Whoa! New type of space drive discovered

[Ruptga]

:thumbsup::beer;

 

[Paratus]

Photons can spontaneously transform into particle-anti-particle pairs. This is one possible explanation for why neutrinos from a supernova arrived before the light did.

If the photons in the burst of light transformed into particle pairs and then annihilated each other back into photons, those particles would have been much more massive than neutrinos which have almost no mass. Therefore they would have been affected more by gravitational fields.

So maybe what the microwave field is accelerating isn't virtual particle pairs but particles that temporarily pop into existence from the photons in the microwave radiation itself.

I actually heard it was because neutrinos generally pass through everything and light is actually caught and reradiated so until the light escapes the surface of the star it's actually slower than the neutrino's.

One other thought

If this does interact with virtual particles could you pump say an E=mc^2 amount of energy into the quantum vacuum and create a real particle from scratch similarly to how a black holes does through Hawking radiation?

 

[Phoenix86]

It's more that it should work.

 

[Daedalus685]

I actually heard it was because neutrinos generally pass through everything and light is actually caught and reradiated so until the light escapes the surface of the star it's actually slower than the neutrino's.

One other thought

If this does interact with virtual particles could you pump say an E=mc^2 amount of energy into the quantum vacuum and create a real particle from scratch similarly to how a black holes does through Hawking radiation?

You are correct about the neutrinos. The lag is expected due to how we expect the collapse to occur. Photons interact far more on the way out, thus escape the star only after the rebounding shock wave reaches the surface.

That article is talking about a second neutron pulse that occurred even before that though. Which is generally, though not for sure, attributed to an unrelated coincidence.

This stuff is so entertaining! As to the creation of real particles, we do it all the time with gamma radiation! Just that the antimatter part of the pair annihilates with either the pair produced electron, or another one that is lying around (well, it doesn't have to be an electron positron pair even). Conservation being what it is, you can't create something without its antimatter pair as far as I know. You'd need the black hole to eat up the one you don't want You'd also need matter for the photon to interact with though... this kind of thing doesn't happen in a straight vacuum. But

 

[Charmonium]

I actually heard it was because neutrinos generally pass through everything and light is actually caught and reradiated so until the light escapes the surface of the star it's actually slower than the neutrino's.

The amount of light from a supernova does grow and then subside with different types of novae having different curves. But the initial light should arrive at the same time as neutrinos if Einstein's equivalence principle is correct.

According to the article, many scientists believe that the first batch of neutrinos they saw wasn't really from the supernova, even though this fits well with how we know them to evolve. However that seems statistically unlikely. The problem seems to be that the 1987 SN was unique in terms of being close enough to make these measurements. It's unlikely we'll see another close enough anytime soon. But with all of the new neutrino experiments starting to take data around the world, who knows what we might find.

If this does interact with virtual particles could you pump say an E=mc^2 amount of energy into the quantum vacuum and create a real particle from scratch similarly to how a black holes does through Hawking radiation?

Personally, I've never really understood Hawking radiation. You would think that only anti-matter particle pairs would cause a black hole to evaporate, but it doesn't seem to work that way as best as I can tell.

I think that we probably create matter from energy all of the time in particle accelerators. Some of the really massive particles created, like the Higgs, I don't think come just from recombination of quarks and gluons. But in terms of creating matter from pure energy, IDK. You would think that's probably possible but I honestly have no idea.

 

[Ichinisan]

NASA Eagleworks Has Tested an Upgraded EM Drive

 

[Mojoed]

NASA Eagleworks Has Tested an Upgraded EM Drive

Thanks for the update. This has been extremely interesting to follow for awhile now.

The comments at the bottom of your link offer some high-IQ insight.

 

[disappoint]

No. I'm paraphrasing here, but you have have called people "stupid" on multiple occasions after being told that one of your statements was incomprehensible. I don't want to go back and find examples right now.

I didn't say you were stupid. I said you have difficulty conveying your thoughts. That much is very clear to those of us that are familiar with your posting history.

If I was in your position, I'd want to recognize the problem and try my best to make comprehensible posts. At the very least, clarify what you meant with the post in question. Attacking people is not the proper response.

Fine. That may occur from time to time but it is not my general want to respond that everyone who disagrees with me is dumb.

