Reactionless Space Drives Taken Seriously 18
bjn writes "The Observer ran an article on Sunday about reactionless space drives running on zero-point energy. The article was a bit light, but it seems that the concept is now being taken seriously enough that they are organising international conferences." Well, anyone can call a conference. This seems like some very long-range research going on - interesting, but don't expect anything tangible for quite some time.
In the article... (Score:1)
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
very long term? can you read, michael? (Score:2)
Why long term? (Score:2)
Because Puthoff and company are more than likely pseudoscientists and the technology they're so actively pimping is based on unrealisticly optomistic views of how much energy is available.
See this Scientific American article [sciam.com], from the December '97 issue.
Of course, I'd be very happy if I were wrong about this.... ;)
-- WhiskeyJack
Oh, yeah, that's right.... (Score:2)
Re:very long term? can you read, michael? (Score:3)
I hate to sound like a stuffy academic, but I have a PhD in physics, and the whole thing sounds goofy to me. I'm not an expert on this kind of zero-point-energy-of-empty-space stuff, but it seems to me that to release the zero-point energy of empty space, you have to leave that space in a lower energy state after you're done. We don't know if such a lower-energy state even exists.
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Re:very long term? can you read, michael? (Score:3)
it seems to me that to release the zero-point energy of empty space, you have to leave that space in a lower energy state after you're done.
Indeed it would seem that way to me too, if you were truly "extracting" the zero point energy from the vacuum.
We don't know if such a lower-energy state even exists.
And we might hope that such a state doesn't, because it would mean that the current vacuum state is a "false vacuum" meaning that it is unstable and will eventually decay into the true vacuum....and in the true vacuum, physics as we know it may not hold, portending the end of a universe capable of sustaining life as we know it!
I hate to sound like a stuffy academic, but I have a PhD in physics, and the whole thing sounds goofy to me.
Sounds goofy to me too, and I haven't finished the PhD yet....but then again, most of the stuff I do for my research sounds pretty goofy to me as well :-)
We broke the Second Law (Score:2)
Seems to me (Score:1)
Re:very long term? can you read, michael? (Score:1)
You don't actually have to have a lower energy state, i think. You could have a fluctuating energy state, and an asymmetric process. (think hysteresis) I don't know what that could be, though, or if in the process it violates some other law.
Black holes *appear* (i'm sure they don't really) to violate the conservation of energy when two virtual particles are created near the event horizon, and one gets sucked in but the other doesn't, rendering them real particles forevermore. Then again, there are competing models that can explain gravity nicely, too, without blackholes, but blackholes are in vogue so everybody insists they're real.
Then again, maybe i'm just confused. ;)
Re:very long term? can you read, michael? (Score:1)
The energy in the now real particle flying away is taken from the black hole's mass. That's the process that causes black holes to lose mass and eventually disappear.
Another Dream to be Stolen and Hidden (Score:1)
To the Moon!
http://www.beefjerky.com
Terminology (Score:2)
Of course, there are some theories that say our entire universe is a quantum fluctuation that just got a wee bit out of hand...
Re:Seems to me (Score:1)
For the most part, I agree with you on the (on topic) subject. However, I have to point out that flying cars actually exist [moller.com], despite Capt Sisko's IBM commercial.
problem (Score:1)
Re:Terminology (Score:1)
Don't feel bad. "Chaos [dictionary.com]" used to mean "A condition or place of great disorder or confusion. or A disorderly mass; a jumble: The desk was a chaos of papers and unopened letters. or The disordered state of unformed matter and infinite space supposed in some cosmogonic views to have existed before the ordered universe.
But now "Chaos Theory" has brought us a whole new definition: "A property of some non-linear dynamic systems which exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions. This means that there are initial states which evolve within some finite time to states whose separation in one or more dimensions of state space depends, in an average sense, exponentially on their initial separation. Such systems may still be completely deterministic in that any future state of the system depends only on the initial conditions and the equations describing the change of the system with time. It may, however, require arbitrarily high precision to actually calculate a future state to within some finite precision."
("On defining chaos", R. Glynn Holt rgholt@voyager.jpl.nasa.gov and D. Lynn Holt lholt@seraph1.sewanee.edu.)
So don't feel bad about something like "zero-points" being redefined. Unfortunately, life does not generate compiler errors and halt nearly often enough; Usually you get a malformed birth, instead.
Re:Another Dream to be Stolen and Hidden (Score:1)
Aww, it's a conspiracy again!
But would you really think that anyone could hold something like that back? Any government and their military would have a really big interest in free energy anywhere. Energy companies would just be shoved aside.
However it is not a technology. It's a bunch of wild theories that don't look like they'd play well with the most basic laws of nature (creating energy out of nothing).
Voodoo science (Score:2)
I'm almost done reading Park's excellent new book Voodoo Science. I've learned a lot from it about the psychology of pseudoscience, and I've also learned that no branch of the U.S. federal government is really free of it. I'd assumed NASA was run by people with good scientific training, so if they were studying a certain topic, it must not be 100% nonsense. Not true, as it turns out. In the book, Park documents how NASA panders to the politicians by betraying science. (It's also nice to see a cogent and knowledgeable presentation of the case against human space flight and the ISS.)
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conservation of momentum (Score:1)
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