No, NASA Did Not Accidentally Invent Warp Drive 416
StartsWithABang writes: As Slashdot has previously reported, NASA Spaceflight has claimed to have vetted the EM Drive in a vacuum, and found there is still an anomalous thrust/acceleration on the order of 50 microNewtons for the device. While some are claiming this means things like warp drive and 70-day-trips-to-Mars are right on the horizon, it's important to view this from a scientist's point of view. Here's what it will take to turn this from a speculative claim into a robust one.
intentional (Score:5, Funny)
hah HAH! they INTENTIONALLY invented warp drive!!! now make it so!
Re: (Score:3)
Well...then what did they accidentally invent?!
Re:intentional (Score:5, Funny)
Dunno, but possibly huge like dark matter interaction.
It's like with radioactive elements a hundred years ago. They didn't know what the stuff could actually do, so they painted it on clock faces to make them visible in the dark.
Here they could have the key to warping space/time, and the first use is to putter along in orbit cheaply.
Re:intentional (Score:5, Funny)
Here they could have the key to warping space/time, and the first use is to putter along in orbit cheaply.
You know someone is a small scale thinker, when they miss the bus, and wish they had a Star Trek transporter device, so they could beam themselves to the next bus stop.
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Here they could have the key to warping space/time, and the first use is to putter along in orbit cheaply.
You know someone is a small scale thinker, when they miss the bus, and wish they had a Star Trek transporter device, so they could beam themselves to the next bus stop.
I don't remember the author, but I read a short story long ago about a man who invented time travel and only used it once a week to go back several decades and buy pork chops because they were really cheap.
Re:intentional (Score:4, Insightful)
Must have been really annoying making sure you still had money identical to what was used several decades ago - down to the correct signatures, date-of-issue, stamping etc :)
Re:intentional (Score:4, Funny)
You'd be better off taking modern meat back in time and selling it for mint condition 1958 and earlier coins.
*whoosh*
that's the sound a timetravel machine makes when it whizzes over your head
Re: (Score:3)
But wouldn't the guys from 30 years ago eventually notice that you're trying to pay with newer currency, minted or printed during the last 30 years?
I guess I got to read that story now.
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Hell, they had copies of the people in the "pattern buffer." Just beam them back to the Enterprise and stick them back there. This way you don't lose the experience by making a new one each time.
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For instance why bother having Starfleet at all if you can teleport instantly by belt-buckle to the Klingon homeworld?
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Because without some sort of constraint of the plot device it removes a whole lot of plot opportunities
Precisely. Without constraints, Captain Kirk would surely manage to bang every green woman in the known Universe.
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Yep, the entire reason they even invented the transporter is because they didn't have enough money to build shuttlecraft and sets for them at the beginning. The shuttlecraft weren't seen until later episodes. The transporter was cheap and easy, from a filming standpoint.
wapr drive (Score:4, Funny)
The Vulcans will be here soon, swooping in like a returning Jesus Christ to save us from ourselves at long last, show us the true path of wisdom, and help us complete the application (an on-line PDF form, no doubt) for membership in the United Federation of Planets.
And then we will all live happily ever after.
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You mis-spelt Pleiadians and forgot to mention First Contact in ~2024.
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Re:wapr drive (Score:5, Funny)
The Vulcans will be here soon, swooping in like a returning Jesus Christ to save us from ourselves at long last, show us the true path of wisdom, and help us complete the application (an on-line PDF form, no doubt) for membership in the United Federation of Planets.
And then we will all live happily ever after.
They'll step out of their spacecraft and inform us that our newly invented warp drive was invented 324,123 years ago and we cannot use it without paying the license fees of approximately 2.3 earth planets per earth year.
Otherwise we will need to wait another 14,675,877 years until it enters the public domain.
Re:wapr drive (Score:5, Funny)
Fermi paradox solved.
The question is (Score:2)
If all goes through, what will it mean?
If I understood correctly, it allows you to pre-warp some space ahead in your journey, so that you can begin your journey later. For example, to go to Alpha Centauri A, where light takes a few years, you may start the warp drive, wait for a year, then jump into the ship and travel there (taking 1 year less time).
