Star Trek impulse drive has been developed

"However scientists still have no idea how it actually works"

Love that quote. Makes the assumption that if we do not know then it can not be.

We don't know what we don't know.
 
Remember the guy/ guys who claimed "Cold Fusion" years ago...:rolleyes:..

I still ain't seen any proof of that concept...:no:
 
ElPaso Pilot said:
Hmm.., we'll see.

Smells like cold fusion to me.

http://io9.com/no-german-scientists-have-not-confirmed-the-impossibl-1720573809

<edit> Looks like I'm not the only one with this line of thought. ;)
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“I noted in [the study’s] conclusion paragraphs that [Tajmar’s] apparatus was producing hundreds of micro-Newtons of thrust when it got very hot and that his measuring instrumentation is not very accurate when the apparatus becomes hot,” Davis told io9. “He also stated that he was still recording thrust signals even after the electrical power was turned off which is a huge key clue that his thrust measurements are all systematic artifact false positive thrust signals.”

Hmmm. Heat. As in hot tea. Yes, I believe I've seen this plot before:

"Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning in this way: If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must have finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out how exactly improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn it on!
He did this and was rather startled when he managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator. He was even more startled when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he was lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had realized that one thing they couldn't stand was a smart-ass"

Fortunately the Germans would appear to have nothing to fear from rampaging physicists.
 
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Nasa thinks it works, and a prof. from Dresden showed it produces thrust, I hope it works.
 
Shawn said:
"However scientists still have no idea how it actually works"

Love that quote. Makes the assumption that if we do not know then it can not be.

We don't know what we don't know.
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Seems unlikely that they would investigate a prototype without having any clue as to how it works. Also, I'd take the part about "defying" conservation of momentum with a grain of salt. In over 300 years not a single violation of the law has been discovered, so any physicist who would say something like that is probably speaking figuratively.

Most likely, the article is an example of science reporting on the level of the kind of aviation reporting we know all too well. :rolleyes:
 
N801BH said:
Remember the guy/ guys who claimed "Cold Fusion" years ago...:rolleyes:..

I still ain't seen any proof of that concept...:no:
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In a nutshell, yes. Exactly.

This is not the first guy to have claimed to make free energy from the Casimir effect.

"NASA" doesn't control basic research in the way the reporting assumes. Basically, once you have your grant, you do whatever the hell you want. Success is measured in papers, not conclusions and not devices. That some guy at Glenn thought it might be interesting to look means exactly nothing.

That results are "a few months away from peer reviewed publication" is almost exactly the same statement as "we'll have a flyable prototype airplane real soon now." I'll believe it when it is actually written and accepted.

As for now, there is no evidence whatsoever that this guy has seen anything at all.

Crackpot engine designs pop up every year or two. They almost never amount to anything at all but some random nutcase's rantings.

Crackpot "theories of everything" are a lot more entertaining.
 
Well that's encouraging...

Can we fit one somehow into a skywagon? :happydance:
 
I posted about this when the NASA group news came out.

This German group apparently has a good reputation. Still, there seems to be lots of warranted skepticism. There are interesting discussions on the NASA space flight forum, which, incidentally, is not a NASA site. There has been enough interest that they are on thread number 3 and some of the folks joining this discussion appear to be in the field.
 
PaulS said:
Nasa thinks it works, and a prof. from Dresden showed it produces thrust, I hope it works.
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We all want to believe, but the science is not yet convincing me. Many goofball journalists cutting and pasting information they have no clues about.

THE LAST TIME we saw the so-called EM Drive, it was causing a kerfuffle over at NASAspaceflight.com, where a member of a tiny team called Eagleworks at NASA’s Johnson Space Center had posted some information about a propellantless propulsion device. People got really excited, like you do when you think super smart physicists might have figured out a way to travel to the farthest reaches of space by bouncing microwaves around in a cavity—no propellant, no extra weight, no end in sight. But as we explained, the NASA team’s results appeared just on the threshold of detection, weren’t peer-reviewed, and, you know, violated this pesky thing called conservation of momentum.
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http://www.wired.com/2015/07/really-propellantless-space-drives-still-not-thing/
 
Oh, and mainstream NASA has already backed away from the reports,

"While conceptual research into novel propulsion methods by a team at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston has created headlines, this is a small effort that has not yet shown any tangible results, ... NASA is not working on 'warp drive' technology."
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http://www.space.com/29363-impossible-em-drive-space-engine-nasa.html

Which were funded with, er, a $50K annual budget.

Despite the fact that the group works out of Johnson, under the auspices of NASA, Eagleworks still only runs on $50,000 a year in funding. “That’s not enough to conduct a high-quality experimental research program,” ... “They’d need $1.5 million, $2 million for five, six, seven years.”
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http://www.wired.com/2015/05/nasa-warp-drive-yeah-still-poppycock/
 
MAKG1 said:
In a nutshell, yes. Exactly.

This is not the first guy to have claimed to make free energy from the Casimir effect.

