is wrong, it is the reluctance of the scientific community to put some resources together and attempt a replication which is really what is enabling his assumed delusion. But I suspect time will tell if he is indeed wrong or is actually on to something because he will either continue to make genuine progress or someone will call him on his lack of progress and hopefully attempt a proper replication and post the results.

[birchoff]

... Let people follow there our beliefs and follow what they understand is truth without being judgmental.

I just want to poke my head in here and comment on this remark a little. The only problem with this is that I'd like to think there is an objective reality out there. As GI pointed out, we need to build on things we already understand as being true, or at least, close enough to the reality that we can extend on top of these discoveries. "Being judgmental," is not automatically bad. No, having good judgement is what weeds out the crap and keeps science on the level.

I agree that we need to continue to build on things we already understand as being true. However, we also need not be afraid of attempting to explore things that run contrary to what we believe is true. Especially if we have an experimental evidence that could be pointing to something contrary to our beliefs.

Now I get that it would be useful and efficient to be able to dismiss things that do not fall in line with our current understanding of the universe but until we can say with a straight face that humanity has experienced every situation that will ever exist in our universe. Then we must live with this suboptimal process.

[ladajo]

Science is more about showing where the truth isn't than where it is.

[GIThruster]

Your (GIThruster) statements about what you state is pseudo science are keeping the top minds in physics up at nights.

I'm sorry but that's just not true. There are no top minds in physics that think virtual particles have inertial mass but no gravitational mass, and this is the whole basis for Dr. White's QVF conjecture. There are not only exactly NO reasons to believe this, there are many reasons to believe this is not so, especially including Einstein's Equivalence Principle, General Relativity and the Principle of Conservation, all of which are violated by Dr. White's conjecture. This science is indeed settled, even to the point that CalTech's Sean Carroll has called this stuff "bullshit" publicly. So it's not as if I am dabbling in unknown territory.

You are so confident of your position but physics' top men are not even sure what is real.

Well that is one of the consequences of QM. There is more than one interpretation. There have always been and perhaps will always be, some people who doubt the reality of reality, but I would note to you again, if the modern interpretation of QM that leads to an unreal reality were true, there would be no point in doing science of any kind. I stand with the realists, the Copenhagen interpretation notwithstanding.

Let people follow there our beliefs and follow what they understand is truth without being judgmental.

People are surely free to do what they think is right, but don't ask me to suspend judgement and do science at the same time. Sometimes you need to take a stand, and I stand with Einstein. BTW, so do Woodward, Cramer and Kastner. I think I'm in good company.

[Axil]

Your (GIThruster) statements about what you state is pseudo science are keeping the top minds in physics up at nights.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/9401081.pdf

Black Hole Evaporation and Quantum Gravity

the Hawking particles emitted by the black hole begin their
lives as virtual particles produced by pair creation out of the vacuum near the horizon.
Since this pair production takes place after the black hole has already been formed and
settled into a “steady state”, it appears that the out-going radiation never had a chance
to interact with the in-falling matter. In other words, the test-wave used in Hawking’s
derivation nor the virtual particles near the horizon are physically detectable, and should
according to this argument have no measurable effects on the back ground geometry or
anything else

[Axil]

You are so confident of your position but physics' top men are not even sure what is real.

This confusion is derived from the contradictions between General Relativity and quantum mechanics, not from the various versions of quantum mechanics.

SEE

http://theory.caltech.edu/people/jhs/st ... tr115.html

The Final Contradiction

[Carl White]

Could someone explain to me how pushing against the virtual particles of the quantum vacuum is supposed to work, please?

If an object is moving, does it carry the QV with it? I.e. do the virtual particles supposedly popping in and out of existence match its velocity?

If they do, why would they? If they don't, doesn't that give the universe a sort of absolute frame of reference and therefore violate relativity?

[tokamac]

Until just recently, it was almost universally believed that any information passing into a black hole was lost forever, and thus not conserved.

A very recent article (April 2, 2015) supporting the idea that information may not be lost once it enters a black hole: Black holes don't erase information, scientists say.
The link to the published paper in Physical Review Letters is at the end of the article. Since it's behind a pay wall, here is the PDF on ArXiv.

[tokamac]

Could someone explain to me how pushing against the virtual particles of the quantum vacuum is supposed to work, please?

If an object is moving, does it carry the QV with it? I.e. do the virtual particles supposedly popping in and out of existence match its velocity?

If they do, why would they? If they don't, doesn't that give the universe a sort of absolute frame of reference and therefore violate relativity?

I don't understand neither how the pair production of virtual particles in quantum vacuum fluctuations (and the associated concept of "quantum foam" which would be the "fabric of the universe") is compatible with the theoretical absence of an absolute frame of reference in general relativity. In my mind a mobile object would have a measurable speed relatively to those virtual particles continuously popping-in and out of the vacuum.

