Propellantless Field Propulsion and application

[Star-Drive]

Sorry - i did not see the first PDF at all the first time i looked.

I now had a chance to go over the calculations.

As far as I understand; the central effect you use is the mass fluctuation calculated for a test mass.

Unfortunately; I think a fundamental error is introduced in equation A4 in the appendix A, page 24, where your central equation is derived:

You write "In this frame we can ignore the difference between coordinate and proper time, and gammas (since they are all equal to one)" 

However, even if the relativistic gamma factor equals one at that time and in that frame of reference, the time derivative of gamma in that frame is of course not zero! Gamma is a function only of the particle velocity. This is the missing piece in the equation.

This derivative of gamma is not a relativistic correction - this is the change in the kinetic energy of the particle!

At this point, a time derivative on the rest mass is introduced, compensating for the missing kinetic energy. Subsequently, this leads to equations which predict fluctuation in mass.

Cheers,
Sirius

Sirius:

Up front I have to tell you that my formal training is as an Electrical Engineer with minors in math and astrophysics, so I'm not the best person to take up your below objections with for you need to be talking to the man who derived it.  IMO, it takes a special and general relativity specialist who has had many years becoming familiar with most of the various arguments that have swarmed around this topic over the years and that gentleman is James F. Woodard from California State University - Fullerton (CSUF) Campus, now partially retired who can be found here;   [email protected], if you need further clarifications about Woodward's Mach-Effect conjecture.

In the meanwhile I forwarded your comments to Jim Woodward last night and here is his reply:

"Paul,

Your correspondent is looking for a flaw in the argument as most would: in this case, taking an approximation which might suppress something that leads to a cancelation of the effect that is suspected.  He's right, of course, that in general the derivative of gamma is not zero.  It is easy to calculate.  You get gamma cubed times the dot product of the three velocity and three acceleration divided by c^2.  If the three velocity is not equal to zero (that is, if you are in some frame other than that of instantaneous rest of the test particle in this case), then dgamma/dt will likely be non-zero.  But in the frame of instantaneous rest, the three velocity is zero -- and so too is dgamma/dt.

If you stop and think about this for a few moments, it should be plain that dm0/dt =/= 0 is a real physical effect.  You should not be able to transform it away by choice of particular coordinates.  Especially since the Lorentz transformations do not depend on acceleration.  There is no fundamental error in Equation (A4).

Best,

Jim"


I also have most of Jim's and his graduate student Tom Mahood's earlier related M-E papers as well if you need copies.  You also might be interested in Jim's CSUF home & R&D pages:

http://physics.fullerton.edu/Woodward.html
http://physics.fullerton.edu/~jimw/general/ 

PS: We also have two decades worth of supporting data to back up Woodward's M-E conjecture. 

Best.

Paul March
Friendswood, TX

[Celebrimbor]

So what you're really saying is that through some mechanism (that I don't understand at all) there is some acceleration/boost/increase in kinetic energy. And this energy is accounted for by E=mc^2, which you refer to as gravitational potential energy, but most people call rest-mass energy.

Aren't you describing the theoretical limit of rocket propulsion? How is your idea fundamentally different from this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_photonic_rocket

Are you counting photons as propellant? Would you count gravitons as propellant? If not, why not?

Celebrimbor:

I'll try to paint a picture of the M-E and rockets that you can relate to, but this stuff is not easy to navigate through so bear with me. 

I'm not as dumb as I have been made out (physics PhD and numerical GRT enthusiast). I trust you to lead me through it in a transparent way I can understand...

BTW, until we have an experimentally verified quantum-gravity theory that merges QM and GRT into a harmonious whole, we have no clue whether "gravitons" or the quantification of gravity into particles exist or does not. 

Point taken.

So the GRT community talks about spacetime distortion waves being the seat of all gravitational and inertial phenomenon's instead. 

Well not just "waves" but more generally, warped spacetime. And GRT doesn't claim to explain "all" interial phenomena...

In fact, Woodward claims that Newtonian inertial reaction forces are the only TRUE force of gravity! Local gravitational disturbances, like the gee-field of the Earth, are just minor local spacetime distortions…

This isn't Woodward's claim, it's Einstein's GR theory. On Earth we live in a warped spacetime and, for the most part, we don't follow geodesics. So we feel a force. Nothing controversial so far...