It will not save you anything going to new places you did not plot a course to.
I am also not sure about the speed limits that warp drive imposes. Possibly beyo
Re: (Score:2)
If all goes through, what will it mean?
If I understood correctly, it allows you to pre-warp some space ahead in your journey, so that you can begin your journey later. For example, to go to Alpha Centauri A, where light takes a few years, you may start the warp drive, wait for a year, then jump into the ship and travel there (taking 1 year less time).
It will not save you anything going to new places you did not plot a course to.
If that's correct, who cares if it takes a few centuries for the thing to warm up? It would completely solve the problem of how you get the crew from point A to point B alive... no suspended animation, no generation ships, etc, just board at the right time and be there after a relatively short period. YOU won't ever get to see Alpha Centauri, but frankly, from the perspective of the species, that's really not a problem.
Re:The question is (Score:5, Insightful)
If I understood correctly,
You don't.
it allows you to pre-warp some space ahead in your journey
No-one - that is to say, no-one with an ounce of scientific credibility - is claiming it's a warp drive. There's no reason to even start to consider the idea that it might be a warp drive. The article linked to by the summary with the words "some are claiming this means things like warp drive..." doesn't even mention any claims that it's a warp drive.
The Forbes article links to another article with these words:
When you come across an announcement like the one made by NASA Spaceflight a week ago: that NASA has made a successful test of the EM Drive — a propulsion engine that uses no propellant, seemingly violating one of the most fundamental laws of physics, while warping space in the process — you’d better make sure you aren’t fooling yourself.
And that linked article also doesn't even mention warp drive. Seems to me like some journalists need to calm down a little. "ZOMG! It's not a warp drive!!!" - yes, thanks, but no-one seems to saying it is.
It's a thing that appears to produce thrust by unknown means. That's all. It's very interesting, but it has nothing to do with anything that anyone would call a warp drive.
Re:The question is (Score:5, Informative)
It's a thing that appears to produce thrust by unknown means. That's all. It's very interesting, but it has nothing to do with anything that anyone would call a warp drive.
One point to add here: it definitely isn't a warp drive, but the guy that invented it in his garage did so while following a theory he had that the relativistic effects at the moment an electromagnetic wave is reflected can be harnessed to turn the energy of those waves directly into thrust. There is a very simple test nobody has done yet (that the inventor himself is still trying to save money to do, last I heard) - that is to replace the copper resonating cavity with a superconducting cavity to drive up the Q-value. If his theory holds true a 1000W magnetron from a microwave oven will be able to lift a small car off the ground in that setup.
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If I understood correctly,
You don't.
it allows you to pre-warp some space ahead in your journey
No-one - that is to say, no-one with an ounce of scientific credibility - is claiming it's a warp drive. There's no reason to even start to consider the idea that it might be a warp drive. The article linked to by the summary with the words "some are claiming this means things like warp drive..." doesn't even mention any claims that it's a warp drive.
The Forbes article links to another article with these words:
When you come across an announcement like the one made by NASA Spaceflight a week ago: that NASA has made a successful test of the EM Drive — a propulsion engine that uses no propellant, seemingly violating one of the most fundamental laws of physics, while warping space in the process — you’d better make sure you aren’t fooling yourself.
And that linked article also doesn't even mention warp drive. Seems to me like some journalists need to calm down a little. "ZOMG! It's not a warp drive!!!" - yes, thanks, but no-one seems to saying it is.
It's a thing that appears to produce thrust by unknown means. That's all. It's very interesting, but it has nothing to do with anything that anyone would call a warp drive.
/me quickly skims the comment
Awesome! NASA invented a warp drive!!!
Re:The question is (Score:4, Informative)
No-one - that is to say, no-one with an ounce of scientific credibility - is claiming it's a warp drive. There's no reason to even start to consider the idea that it might be a warp drive.
Oopsie. [wikipedia.org]
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Why would getting a reactor into orbit [wikipedia.org] be particularly difficult and why would it be difficult to design one that doesn't kill the crew?