Sometimes your emotions get the best of you. It happens to most humans from time to time. Some learn to control themselves. I think that's called growing wiser. May we all grow wiser from social interaction. Even if it's among some misfits in a forum.

As for the science, keep calm and carry on. Just don't expect me to believe in anything without evidence. Why would anyone want to do a silly thing like that?

 

[Paratus]

NASA Eagleworks Has Tested an Upgraded EM Drive

Thanks for the update. This has been extremely interesting to follow for awhile now.

The comments at the bottom of your link offer some high-IQ insight.

Here's the post by Paul that has some more information:

All:

I wish I could show you all the pictures I've taken on how we saluted and mitigated the issues raised by our EW Lab's Blue-Ribbon PhD panel and now Potomac-Neuron's paper, on the possible Lorentz force interactions. That being the Lorentz Interactions with the dc currents on the EW torque pendulum (TP) with the stray magnetic fields from the torque pendulum's first generation open-face magnetic damper and the Earth's geomagnetic field, but I can't due to the restrictive NASA press release rules now applied to the EW Lab.

However since I still can't show you this supporting data until the EW Lab gets our next peer-reviewed lab paper published, I will tell you that we first built and installed a 2nd generation, closed face magnetic damper that reduced the stray magnetic fields in the vacuum chamber by at least an order of magnitude and any Lorentz force interactions it could produce. I also changed up the torque pendulum's grounding wire scheme and single point ground location to minimize ground loop current interactions with the remaining stray magnetic fields and unbalanced dc currents from the RF amplifier when its turned on. This reduced the Lorentz force interaction to less than 2 micro-Newton (uN) for the dummy load test. Finally we rebuilt the copper frustum test article so that it is now fully integrated with the RF VCO, PLL, 100W RF amp, dual directional coupler, 3-stub tuner and connecting coax cables, then mounted this integrated test article at the opposite end of the torque pendulum, as far away as possible from the 2nd generation magnetic damper where only the required counterbalance weights now reside. Current null testing with both the 50 ohm dummy load and with the integrated test article rotated 90 degrees with respect to the TP sensitive axis now show less than one uN of Lorentz forces on the TP due to dc magnetic interactions with the local environment even when drawing the maximum RF amp dc current of 12 amps.

Given all of the above TP wiring and test article modifications with respect to our 2014 AIAA/JPC paper design baseline needed to address these Lorentz force magnetic interaction issues, we are still seeing over 100uN of force with 80W of RF power going into the frustum running in the TM212 resonant mode, now in both directions, dependent on the direction of the mounted integrated test article on the TP. However these new plus and minus thrust signatures are still contaminated by thermally induced TP center of gravity (cg) zero-thrust baseline shifts brought on by the expansion of the copper frustum and aluminum RF amp and its heat sink when heated by the RF, even though these copper and aluminum cg shifts are now fighting each other. (Sadly these TP cg baseline shifts are ~3X larger in-vacuum than in-air due to the better insulating qualities of the vacuum, so the in-vacuum thrust runs look very thermally contaminated whereas the in-air run look very impulsive.) So we have now developed an analytical tool to help separate the EM-Drive thrust pulse waveform contributions from the thermal expansion cg induced baseline shifts of the TP. Not being satisfied with just this analytical impulsive vs thermal signal separation approach, we are now working on a new integrated test article subsystem mounting arrangement with a new phase-change thermal management subsystem that should mitigate this thermally induced TP cg baseline shift problem once and for-all.

And yet the anomalous thrust signals remain...

Best, Paul March

TL: DR

• A peer review paper is in work
• Nasa Eagleworks has been eliminating sources of error defined by panel of physicists
• Reduced Lorentz force, ground loops, improved design of thruster for testing
• tested in vacuum @80W got 100uN thrust reversible.
• Found new thermal issues due to vacuum testing - working on mitigating.

 

[Charmonium]

Is it just me or is it a little strange that they didn't anticipate the 'greater insulating properties of a vacuum?' It's things like that that make me question the overall competence of the people doing the testing.

Personally, I don't think it's at all strange that such a drive could work. Quantum mechanics was formulated over a hundred years ago and we still don't really understand it. So the idea that you could use virtual particles for thrust doesn't seem odd. But if you don't or can't anticipate things that really should be obvious from the beginning, you have to start to wonder if this isn't another faster-than-light neutrino situation.

