Finnish Scientist Provides Another Explanation For The 'Impossible' EM Drive (examiner.com) 299
MarkWhittington quotes a report from Examiner: Ever since the EmDrive entered the news about a year or so ago, it has sparked considerable controversy. The device is alleged to work by using microwaves that produce, in some fashion as yet unknown to science, thrust. Many scientists suggest that the EM drive is impossible as it violates known physics. However, a number of tests conducted in Great Britain, Germany, China, and at NASA's Eagleworks at the Johnson Spaceflight Center have resulted in thrust that cannot, as yet, be explained by experimental error. The International Business Times reported that a Finnish scientist has published an article in a peer-reviewed science journal with a possible explanation as to how the drive works. International Business Times writes, "A new peer-reviewed paper on the EmDrive from Finaland states that the controversial electromagnetic space propulsion technology does work due to microwaves fed into the device converting photons that leak out of the closed cavity, producing an exhaust. The research, entitled "On the exhaust of electromagnetic drive," is published in the journal AIP Advances 6 and is the brainchild of Dr Arto Annila, a physics professor at the University of Helsinki; Dr Erkki Kolehmainen, an organic chemistry professor at the University of Jyvaskyla; and Patrick Grahn, a multiphysicist at engineering software firm Comsol."
If this is correct it should be easy to check (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless the photons are perfectly out of phase and co linear you will get interference patterns on all three axes. Seeing as they are microwave photons that should make them nice large and obvious.
Re:If this is correct it should be easy to check (Score:5, Informative)
Re:If this is correct it should be easy to check (Score:5, Informative)
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if the directional emission of photons creates thrust why can't we create an em drive from a flashlight?
Every flashlight is an EM drive. The thrust is quite small, of course, as is the efficiency. Light has momentum, and every physics student has probably calculated the thrust of a solar sail, both black and reflective, for some test or assignment.
Re: (Score:2)
So the theory is that it is a solar sail with a portable sun?
That actually makes some kind of sense... I must have screwed it it up.
Re: If this is correct it should be easy to check (Score:4, Informative)
except it takes 300MW to produce a newton of thrust, which is why I don't buy the argument of exhaust photons causing EM drive thrust, the level of photons (they're all contained in any practical sense) leaving the device, if any, are far far too tiny to produce thrust. so if something is really going on, it isn't simple photon propulsion
Re: If this is correct it should be easy to check (Score:4, Informative)
Yup, the paper about escaping photons is rubbish. But then, I'm assuming this drive is as well, unless someone can manage to get thrust out of it above the hard-to-isolate background noise.
The gravity wave detector guys have the same isolation problem, but they can use correlation between detectors to prove results. Extreme claims require, well, more than "this might be something other than noise".
Re:If this is correct it should be easy to check (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming the theory is correct, you may be right. But this is a new theory - and key to it is that it means the EM-drive does, in fact, have an exhaust - it's just that the exhaust is mass-less photons rather than matter. But the whole reason we have the name 'photon' is because light behaves so much like a particle to begin with - and photons are known to have momentum after all.
That said, since it's apparently able to convert something like sunlight into useful thrust without fuel - it could, in theory, keep providing thrust for many centuries (well until something hits or damages it). Your decaying matter will be useful only as long as the fuel remains(but may provide more thrust since the particles it exudes have mass which hugely increases their momentum). Then again - depending what you use, quite a lot of decaying matter have half-lives in the thousands-of-years category.
All that said - assuming both technologies prove viable, you can expect more prosaic and immediate concerns to dominate the decision - like what happens if something goes wrong and the damn thing crashes to earth. Space agencies tend to be rather reticent about putting things in orbit which, if they crash, could spread highly reactive material around the area they land in. This is why RTG's tend to only be used on long-range space-probes, the only risk of spreading that plutonium on the planet is if it crashes during launch.