Woodward’s transient Mach-Effect (M-E) conjecture is inextricably tied to his proposed origins of inertia theory based on Newton's three laws of motion, Mach’s Principle, Special and General Relativity Theories (SRT & GRT), Lorentz Invariance, with the latter requirement guarantying that the resulting conjecture observes all known conservation laws, along with Dennis Sciama’s 1953 and 1969 origins of inertia papers.   

OK thats a good shopping list, but by Newton's three laws, I assume you mean as genweralised by GR? But the way you include "both Special and General RTs" make me think you don't understand that you only needed to say General Relativity, since Special include as... a special case.

The strength of Woodward’s arguments relies on the strength of these underlying assumptions, which have yet to be disproven in or out of the labs. 

What underlying assumptions? Ok, no new assumptions so far...

Also note that since we are talking about using a hidden attribute of regular Newtonian inertial reaction forces instead of gravity effects to create the M-E, the magnitude of these predicted M-E transient inertial forces are in line with everyday inertial reaction forces that can be very large dependent on the magnitude of the applied acceleration, instead of the pico-picoscopic forces described by gravity effects or GRT predicted gravity waves due to the ~1x10^40 measured difference in gravity verses inertial derived effects.

Wow, thats a long sentence! You've lost me here. Are you claiming that M-E effects can be larger than GR effects? I don't see how, they sound the same so far.

One may legitimately then ask why does this huge difference in magnitude exist between spacetime distortions derived effects such as gravity and inertia? 

You read me like a book!

It results from the fact that the gravitational forces are created by spacetime distortions created by local mass/energy concentrations only, whereas inertial forces are created by the interactions of all the causally connected mass/energy in the universe which is currently pegged as having a radius of 13.7 billion light years.

The universe has a radius? Ok the causally-connected Universe. Is that really 13.7 bn ly? I thought the edge of the observable universe (OU), the particle horizon, was 46.6 bn ly away(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe) Hmmm, in GRT, spacetime, and hence, interial forces are effected by the entire OU. So what's different here is that spactime is determined local and interial forces are globally determined (so necessarily separate from spacetime). Is that right?

Now why did I provide all of the foregoing when talking about the difference between the M-E based thrusters and rockets?   First off the reader has to remember that the rocket and its propellant form a small  CLOSED-loop system. 

Small? Loop? Closed, yes, but not necessarily small... and never a loop...

It has NO pertinent interactions with the outside universe as far as its maximum delta-V generation capability is concerned.  This closed system restriction limits a rocket vehicle’s maximum obtainable delta-V to the total amount of onboard propellant and the amount of useable energy that is stored in the vehicle’s propellant or reactors be it chemical or nuclear derived.   This local onboard energy and propellant limitation IS the origins of the Tyranny of the rocket equation!

Preaching to the converted, and not just me but most here.

An M-E based thruster on the other hand is a much larger closed-loop propulsion system that can react with ALL the mass/energy in the causally connected universe that participates in the creation of the local acceleration induced inertial forces.  (See Sciama’s and Woodward’s “Origins of Inertia” papers.) 

React, with the observable universe. Hmmm. I'm not with you. This is a passive reaction I take it? No active reaction could involve the entrie OU without instantaneous action at a distance...

I'm sorry, at this point, I've run out of time and lost trust that you are genuinely trying to explain something to me.

[Celebrimbor]

Sirius:

Up front I have to tell you that my formal training is as an Electrical Engineer with minors in math and astrophysics, so I'm not the best person to take up your below objections with for you need to be talking to the man who derived it.

Oh I see.

[Star-Drive]

Sirius:

Up front I have to tell you that my formal training is as an Electrical Engineer with minors in math and astrophysics, so I'm not the best person to take up your below objections with for you need to be talking to the man who derived it.

Oh I see.

