An electromagnetic drive being developed by NASA to operate without rocket fuel, in a vacuum, is seemingly defying the laws of physics, and raising hopes for the future of space travel.
h/t TSB
An electromagnetic drive being developed by NASA to operate without rocket fuel, in a vacuum, is seemingly defying the laws of physics, and raising hopes for the future of space travel.
h/t TSB
I’ll wait and see. I’ve heard these stories before.
“defying the laws of physics, and raising hopes for the future of space travel.”
Obamafarts.
But how will this improve relations with Muslims, NASA’s most important mission. Maybe they can help Iran develop the reactor to power this drive.
NASA has degenerated into a cesspool of pseudoscience and superstition. Just how many utterly bogus claims from NASA charlatans and frauds must we put up with until we shut the clown show down?
warp 9.5 scotty.
Defy the laws of physics? Right. NOT. NASA had better put another turban on.
Doing warp 7 in a warp 5 zone carries heavy fines and a stint on Elba II slow down your runabout and shuttlecraft
You guys do realize that this changes -everything- right? If it actually works, at all, we will have practical moon colonies, practical asteroid mining, practical orbital facilities. Because constant acceleration/deceleration allows huge speeds to be reached, cutting transit times.
As in, someplace to GO. New frontier, boys.
If the space warping light path changes are not artifacts, then these guys have managed to bend space time with electromagnetic force. That’s huge.
If your discovery defies the laws of physics, either the previous understanding of the laws of physics is wrong or you are mistaken about your “discovery”. Both have happened in science before, but one of them much more frequently than the other.
this is very promising, but there’s the sticky little matter of getting into orbit. it’s been said that getting into orbit is being halfway to anywhere.
You know this is a communist russian source, don’t you?
Star Trek technology from some obscure web site. The “fountain of youth” from Time Magazine. “Head transplants” all over the news. Legalize pot and every form of depraved sex. Put it all together and you have an alternately dazzled, indulged or numbed populace who won’t notice while rights are systematically stripped away and the economy becomes sclerotic. Meanwhile the elites buy up more and more islands, 300 foot boars, private jets and helicopters, politicians, police forces, etc etc.
If it worked, Obamba will sell it to China for a golf membership at the Bejing Golf & Country club.
For a couple of young village caddy’s he’ll toss in an Aircraft Carrier.
Ha, I see I am far from being the only skeptic here. From the article…” ….such a cavity would convert electrical energy directly into motion (thrust) without requiring fuel.”
I am not a trained scientist, which may be an advantage in these times, but is “electrical energy” not a fuel itself? Also, since so many die-hard leftists seem to operate in a vacuum, I wonder if this could be used to power their Prius’?
Yet another bizarre advanced technology article from the same site….. too funny.
http://sputniknews.com/russia/20150429/1021513320.html
Invoke all the Quantum-mumbo-jumbo you want. If the thrust generated is so small that it’s measurement is controversial then I’m going to be sceptical. I want to see it move something.
When the F-1 engines on the Saturn V started you didn’t need complicated simulations to tell you they were generating thrust.
That’s scientific illiteracy on the part of the writer. Instead of “fuel”, what he should have said is “reaction mass”. All known space drives work by conservation of momentum: throw something out the back of the rocket (burning fuel), and the rocket goes forward. This drive appears to take power in and produce thrust without needing to throw anything out the end of the rocket. That violates Newtonian physics, but then so does all of quantum mechanics.
I’m not sceptical as much as I am ho-hum. The experiments are repeatable and they work in a hard vacuum, which eliminates a lot of the possible “well, it could be this other thing” explanations. But just because something produces milliNewtons of thrust in a lab doesn’t mean it can ever be turned into anything useful outside a niche. Gallium arsenide microprocessor chips were supposed to break the 3.0 GHz barrier in 1998. We’re still waiting.
Oh look NASA is trying to justify its existence again.
That’s because we got to 5GHz using silicon – which was much cheaper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER6
I guess I’ll try to read the wikipedia article about vaccuum states. They also have a page on this “Q-thruster”.
Also, fun quote from wikipedia, “A number of notable physicists have found the Q-thruster concept to be implausible.” At least it isn’t consensus science.
I wonder if they couldn’t reach some minimal thrust by merely throwing electrons or photons out the back.
And apparently the spontaneous creation of a proto-cell – as biologists simulated the ancient conditions in a test tube required for the materialist generation of life – was just around the corner in 2004, than 2006, than 2008…
Meanwhile, we are probably closer to simply tailoring a reproducing proto-cell from scratch based upon our understanding of the required components. The implications of that would blow a few sprockets from the heads of atheist vegan leftist greenies everywhere. It might even result in a collapse of their worldview.
Yep, settled science. The theory is sound. Blah, blah, blah.
Sorry Daniel – good comment. My cynicism is just set at “high” this morning.
The actual term is propellant.
Ion and electric drives do just this. They have a low thrust but very high specific impulse which is basically thrust per mass of propellant. To avoid having to carry propellant you either have to use a “light drive” which is VERY low thrust or suck up the hydrogen atoms in your path and use a fusion reactor to blast them out the back.
Brings to mind cold fusion!
Phantom, you are dead on! This absolutely changes everything.
The reality, as taught by history, is that everything is impossible until it isn’t. IOW, until someone figures it out.
Years ago I read Chuck Jaeger’s autobiography. At that time about half the world’s scientists believed that it was impossible to break through the sound barrier, and anything doing so would literally disintegrate. Then Jaeger pulled it off.
The implications of this breakthrough regarding space travel are staggering, and it opens the door to myriad possibilities down the road yet to even be conceived.
Of course there are the naysayers, eh? But then Galileo, too, faced the same resistance and criticisms.