Having said all that - if we imagine an EM-drive which uses solar-power to produce microwaves to produce photons to produce miniscule levels of thrust - well magnetrons are fairly heavy, and the parts in there are quite pricey... would you not be able to do it more cheaply for about the same weight (if not volume) by skipping all the intermediary steps and just fitting the satelites with solar sails ?
Re: If this is correct it should be easy to check (Score:2)
Well thats a factor for long range missions but not for orbital satelites just trying to compensate for decay. If you make a long range em-drive probe with solar as the electricity source you have the same problem. Solar panels are subject to the same inverse square law as solar sails.
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There's also the energy consumption to consider - will it require solar cells large enough to act in a manner of solar sails? And will the thrust on the solar panels negate the thrust generate by the EM drive?
Pre-edit:
TLDR: No
According the fountain of knowledge (Wikipedia), the EM drive generates thrust in the region of 0.1 to 0.3 mN/W. Solar energy is about 1361 W/m2, and a solar sail generates about 7.81 uN/m2, which is the equivalent of 5.7 nN/W. Plus, thrust isn't ways going to be opposing sunlight.
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I said "a supply of energy" not "solar panels". My presumption was that any really long-range vessel (to which an EM drive would be well suited) would be nuclear powered in one form or another.
Re: If this is correct it should be easy to check (Score:2)
If its a nuclear powered craft an em-drive is pointless. You just changed the type of fuel not the need for fuel.
In that case a chunk of uranium and a funnel will do the same job much cheaper.
Re: If this is correct it should be easy to chec (Score:2)
A nuclear rocket uses fuel, such as hydrogen which is expended long before the nuclear reactor quits. Doing away with that fuel is the goal.
Re: If this is correct it should be easy to check (Score:2)
But wouldn't the solar panels also lose collection capability? I think a direct conversion of momentum would always be more efficient than hopping through multiple energy states.
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Ah, but this drive is MAGIC, and doesn't obey the laws of conservation of momentum and equal action/reaction and all that. It pulls itself up by its bootstraps. It gets rich by selling itself rocks. And if it violates momentum conservation it almost certainly violates energy conservation too. Chaos ensues. The Universe collapses in a puff of physical inconsistency.
Or, as it moves forward, it kicks something else backwards. There really aren't a lot of choices here that don't require a fairly complete
Re: If this is correct it should be easy to check (Score:5, Interesting)
Your signature line is funny, considering the nature of your post. ;)
That being said, you should read McCulloch's paper on his emdrive theory. It isn't a complete rewrite of physics, just an additional term added in to momentum. It struck me as very similar to when Einstein amended momentum with the gamma factor. Everything we saw up to Einstein's time was correct for p=mv. Mostly because velocities near the speed of light hadn't been considered yet. If McCulloch is correct, we get another gamma-like term added in for small accelerations in the form of quanta. If he's correct, of course.
He might be, and he might not be. But I think his paper is pretty interesting and it doesn't seem to me like it would take a massive rewrite of everything we know. It feels more like the transition from Newtonian physics to relativistic physics. More of a "Oh, for these unique and less common cases, here's another thing you need to consider." No magic necessary.
Re: If this is correct it should be easy to check (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, I was just being facetious. As you say, physics has undergone multiple "complete rewrites" (not really, but yeah, aristotelian->newtonian, newtonian->quantum, galiliean->lorentz are at the very least very, very serious revisions of the way we think even if they do eat their predecessors and continue to support their successful results).
However, the law of conservation of momentum is one of those things that it is difficult to muck with, without requiring a pretty complete rewrite. If you put this thing in deep space and it just moves (accelerates) without shooting mass/energy/momentum out in some form, it would make me -- and physics -- pretty sad. I have to put it in the same category as the prior reports of transluminal neutrinos and the like. Always possible that they are true, but claims that will change everything require the most solid of evidence, and so far this is in the category of any number of famous "marginal" results that turned out to be accidents of one sort or another.
