I was beginning to worry that everybody else had quit.
Quote from: IslandPlaya on 11/22/2014 06:11 amAm thinking or trying something with my friend and a copper frustum with a 900w magentron (out of a uWave oven of course.) Planning to suspend the whole setup on piano wire...What we hope is that we get a nice deflection cos of the high power.Is this a good way to go about it?The magnetrons used in microwave ovens typically cost $25 on EBay and range up to about 1kW power. The trouble with them is, they are not intended for high Q applications and will burn out if attached to a resonator. I first learned of this in discussions with Paul March in 2007 when he and Sonny built their first Shawyer resonator with funding from Gary Hudson. According to Paul, what you need is a continuous wave magnetron, which back then was much more difficult to find and I think the only stuff available on a budget was from Russia. (Paul actually asked me to help him find one which proved to be a difficult task.) Now they're pretty commonplace though, I have no idea why. My guess is they have a commercial application in inductive heating or some such but I'm not familiar with it.http://www.rell.com/products/Magnetrons/Magnetron-CW.htmlAs far as suspending it from a wire, that's a common practice. I would just note to you, that especially if the wires are the power leads, clearly demonstrating any action one might observe is not thermal and result of the leads, is a huge task. This is what Tom Mayhood faced in his masters thesis work back in the 90's and he was never successful clearly ruling out that what he had was thermal. http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/physics/graduate-studies-in-physics-at-cal-state-university-fullerton/ And I would just note again, that none of these hobbyist efforts is worth anything if you can't rule out spurious sources. There are many dozens of experiments that have been done over the last couple decades that are clearly useless, as they don't cope with the actual science of eliminating such possibilities.So again I'd just note, that it is almost impossible for me to see how any low thrust experiment could be useful without providing vacuum. It doesn't need to be much vacuum and it doesn't need to be expensive, but you'll be gluing lots of acrylic together to a hard line to a chamber, and you'll want to pay the cost of a decent roughing pump like the Welch Duoseal 1400. If there were a way to do a decent experiment without vacuum, trust me I'd be all for that, but I don't see one.As to thrust balance, there are lots of different designs. The suspension notion has some merit, but if one is to completely eliminate thermal as a spurious source, those wires are serious trouble. What I think would be much better, and perhaps in many ways easier; would be to use magnetic suspension. This is surprisingly easy to do and apart from the stray magnetic fields this generates, it solves a host of issues. MIT is doing this and I have to say, I like it! But when you're using these powerful fields for suspension, you both need to make judicious use of something like Mu metal during your testing (once you have thrust) to show you don't have b field coupling, and you'll need to make a fully powered test where your dummy load is as perfect as it can be. For the MET, this is simple: just alter the phase between the 1w and 2w portions of the power supply as this should not matter much for coupling and so provide a good dummy. For thruster designs that use a single frequency component, the task is harder. You'll need to think on that. Here though for your consideration is a small vid of the MIT Space Propulsion Lab balance in acton. It's a fun setup. There's nothing like floating stuff in the extra bedroom. :-)
Am thinking or trying something with my friend and a copper frustum with a 900w magentron (out of a uWave oven of course.) Planning to suspend the whole setup on piano wire...What we hope is that we get a nice deflection cos of the high power.Is this a good way to go about it?
Quote from: JohnFornaro on 11/19/2014 12:36 pmWell, the propulsive efficiency of the "advertised" experimental devices is very low. For some reason, I seem to be the only person to put this in English: The devices aim to convert electrical energy into linear momentum.That is one interpretation, based upon certain explanations for the thrust being true and others not. Generally though, any explanation that holds this view that this is a force transducer, leads to a violation of conservation. The exception to this, is Woodward's theory which posits that this, if indeed it is generating Mach-Effects; is a gravinertial transistor, not a transducer. It is not transforming electrical power into kinetic but rather, controlling the flow of inertial flux into and out of the active mass, and that therefore the vast bulk of the energy and power provided is not electrical but gravinertial. This is why Woodward's theory alone does not violate conservation. Also, it is why Woodward's theory alone posits hugely improved thrust to electrical power ratios than what we've seen--the power is not being transduced or converted into thrust. It is merely controlling the flux that gives matter its mass.