Celembrimbor:

We all have our limits, and alas, I did not acquire formal training in GRT when in college during the late 1960s.  My only qualification for this M-E work is a 38 year career in American aerospace working avionics, power and space propulsion projects, and spending the last 12+ years of my spare time trying to understand Woodward's work with an eye toward advanced propulsion applications.  I've also spent part of that time working the experimental verification side of the M-E as reported in my three STAIF-2004, 2006 and 2007 papers, while continuing my M-E experimental work in my home lab as time permits.  So I wasn't trying to muddy the waters with my long sentences, but I was just trying to translate my engineering viewpoints of the M-E into something you or others at this forum might connect with.  The problem I have on this forum though is that the various posters have such a wide range of backgrounds that it is very difficult for me to nail down the presentation style one should use for any given posting, and that assumes that I'm a good communicator, which I'm not.  And that is doubly so for conveying Woodward’s M-E work since it is rather outside the Physics mainstream, so there is not a widely shared background one can fall back on, so I end up using long sentences.

BTW, I've attached Sciama's 1953 & 1969 papers on the origins of inertia if you are not already familiar with them.  You might also find Woodward's CSUF web pages an illuminating resource on this M-E topic as well.

All the best.

Paul March
Friendswood, TX

[JohnFornaro]

Celebrimbor:  Hah!  I see you disagreed with Jim!

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=13020.msg383404#msg383404

I too have been lurking this thread for quite a while; clearly one would want to know about such a cutting edge technology as quickly as one could.  Sadly, from my perspective, the math is daunting, and although my spirit is willing to understand the M-E thruster design from first principles, the flesh has turned out to be weak.

Even so, from my personal perspective, and only because I am interested in the subject, I post from time to time here.  In light of the recent posts by the new member, SiriusGrey, I took a few moments to review the thread.  I speak as a half-baked, ahem, "philosopher of technology" myself.  (Hint: Search the thread.) PhT?  But enough of my levity.

Paul March "channels" for Mr. Woodward from time to time on this thread, but Woodward himself does not post here under his own name.  This does not seem to be effective communication to me, and I wish he would post here.  There's another aspect of Woodward's approach that makes me feel uncomfortable:

... Jim routinely turns down offers for financial support.  ...

Subsequent commentary after this statement offers what I would call an unsatisfactory explanation of Woodward's policy of not accepting financial support.  Even tho I have criticized NASA, DoD, and the Feds, for wasting taxpayer dollars, a shoestring budget, such as Woodward's must be characterized, in my opinion, on development, will demonstrate very little.  If the math involved is incontrovertible as far as it has been made public, there should be more official interest, one would think. 

Because this thread is so long, I submit a partial summary of some of the parts that I have participated in because of my own personal interest.  I have noticed that, in my opinion, the "style" of the presentation seems to be obscuring the presentation of the complete theory.

My first post here:

In building one of these things, how do you know that they have given you enough information to build a working model?  Naturally, they're trying to patent a device, so I'm missing something here.  Are you supposed to figure out the missing pieces to the equations or mechanism yourself?

Secondly, what is the power source of this drive?  A small nuclear plant?  Where's the energy coming from?  It's one thing to build a device which can levitate itself off the lab bench while attached to a thick cable, and another to build a guidable, non-attached unit.

And am I correct in understanding that the device has not yet actually levitated any material, such as a thin sheet of gold, or something?

The first response to my post was incredibly difficult for me to glean understanding.  It read, in part:

... I know that people get enough info to build these devices because I have built them myself.  I'm not an engineer or physicist so it would be worthless for me to try to do these experiments on my own. ...
None of the thrusters levitate.  We often joke about how the people with the purses will need to have a test item floated into their offices before they listen.  When running in the 40 kHz range Jim uses a 2kW  Carvin audio amp that has a flat response to 70 kHz.  He generally puts a couple hundred watts on a test item. 

I don't know what Mr. Woodward uses right now, but if 2kW could levitate a gold sheet or something, it would be pretty spectacular.  That no levitation has happened yet does not prove the theory wrong, but it does not support the theory either.  A few days after my asking about the 2kW power supply, Paul March answers thus:

... the local Carvin or other local power converters and energy sources only supply the catalytic power required to initialize and maintain the possibly much larger directed momentum flux from the G/I field that then back reacts onto the vehicle.  ...

He expects to get some kind of power from the universe, but I don't know how.

Thanks for your all's efforts to explain.  ...

About transistors.  They amplify a signal, true, but they depend on power coming from another circuit.  So, the "G/I field engines act like momentum amplifiers that use a very small control signal, (the local input power), to control the potentially much larger momentum flux from the cosmological G/I field."