(…I am reminded of that Star Trek moment when the first warp drive test succeeded. 🙂 )
NASA employs more than 20,000 people, some of whom are pretty smart. It has an annual operating budget of more than 18 billion dollars.
For all the wheel spinning and political bullshit, it’s perfectly possible, even likely, that somebody in some corner of the agency will come up with something great.
Time will tell.
Unlike our ancestors, NASA can no longer get a man into orbit. I don’t share your optimism.
Love to see this be true.
Cynical as hell.
If true, the ETHER exists and Einstein’s Relativity and Bohr’s Quantum physics goes up in smoke: poof!
Executive summary: the last 100 years of Physics gets trashed. Time to start over.
Dan Kurt
This is an extraordinary claim, and thus requires extraordinary evidence. Actually change the orbit of a spacecraft with this device, and we’ll have something.
Until then, assume this is like the “faster than c neutrinos” from CERN that turned out to be a measurement error.
Not all Dan.
“…is seemingly defying the laws of physics.”
I thought only CO2 could do that. Check out the top banner; another indication of a questionable source here; though, it would be cool if it were true.
Not at all, Dan. Schroedinger’s cat is purring 🙂
I have read about this “Q-drive” before. It apparently bounces microwaves around inside of a closed cavity, which is somehow (insert hand-waving here) supposed to generate thrust. They are now claiming that it generates a tiny amount of thrust in a vacuum. Since the cavity is closed, why would it not generate thrust if it were in atmosphere, or even underwater? Nothing is being exchanged between the cavity and its surroundings.
For a physical analog, think of a railway boxcar, sitting on absolutely friction-free wheels and bearings, sitting on absolutely level track. Such a boxcar would start rolling if you pushed on it with a feather, or even if the wind blew on one end. (so assume no wind) You are standing inside the boxcar, with a satchel of baseballs, and are throwing them at a target on the end wall, with the expectation that the momentum of the baseballs will be transferred to the boxcar, causing it to roll. Classical physics tells us you wasting your time, because for every unit of momentum you apply to the baseballs, you apply an equal and opposite amount to the floor of the boxcar by way of your feet. The boxcar might jerk to and fro because of the time lag between your release of the ball and its impact on the end wall, but there will be no net motion.
Remember, physical laws are not “laws” because somebody so decreed them to be. They are laws because in all observation and experimentation they have never been observed to be untrue. The laws violated by this device are so fundamental that it would be Nobel Prize material for sure if it were true. It would be both astonishing and exciting if such a reactionless drive were discovered, but I won’t hold my breath.
Iran will insist that they be given all the research on this drive in return for giving up nuclear research, to which der Obama will quickly agree, in return Iran will build the bomb anyway.
It is unlikely the moonbats on the net are correct that alien drives have been reverse engineered…..just sayin’.
There has never been any weapon system in history that has never been used….
Foo-fighters?
My space ship will be propelled by cold fusion. This is a waste of time.
You have to dig into the original sources to find the info, but it’s not that the drive only produces thrust in a vacuum (it does it on the bench, too); it’s that reproducing the results in a hard vacuum eliminates the possibility that the thrust is caused by thermal convection in the air around the prototype, or vibration, or electrical resonance or who knows what else. We’re talking about incredibly low measured thrust values here, although they claim reliable reproducibility.
Looking at the pictures of the reported devices http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive/ they are open.
Where out there is the Jupiter 2?
Yeah, I understand the need to control for influences of air on the device. I wonder if they also control for the interaction of the magnetic fields set up the electric current needed to operate the device (which might be substantial) and the magnetic field of the Earth itself? If the device were free to rotate on one or more axes, it might (when the current is turned on) swing to align itself with the Earth’s field, just as a compass needle does. If it is constrained from rotating, that minute torque might be misinterpreted as thrust.
Let them repeat the experiment with a flock of proton magnetometers surrounding the test chamber.
According to the article that Robert from Ottawa quoted, the “thing” is working. This wouldn’t be the first time the laws of physics been turned onto it head. Relativity and Quantum comes to mind.
I would place my bets on some sort of time-space distortion. The front of the cone with all that microwave concentrated there creates a small but detectable change in time-space quantum interaction, causing the drive to keep falling forward. Warp!
But then, what do I know?
If that engine doesn’t work they can always use this as a Plan B.
http://www.google.com/patents/US6650527
Method and apparatus for modulating the direction and magnitude of the Casimir force between two bodies. In accordance with the illustrative embodiment, a repulsive Casimir force is generated by placing two bodies in near-proximity to one another.
Way ahead of you. Already there with teleportation.
See? I’m now typing this on Saturn. (The air, if yo can call it that, stinks, BTW, and if you try to walk you’re sinking up to your armpits. The rings are kinda neat up close though.
There see, now back on earth. I have to go clean the Saturnian goo off my shoes. Not sure of what it’s made of… sticky and slippery at the same time.
Don’t need no stinkin’ Q drives.
didn’t the Ruskies develop “silent” drives for their Subs???
this sounds like about the same, only different, maybe:-)))
the article I read previously on this was simply a demo of the fact the writer was clueless on physics
I’ still waiting for my cold fussion reactor:-))
Illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator? You mean Marvin the Martian works for NASA?
If an electromagnetic field can be used to generate thrust without the need for fuel, then what generates the electromagnetic field? A very long extension cord?
Like I said at the beginning: Obamafarts. It’s a new branch of physics known as circular fission.
What’s created in the chamber is called a “linear circularity” …
Here’s the thing – there’s no actual link to NASA. NASASPACEFLIGHT dot com is a pseudo-news portal.
It’s bogus.