I'll assume that you're thinking it will irradiate them, but with no need to carry any propellant for the trip, there is suddenly a huge allowance for shielding for the reactor. That sort of addresses the second point, too.
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The NEXT trick is managing not to kill the crew from all the radiation generated by traveling very, very fast through a space full of - radiation.
Who says you have to travel through the space? Why is everyone assuming they know the physics of something that we have no clue how it would even fundamentally work? A bunch of armchair physicists suggesting theoretical problems to things that we have no clue about. How about moving the space - and everything in it - around the ship instead of moving the ship through the space? How would something like that work, you're asking? We have no idea! Just like any hypothetical you're referring to or making
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It could mean anything between, "shave a few hours off a trip to Jupiter" all the way up to, "2 hours to Alpha Centauri."
What we have now is some new engineering that advanced ahead of the science. Until the science catches up and explains it, we have no way to understand or predict the actual utility of the device beyond the inconsequential amount of force the existing device directs.
Another thing to remember when thinking about it is that the speed of light is not any sort of "speed limit." Actual photons
Seriously ? What a non story (Score:2, Insightful)
Really why not just sample facebook find a post that says something crazy and then extrapolate to a large group of people.
You might as well complain about the new cult that thinks mankind was created by spaghetti.
The drive may or may not work, pretty hard to mismeasure a newton + of thrust, we will see. There is no doubt it's positively insane to go all guilt by association.
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Where do you get that? According to the article:
Re:Seriously ? What a non story (Score:4, Interesting)
That came from yesterdays story and actually searching for the numbers. This isn't this devices first test outing, as far as I can see he took the most discreditable data point to attack.
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What exactly are you saying here? Are you saying that this article is silly because nobody really thinks this is a warp drive? Because get ready: this discussion is about to get flooded with people who think that this is a warp drive.
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Even if they're bending spacetime, they're only doing it inside the device so it would be more of a pinch drive than a warp drive. Warp drive is a metaphor from the art of weaving, applied to the concept of a "fabric" of space and time. So "warp drive" implies a large scale folding, an effect involving the breadth of space. This device, if we give the interpretation most favorable to this line of thinking, pinches space locally without changing what is outside the device. This creates an imbalance, and some
Re: Seriously ? What a non story (Score:2)
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the new cult that thinks mankind was created by spaghetti.
Not just any spaghetti.
anomaly (Score:2)
>> anomalous thrust/acceleration
Must have been a Trekkie that posted this. There would be no ST:TNG without a Federation shit-tonne of anomalies to investigate.
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Re:anomaly (Score:5, Funny)
I watched the show! My favorite episode was the one where they encountered a space-time anomaly while someone was on the holodeck.
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if only I had mod points. that made me chuckle pretty heartily :)
Bad title (Score:5, Interesting)
Skepticism is a good thing. This isn't proper skepticism.
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The energy of the thrust effect is basically lost in the measurement error. Hell, the device measuring it could be affecting the measured thrust.
The problem is that there's a TINY, TINY effect and we're not sure of the origin. It's therefore useless for propulsion, for decades at least, and certainly until we know where it's coming from and why. Because it might not be something that can ever be scaled, and that amount of thrust is absolutely minuscule.
We're used to dealing with tiny thrusts - you can "p
Re:Bad title (Score:4, Insightful)
No independent testing? This is one of three devices built by three separate groups that exhibit similar behavior. I do believe that is the definition of independent testing. Now, as to whether it every becomes useful, who knows.
Re:Bad title (Score:4, Insightful)
50 micronewtons is not similar to 3 newtons.
If 3 different labs claim to have discovered a new element, one lab claims the halflife is 1 hour, and the other lab claims that the half life is 7 years. Are those results conclusive? At best you could guess one lab is correct and the others are mistaken. At worst you might conclude that they are all mistaken.
This is the position we are in right now. The measurements on this device vary so vastly that the concept of verification has all but broken down.
Re:Bad title (Score:5, Informative)
The energy of the thrust effect is basically lost in the measurement error. Hell, the device measuring it could be affecting the measured thrust.