I hesitate to ask this, but are you guys intending to create a "flux capacitor"  in order to capture the momentum from the G/I field?  Then all this "Carvin circuitry", for want of a better term, directs this captured and stored momentum for purposes of the demonstration satellite thrusters?

Fine, but now I have to ask the question that blazotron asked above:  How can you guys access and control the momentum flux and nobody else can?  I know, we're "free" to do so...

So:  What is it that you all are pushing against? And where is the energy source that the "Carvin circuitry" can amplify and convert into directed momentum?

I was confused in that exchange, because Cullen's paper was cited by Shawyer, not Woodward, but my question remains.  Further, I ask the question in layman's terms, in a different way:

... Am I correct that the device doesn't have enough thrust to escape Earth's gravity?  But it has some thrust.  Maybe not levitate a gold leaf, but push against a balance beam, then.  Something that the guy with money can see. ...

Now, as then, efficiency of this drive is very low:

What I hear you not saying is that the power supply is still an issue.  And with the reported thrust levels so low, the power supply seems to be adding more mass than the device can push against.  At least push against usefully.

Another poster, with greater apparent knowledge of the math involved, also commented:

By what mechanism is it reacting against the rest of the universe?  Why do other devices not react with the rest of the universe like this?  Why is this one special?  How can it instantaneously signal the rest of the universe to react?  Saying it is so doesn't make it so. 

Read his next post, which focuses on the "em-drive" to get an idea of his knowledge of relativity.  For a guy like me, who is very comfortable up to trig, and stumbles at calculus, his explanation was relatively easy for me to follow.  I wish he would comment some more on the M-E thruster, however.

Paul March submitted a list of ten other attempts at experimenting with M-E theory:

... 1.   Hector Brito’s ~1996 self contained battery operated MLT like device ...
...
10.  Jim Woodward’s latest 2008/2009 M-E rotary proof of principle tests that have clearly demonstrated above the noise 2-omega M-E like mass fluctuations signatures. ...

One of the problems that Woodward has been having is getting the test apparatus evacuated to a suitably low pressure:

... As to the Crookes Radiometer effect, that is somewhat problematic at 2x10^3 Torr and it is one reason I keep harping on going down to at least 1x10^-6 Torr or even 1x10^-7 Torr where the vacuum relay folks hang their hats.  However, Woodward did mitigate the Radiometer effect and others like it by potting all his latter vacuum test articles in steel Faraday shields that would have killed off any such thrust effects.  In other words what he is reporting is most likely something that is NOT due to mundane effects. 

A note about thruster efficiency at the time of the experiment:

The Mach-2MHz that produced a peak thrust of ~5.0 milli-Newton was absorbing approximately 7.0 Watts from the 3.8 MHz transmitter it was attached to at the time.  In other words its efficiency was ~0.714 mill-Newton/Watt or its Newton/Watt efficiency was 0.00071 Newton/Watt.

I asked of the principle of the M-E thruster in layman's terms, although at the time of my asking, I called it an MLT:

... The principle of MLT, if I understand correctly, is the direct conversion of energy to momentum, which bypasses the inefficiency of propelling hot gas or ions as in typical propulsion systems.  At the same time there is the payload savings of not having to carry all the propellant and rocket infrastructure, which just weighs down the craft, especially when empty. ...

Anyhow:  It is not the "style" of the presentation that is important.  What is important is whether or not the presentation is complete.

[Star-Drive]

JohnF:

"It is not the "style" of the presentation that is important.  What is important is whether or not the presentation is complete."

Ahh, but are you willing to take the time and skull sweat required to read and understand the complete set of the origins of inertia, Mach-Effect (M-E) theory and M-E related data reports required to understand the M-E explanations posted here?  I’m not the brightest bulb around here, so it's taken me years on a part time basis to plow through most of the background “Origins of Inertia” and GRT material needed to appreciate some, but still not all of the implications that Dr. Woodward has presented in his M-E conjecture.   And it turns out that several additional solid state physics and engineering disciplines are also required to do so, especially when trying to design and build M-E thruster devices.  Thus when I try to convey that much material in an e-mail post or even a string of e-mails, it is near impossible to do so even for those formally trained in physics, GRT and the origins of inertia in particular.   The commonly shared  background just isn’t there, yet.