At the end of the day, of course, physics is KNOWN to be incomplete. Maybe the damn thing is acting as a darkon drive and is through a process we do not understand converting microwaves to darkons to momentum through some unknown resonance process. Maybe it is evidence for a dual universe where charge and spacetime are reversed, and the cavity somehow couples the two so it is pushing off against its shadow twin. Maybe we can make up a dozen theoretical explanations for it -- eventually, if necessary.
But for the moment it, like transluminal neutrinos, is still in the "probably magic" category pending extraordinary evidence to back up the extraordinary claim. Maybe if NASA launches one into orbit with its own solar power system and runs it for a few years, during which time it promotes its orbit in unmistakable ways. It doesn't look like it needs to mass more than a few hundred kilograms total, solar panels ought to be able to provide it with at least a kilowatt or three, so getting a thrust of around a newton should be possible. A newton may not sound like much pushing 100+ kg, but an acceleration of 1 mm/sec^2 over a day adds 84600 mm/sec, or roughly 90 m/sec, or (multiplying by 9/4) roughly 200 mph. It wouldn't take many days to make a clear, unmistakable alteration in the orbit. With modern instrumentation, I would think "one" (or even less) would suffice. Even 20 m/sec/day acceleration at a tenth of this ought to show up almost immediately.
In space, there is nothing nearby to push against. One can actually use the observed thrust itself to measure the mass of the satellite and see if it varies over time (eliminating the possibility that mass is being thrown out somehow assuming that it does not, as it should not). With solar cells with a cross-sectional area of at most a few square meters, radiation pressure is utterly incapable of producing this acceleration because you have at most Pr = S/c to work with, and S is order of 1400 W/m^2 and by the time you divide by c you have basically nothing left (as observed elsewhere in the thread).
At that point, if it accelerates as advertised, Classical Electrodynamics is dead as a doorknob, and QED is walking wounded as it still works off of CED and at the microwave level and high power, "photons" ought to be irrelevant anyway. Note well: you are converting a substantial amount of incoming electromagnetic energy directly into work "with no other effect" if it works as advertised. So even the second law of thermodynamics is going to be very sad. I'm tempted to quote Eddington:
"The second law of thermodynamics holds, I think, the supreme position among
the laws of nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the
Universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse
for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation -
well, those experimentalists do bungle things up sometimes. but if your theory
is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope;
there is nothing to do but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
There's some wisdom there...
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The thrust of a solar sail drops exponentially as it moves away from stellar bodies though, whereas the thrust of an EM drive could remain constant as long as it had a supply of energy.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Assuming we're talking about a "solar sail" that works by reflected sunlight, both the thrust of the solar sail and the power from your solar panels drops off identically, as the square of the distance from the Sun.
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The bigger problem is the question of trust-to-power ratio. Specifically, the fact that the EMDrive exhibits way too much thrust-to-power to be a photon drive unless the photons are *way* more energetic than microwave photons. The momentum of a photon is a function of the photon's frequency (or, inversely, wavelength), and the momentum is also proportional to the energy. This means it's pretty easy to compute the maximum possible force from a given frequency of EM radiation at a given power level (assuming
Not making any sense to me (Score:4, Interesting)
Their claim, to my ears, is even more ludicrous than the EM drive itself. What they say is that if two photons co-propogate with opposite phase they exist in the sense of carrying momentum and energy but they can't intereact with anything like say the wall. Isn't his bananas? the dark nodes of an interference pattern don't contain any ray-like photons. they seem to be saying it does. Now one can argue what's a photon? ie. can we really talk about ray-like photons (photons going along an axis), or do we need to talk about full 3D modes which are the eigen modes of the cavity. However in either case this seems bananas to me. if two photons are canceling it's the same as no photons. the energy didn't disappear, it just was reflected at the time you injected the second photon. you do not get two photons co-propagating out of phase like they claim.
Some one please explain this seeming madness.
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If two out of phase photons, carrying momentum, cancel each other out and 'cease to exist', what happened to the momentum?