That's not true. They're measuring 30-50 micronewtons on a device with a 10-15 micronewton margin of error. Do you seriously think that the NASA scientists who did the testing don't grasp how margin of error works?
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Excuse me sir, but I could not help heartily agreeing with the veracity of your statement and wondering just why it was your signature for at least that post is not "Ha Ha!".
Re:Bad title (Score:4, Insightful)
It's premature to throw a Singularity party but it's definitely premature to declare the device to not be a warp drive.
I guess you're right in the sense that if we don't know what's generating the thrust, it's premature to declare it to be *not* much of anything. It's premature to declare it not-a-time-machine or not-a-perpetual-motion-machine. It might be premature to declare that it's not witchcraft. But on the other hand, it's a pretty safe bet that it's none of those things. If it really does work, it probably works via some very reasonable mechanism.
The author is right: we should reserve judgment until there's something more substantial. From what I've read so far, it sounds more like a couple of scientists played with it and said, "Huh, this is actually pretty cool. It does seem to generate thrust, and we're not sure how. Wouldn't it be cool if it was a primative warp drive? Yeah, that'd be cool. Oh well, we need to test it more before we're even sure that it's generating thrust." The whole warp-drive thing is wild speculation, picked up by fanboys who desperately want it to be true.
Re:Bad title (Score:4, Insightful)
The scientists didn't say anything about a warp drive. They did say the other stuff, as did two other independent teams.
Honestly, it reminds me of fucking managers losing their shit when they inquire about the status of a large project and hear something they didn't expect to hear.
These guys simply reported what they observed and people are losing their shit over it.
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I don't know. The first article I read quoted some scientist saying something to the effect of, "The effect is consistent with what we might possibly see if it were a warp drive, according to what we guess a warp drive might possibly do, which is all kind of cool. But I don't actually know what's going on here." I thought that's where all the talk of warp drives came from.
But it didn't sound to me at the time like the guy who said it, whoever that was, was even really positing that it was a warp drive.
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This is actually the conflation of two different stories.
The first thing to understand is both stories are coming out of the group at NASA whose job it is to deal with the crackpot theories that might not quite be false.
One group is working on a warp drive that while theoretically possible, even the person that invented it doesn't think it can be built. They are working on the very first step. Their detector for when they have completed the first step just went off. So now there is a chance they have com
Re:Bad title (Score:5, Insightful)
No it isn't premature. That's the null hypothesis.
Your argument is like saying "it's definitely premature to declare the pen sitting on my desk to not be a warp drive."
It is premature to declare that this device does anything. Once some good science has been done and shown some relevant results, then we can start thinking about changing our opinion of this device. So far, no good science has been done.
Eagleworks is hardly the bastion of scientific accuracy and non-hypebole. Wake me up when JPL duplicates their results.
Article asks an important question (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article [numbers added for clarity]:
So let me ask you this, aspiring (or armchair) scientists: what would be the criteria you'd demand as the extraordinary evidence necessary to convince you that this is real? For myself, here's what Iâ(TM)d demand at minimum:
* I would certainly demand #4 - this combined with #3 (or a substitute - see below) is the gold standard for "there is really something here even if we don't know what it is".
* I would demand #5 or a similar process of independent peer review
* I would allow "enough reproductions over enough diverse environments to rule out environmental factors" as a substitute for #3.
* As for #2, the less the measurement error could lead to misleading results, the better, but a result that is "at least many standard deviations above the measurement error" may not be necessary to declare that we have an interesting, publishable result worthy of further study.
I would let #1 go: If the phenomenon was caused by something that did NOT scale with input power, it could still be interesting. It might not get us to space, but it would be worth publishing and studying.
Re:Article asks an important question (Score:4, Insightful)
Nay Sayers Are As bad as the Hypers (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm probably not alone in being sick and tired about hearing the endless back and forth on this.
On the one hand we have people calling this a Warp Drive and making fantastic flights of fancy and on the other side we have people who think the entire thing is rubbish and anyone even remotely involved deemed a crackpot.
Look -- we have had three different successful reproductions of predicted results. The tests have been done by respected members of respected agencies. And there will be many more tests on the way, I've even heard talk of actually conducting tests in outer space.