 BTW, the true origins of inertia is the key player in all of this for if GRT and Mach's principle rules the causally connected universe to whatever radius we can all agree on, then Woodward’s Mach-Effect conjecture has to be true to some yet to be determined degree.  And if it does hold in the final analysis, Star-Trek like impulse drives, warp drives and stargates are also buildable in this Century.  That is the carrot that has kept this donkey engineer engaged in this pursuit for over a decade now.

PS: to Celembrimbor:

“React, with the observable universe. Hmmm. I'm not with you. This is a passive reaction I take it? No active reaction could involve the entrie OU without instantaneous action at a distance...”

Now you hit the nail on the head for Mach’s Principle and its implications on the origins of inertia and the M-E requires there to be an effective instantaneous momentum exchange between the locally accelerated mass and the bulk of the mass/energy in the causally connected universe.  This may seem to be a direct violation of Special Relativity Theory (SRT)’s speed of light c limit in a vacuum on the speed of energy and momentum (momenergy) transfers between objects.  However as one of your countrymen, (Dennis Sciama), pointed out in his 1953 origins of inertia paper, there appears to be an end run around this speed limit if we are willing to use it.  This apparent end run around the c speed limit has also been explored by Wheeler and Feynman in their 1947 papers on radiation reaction forces as well as John Cramer with his Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (QM).  In other words, if the phenomenon we call inertia has its origins in the causally connected universe’s total mass/energy, which creates the cosmos’ gravitational field phi which in turn is equal to c^2, and given that local inertial reaction forces are instantaneous in nature as measured everyday and required by Newton’s third law, then instantaneous momenergy transfers via whatever hyper-3D channel you care to name is required every time a local acceleration induced mass reaction force is generated in a mass. 

Some folks don’t like this Mach's Principle and GRT based origins of inertia solution and try to make local QM effects the cause of inertia, see Puthoff, et al.  However if GRT rules the macroscopic universe, as it still appears to do so, then we have to learn to live with this weirdness as well and the weirdness we deal with everyday when generating QM effects in the microscopic realms. 

[JohnFornaro]

Ahh, but are you willing to take the time and skull sweat required to read and understand the complete set of the origins of inertia...

Oh, I'm reading all right.  Bit of a slow learner, nor have I been doing it full time either.  The last few posters have piqued my interest again.

[Star-Drive]

Ahh, but are you willing to take the time and skull sweat required to read and understand the complete set of the origins of inertia...

Oh, I'm reading all right.  Bit of a slow learner, nor have I been doing it full time either.  The last few posters have piqued my interest again.

JohnF:

I feel your pain!  However, this topic is where the real gold in spaceflight advancement hangs its hat, so we all need to make the effort to understand and perfect this new approach to propulsion.  Otherwise we are stuck with the too expensive and dangerous rocket solutions that will never get us much past Mars or Jupiter in an affordable and sustainable way, let alone getting us to the stars...

Best.

[scienceguy]

{snip}

  In other words, if the phenomenon we call inertia has its origins in the causally connected universe’s total mass/energy, which creates the cosmos’ gravitational field phi which in turn is equal to c^2, and given that local inertial reaction forces are instantaneous in nature as measured everyday and required by Newton’s third law, then instantaneous momenergy transfers via whatever hyper-3D channel you care to name is required every time a local acceleration induced mass reaction force is generated in a mass. 

So you're saying that the "cosmic gravitational field" is created by the "universe's total mass/energy"? Has this cosmic gravitational field been measured? Wouldn't it fall off by r^2 from where it is generated, being insignificant in most places?

[cuddihy]

 Has this cosmic gravitational field been measured?

Yes.

*added*: +~1/c^2

Wouldn't it fall off by r^2 from where it is generated, being insignificant in most places?

Good question. The answer is no. Gravitational effects, and by Woodward's calculations inertial ones as well, are dependant not only on distance but on the masses involved. Since for every inertial reaction force you have to consider the mass and distance of all particles in the universe, the observed effect is going to be virtually the same everywhere it is observed, with extremely minor variations due to local (and here local is on the cosmic scale) variations. But since we're physically located solidly in the middle of a fairly average distribution of matter, where do you measure the center of the force from?

