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#3340
by
JohnFornaro
on 22 Nov, 2014 14:38
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I was beginning to worry that everybody else had quit.
We have yet to hear from IslandPlaya's friend...
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#3341
by
Mulletron
on 22 Nov, 2014 22:16
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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?
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.html
As 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. :-)
Please elaborate on the bolded statements above.....Do you think a properly sealed, in an air tight container, insulated and baffled test article could suffice as a substitute for a vacuum, at least for lower power level studies? I'm planning on putting my test article in a sealed, foil lined box surrounded by insulation for example. I want to eliminate conduction convection and radiation as much as possible and not break the bank. Do you think that is enough? I understand the utility of using a hard vacuum as a pentamount test, but using the crawl walk run approach along with proper controls, we can glean useful results.
Also do you think that elaborate magnetic suspension is better than a low torsion string? Considering we're trying to measure mosquito fart levels of thrust here?
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#3342
by
Mulletron
on 22 Nov, 2014 22:30
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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.
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.
Can you please expand on the bolded statements above? This sounds very interesting. Please explain what you mean.
Perhaps Dr. Woodward himself could elaborate?
I get it, that this thread isn't about Mach Effect thrusters (and I never tried to shut you down on that point), but I think they are related (dielectrics interacting with the......QV, or as you say, distant matter...posted about before numerous times) and I really want to hear why they are important to humanity! I've studied them too. After all, they too supposedly convert electricity to thrust. Which is why we're all here.
Be an ambassador. For the sake of humanity, sell... your... point! Tell us why they work. Tell us how they work. Tell us why (only METs?) work. Make your theory undeniable and...make it reality! In short, be a leader...........I want you to be successful. I want you to be right! I want you to lead us to the stars! I want you (and Woodward) to be the Zefram Cochrane
WE have strived for, and dreamed of......to be more than we are now.
In the end, I don't care how we reach the stars. Only that we do.
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#3343
by
aceshigh
on 23 Nov, 2014 10:48
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I prefer to reach the planets around other stars
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#3344
by
RotoSequence
on 23 Nov, 2014 12:05
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I prefer to reach the planets around other stars
I'd be quite happy with our own planets being within reach for a vacation.
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#3345
by
Mulletron
on 23 Nov, 2014 13:51
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A couple videos I encountered a few months ago while trying to learn more about the QV and about how potentially Q-thrusters could possibly work:
The Edinburgh video has a lot of answers pertaining to issue @Ron Stahl brought up about why vacuum fluctuations don't gravitate.....and collapse the universe.
The Peter Milonni lecture was extremely valuable to me, trying to understand the QV and the Casimir effect. It helps to hold on to your head to keep it from exploding while watching it. See Youtube comments
Putting all this together with previous information about how the QV can interact with normal matter, (the transferring momentum from the QV papers and spontaneous symmetry breaking posted before) it becomes evident to me that the anomalous thrust is due to asymmetric Casimir forces. When you get a force imbalance on an object, it moves.
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#3346
by
Stormbringer
on 23 Nov, 2014 14:07
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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. It seems that it isn't or does not have to be exotic matter at all. and that is basically what White and others meant when he said that it appears that exotic matter isn't necessary to make warp drive work.
Anyway, to make this more precisely related to this thread casimir force does not have to be either exotic energy or mass to be useful to create the correct spacial distortion nor is casimir force the only "body double" for exotic matter, mass or energy. In these models it is possible mathematically at least to get the right topology without negative mass and so forth.
For some cosmological models that have the universe as we know it contained in a 'Brane which is embedded in the cosmic substrate known in Brane theory as the "bulk;" negative mass and energy are mathematically unnecessary for warps or wormholes. Bulk is the brane concepts version of the fictional plot device known as subspace.
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#3347
by
Mulletron
on 23 Nov, 2014 14:31
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@Stormbringer
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.
Dude, if that Scottish professor is correct and what you're saying is correct, then hot damn!
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.
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#3348
by
Stormbringer
on 23 Nov, 2014 15:36
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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.
I think some types of exotic matter do exist.
Some have been experimentally produced in labs and others are being seriously considered for candidates for dark matter.
Additionally; in astrophysics and astronomy it is considered true that the super or hyper novae of certain types of star system can produce tons of heavy matter beyond that achievable by normal nova or super nova. so for example a red giant with a white dwarf or neutron star in it can make element 120 (just an example) and make it in all isotopic possibilities in quantities such that stable isotopes would persist and be available for acquisition and study and use. Normal novae cannot make elements beyond a certain atomic weight; but there is likely places where this exotic matter can be found (problems of getting to it aside.)