So why can't we just wait for more tests? Seems to me that that's the only think to do.
Either way, it will either succeed or it will fail. If anything we MUST conduct these tests to understand the anomalous effect we are seeing here.
Because even if it does fail further tests, it could lead to an understanding the documented and so far anomalous effect which could lead to further advances in science or, if just bad testing could help us understand how to better setup tests and instrumentation.
Above all, it's the complete lack of desire to understanding the cause of the documented effect while focusing on a shouting match that makes both sides look more like religious zealots better suited to jihads than any sort of educated members of the modern society.
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Hear, Hear!
Re:Nay Sayers Are As bad as the Hypers (Score:5, Funny)
Because liberals hate actual science - new inventions their leadership doesn't control (the majority of billionaires in the world are liberal because it is the new Christianity to control idiots) are decried. This one comes with a double-whammy because not only is it an incredibly disruptive technology, it is also something created entirely from theory to initial testing by a guy in his garage - the very idea of such a person existing goes against the idea that people need huge government research groups and megacorps leading the charge because science is just so overwhelming that individuals can't do it themselves anymore - which is the entire basis of most of the liberal leadership power base. But be assured, if they can figure out a way to drive the inventor to suicide or just wait for him to fade away to get their hands on the tech themselves we'll have asteroid-mining within the year.
Damn. Our evil plot is exposed.
Who's saying it is a warp drive? (Score:5, Insightful)
While some are claiming this means things like warp drive [...] are right on the horizon
Who are these "some"? The article linked to by the sentence makes no mention of any claims of it being a warp drive.
And then this from the Forbes article:
When you come across an announcement like the one made by NASA Spaceflight a week ago [nasaspaceflight.com]: that NASA has made a successful test of the EM Drive — a propulsion engine that uses no propellant, seemingly violating one of the most fundamental laws of physics, while warping space in the process — you’d better make sure you aren’t fooling yourself.
The linked announcement makes no mention of warping space, so the bolded section seems inaccurately disparaging.
It sounds to me like the guy who wrote the article has fooled himself into believing that someone has claimed it's a warp drive for the purpose of being able to find something to write indignantly about.
Come to think of it, the writer doesn't even seem to be sure of who's who in this scenario. "When you come across an announcement [...] you'd better make sure you aren't fooling yourself." Why would I be fooling myself by simply reading an announcement? Surely it's the people who make the announcement that should make sure they're not fooling themselves. Which I might think they were, if they'd said anything about warping space. Which they didn't.
So just who are these apparently imaginary people that the summary/article is railing against?
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I've seen several gushing articles -- things I saw linked to on Twitter, glanced at, thought "Yeah right" and didn't give a thought to bookmarking -- claiming that there was some kind of space-time warping effect detected in the Em-drive.
It is difficult to know where along the chain of articles-quoting-articles that "WARP DRIVE!" got added to "reactionless thruster."
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Because they used their warp-field interferometer and found that the results possibly showed that the inside was bigger than the outside. You can find more info on it on the NASA forums. http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=36313.1860
summary as i understand it: (Score:3)
we either have
1. another cold fusion debacle
2. groundbreaking fundamentally new science
do i understand the em drive status quo correctly?
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we either have
1. another cold fusion debacle
2. groundbreaking fundamentally new science
do i understand the em drive status quo correctly?
Not exactly. The cold fusion debacle led to a lot of failures right away. There were people trying to replicate the cold fusion that got nothing, and others that saw some results. It turned out it depended on your source of palladium whether you would see any results.
In this case, all attempts to replicate the machine have detected some thrust coming from it, and at fairly consistent levels (as far as the measurements go). So it's clear in this case that the claims are correct and the EM works. There a
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interesting
sounds like it could also lead to groundbreaking new science along the lines of "hey, that's odd..." discoveries in the past where results were wildly outside expectations
Re:summary as i understand it: (Score:4)
None of that sound scientific approach is present here, so the cold fusion "debacle" was handled right on the scientific side. This thing here is not and nothing of the published results deserves much trust at this time.