It's like trying to calculate the falloff in electrostatic forces from molecules in a soup. Where do you want to measure from? The difference is that gravito-inertial forces fall off much slower, and appear to always be in the same direction. That is, opposite the direction of applied acceleration, or F=-ma

[aceshigh]

Star-Trek like impulse drives, warp drives and stargates are also buildable in this Century

how exactly do your ME Propellantless Thruster becomes a stargate or warpdrive? Is it because it can create the enourmous energies needed for such distortions of space time?

anyway, dont most physicians say warp drives and stargates lead necessarily to time travel and thus it would be impossible?

[Star-Drive]

Star-Trek like impulse drives, warp drives and stargates are also buildable in this Century

how exactly do your ME Propellantless Thruster becomes a stargate or warpdrive? Is it because it can create the enourmous energies needed for such distortions of space time?

anyway, dont most physicians say warp drives and stargates lead necessarily to time travel and thus it would be impossible?

No, the GRT folks who count say it may be doable.  See Woodward's latest SECSIF-2011 paper that will be published by the AIP next February.  The abstract for same is appended below:

"Making Stargates: the Science of Absurdly Benign Wormholes

James F. Woodward

Department of Physics, California State University, Fullerton, CA  92834
657-278-3596,  [email protected]

Abstract. Stargates – extremely short throat “absurdly benign” wormholes enabling near instantaneous travel to arbitrarily remote locations in both space and time – have been a staple of science fiction now for decades.  And the physical requirements for the production of such devices have been known since the work of Morris and Thorne in 1988.  Their work has engendered a small, but significant literature on the issue of making stargates and warp drives.  Morris and Thorne approached the issue of rapid spacetime transport by asking the question: what constraints do the laws of physics as we know them place on an “arbitrarily advanced culture” (AAC) in the design and implementation of stargates?  Here we invert their question and ask: if “arbitrarily advanced aliens” (AAAs) have actually made stargates, what must be true of the laws of physics for them to have done so?  The chief problem in making stargates is that they seem to require the assembly of a Jupiter mass of “exotic” matter concentrated in a thin structure with dimensions of a few tens of meters.  Elementary arithmetic reveals that such structures would have a density of on the order of 10^22 gm/cm3, that is, orders of magnitude higher than nuclear density. Not only does one have to achieve this stupendous density of negative mass matter, it must be done, presumably, only with the application of “low” energy electromagnetic fields.  A few schemes that at least in principle purport to do this that have been proposed by capable physicists are discussed.  And one that might actually work is examined in a little more detail."

[aceshigh]

thanks, but again, how do ME relates to that? Why would ME be able to gather a jupiter mass of exotic matter? 

[Cinder]

I'm fairly sure this is covered earlier in this thread at enough length that you should glean at least in general the justification for that expectation.

IIRC One of the investigators mentions at some point that a successful experiment could show noticeable negative mass variation. 

[Sith]

Even if you get mass down to 0 or (-), you'll get plenty of resistance in air when travel in the atmosphere. YOu need an airspike in addition. Plasma or so...

[93143]

No, you don't.  For atmospheric travel you'd want a simple application of thrust, rather than trying to create negative mass, and M-E thrusters (if they work, and work as well as March et al. hope) would be perfectly suited for that.  No need for conventional engines.

[kurt9]

JohnF:

 I’m not the brightest bulb around here, so it's taken me years on a part time basis to plow through most of the background “Origins of Inertia” and GRT material needed to appreciate some, but still not all of the implications that Dr. Woodward has presented in his M-E conjecture.   And it turns out that several additional solid state physics and engineering disciplines are also required to do so, especially when trying to design and build M-E thruster devices.

This is no lie. I've spent the past 10 months going through Woodward's papers again and again and again. This is very complex stuff to wrap your head around. I'm still not there yet.

 BTW, the true origins of inertia is the key player in all of this for if GRT and Mach's principle rules the causally connected universe to whatever radius we can all agree on, then Woodward’s Mach-Effect conjecture has to be true to some yet to be determined degree.  And if it does hold in the final analysis, Star-Trek like impulse drives, warp drives and stargates are also buildable in this Century.  That is the carrot that has kept this donkey engineer engaged in this pursuit for over a decade now.