If that, too, ceased to exist, and all the cancelled photons were going in the same direction, it would have a net effect on the momentum of the drive.
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Elementary E&M. The EM field, quantum or not, "particle like" or not, is a FIELD. If you set up the two slit experiment there are places on the screen where the fields from two coherent sources (slits) are out of phase and no energy or momentum is transferred. Even if you turn the intensity down to where one "photon" at a time goes through the pair of slits (yes, it goes through BOTH slits, or at least the FIELD does) the photons appear only in the BRIGHT bands where the fields are IN phase. No ene
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Interference just causes the photons to be somewhere else: points of constructive interference, not oblivion. I was going to type up the double slit experiment but someone beat me to it. Their explanation is correct.
Simply put the article
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Go to ludicrous speed [youtube.com].
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Large and obvious elementary particle, what sort of Universe do you live in?
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One where the wavelength of photons can be kilometers. Which one do you live in ?
Must be a first for slashdot RTFA skimmed summary (Score:5, Informative)
Recent reports about propulsion without reaction mass have been met on one hand with enthusiasm and on the other hand with some doubts. Namely, closed metal cavities, when fueled with microwaves, have delivered thrust that could eventually maintain satellites on orbits using solar power. However, the measured thrust appears to be without any apparent exhaust. Thus the Law of Action-Reaction seems to have been violated. We consider the possibility that the exhaust is in a form that has so far escaped both experimental detection and theoretical attention. In the thruster’s cavity microwaves interfere with each other and invariably some photons will also end up co-propagating with opposite phases. At the destructive interference electromagnetic fields cancel. However, the photons themselves do not vanish for nothing but continue in propagation. These photon pairs without net electromagnetic field do not reflect back from the metal walls but escape from the resonator. By this action momentum is lost from the cavity which, according to the conservation of momentum, gives rise to an equal and opposite reaction. We examine theoretical corollaries and practical concerns that follow from the paired-photon conclusion.
Relevant portion of abstract bolded
Re: (Score:2)
The electromagnetic field strength is linked to the energy density of the field. If the electric fields from the photons cancel in some location, then there is no energy density in that location and no probability of finding a photon there. If the photon fields cancel at the metal, then there is nothing to escape. eg. the article doesn't make any sense at all.
Conservation of (relativistic) momentum is conserved in all particle interactions - even in quantum mechanics. The only way the EM drive can work is
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The only way the EM drive can work is if there is entirely new physics.
All articles I have read explain it with standard physics. Perhaps I missed something, care to point it out?
It is as certain as anything is in science that the EM drive cannot work.
So far you failed to explain, why it can't work.
Why don't you simply read the theories about it and debunk it for us, so we can share your wisdom?
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In the article they say "These photon pairs without net electromagnetic field do not reflect back from the metal walls but escape from the resonator" This doesn't make sense. If the electromagnetic fields from the photons cancel, then the energy density and probability of finding a photon vanishes. There is nothing in that location to escape.
The more general argument is that all known physics (including quantum, gravity and relativity) conserves momentum (4-momentum if you are using relativistic terms). S
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Your argumentation makes no sense.
If the photons vanish as you claim in your first part, then obviously the momentum is conserved, contrary to your claim in the second part.
You can not start arguments with claims and then turning them around to explain why something is not working.
I suggest to start with the conversation of momentum, and then work backward. Explain us why momentum is not conserved when every physicist involved in this drive is explaining us: it is. If it was not conserved: the drive would n
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To be clear I was quoting the article's INCORRECT description.
In locations where the photons fields vanish, the energy density vanishes. The probability of finding photons IN THOSE LOCATIONS goes to zero. Think of it as waves - if I drop two rocks in the water, there will be places where the waves interfere and there is not wave amplitude. That means that there are no waves in that location, but it doesn't mean that all the waves have vanished everywhere.