You are mistaken. Everything regarding how to build an EM drive is published.
I would start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
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"Published" and published are two different things. Where is that peer-reviewed paper in a respected journal? Where are the papers describing independent verification?
yes (Score:3)
Yes,
we have something here as exciting as cold fusion or polywater. it seems to violate newtons second law so people are looking for the escape clause. If it's real it's a huge deal because it means the fundamental problem of space travel--- bringing your propellant--- is permanently solved modulo the nitty gritty of making it more efficient.
On the otherhand, like polywater and cold fusion it's likely a reproducible experimental error that's not been identified yet. 3 groups have in
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Unlike cold fusion this has been duplicated at least 3 times. And NASA even tried to break the system deliberately and it still worked meaning they really have no idea how it works. I'd say with 3 successful independent tests by some very smart people and we've got something interesting even if it turns out to be worthless as a propulsion device. They are going to be writing papers about this for years trying to understand the effect and it's nuances. They might have discovered some new aspect of the univer
Laws of Physics were written before dark matter (Score:2)
Problem we have here is that we do not understand how dark matter interacts with the universe as a whole. It could be possible we have found a device that can propel itself via an interaction however weakly with dark matter.
Still fast travel means you have to develop deflectors or some way to know what's in front of you in time to maneuver away from it.
Also, at light speeds passing a massive object might liquidate organic beings. Need to be able to negate gravity.
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The laws of physics were not simply written, nor is anyone I know of claiming they are a done deal. We are running out of corners of the physical universe that have not been fully explored (as far as physics is concerned) and modeled, and have moved into the nooks and crannies. Occasionally we need to amend the laws of physics to cover new discoveries, but these amendments have been pretty small.
Dark matter is a weird subject, since it is a thing we apparently can observe the effects of, but cannot direct
Terminology (Score:2)
Obviously they didn't invent warp drive.
Warp drive works by warping space-time. An artificial inertial drive is something completely different.
Unless it turns out it isn't...
Ethan Siegel (Score:2)
Do the Slashdot authors get their science news from anyone other than Ethan Siegel these days?
uh... (Score:2)
fail state (Score:3)
I don't know who the "some" are in that sentence, but no one at the link provided in the story is saying this means NASA created a warp drive.
Stop, already.
NASA was just messing around... (Score:2)
NASA was just messing around, you see, they had an experimental EM drive... and next think you know they accidentally the whole spacetime.
Scales with input power? (Score:3)
The Forbes article lists five criteria that would make it a more plausible claim. One stands out in particular: the thrust scales with power. The drive reportedly creates on order of 30-50 microNewtons (uN) at 100 W input power. 1 KW power at microwave frequencies really isn't that hard (most kitchen microwave ovens operate near or at this scale), and 10 KW shouldn't be beyond the skills of a decent microwave engineer. Beyond that and it gets into Serious Engineering.
This idea came to me in a matter of seconds, so I must assume that the people currently testing it at NASA should also have thought of it as well and are working at testing the device at a range of power levels to plot out the power-vs-thrust relationship. Should be a piece of cake for at least one order of magnitude.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The people at NASA have been doing this with a very small budget since this whole thing is still within crackpot territory. They have only been able to use equipment which can operate / measure over small ranges, so that's what they've been doing. They hope to eventually have other labs with better equipment will test at even greater powers (after getting above 100 micronewtons, they plan to have Glenn Research Center, Jet Propulsion Lab, and John Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab take over).
There's a
Apparently people cannot even read... (Score:3, Interesting)
All the proponents of this "device" are just an example of how incompetent and delusional humans can get. From the NASA publication abstract: "Thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust. Specifically, one test article contained internal physical modifications that were designed to produce thrust, while the other did not (with the latter being referred to as the "null" test article)."
Listen up kids, this means that they tested the "true em-drive" and a dummy and _both_ gave them thrust. The dummy is specifically designed so that it _cannot_ do this! This means the "thrust" comes from some other effect, not the "em-drive". That truly and utterly pathetic thing here is that NASA actually did sound science and people are missing the necessary reading comprehension skills to even understand the abstract.