No kidding. This is what drives my interest in this stuff.

Some folks don’t like this Mach's Principle and GRT based origins of inertia solution and try to make local QM effects the cause of inertia, see Puthoff, et al.  However if GRT rules the macroscopic universe, as it still appears to do so, then we have to learn to live with this weirdness as well and the weirdness we deal with everyday when generating QM effects in the microscopic realms. 

This is the reason why I think Mach's Principle may be real. This and Heim Theory. Both theories use GRT as the start point and work from there. Puthoff and others attempt to use QM as the start point. I think starting with QM is not workable as I consider GRT to be the fundamental basis of reality and QM is something that emerges from it in some manner that we do not yet understand (although retro-causality is a very plausible explanation).

[Star-Drive]

thanks, but again, how do ME relates to that? Why would ME be able to gather a jupiter mass of exotic matter? 

Perhaps one of Woodward's earlier papers called "Twists of Fate" might give you a starter course for Jim's latest SPESIF-2011 paper on the same but expanded topic.  It's attached.  However if you look to Woodward's M-E equation's "Wormhole Term", you will notice that it is always negative going and can become very, very large when the density rho of the active dielectric approaches zero kg/m^3.  This density function is driven by M-E's +/-impulse term. 

[Star-Drive]

Celebrimbor:  Hah!  I see you disagreed with Jim!

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=13020.msg383404#msg383404

I too have been lurking this thread for quite a while; clearly one would want to know about such a cutting edge technology as quickly as one could.  Sadly, from my perspective, the math is daunting, and although my spirit is willing to understand the M-E thruster design from first principles, the flesh has turned out to be weak.

Even so, from my personal perspective, and only because I am interested in the subject, I post from time to time here.  In light of the recent posts by the new member, SiriusGrey, I took a few moments to review the thread.  I speak as a half-baked, ahem, "philosopher of technology" myself.  (Hint: Search the thread.) PhT?  But enough of my levity.

Paul March "channels" for Mr. Woodward from time to time on this thread, but Woodward himself does not post here under his own name.  This does not seem to be effective communication to me, and I wish he would post here.  There's another aspect of Woodward's approach that makes me feel uncomfortable:

Anyhow:  It is not the "style" of the presentation that is important.  What is important is whether or not the presentation is complete.

JohnF:

"Paul March "channels" for Mr. Woodward from time to time on this thread, but Woodward himself does not post here under his own name.  This does not seem to be effective communication to me, and I wish he would post here."

Dr. Woodward is a bit of a old fashion ludite who doesn't like to mess with forums or other trendy communications technologies of this digital age.  In other words, he would rather work in his retirement lab and publish his papers the old fashion way that was the norm up until ~15 years ago.  So it is up to some of his followers such as me to perform digital outreach to folks with common interests such as yourself and others on this forum.  Sorry that doesn't suit you, but that is the way that cookie crumbles...

[mlorrey]

thanks, but again, how do ME relates to that? Why would ME be able to gather a jupiter mass of exotic matter? 

Ok the core of Woodward's work seems to revolve around an interesting theory of the structure of the electron. Essentially, the claim is that the mass of the electron really is rather large but NEGATIVE. The reason we don't see this negative mass is that Mach's Principle, that inertia is created by the rest of the observable universes gravitational attraction equally in all directions, acts upon the negative mass of the electron in such a way that what we "see" for its gravinertial mass is its known atomic mass (essentially 0.000055 Atomic Mass Units) that is really the balancing point between the universes gravity stress put on the electron and its negative raw mass.

So, assuming this is true, and using Mach-Lorentz devices to cause electrons to temporarily unveil some or all of their negative raw mass to the local spacetime, you get a variation in the gravinertial mass of the electron as perceived by local spacetime. Doing so while moving the electron back and forth in sync with the variations in mass allows you to extract momentum from the gravinertial field. Because you can theoretically expose the entirety of an electrons negative raw mass with a strong enough B field, you can build up the jupiter mass of exotic matter in this way. Electrons are the exotic matter, when treated properly. Because this negative mass is so localized in the stargate device, it bends spacetime to create a wormhole of an arbitrarily benign topology.

This is how I understand Woodward's stuff, the other guys can correct me if I'm wrong.