I believe that the drive is not in fact working. T
Re: Must be a first for slashdot RTFA skimmed summ (Score:5, Interesting)
What they wrote in the paper may sound good to someone who has a passing knowledge of EM fields and constructive/destructive interference in waves, but to someone who understands this more clearly it makes about as much sense as asking a mechanic to change your blinker fluid.
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Well, if they are right then something good came from this thing after all. This is also the first explanation that at least sounds as it could hold water.
Re: Must be a first for slashdot RTFA skimmed summ (Score:5, Interesting)
More, photons are massless, and only interact strongly with matter because they are the force mediating particle for electromagnetism.
Photons are their own antiparticle, so when they interact strongly with each other, the force drops to zero, so the pair doesnt interact with anything else. This allows them to pass through the wall of the cavity like it wasnt even there. They still have energy, and a mathematical equivalent of momentum, so when they leave the system, an equal and opposite change in momentum of the system occurs.
That's my layman's understanding anyway.
The problem is that this is just a convoluted form of light pressure. The thrust exhibited by the em-drive is supposedly higher than the expected momentum change from simply radiating the microwave photons, and only some of the photons bouncing around inside the cavity will perfectly pair up to form neutral photon pairs that can escape the system. That means this mechanism cannot explain the anomalous nature of the thrust.
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Re: Must be a first for slashdot RTFA skimmed summ (Score:4, Insightful)
Photons are not really mass less. They have mass due to their enormous speed: E=mc^2
That's an old way of thinking. These days they are treated as purely massless.
The full version of Einstein's formula is E^2=(mc^2)^2+(pc)^2 where p is the momentum, which in photons is related to the frequency. The (mc^2)^2 bit remains 0.
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[pedantic]
Be careful how you phrase that - photons have no interaction via the strong force. They cannot "strongly interact" in the way that, say, quarks strongly interact to create protons and the like.
[/pedantic]
I understand what you meant - that the photons are interacting with each other in a strong (i.e., powerful, tightly bound, significant
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Photons are their own antiparticle, so when they interact strongly with each other, the force drops to zero, so the pair doesnt interact with anything else.
Particle-antiparticle interactions imply annihilation, which doesn't occur in typical photon-photon interactions (which are wave-like). Instead, you get a time- or space-localized interference and a change in the probability of finding a photon. There are situations where it makes sense to think of photons as their own antiparticle (largely in the context of matter-antimatter annihilation), but that's not a helpful way of looking at interference. Interference and tunneling are wave-like behaviors.
Perhaps pe
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Actually, it depends on how you define "mass."
Physicists used to use the terms "rest mass/invariant mass" and "relativistic mass," but most have since thrown out the term "relativistic mass" because it means the same thing as "energy of motion relative to an observer."
https://profmattstrassler.com/... [profmattstrassler.com]
Most physicists would define a photon as having no mass, yet it would carry momentum proportional to its energy. Mass is seen as a property of a particle that makes it resist changes in speed, but photons alwa
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Pfft!
Where have *you* been, Mr. Late-To-The-Party?
http://phys.org/news/2009-07-t... [phys.org]
Heck, it was even on Slashdot!
https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
Strat
This could be exciting (Score:2)
If the theory is correct, then researchers will actually know how the damned thing works. That should allow allow them to make the drive much more efficient.
Re:This could be exciting (Score:5, Informative)
There's one problem though...
I seem to recall that the net thrust exhibited by the em-drive is greater than the photon pressure of the microwaves. if the thrust was being produced by cancelling photon pairs escaping the system, then it would be some fraction of that potential, not greater than.
I can see this explaining SOME of the thrust, but the deal breaker is the thrust being higher than the photon pressure of the microwaves it runs on. (Else, it would be easier and more efficient to just aim the magnetron's waveguide out the back of the ship.)
Shawyer's non-peer reviewed "quantized inertia" explanation that abuses unruh radiation is more likely to explain the greater thrust values (and also makes some testable predictions.)
Re:This could be exciting (Score:5, Informative)
For anyone interested, the "quantized inertia" explanation was proposed by McCulloch, and is here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/111/60005 [doi.org]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's very simple, AC.