"NASA" doesn't control basic research in the way the reporting assumes. Basically, once you have your grant, you do whatever the hell you want. Success is measured in papers, not conclusions and not devices. That some guy at Glenn thought it might be interesting to look means exactly nothing.

That results are "a few months away from peer reviewed publication" is almost exactly the same statement as "we'll have a flyable prototype airplane real soon now." I'll believe it when it is actually written and accepted.

As for now, there is no evidence whatsoever that this guy has seen anything at all.

Crackpot engine designs pop up every year or two. They almost never amount to anything at all but some random nutcase's rantings.

Crackpot "theories of everything" are a lot more entertaining.
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I always get a kick out of a few people rewarming the "Dynacam is going to revolutionize the internal combustion engine" hype every few years...:rolleyes::lol:..

Ranks right up there with the Moller Skycar...:goofy:
 
The Casimir force, or something that is essentially the Casimir force, was apparently one explanation proposed by somebody that thought the device actually worked, but (a) the Casimir force can't be used to generate thrust and (b) the energy source for this thing is electrical, not some mysterious perpetual motion engine.

If they think this thing generates even microscopic amounts of thrust, I predict they will find they haven't truly isolated the system. It's either radiating and generating thrust via radiation pressure (NOT a very efficient means of propelling a spacecraft), or it's pushing on something, or there really isn't any net thrust and their tests are flawed.

A standing wave in a resonant cavity generates ZERO net force on the enclosure.

This is the first I've heard of this "EM Drive" so this is all of the top of my head, but basic physics says it can't work.
 
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azure said:
The Casimir force, or something that is essentially the Casimir force, was apparently one explanation proposed by somebody that thought the device actually worked, but (a) the Casimir force can't be used to generate thrust and (b) the energy source for this thing is electrical, not some mysterious perpetual motion engine.

If they think this thing generates even microscopic amounts of thrust, I predict they will find they haven't truly isolated the system. It's either radiating and generating thrust via radiation pressure (NOT a very efficient means of propelling a spacecraft), or it's pushing on something, or there really isn't any net thrust and their tests are flawed.

A standing wave confined to a resonant cavity generates ZERO net force on the enclosure.

This is the first I've heard of this "EM Drive" so this is all of the top of my head, but basic physics says it can't work.
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Azure: I'd be interested in your thoughts on some of the comments in the thread on the NASA space flight forum If you have an inkling to read any of those. Though with 3 threads each of hundreds of pages, I recognize that is a bit of an undertaking. It is all a bit above my pay grade, but it is interesting to read through. My understanding is that some of the folks from the NASA team have commented throughout those threads.
 
asechrest said:
Azure: I'd be interested in your thoughts on some of the comments in the thread on the NASA space flight forum If you have an inkling to read any of those. Though with 3 threads each of hundreds of pages, I recognize that is a bit of an undertaking. It is all a bit above my pay grade, but it is interesting to read through. My understanding is that some of the folks from the NASA team have commented throughout those threads.
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I took a quick look at the last page of the thread that you posted, but I don't really have time to go through the whole thing. It's also been a while since I've studied Jackson-level electrodynamics, so I'm not really in a good position right now to delve into it either. :( What I do know is that conservation of momentum in E&M is a subtle thing and it's easy to find mysterious "violations" of Newton if you don't correctly account for the momentum in the field (AND angular momentum too, as Feynman pointed out in a famous example in his Lectures).

My first impression is that most of them thought it was either thermal effects or escaping gases, in other words experimental artifacts. Whether that's what is actually happening or not, I think either one is a lot likelier than that Shawyer discovered a way to generate thrust without recoil.
 
Someday we will do something that we say is impossible by the laws of physics. Mostly because we don't know everything, and to say we do it pretty egotistical. All through time we have routinely done the impossible - or at least what we erroneously declared to be impossible.

A human will never break a 4 minute mile.
Heavier that air craft will never fly.
We can never break the sound barrier.
Prior to the transistor/microchip all of today's electronics would be impossible.

The list goes on and on. Someday, everyone in this thread who says it's impossible will be proved wrong. It's been shown time and time again. The impossible suddenly becomes possible. We may not be around when it happens, but it will.
 
Add to that: time is the same for all observers and space is always Euclidean. I fully expect that much of what we currently believe to be sacrosanct will someday be overturned. But revolutions in physics happen when laws are pushed into realms where they haven't been tested before. The correspondence principle is your friend. These guys aren't working in new realms. I don't think you're going to find a basic revolution here.
 
A key issue will be whether others can reliably reproduce their results.
 
azure said:
The Casimir force, or something that is essentially the Casimir force, was apparently one explanation proposed by somebody that thought the device actually worked, but (a) the Casimir force can't be used to generate thrust and (b) the energy source for this thing is electrical, not some mysterious perpetual motion engine.

If they think this thing generates even microscopic amounts of thrust, I predict they will find they haven't truly isolated the system. It's either radiating and generating thrust via radiation pressure (NOT a very efficient means of propelling a spacecraft), or it's pushing on something, or there really isn't any net thrust and their tests are flawed.