 

[Paratus]

Is it just me or is it a little strange that they didn't anticipate the 'greater insulating properties of a vacuum?' It's things like that that make me question the overall competence of the people doing the testing.

Personally, I don't think it's at all strange that such a drive could work. Quantum mechanics was formulated over a hundred years ago and we still don't really understand it. So the idea that you could use virtual particles for thrust doesn't seem odd. But if you don't or can't anticipate things that really should be obvious from the beginning, you have to start to wonder if this isn't another faster-than-light neutrino situation.

I'd cut them some slack. This is a small lab being run on nickel in the slot machine money.

Plus you'd be amazed at the things that get missed. Take the flexible trusses that support the ISS solar arrays. The longerons that run the length of the mast are canted 10 degrees to prevent thermal stresses from being induced by the front longeron shadowing the back. This is good.

What they forgot was when the array is off pointed the array itself can shadow one of the longerons and induce the same thermal stress due to the design. So we spend a lot of time and effort doing analysis to make sure that doesn't happen every time the arrays have to stop tracking the sun.

 

[Charmonium]

Oh, OK. From the title of the group it sounds like they would be an official NASA project. But I guess even if that's true, these days that doesn't really count for much in terms of funding. Shame since this really could be revolutionary.

 

[Paratus]

Oh, OK. From the title of the group it sounds like they would be an official NASA project. But I guess even if that's true, these days that doesn't really count for much in terms of funding. Shame since this really could be revolutionary.

Found a couple of other interesting quotes from Paul March in that thread:

We looked at using a 3U CubeSat as a means of validating the EmDrive physics, but the cost just for the required parts to build it is still well beyond our current means, even considering that the EW Lab could get a semi-free ride into orbit on one of the ISS resupply runs. (The ISS can and does launch 3U CubeSats from the ISS Japanese lab module.) Since you are considering selling CubeSats commercially, have you priced out how much a 3U at 3kg, 6U at 6kg and 12U at 12kg CubeSat would cost to have it put into orbit even using secondary payload status on flights of opportunity?

Notsosureofit:

The integrated copper frustum test article's -3dB loaded Q-factor for the 80W / ~100uN test runs or 1.25 uN/W was 7,100. That is 1.25 uN/W / 3.33 nano-Newton (nN) / Watt = ~375.4 times as much thrust as a 100% efficient E&M rocket can produce.

Meberbs:

"Some people on this thread have been having trouble accepting that the emDrive requires new physics to explain its thrust if it is not experimental error."

I concur with your position that Maxwell's Classical E&M can NOT explain the frustum test results we continue to see, because when you sum up ALL of the Maxwell pressure stress tensors in the frustum due to all the E&M fields bouncing around inside the cavity and their interactions with any interior components like the PE discs and the active copper layer in the frustum's end and side walls, the NET force answer has to be ZERO by definition. In other words classical E&M cannot provide an explanation for conservation of momentum for a closed E&M system that produces a net thrust.

Flux Capacitor:

I have tried to stay neutral in my support of either Woodward's M-E or White's Quantum Vacuum (QV) conjectures in regards to how CoM is being saluted in these frustum space drives. I will point out to you though about something you said that the virtual particles not being able to convey momentum, could be in error. It's true that a single charged virtual particle, most likely an electron or positron due to their low mass, only have a very, very limited lifetime in our universe. However IF they collide and annihilate with a different virtual charged particle than they were created with, then any E&M field induced accelerations while they ARE in this universe should be carried forward as newly added momentum in the created gamma photon that continues on the creation / annihilation process. If repeated a sufficient number of times, a momentum wake could be established in the QV, just like the momentum wake created in water by a propeller. One form of this QVF momentum transfer mechanism is discussed in a Rice University paper by Dr. Paul M. Stevenson, (The Hydrodynamics of the Vacuum), that I pointed to before, see attached. One could also view this QV momentum transfer mechanism as a higher dimensional interaction such as discussed in Dr. White's Physics Essays paper found here:

http://physicsessays.org/browse-jou...on-characteristics-of-the-quantum-vacuum.html

Or the EW group paper found here:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20150006842.pdf

However all these conjectures require the QV to be mutable and degradable and/or we live in a 5, 6 or even more dimensional universe, which includes Woodward's reliance on Wheeler/Feynman radiations reaction forces, so your mileage may vary...