You see, when you touch your little red rocket, and make the fuel spray out, it makes daddy god very angry. Especially if it gets on the floor.
When daddy god gets angry, he makes poor little jesus have to strike you blind, so you cant find it anymore.
Really, it's all in the bible, which everyone knows is the leading authority on everything. /sarcasm
No No No (Score:5, Funny)
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I dont see "quantum burrito" on the standard menu-- Is this something you have to ask the universe for directly?
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Ahhhh! So THAT explains why the enterprise is always looking for gaseous anomalies!
Do the phartons exhibit any kind of tunneling behavior? I'd expect them to be quite difficult to contain...
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Yes, but until you eat the burrito you are not sure exactly how much thrust there is going to be.
This stuff is cool (Score:2)
Awesome (Score:2)
Next we need research on how the flux capacitor works.
Universal Equation (Score:2)
Now they just need to figure out how Pi and Planck's constant fit in and we'll should get the Universal Equation.
Kinda sounds like how a LASER works (Score:5, Insightful)
You've got a cavity. Inside you pump some energy. The energy is nominally trapped and bounces around. Eventually, some of it finds its way out in a coherent way. Seems like the paper is describing a similar explanation as to how LASERs work, roughly-speaking. Sounds plausible for sure.
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Lasers have the cavity to increase gain through a medium. We have no gain medium in this case, it would be far more efficient to just strap a pringles can on the end of a magnetron and call it a day if it worked like that.
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It's like a LASER with microwaves. Dare I say a MASER? :-)
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I have a cavity. I pump energy into it, in the form of some small bits of food (chewing would be a better term than pumping). This energy is trapped, but it sticks rather than bouncing around.
Eventually it finds its way out, via a dentist, in some coherent way. The cavity is also filled.
Please, dear god, please don't let there be lasers involved!
Anyway, I apologize, I just had to...
Actually (Score:2)
The explanation is that it works by Swimming through Spacetime [brophy.net].
Or we may ask its inventor (Score:2)
High temperature superconductors (Score:3)
We don't have a current accepted theory for high temperature semiconductors either, [wikipedia.org] but they exist and we're working with them.
Sometimes theory leads experiment, sometimes not.
pfff.. (Score:4, Insightful)
All it shows is that our knowledge of physics is just very limited.. Laws of physics are only a template to try to explain stuff, it isn't set in stone, it's just our (lack of) understanding of physics..
Dirk Gently (Score:4, Insightful)
Sherlock Holmes: "Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth"
Dirk Gently: "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks."
I'm not ready to give up on a plausible answer based on physics we understand, it may be that it is doing something we understand and we are simply not realizing it.
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But they (the experimenters) have systematically removed measuring errors so... I guess as you are so smart you should help them? /s
Convert energy into photons? (Score:2)
Interesting historical comparison with Tesla. (Score:2)
The explanation for the photons escaping the cavity sound similar to the comments by Tesla about longitudinal waves versus regular transverse waves being attenuated.
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Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
Finns get a lot of media considering it is an icey wasteland.
An icy wasteland that gave us Linux!
Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
He's not Swedish, just comes from a Swedish speaking family in Finland (very common).
According to your principal 50 million Americans are "actually Spanish".
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And now, I'm picturing Linus Torvalds as the Swedish Chef. . .
"Hin-de-foo, dee leenux in dee ker-null. . . ."
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And now, I'm picturing Linus Torvalds as the Swedish Chef. . .
"Hin-de-foo, dee leenux in dee ker-null. . . ."
Bork bork bork!
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That was a bit flippant, so let me explain. "American" is a nationality, but Swedish is also an ethnicity.
In North America you have borders with barbed-wire fences and long queues where you smile at idiot homeland security drones who can really ruin your day.
In Europe there is a sign at the side of the road "Welcome to Finland" in 3 or so languages.
Ethnicity and language there is more relevant than the nationality on your passport.