A standing wave in a resonant cavity generates ZERO net force on the enclosure.

This is the first I've heard of this "EM Drive" so this is all of the top of my head, but basic physics says it can't work.
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What isn't being factored in the potential that exists in Dark Energy and Dark Matter. If it can excite Dark Matter, it ican be reacting to creating gravity.
 
teejayevans said:
Yea, like dark matter and dark energy are a real thing.
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Dark matter almost certainly is, even if we haven't yet detected it directly. The alternative is that gravity doesn't always fall off exactly like 1/r^2. That's a serious proposal and I'm not sure whether the claims I've heard that it has been ruled out are correct. Last I heard, the Israeli theorist who came up with the idea said the observations were still consistent with a form of his theory.

Not that this has anything to do with the EM drive...
 
If the fool thing works it won't be too hard to prove. Build the engine, bolt it down and measure the damn thrust. The level of thrust the media describes is really easily measured.
 
steingar said:
If the fool thing works it won't be too hard to prove. Build the engine, bolt it down and measure the damn thrust. The level of thrust the media describes is really easily measured.
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I think that's part of the problem. It's producing such small amounts of thrust that it's on the edge of what can be measured - micro newtons if I remember it right. It produces a lot of heat, but I think the idea of bouncing EM waves inside a sealed container isn't going to do much from the thrust production standpoint.
 
bflynn said:
I think that's part of the problem. It's producing such small amounts of thrust that it's on the edge of what can be measured - micro newtons if I remember it right. It produces a lot of heat, but I think the idea of bouncing EM waves inside a sealed container isn't going to do much from the thrust production standpoint.
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It won't create thrust, it will create repulsion. This is going to be interesting to watch.
 
bflynn said:
I think that's part of the problem. It's producing such small amounts of thrust that it's on the edge of what can be measured - micro newtons if I remember it right. It produces a lot of heat, but I think the idea of bouncing EM waves inside a sealed container isn't going to do much from the thrust production standpoint.
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It isn't going to do ANYTHING from the thrust production standpoint, not even a uN. If that design is producing thrust it's via a mechanism that hasn't been identified yet.
 
azure said:
It isn't going to do ANYTHING from the thrust production standpoint, not even a uN. If that design is producing thrust it's via a mechanism that hasn't been identified yet.
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Correct, and where it will lead could be really interesting and lead to a major advance in knowledge of quantum physics.
 
bflynn said:
I think that's part of the problem. It's producing such small amounts of thrust that it's on the edge of what can be measured - micro newtons if I remember it right. It produces a lot of heat, but I think the idea of bouncing EM waves inside a sealed container isn't going to do much from the thrust production standpoint.
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Then scale up. The engine that's going to go into a space ship is going to be light and small. Should be able to build one on the ground and test it. Micronewtons will not fly a space ship.
 
Henning said:
There is nothing settled in physics, it's all incomplete.
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Exactly, the concept of "settled science" is a non sequitor. Science is a *process* for experimentation and hypothesis based on results, it's not a goal where we say "Ah, we know now, we can stop testing."
 
From the designer's web site:

At first sight the idea of propulsion without propellant seems impossible. However the technology is firmly anchored in the basic laws of physics and following an extensive review process, no transgressions of these laws have been identified.

The principle of operation is based on the well-known phenomenon of radiation pressure. This relies on Newton’s Second Law where force is defined as the rate of change of momentum. Thus an electromagnetic (EM) wave, travelling at the speed of light has a certain momentum which it will transfer to a reflector, resulting in a tiny force.

If the same EM wave is travelling at a fraction of the speed of light, the rate of change of momentum, and hence force, is reduced by that fraction. The propagation velocity of an EM wave, and the resulting force it exerts, can be varied depending on the geometry of a waveguide within which it travels. This was demonstrated by work carried out in the 1950’s. (CULLEN, A.L. ‘Absolute Power Measurements at Microwave Frequencies’ IEE Proceedings Vol 99 Part 1V 1952 P.100)

Thus if the EM wave travelling in a tapered waveguide is bounced between two reflectors, with a large velocity difference at the reflector surfaces, the force difference will give a resultant thrust to the waveguide linking the two reflectors. If the reflectors are separated by a multiple of half the effective wavelength of the EM wave, this thrust will be multiplied by the Q of the resulting resonant cavity, as illustrated in fig 1.

fig01.jpg


Fig 1. Diagram of an engine concept.

The inevitable objection raised, is that the apparently closed system produced by this arrangement cannot result in an output force, but will merely produce strain within the waveguide walls. However, this ignores Einstein’s Special Law of Relativity in which separate frames of reference have to be applied at velocities approaching the speed of light. Thus the system of EM wave and waveguide can be regarded as an open system, with the EM wave and the waveguide having separate frames of reference.

A similar approach is necessary to explain the principle of the laser gyroscope, where open system attitude information is obtained from an apparently closed system device.
 
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