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It doesn't imply the power range to be infinite. Everything has a working range. But, although the claim that it's a necessity is dubious, it's pretty well universal. If you supply an LED with less power, it will light less. We tend to PWM them in order to do this digitally with only one voltage on a digital circuit, but - for a certain range - their brightness correlates to the power supplied to even LED's, yes.
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I was thinking the same thing. There's no reason for the scaling to be easily predictable before there is a model to base the prediction on.
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Perform test several times in a variety of positions so the effects of gravity can be measured and accounted for?
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Warp drive would involve fielding to warp space, not seeing the connection with this device.
If this device actually works, it means everything we think we know about physics is wrong. At that point, all bets are off, and anything may be possible. FTL travel is widely believed to be impossible, because mass approaches infinity as velocity approaches light speed. But if momentum isn't conserved, then we may be able to blow right through that limit. This is just like back in 1989, when cold fusion was first announced. The possibilities are endless.
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BTW - cold fusion turned out to be a fraud, despite people clinging to the hope even today.
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Things like "cold fusion" and this could actually be useful if not managed by irresponsible teams seeking to make headlines for themselves. It can be important to learn when there's things that can throw your measurements off that weren't immediately apparent. You don't need headlines to get the necessary followup; researchers in the field read the peer-reviewed literature and most definitely will take interest in such unexpected results.
Re:Warp drive? (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW - cold fusion turned out to be a fraud, despite people clinging to the hope even today.
It did not turn out to be a fraud. It turned out to be a 'mistake', and that is even not sure as plenty of physicians are still or again working in that field.
Fraud is a word used in criminal contexts, it means a person is deliberately misleading other people to gain a profit, usually by causing damage to those people.
E.g. if I sell you at a metro station a ticket for 80 cents, which would normally cost 1,30 Euro ... you use the ticket and surprisingly it works, but as soon as a controller checks you, it turns out it is a children's ticket ... that is fraud.
Setting up a weird experiment and finding a strange effect and publishing everything about it: that is science. Even if it get debunked later.
Re:Warp drive? (Score:4, Insightful)
If this device actually works, it means everything we think we know about physics is wrong.
No, just the non-scientific armchair claims of various things being "impossible," where actual physics doesn't even address what isn't possible, and can't claim anything to be impossible. Science is about what is known, not what isn't. Things are either know to be true in a certain set of conditions, known not to be true in a certain set of conditions, or not known. There is no way that science could, or would try to, claim what is or isn't possible in unknown conditions.
A new technology is just an example of a new context, a new set of conditions. There are basically no limits to what might be true under new conditions. Those are all unknowns.
Re:Warp drive? (Score:4, Insightful)
Science is about what is known, not what isn't.
It wouldn't make much progress if that were the case!
things are either know to be true
Science, by necessity, does not deal in truth. It wouldn't work if it did.
You have a very odd understanding of science.
One Criterion Missing (Score:5, Insightful)
This is how the solar neutrino problem was solved. For decades experiments measuring the flux of solar neutrinos had come up short by a factor of 1/3 to 1/2 of the expected value. Initially people thought the experiments were somehow wrong, then focus switched to the solar models predicting the flux but these were confirmed as correct so ultimately nobody had a clue as to why there was discrepancy. People were split between inaccurate experiments, inaccurate prediction or new physics. The problem was solved only when the model which theorists had proposed as a possible solution - that neutrinos changed their flavour as they move through space - was tested by the SNO experiment which measured both the total neutrino flux and the electron neutrino flux separately.
You need both theory and experiment to agree to get understanding and without that clear understanding I would not expect the 'warp drive' effect to be resolved. No matter how much you repeat and verify the experiment there will always be questions raised about some effect which is not accounted for (assuming the effect remains so small). After a few decades you might get to the point where people will admit that the effect is not understood but even then many will ascribe it to some subtle experimental effect rather than new physics. The only way you will change minds is by having a new theory whose predictions are verified by further experiments.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
No. These tests prove that the device is real, and that it produces force.