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But Finland has had a significant Swedish-speaking minority for a very long time (long before the EU opened the borders). They have no herritage with Sweden and the only thing they have in common with the Swedes is that they speak a dialogue of the language. They are no more Swedish than the entire population of Switzerland is German (despite speaking a variant of German as their language).
Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
They are no more Swedish than the entire population of Switzerland is German.
Come on - the Swiss are even more German than the Germans. Swiss visitors to Germany complain about the inefficiency, lawlessness and excessive frivolity.
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They have no herritage [SIC] with Sweden and the only thing they have in common with the Swedes is that they speak a dialogue of the language.
This is not true. The Finnish is NOT related to Swedish but is related to Hungarian.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
As a side note: Schengen States != EU.
There are EU states that did not join the Schengen Treaty. E.g. UK.
ONTO there are non EU states that did join it: e.g. Switzerland and Norway.
It is actually only really important when you acquire a visa to visit an EU country, as the visa usually states if it valid in all of Schengen or only in the country. (All of Schengen, haha ... perhaps I should write that different, rofl)
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That was a bit flippant, so let me explain. "American" is a nationality
There are 35 American countries. So which country, pray tell, is an American from? And yes, I was born in the US and, unless you're Native American, my family has probably been here longer than yours.
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Have you been to the Southern border? I'm guessing not.
Yes, seen fenced sections, and even swum across the unguarded creek that is the Rio Grande. Don't worry: Drumpf will build the giant ice wall.
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Th word I was looking for was "Spanish", not Hispanic or Latin American.
The point is that speaking a language does NOT define one's nationality.
Most of my (mother-tongue) Swedish speaking friends here in Finland, would without a doubt call themselves Finnish. The exceptions are those that come from Sweden. Pretty sure that if Linus was my friend, he would be be in the non-exceptions.
Finland has 2 official languages.
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Really, I thought it was summer up there?
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No, next weekend is Canadian summer.
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Finland has two main seasons - Mosquitoes and Mosquito-free.
Outdoor activities are preferred in the mosquito-free season, indoor activities are aside from Koskenkorva consumption also a lot of thinking and preparations for the mosquito-free season.
Re: Good (Score:2, Insightful)
The quality of trolls is really slipping around here
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That's not nice!
I am sure this poor soul just tried many times to gain tenure, and ended up having to take a real job in software instead.
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What does tenure have to do with it? You become a Physicist when obtaining a Ba or Ma in the field. You become a scientist when obtaining a PhD. This person has one. It is immaterial what you do after.
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You are a scientist when you perform science.
It dos not matter if you have a Ba, Ma, Phd or are a professor.
Most of the titles above require you to do science before you even can acquire such a title, as in a diploma thesis, or for more "natural" sciences: field studies outside in the woods.
Don't know in what world you live, but in Germany a student physics is called: Physicist.
Q: "What are you doing?"
A: "I'm a Physicist"
A completely valid answer for a student of physics.
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Do you think that your primary care doctor invented all the drugs and tests you get? Do architects design and build the entire building by themselves? Does the CEO of a cable company personally bring the fiber or cable to your door?
Sometimes stupid can be cute. This does not apply to you
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No. And if you were able to use Google, you would have found very fast that this is a specialization in Physics: "Multiphysics treats simulations that involve multiple physical models or multiple simultaneous physical phenomena." Or are you implying a simulation expert physicist working at a software firm suddenly loses his credentials? That would be even more stupid.
Re:But what if we fed it more power? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is proceeding the way that scientific progress normally works. An experimenter found an effect that did not fit in the current paradigm. Other experimenters found similar results. Now theoreticians are coming up with hypothesis that may explain the result. Other theoretical types will either agree or disagree. Other experiments will be done to test the hypothesis. Eventually a general consensus will emerge. It's all completely normal.
Remember it was 100 years ago that Einstein predicted gravity waves, and they were just detected. Eventually can be a long time.
