Quote from: tdperk on 07/29/2018 09:16 pmYou are presuming the falsity of the concept, and so of course can not make a relevant statement about it -- you are presuming the MET does not work as described, abnd building your argument around that presumption.Ppnl did no such thing. You however apparently refuse to actually read the content of his posts.You have not demonstrated an understanding of any of the concepts that you listed in your post.Also to be clear:Quote from: tdperk on 07/29/2018 09:16 pmQuote from: ppnl on 07/28/2018 07:22 amOf course it implies a potentially over unity device. No, and it excludes the possibility of that by sourcing what would be the "excess energy" which is "over unity" from the gravinertial field of the observable universe.Saying that something is potentially true does not "exclude the possibility" of anything including its exact opposite. This kind of blatantly obvious starwman is the type of argument made by someone who has no valid arguments left, but refuses to change his view anyway.
You are presuming the falsity of the concept, and so of course can not make a relevant statement about it -- you are presuming the MET does not work as described, abnd building your argument around that presumption.
Quote from: ppnl on 07/28/2018 07:22 amOf course it implies a potentially over unity device. No, and it excludes the possibility of that by sourcing what would be the "excess energy" which is "over unity" from the gravinertial field of the observable universe.
Of course it implies a potentially over unity device.
PPNL has many times refrained from in any way qualifying the claim the MET is necessarily an over unity device. Their suddenly being careful when called out on it doesn't change that. That is a fact and not a strawman argument.
PPNL has done nothing to but assert by implication the universe is not Machian, and has done so with no reasons given for the assertion at all.
While my recall of all 76 pages of comments on the topic is not eidetic, I believe no one has ever shown Woodward's math with respect to the MET is incorrect.
It is not possible it is an over unity device, and everyone who has asserted it is or even could be, has done no math showing that to be possible, because no one stating or implying that has shown there is no energy input from the gravinertial field of the observable universe.
A recent test of general relativity:https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0265-1found that general relativity holds even under very extreme conditions.Does this test have any implications for Woodward's theories? Would Woodward have predicted different results? The authors do not reference Woodward specifically but they do reference other theories which incorporate Mach's principle.
Quote from: Povel on 07/27/2018 11:20 pmI don't know if the "measurement are far above the noise floor of his instrumentation"; judging by some scope traces shown in his papers and books the difference before and after the input signal is turned on seems significant. Many of these are averaged combination of test runs, made explicitly to lower down the signal/noise ratio.I don't want to spend much time on this, which is why I just went back to the most recent relevant picture I could find in the thread, which loooks worse than some others for good reason. The post you linked me to has a much better picture, but it illustrates signals deep in the "noise." This is not the standard "noise" but instead is errors and biases in the measurement equipment are comparable to the supposed "signal."
I don't know if the "measurement are far above the noise floor of his instrumentation"; judging by some scope traces shown in his papers and books the difference before and after the input signal is turned on seems significant. Many of these are averaged combination of test runs, made explicitly to lower down the signal/noise ratio.
The baseline does return to pre-pulse values after a few more seconds, which we could not show due to restrictions in our data acquisition system. [pg. 8]
[..] the source of the errors has to be understood and eliminated, or the signal clearly raised much higher to draw any real conclusions.
I don't have time to look into his papers in detail, but enough people are paying attention, if conclusive data existed in them, it would be well known, and everyone would want to replicate and apply the effect.
I should mention that General Relativity has some weirdness with global conservation laws that make answering this question harder than it sounds. Given that there is a theory predicting the effect I'd expect they can at least provide a partial answer, but a full answer would likely need more than 2 years to come up with.
The answer to your questions here also gets into why the paper I always bring up is a problem. With the mistakes in that paper, if Woodward was able to convince himself to write it despite any competence he may have demonstrated elsewhere, it also means he could have a blind spot for an error in his experiment that may not be easily recognizable from just published data. Retracting his statements in that paper would actually do a lot to gain him credibility, at least for me.
In the papers I read it is not mentioned any possible cause, but it doesn't appear to be always present; for example the other picture I posted doesn't show any.
Given all this, I personally find difficult to confidently state that "errors and biases in the measurement equipment are comparable to the supposed "signal"", and I'm not sure what makes you reach this conclusion so quickly, since this is definetely not so for every single run.
Quote from: meberbs on 07/28/2018 02:43 am I don't have time to look into his papers in detail, but enough people are paying attention, if conclusive data existed in them, it would be well known, and everyone would want to replicate and apply the effect.Are you sure? Up until very recently there was practically no interest whatsoever. I have the impression this situation had (has) much less to do with the possible merit of the idea and much more with the context the idea belongs to and was first developed in.
Certainly there are no "conclusive" data so far: The devices have been tested only in an handful of laboratories with not always correct procedures.
And yet, I think that the attitude you showed in the previous comment is at least worth some general reflection.You jumped extremely fast to the conclusion (incompetence and/or will to deceive by Woodward), without taking time to analyze the informations you were using. This is something that I've actually seen happen quite a number of times around this whole subject over the past years, and it keeps happening.
Anyway, the fact that this attitude seems so prevalent makes me hard to believe that the criticism on this subject from the scientific community (with the exclusion of the concern over energy conservation), if the comments I saw from some of his members are representative, is based on something more than just a brief reading of, at best, the abstract/first pages of Woodward 1990 paper.