You're just saying, it isn't proved how it works. That is true, there are different ideas, and a lot of people are skeptical of the inventor's theory of operation. However, most of those skeptics also claimed the device wouldn't work at all, and yet, it does work. So it is on them to think up new hypotheses if they don't like his.
That the device works is what was proven here. Waving your hands about how you don't know why it works, th
Re: (Score:2)
No. These tests prove that the device is real, and that it produces force.
They don't prove any such thing. All they prove is that a bunch of questionable researchers claimed to measure a marginally significant effect, and have been hyping the fuck out of it. Scientific openness is not equivalent credulously accepting the claims of every whacko and charlatain who makes a claim, just because it "hasn't been disproven".
We do know things about the world. Nothing is absolute in science, but some things come very, very close. Conservation of momentum is one of those. You don't toss tha
Re:One Criterion Missing (Score:5, Informative)
No. These tests prove that the device is real, and that it produces force.
Actually that is NOT what these tests show. They show that someone has done an experiment which, using their apparatus, returns readings consistent with a micro-newton force. What the experiment has NOT shown is that this is due to some new, as yet unexplained, physics.
There are a myriad of other, far more mundane, possibilities to generate such results before anyone will seriously start believing in new physics as an explanation. For example did they account for the radiation emitted bouncing back and forth between the apparatus and the vacuum chamber walls?
After the results have been confirmed independently and all the possibilities people can come up with disproven then you have an interesting result which is unexplained. At this point there are still two possibilities: either new physics OR an effect so subtle that nobody has thought of it. The only way to prove new physics is therefore to come up with a theoretical explanation which allows testing.
Whether or not you agree with this this is how science works: there are simply too many ways that a precision experiment like this can be fooled and history is littered with examples of this happening e.g. faster than light neutrinos, gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background, cold fusion etc. The results have to be confirmed and stand several years of scrutiny before people will start to believe that they are interesting. Even when that happens to get people convinced that there is new physics here you need a model for that new physics that makes predictions which can be confirmed.
Re:One Criterion Missing (Score:5, Insightful)
"Prove" is a dangerous word. Everyone involved in the testing of this device is someone who wants desperately to see it succeed. When the effects you're measuring on on the order of 50 microNewtons, it doesn't take much of anything to screw up the results. Read about the history of N-Rays for a historical example of how even (or maybe especially) very intelligent, informed people can fool themselves into believing poor experimental results.
Three experiments does not overturn 300 years of experimental evidence in support of conservation of momentum. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far the evidence has been interesting, but not extraordinary. Like the article says, show me an experiment with thrust correlating with power input. Show me another one where the device runs for a month. But most importantly, show me one performed by skeptics!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they didn't.
The tests so far have proven that in certain experimental circumstances readings are observed that might indicate a micro-force being generated by the device
They have not yet proven:
1) The device is actually causing the force
2) The readings are correct (e.g. measuring devices calibrated correctly)
3) The readings are not the result of some other factor they are failing to take account of (e.g. Earth's magnetic field).
To
Re:One Criterion Missing (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it "works" in the same sense that a single grain of rice is "edible" and a "viable human food source."
Re: (Score:3)
That's not correct. Their original test involved three models - (1) one that was designed to provide no thrust, (2) one that was missing a particular feature a particular person claimed was necessary to produce thrust, and (3) one that had all the design features recommended.
(1) produced no thrust, as expected. (2) and (3) both produced equivalent thrust, showing that one particular theory was incorrect.
Re: (Score:3)
The equivilent of a block of wood produced the same thrust as the device, and your response is that it works?
Likely the thrust seen is an artifact of the measuring device, and not any real thrust.
Re: (Score:3)
Having a theory does not make it more real. Faraday was busily inventing dynamos and electric engines before Maxwell ever came up with EM Theory.
What the theory does is make it easier to reproduce and provides you with the tools to design something and know what will happen without actually building something.
Re: (Score:2)
Extremely different.
Re: (Score:2)
Crookes's device is a heat engine moved by air currents, this devices is claimed to work in vacuum
Re: (Score:2)
Because not one of its components is a mug of hot tea. Where are they going to get the source of brownian motion from otherwise?