Where does it say it is a massless thing? I mean, if the effect is massless, sure, whatever, but the apparatus still has mass. So that state of free energy cannot be reached, no?
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
NASA Publishes Peer Reviewed Paper on EM Drive: It Works
- Thread starter cheezcake
- Start date
- Status
Where does it say it is a massless thing? I mean, if the effect is massless, sure, whatever, but the apparatus still has mass. So that state of free energy cannot be reached, no?
Ether_Snake
å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®
Well I forgot to say: the simplest code is "there is no rule, just avoid wide divergences in the immediate future compared to the present". So you do have to make tests, but you don't need to hire a mathematician, just a programmer for a line of code
So either the universe had a lot of free time but didn't want to learn maths, or it wrote all the maths and then shot itself in the head.
Vincent Alexander
Member
Nice! Now I just have to try and understand all of this stuff. Reading up on EM drives now.
Not if you're not sure if it could be due to an error.
Secondly, understanding it helps us to better understand the mechanics of tbe universe, even if it still would turn out to be "impossible".
TheLostBigBoss
Banned
...what?
Why didn't they include that in their tests and methodology for such an important review?
PantherLotus
Professional Schmuck
This is amazing!
Ether_Snake
å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®
Oh right; if the rule is just "avoid divergences" you are more likely to have no error than if you say "I'll figure out a set of rules to avoid chaos". Checking all outcomes to find the least chaotic future is less error prone than writing a bunch of rules.
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
that was months ago, wasn't it? I thought this publication was about an updated version of the experiment..
science is hard
cheezcake
Member
1. This paper was published two days ago and I don't recall seeing a GAF thread on it
2. There's quite a lot in the paper of potential error sources from test conditions and equipment and how they mitigate their potential effects. The only thing they note is thermal shift was addressed in their test methodology but not completely.
Messofanego
Banned
Yes the apparatus has mass because how the fuck are you measuring anything? What it doesn't have mass is the reaction mass (which is why this is called massless or reactionless thrust) that everything need to have to conserve momentum. As far as we know, momentum always has to be conserved, which means that to create ANY thrust, you need to have an identical opposite thrust (3rd law of motion). Whenever you lift yourself from the ground, you're also pushing the ground down. Whenever you're walking and moving froward, you're also pushing the ground backward. In this experiment, this is not true. The apparatus is creating thrust without "pushing" anything (obviously as far as we know: the paper hypotesize that they are pushing against the quantum vacuum, which is the same as saying that you're extracting energy from the universe). Which means that you're creating thrust without reaction mass.
This violate conservation of momentum, and more drastically, conservation of energy (locally) because there always exist a velocity over which the thrust given result in greater energy that the one you're throwing in to get the thrust in the first place. This is not true of classical thruster because in classical thrusters the mass you're pushing against also get more expensive in term of energy to accellerate from (aka: rockets).
No idea. I assume it's a peer review based on findings from older tests, they didn't re-run the tests to take the Dresden theory into account. At least that's what I gather from this sentence from the report:
"All dc power and control signals pass between the external equipment and vacuum chamber internal components via sealed feedthrough ports. "
The university of Dresden assumes that the observed force isn't propulsion, but electromagnetic interaction between the "engine" and the power cable (which is fixed to the walls of the vacuum chamber and therefore static). To rule that possibility out, the Dresden report suggested testing a self-contained, battery powered unit,
Keep in mind, this is the same experiment Eagleworks did all those months ago. There are still plenty of experiments left to do, and we're still months away from determining even if it works, not to mention why.
Luckily, if they can get the thrust high enough, Goddard said they'd take a look, which would be a good source of independent verification of their results. Lots of wierd shit is supposedly found that later turns out to be error, see tons of new particles that were thought to be discovered at 3 sigma significance, to later be a statistical anomoly and the FTL neutrinos that were caused by a wiring error.
As with anything in science, it has not been proven to work, only to not fail, and continued experiments will try again and again to show how the device actually doesn't work, and it's just some source of error unaccounted for. It's important to be sceptical, exciting news as this is, particularly when what is experimentally observed contradicts a fundamental cornerstone of physics. This will be a process that takes years and years and years, and every experiment will have to be exhausted before we can definitively say it probably works.
Edit: As someone else pointed out, there has already been a future test stating it may have been electromagnetic interaction with an outside source causing the thrust. Future tests will have to take that into account.
Luckily, if they can get the thrust high enough, Goddard said they'd take a look, which would be a good source of independent verification of their results. Lots of wierd shit is supposedly found that later turns out to be error, see tons of new particles that were thought to be discovered at 3 sigma significance, to later be a statistical anomoly and the FTL neutrinos that were caused by a wiring error.
As with anything in science, it has not been proven to work, only to not fail, and continued experiments will try again and again to show how the device actually doesn't work, and it's just some source of error unaccounted for. It's important to be sceptical, exciting news as this is, particularly when what is experimentally observed contradicts a fundamental cornerstone of physics. This will be a process that takes years and years and years, and every experiment will have to be exhausted before we can definitively say it probably works.
Edit: As someone else pointed out, there has already been a future test stating it may have been electromagnetic interaction with an outside source causing the thrust. Future tests will have to take that into account.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
some people about to get pissed
D
Deleted member 80556
Unconfirmed Member
Awesome. Hope more scientists get on this, because I'm hyped as heck that this is working at all. Wonder what's the physics behind it. Gotta read that GAF thread.
Motherfuckers are going to kill the asteroid redirection program!
Even NASA is politicized, Jesus.
Motherfuckers are going to kill the asteroid redirection program!