[GIThruster]

I don't understand neither how the pair production of virtual particles in quantum vacuum fluctuations (and the associated concept of "quantum foam" which would be the "fabric of the universe") is compatible with the theoretical absence of an absolute frame of reference in general relativity. In my mind a mobile object would have a measurable speed relatively to those virtual particles continuously popping-in and out of the vacuum.

I don't understand the details either, but I would just note that the answer appears to reside in the lack of existence in virtual particles. According to the math they are generated by a statistical probability, and the probability goes down as the frequency (and hence energy) and duration increases. The longer they appear (and we can't say "exist" because virtual particles do not by definition "exist", they merely have being) the less probability they have to come into being in the first place. The uncertainty principle is at the heart of this dynamic, and when you simultaneously try to get location, energy and duration, you get nothing--UNLESS--you dump huge energy into them and they are no longer virtual but rather then, real. There does seem to be some evidence that one can dump energy into them and make them real, but then you no longer have a practical propulsion system since you are using such terrible amounts of energy to get your free ride propellant. It's no longer a free ride, when you're basically creating real particles.

Even though this is all very complex and beyond me, it is still true to say that the issue in simplest form is, that if EEP is true, then virtual particles cannot have inertia mass. If they had gravitational mass, they would collapse the universe. If they have no gravitational mass and EEP and GR are correct, then they must have no inertial mass. If they have no inertial mass, they cannot be used as propellant.

And there are other arguments against but that one is enough for me.

[Axil]

http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-a ... -are-they/

virtual-particles-what-are-they

Anybody who wants to understand the subject matter on this thread should look at this blog.

[GIThruster]

I've read this before and its very good. Note that what this guy is saying is the correct way to view "virtual particles" completely negates the possibility that they have any sort of mass, and he is pointing out the mistake people make as regards these particles, when he writes:

"The Feynman diagram is actually a calculational tool, not a picture of the physical phenomenon; if you want to calculate how big this effect is, you take that diagram , translate it into a mathematical expression according to Feynman’s rules, set to work for a little while with some paper and pen, and soon obtain the answer."

It is precisely this mistake that people, yes even physicists like Dr. White; make. Virtual particles are not particles at all, and they are certainly not able to mediate momentum transfer, and thus be used as propellant. Even Feynman who created the diagram, would not agree that virtual particles should be thought of as able to mediate momentum transfer. That is not what the diagram is teaching and in fact, this is a mistaken way to view the diagram.

[Axil]

Except for the proton, all particles that have so far been discovered have a finite lifespan. The energy level of the particle increases that lifespan. When EMF dumps enough energy into the vacuum, the vacuum turns that energy into mass of a particle via the Higgs field. That new particle is just as real as any other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production

Matter will be created from light within a year, claim scientists
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014 ... -positrons


Because of the uncertainty principal, even a small EMF power source can produce some small number of real particles.

[qraal]

Just to clarify something, which illustrates how terminology misleads, the quantum information that black holes may or may not erase is quite different to the information which DNA stores and which is generated via the process of natural selection acting on 'random' variations in a DNA sequence, just as the information stored over the course of a lifetime in a human brain is distinct and different to the information stored in that DNA. Quantum information, which is the entanglements and other quantum correlations of the particles composing a system, is assumed to evolve unitarily (i.e. total probability of all possible states in the evolution of the system add up to 1.) Such information would be lost if black holes decayed and in doing so reduced it all to a purely thermal distribution i.e. 'pure noise'. Solutions to the fate of that kind of information either attempt to demonstrate that black hole emissions aren't purely thermal and actually encode the states of the stuff within, or its 'loss' into the black hole is irrelevant to everything that happens this side of the event horizon - the 'firewall solution' being of the latter variety.

Genetic information goes from being a string of DNA to being a string of amino acids in a protein, and does so millions of millions of times during the lifetime of an organism. Presently we can only assume that the quantum systems that are DNA molecules, ribosomes, ATP, amino acids and proteins evolve unitarily in this process, but the system that all that chemistry represents is most certainly not isolated from the wider environment and all the quantum entanglements are quickly lost via decoherence through contact with the thermal bath that is the wider environment. DNA-to-protein information flow is a tiny, tiny fraction of the total information flow happening in the wider systems that are our cells, all powered by making ADP out of ATP. The information flow via mutations is an even tinier fraction. To speak of quantum information conservation in this context is to confuse the processes of an isolated system (a collapsed star behind an event horizon) with an open system (metabolising cells) and is impossible to speak about meaningfully due to the lack of isolation. More so, because they're two different kinds of "information", at least as presently understood. Perhaps, eventually, we'll be able to talk about all information in quantum terms, but that is a long way off.