Best, Paul March

I'm not going to pretend to understand most of the physics discussed.

 

[Charmonium]

Well, the Casimir effect could imply that the vacuum is mutable. I think there was an idea for a drive that uses that effect to create negative energy but it involves moving the plates closer together and then back very, very quickly - at least if I remember correctly.

 

[Paratus]

Well, the Casimir effect could imply that the vacuum is mutable. I think there was an idea for a drive that uses that effect to create negative energy but it involves moving the plates closer together and then back very, very quickly - at least if I remember correctly.

I'm no physicist, but I wondered whether casmir plates could be used to detect changes in the quantum vacuum from the thruster. Since they measure pressure would the pressure profile change if placed down stream of an me thrusters. Assuming that the EM thruster works by pushing against the quantum vacuum.

Might be a good way to test that hypothesis.

 

[Charmonium]

IIRC, the reason there is pressure on the outside of the plates is that the wavelength of some particles won't fit in the tiny gap. So if you placed the gap perpendicular to the presumed particle/energy flow of the engine, you should be able to detect changes in the pressure and compare that to the pressures in a normal plate setup.

Except virtual particles only last for such a short period, you'd probably be measuring ancillary effects rather than directly measuring the output of the em drive.

 

[Paratus]

IIRC, the reason there is pressure on the outside of the plates is that the wavelength of some particles won't fit in the tiny gap. So if you placed the gap perpendicular to the presumed particle/energy flow of the engine, you should be able to detect changes in the pressure and compare that to the pressures in a normal plate setup.

Except virtual particles only last for such a short period, you'd probably be measuring ancillary effects rather than directly measuring the output of the em drive.

Seems like there could be a couple of PH.D. thesis in there.

 

[Paratus]

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/emdrive-nasa-eagleworks-confirms-paper-controversial-space-propulsion-under-peer-review-1551210

Well work is apparently ongoing and they have a paper undergoing peer-review. Should be interesting to see what they have found using more sensitive tests.

 

[Ichinisan]

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/emdrive-nasa-eagleworks-confirms-paper-controversial-space-propulsion-under-peer-review-1551210

Well work is apparently ongoing and they have a paper undergoing peer-review. Should be interesting to see what they have found using more sensitive tests.

Still very curious!

 

[Raduque]

"Test results indicate that the RF resonant cavity thruster design, which is unique as an electric propulsion device, is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma."

That is some Wesley Cursher-level technobabble.

I'm highly excited by the prospects of this.

 

[Fritzo]

"Test results indicate that the RF resonant cavity thruster design, which is unique as an electric propulsion device, is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma."

That is some Wesley Cursher-level technobabble.

I'm highly excited by the prospects of this.

It's saying the energy is hitting particles that are popping in and out of existence, which is in turn causing thrust.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Bad ass

 

[Jaskalas]

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/emdrive-na...al-space-propulsion-under-peer-review-1551210

Well work is apparently ongoing and they have a paper undergoing peer-review. Should be interesting to see what they have found using more sensitive tests.

I continue to remain skeptical that it can function in space.
Even if every test on Earth checks out.

 

[flexy]

VERY excited about this, I hope it really doesn't turn out being experimental errors. Think about the possibilities, hover cars, hover boards etc

From what I read tho, the peer reviewed paper, as of now, has little chances to pass.

By the way, anyone else CRINGED as soon as that Italian's name popped up?
(Aware tho that this is different than the e-cat)

 

[SMOGZINN]

VERY excited about this, I hope it really doesn't turn out being experimental errors. Think about the possibilities, hover cars, hover boards etc

From what I read tho, the peer reviewed paper, as of now, has little chances to pass.

By the way, anyone else CRINGED as soon as that Italian's name popped up?
(Aware tho that this is different than the e-cat)

I don't think that even if this turns out to work as described it will lead to anything like hover cars. We are talking about it generating considerably less push than a slight breeze. Sure, if it works as described it will scale up, but it is already pretty big to create that little bit of force, to move anything here on Earth it would have to be huge, like building sized, but in space where there is virtually no resistance even a very a little constant pressure can accomplish a whole lot.