Well, the propulsive efficiency of the "advertised" experimental devices is very low. For some reason, I seem to be the only person to put this in English: The devices aim to convert electrical energy into linear momentum.
I prefer to reach the planets around other stars
BTW remember the thread about Whites warp drive theory where casimir force suitability as exotic matter was argued?i have read comments about exotic matter in this context just being a weird name for the correct spacial conditions for creating the proper curvature to enable warps.
Indeed it seems that we don't need exotic matter to achieve those ends. I don't know about wormholes and warp drives, but at least getting a ship to move without carrying around propellant. We can engineer the QV to obtain the same results as using exotic matter, without resorting to exotic matter, which may not exist.
Regarding the Weekend Interview on Nov. 15 by Sohrab Ahmari ("Finding our place in the stars"), in which I was interviewed:We physicists have tried to figure out what the laws of physics say about wormholes. We don't yet have an absolutely firm answer, but it appears very likely that the physical laws prevent wormholes from ever existing, and that if wormholes can exist, they cannot occur naturally - they must be created by some very advanced civilization, such as the bulk beings in "Interstellar".
Indeed, building on our previous discussion on the nature of the QV itself (has weight but gravitationally repulsive, possible QV suitability as exotic matter analogue), Dr. White repeatedly hints that he is exploring this line of research in his warp experiments. He doesn't come out and say it. He is testing Qthrusters on a test bench designed to look for warped spacetime. At the 55:30 mark on through 58:30, he gets a tough question regarding this and he shies away from that. He's essentially saying (or I am, not sure) that creating a perturbed state in the QV is changing the shape of spacetime from flat to sloped. He keeps his core concepts about Q-thruster physics close at hand and doesn't make too many sensational claims. A good move.
@Rodal; in that caricature he looks like a cross between Alfred E. Newman and a garden gnome.
a little less Alfred E Newman-y there. Still resembles a gnome though...But Prof Thorne was the one who suggested Einstein Rosen Bridges for Carl Sagans Sci Fi movie. it's hardly likely he really meant natural wormholes do not occur. He probably meant rather that natural macroscopic wormholes that can be used for travel do not exist or at least do not exist nearby.True story; there are currently astronomical missions being planned to try to see if some blackholes are in fact "just" wormholes.as far as i know no one has ruled out blackholes as being a type of wormhole either. and certain things in physics from the range of the strong force to gravity to quantum mechanics imply wormholes must exist. I have read in the last year or so many science articles on such applications of wormholes.recent ones said entanglement and gravity required wormholes to work.
Quote from: Mulletron on 11/23/2014 04:43 pmIndeed, building on our previous discussion on the nature of the QV itself (has weight but gravitationally repulsive, possible QV suitability as exotic matter analogue), Dr. White repeatedly hints that he is exploring this line of research in his warp experiments. He doesn't come out and say it. He is testing Qthrusters on a test bench designed to look for warped spacetime. At the 55:30 mark on through 58:30, he gets a tough question regarding this and he shies away from that. He's essentially saying (or I am, not sure) that creating a perturbed state in the QV is changing the shape of spacetime from flat to sloped. He keeps his core concepts about Q-thruster physics close at hand and doesn't make too many sensational claims. A good move.His warp interferometer experiment has implicit in it that the q thruster or a similar device does warp space. If it didn't he would have nothing to generate the warp he hopes to detect. And it has to be more than just the mass of his test article. if his interferometer was sensitive enough he could hypothetically at least measure the curvature due to the mass of atoms the beam passes by in the instrument. but it is not that sensitive. he hopes that running energy through it will produce a larger curvature than it's inert mass would and thus reach the threshold of sensitivity of the interferometer and his analysis technique. The Juday White interferometer is not sensitive enough to detect a micro-warp of the magnitude Dr White believes he is creating according to peer reviewed papers in response to his experiment. This is why he is currently learning another type of interferometer for his next series of experiments.http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1407/1407.7772.pdf