Re:But what if we fed it more power? (Score:5, Interesting)
>Remember it was 100 years ago that Einstein predicted gravity waves, and they were just detected. Eventually can be a long time.
And worth noting that, in science, 100 years can be enough for the "laugh-you-out-of-the-room" crazy idea to become the mainstream consensus theory. A perfect example:
1912 - Wegener proposes continental drift. He gets laughed out of the room. Firstly he's not a geologist but a botanist and he basis his ideas on the agreement of the fossil records between Africa and South America but he has no real explanation for what can move a whole continent. He suggests forces in the mantle but every geologist "knows" those forces are far too weak (today we have a completely different model of those forces that's more than capable of it).
1930s - Arthur Holmes proposes an early version of plate-tectonics theory that at least makes Wegener's ideas sound a bit more plausible. Most geologists remain unconvinced to say the least.
1955 - Two scientists show up at a geology conference to rehash Wegener's idea. But they are armed with two key new weapons. One - they didn't used the land-shorelines but the shorelines about 50miles into the sea where erosion is less prevalent. Two, they used a computer to model the pieces - and the fits were just too damn perfect to ignore. They also propose a new mechanism for what could actually provide the force to move the continents - the theory we now call plate tectonics, basically an updated version Holmes's ideas. The conference ends up just as divided but, somehow, moving continents are now the consensus theory.
1990s - the new theory of plume tectonics explains most of the remaining questions about the subject, and what has long been mainstream science with a lot of unanswered bits suddenly makes tremendous sense. This is the prevailing theory today.
But look at that timeline - in a matter of about a hundred years an idea that probably occurred to many people over the centuries but was dismissed as fantasy by any serious scientist goes from ridiculous to mainstream - because we develop ever better technologies to gather data and test theories in simulations which gives us information not previously available. Now we've even got strong evidence that plate tectonics happen on other planets (notably Mars).
Re:But what if we fed it more power? (Score:4, Insightful)
First: magic? Nobody claims it have anything to do with magic. Well except idiots and trolls.
Second: how the fuck do you know? IF the em-drive does work it requires _very_ specific circumstances to work, do you expect that those circumstances would be common in the neighborhood so that people could trivially detect the effect?
Third: continuing your line of reasoning would lead a reasonable person to conclude that semiconductors and the field effect are "magic" and doesn't naturally exist, the same for super-conductors. Yet we are using machines based on semiconductors using the field effect to do Boolean logic to read this very website!
Re:But what if we fed it more power? (Score:4, Interesting)
An experimenter found an effect that did not fit in the current paradigm.
Actually that is not what happened regarding the EM drive.
One guy thought it out and published his thoughts.
Now plenty of research labs are building prototypes: and all found unexplainable thrust
Right now the race is to either find flaws in the experiments and also to find simpler explanations than the ones the original guy(s) had to present (Roger Shawyer, Guido Fetta).
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Unfortunately, brains have already fallen out of the heads of all open minded idiots, so they cannot contribute much to the discussion.
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Emitted photons DO provide a thrust, but the thrust is very minimal, and only noticeable after long periods of time.
Several deep space probes have "anomalous" trajectories that have since been attributed to the IR photons being emitted from the heat sinks of their RTGs.
The EM-Drive is only generating all this press hoopydoo, because the thrust it exerts on the tortion pendulum is greater than that expected from this light pressure alone. If it could be explained handily by light pressure, it would have been
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You misunderstand. Nobody with an actual clue claimed the device violates known physics (there are a lot of clueless morons in the discussion whenever "magic" devices are the subject though), the claim is that the theory of operation offered by the creators of the device violates known physics and that does make the explanation exceptionally unlikely to be true.
As this new paper now shows, it seems no known physics is violated, there is just some tiny extension of it that is consistent with what was already
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Unlike the bogus explanation of the EM drive creators,
Could you point out what is bogus on the "explanation" of the original "inventors"?
Because so far on /. no one did, and I find the articles I read about it very plausible. Thank you.
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