Everything you said is an argument in favor of my statement. There is an uncharacterized signal of unknown origin that is not representative of a working drive. It not being in every run makes it more of a problem not less. The magnitude of this is clearly comparable to the signal that is being claimed to exist. I come to the conclusion quickly because it is sitting right there in the data for anyone to see if they know what they are talking about and aren't letting biases cloud their view.
Dr. Rodal just posted in this thread (with a nice answer to a question). There are third parties that pay attention even if you don't know they are still there, or were ever there to begin with. You seem to be basing the relevant awareness of these things on your personal awareness or the activity on these forums. If there is truly solid data that gets produced, news will spread quickly enough where it matters.
For this next phase of their research,Woodward and Fearn will collaborate with experts from industry and academia, including those at Johns Hopkins University , in hopes of successfully developing a breakthrough technology. Machinist Jonathan Woodland in the Physics Department and a student researcher also will be involved in the project.
And while that mistake was not made by Woodward, the facts of how wrong it is remain true.
I should note that incompetence or ignorance are both easily fixable if the person is willing to learn and I don't feel they should be viewed as insults, everyone starts that way in a new field, and even experienced people do something incompetent once in a while.
Picking the peak out of all the oscillations as the thrust "value" is obviously the wrong answer even if the device worked. The only reasons to do so are incompetence or deception.
Unlike most devices in this category there is potentially some solid theory behind this, but there are still holes that need to be explained (see ppnl's recent posts). They are valid and easy to bring up, but hard to answer.
There are plenty of people online who don't know what they are talking about, and some will end up on either side of an issue like this. There aren't a whole lot of people actually capable of sensibly discussing the issues in the full context of GR.
I wrote that the papers I read don't mention any possible cause. Since I didn't read each and every single paper in detail, I can't exclude that the signal is characterized somewhere.
I fail to see how the signal not being present in every run is a problem. If, say, in 10 runs there's only a couple of them that show such noise and the others do not I'd consider this a quite decent result.
Quote from: meberbs on 08/01/2018 01:44 amDr. Rodal just posted in this thread (with a nice answer to a question). There are third parties that pay attention even if you don't know they are still there, or were ever there to begin with. You seem to be basing the relevant awareness of these things on your personal awareness or the activity on these forums. If there is truly solid data that gets produced, news will spread quickly enough where it matters. Wasn't Dr. Rodal part of NIAC Phase I grant? Judging by its answers he seems to be involved also with Phase II grant. If so, I don't consider him to be a "third party".
Woodward started working on this in the '90s, and he received virtually no attention by the scientific community. While it is true that ultimately the experiments are the deciding factor, one should not forget that they are motivated by a calculation that could, in principle, be disproved by simply using pen and paper.
Quote from: meberbs on 08/01/2018 01:44 amAnd while that mistake was not made by Woodward, the facts of how wrong it is remain true.I agree, but who made such mistake is quite important I'd say, especially if it is used to further confirm our own evaluation of Woodward.
Quote from: meberbs on 08/01/2018 01:44 amI should note that incompetence or ignorance are both easily fixable if the person is willing to learn and I don't feel they should be viewed as insults, everyone starts that way in a new field, and even experienced people do something incompetent once in a while.Agreed, but you wrote QuotePicking the peak out of all the oscillations as the thrust "value" is obviously the wrong answer even if the device worked. The only reasons to do so are incompetence or deception.Which is different from incompetence/ignorance.
Wasn't Dr. Rodal part of NIAC Phase I grant? Judging by its answers he seems to be involved also with Phase II grant. If so, I don't consider him to be a "third party". ...Even if you consider Dr. Rodal as third party, he's only been involved in this quite recently.
phonons have negative mass?https://www.livescience.com/63305-sound-waves-negative-gravity-mass.htmlif so couldn't you just make a really powerful subwoofer or something in a enclosure to maintain a medium for sound and produce enough phonon activity to do something useful (propulsion wise?)
Meberbs:Just out of curiosity, we all know that the "vacuum" of space isn't exactly a vacuum, what with dust and so forth. Is it possible for there to be some kind of "sound" passing thru the medium of space? I'm not trying to prove anything, so don't worry!
I have read Woodwards book "making starships and stargates" and view all lectures on the subject that i could find (most via nextbigfuture) and am trying to make sense out of it. One of the problems i encountered was a remark of Dr Fearn. In some lecture (i forgot to note which one) she says that the energy required for the dP/dt (in woodwards formula for delta m) must come from the force causing the acceleration of the mass in which the energy is stored.Why is this? Is there a fundamental reason for this or is it just a limitation of the experimental setup?I mean i think it does not matter how power is transfered to the accelerated object: the (normal relativitic) calculation should show no change in the momentum of the whole system.Any thoughts?
You should try to find that source again and quote it here with a link, in order for someone to actually address it.
The second consideration that must be kept in mind is that the accelerating force can produce both changes in internal energy of the object accelerated and changes in its bulk velocity which do not contribute to internal energy changes. Only the part of the accelerating force that produces internal energy changes contributes to Mach effects.
I found something. Not the exact quote that triggered me, but it explains what was said:From "Making Stargates: The Physics of Traversable Absurdly Benign Wormholes" just before equation 42 ( ):QuoteThe second consideration that must be kept in mind is that the accelerating force can produce both changes in internal energy of the object accelerated and changes in its bulk velocity which do not contribute to internal energy changes. Only the part of the accelerating force that produces internal energy changes contributes to Mach effects.