Admittedly, the exotic matter that comes up in discussions of exotic propulsion are not in this class. but still exotic matter does exist. when someone says it doesn't they are either unaware of the facts or simply define exotic matter as having only the properties of negative energy or mass.
the most recent articles i have read were about two super heavy baryons with an unusual quark configuration, a type of matter made of contiguous masses of quarks that forms macroscopic bulks of matter that may be responsible for a portion of dark matter, a pentaquark and so on.
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#3349
by
Rodal
on 23 Nov, 2014 15:55
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One of the very few physicists at top institutions that dares write about the science-fiction of wormholes, Kip Thorne (Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus at CalTech) wrote the following letter to the Wall Street Journal (this weekend's edition, page A12, November 22/23 2014), to clarify some pretense (triggered by the movie "Interstellar") about the feasibility of whether our human civilization could actually travel through wormholes to reach planets in other stars: (bold added for emphasis)
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".
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#3350
by
Mulletron
on 23 Nov, 2014 16:43
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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.
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#3351
by
Rodal
on 23 Nov, 2014 17:22
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CalTech's Prof. Kip Thorne, also just wrote a popular, 336 pages long book titled "The Science of Interstellar"
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Interstellar-Kip-Thorne/dp/0393351378/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416766293&sr=8-1&keywords=kip+thorne+interstellarSorry, he doesn't mention in his book the Quantum Vacuum, negative mass, the Mach Effect, Prof. Woodward's theory or experiments, nor does he mention Dr. White's warp drive theory or his Q-Drive experiments. Thorne does mention LIGO, Randall, Hawking, Witten and Einstein.
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#3352
by
Stormbringer
on 23 Nov, 2014 17:34
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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.
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
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#3353
by
Stormbringer
on 23 Nov, 2014 17:39
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@Rodal; in that caricature he looks like a cross between Alfred E. Newman and a garden gnome.
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#3354
by
Rodal
on 23 Nov, 2014 17:49
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@Rodal; in that caricature he looks like a cross between Alfred E. Newman and a garden gnome.
@Stormbringer, that's the WSJ caricature, did you expect Thorne to look like Michael Caine?
. In fairness to Prof. Thorne, here is a recent picture of him:
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#3355
by
Stormbringer
on 23 Nov, 2014 18:11
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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.
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#3356
by
Rodal
on 23 Nov, 2014 18:20
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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.
Prof. Thorne has been clear that << it appears very likely that the physical laws prevent wormholes from ever existing>>. That's why he went through the trouble to write the letter to the WSJ this weekend: to make it clear that
it is his present opinion that naturally occurring wormholes are very unlikely to ever exist. Ditto in his recent book (quoted above). He has investigated "natural occurring wormholes" and he has concluded that
they are unstable: if they were ever to form they would naturally collapse almost instantaneously.
Here is a direct link to Prof. Thorne's letter:
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-laws-of-physics-regarding-wormholes-1416606575
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#3357
by
Stormbringer
on 23 Nov, 2014 18:48
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#3358
by
Mulletron
on 23 Nov, 2014 19:24
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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.
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
Thanks for digging up that paper above. That's good stuff!
Well if Dr. White wants to warp spacetime using the QV, and that if the QV is gravitationally repulsive, it implies (to me at least) that anti matter must fall up instead of down, or at least fall down at a different rate than normal matter. If matter and antimatter don't attract exactly the same with each other and themselves, this means that gravitation could exhibit a dipole moment. This would also imply that gravitation has a sign, much like charge does. Let's hope that the AEGIS experiment finds evidence of this.
http://aegis.web.cern.ch/aegis/home.htmlA few days ago I found this article.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141119084506.htmI dismissed it as just something neat with no real meaning. In retrospect, couldn't this imply that gravitation could be showing signs of being polarizable, evidence of a sign other than just positive? How else would all these quasars line up with each other and with their local filament?
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#3359
by
Stormbringer
on 23 Nov, 2014 20:03
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As to the alignment of quasars indicating a particular cause (being gravity) i just don't know enough to say. my instinct says it's possible there are other causes or explanations. It seems like it could be gravity related; but i am not conversant with all of the elements implicit in the problem.
( hey maybe it proves Mach's principle
)