Even NASA is politicized, Jesus.
cheezcake
Member
Photon rockets work yet aren't free energy (at least, i've never seen anyone say that). You know, basic lasers or lights, because light pressure. Really inefficient though, at about 300MW per newton (assuming perfect laser, i think?).
So why would this be free energy? Because it doesn't have reaction mass but is far more efficient than a photon drive that also doesn't have reaction mass?
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
Nope. Peer review takes a while, so it's not surprising this came much later than the experiments.
It's moderately strong evidence. There's been no independent verification of its findings, and statistical anomolies happen all the tine. When another study comes out from a different team, then I'll start to feel as if there's a large chance it works. In till then, it's important to remain skeptical, particularly when the machine violates something as important as the conservation of momentum.
Missed that. Nice. Hope they're right. Wonder why they didn't go the self-contained route though, that would have been 100% conclusive.
cheezcake
Member
Ah I don't think that this is a true reactionless drive which violates the conservation of momentum (that would make it a perpetual motion machine basically). I just think that if it works it's indicative of a gap in our understanding of some elements of physics, and would eventually be proven a quasi-reactionless drive more akin to a light sail or similar.
thehypocrite
Member
Are we in a simulation?
BlueTsunami
there is joy in sucking dick
Pity works wonders
TimeEffect
Member
So, total dumbass here, but my understanding of the wave/particle thing is that because we observe it, the light (?) or whatever we use influences the outcome. So uh. That's all I know and have no idea what all of this means.
Does the pilotwave theory say that electrons DO have a firm position, and that we are just influencing it?
Because photons still have momentum even if they have no rest mass, so you're never violating conservation of momentum, so there's never a reference frame where you can get infinite energy from a photon rocket.
EDIT: better explained here , about photon rockets http://physics.stackexchange.com/qu...-and-i-turn-on-a-flashlight-will-i-accelerate
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
Positive news, but we're not in the clear yet. The implications for pilot wave theory are impressive.
Ether_Snake
å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®
PWT says the particle isn't in multiple places at once until observed, so yes. We influence the wave that drives the particle. If you watch the silicon droplet video I posted in that article you'll see it in action, at macro-scale, but it is basically how it might be working at smaller scales since all the results from the Double Slit experiment are reproduced at macro scale too.
Like I always say, it's like a beach ball on water. Imagine that there are waves, they can influence where the beach ball will go, but it doesn't mean that the beach ball will be in multiple places at once. Obviously if you check where the beach ball ends up multiple times, it will look like the beach ball was a wave until it reached its final destination, but then you think "hey that's dumb and probably wrong, maybe there were waves moving the ball"
Hoho for breakfast
Member
Most of this is over my head but it sounds pretty damn significant if something is really going on.
Do we know what the hell a wave of space time is in Bohmian physics? Like, wtf is a "wave" of space time? Does it have to do with gravity and mass and does this mean anything new for what "time" is?
I'm so confused.
Do we know what the hell a wave of space time is in Bohmian physics? Like, wtf is a "wave" of space time? Does it have to do with gravity and mass and does this mean anything new for what "time" is?
I'm so confused.
OK, so, the problem with EmDrive is that it is apparently producing thrust without using any known existing mechanism, and so, at least by definition, produces free energy?
I mean, considering that conservation of momentum is a big deal, it seems illogical that EmDrive could actually do that, and it would be logical to assume it isn't actually free, only that our knowledge is less than complete.
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
This is still nondeterministic, just in a slightly different way.
A particle can still be influenced by "ripples" in the pilot wave that originate from sources so far away there is no way study them directly.
Science flip-flops again within a matter of minutes!
Ok so if this ends up true space exploration and mining could actually become a thing. If that is the case how does our current laws handle the ownership of those resources. Man just imagine what we could do if we just had a boat load of the rare earth minerals we needed for so many good technologies.
BlueTsunami
there is joy in sucking dick
Err, this seems to be unlikely to change anything soon.
The thrust to power ratio of EmDrive, at least in its current experimental setups, is awful. Ion thrusters apparently are better, and they're useless for anything bigger than space probes.
Obviously, if this scales up, it will be useful for some things (depending on how good it gets).
But it probably won't solve cheap space access, and thus probably won't have effect on space mining right away.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
This is a list of statements that Trump has said regarding space, throughout the campaign.
http://www.planetary.org/get-involved/be-a-space-advocate/election2016/trump.html
Some excerpts:
SaganIsGOAT
Junior Member
Übermatik;224995059 said:
I'm giggling
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
I'm not an expert in this area, so perhaps someone more knowledgable can comment on this, but iiuc it comes down to a difference of definition as to what "deterministic" means.
The equations of motion for the particles may be completely deterministic, but without knowing the initial value of the pilot wave everywhere in the universe those equations alone aren't always enough to make a reasonably accurate prediction about the next state of a system given its current state.
I think a good analogy would be chaos theory, where the system evolves according to deterministic rules but there are still occasions where unless you know the initial conditions with infinite accuracy it's not possible to determine ahead of time the next state of the system to any useful degree of accuracy.
Ether_Snake
å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®
edit: next page
Melon Husk
Member
No, it doesn't work.
You shouldn't be cheering at their inability to debunk their own setup.
The fact that the thrust effect isn't linear and they're listing the measured thrust as mN/kW when they've only gone up to 80 W is ridiculous.
You shouldn't be cheering at their inability to debunk their own setup.
The fact that the thrust effect isn't linear and they're listing the measured thrust as mN/kW when they've only gone up to 80 W is ridiculous.
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked
- Locked