Hello, I have been following Dr. White's publications with interest since he revived the Alcubierre concept in 2003. I have a few comments and questions below.
--- On the EM drive for propulsion ---
(1) It has been argued that if the EM drive works, it would violate conservation of momentum and thus also conservation of energy. This is not true. Rather, if the EM drive is real, it means that the standard assumption that the quantum virtual plasma (QVP) is immutable would be false.
(2) Clarifying how momentum would be conserved: Dr. White's theory is that the drive exchanges momentum with the QVP. Some people have said that this still does not conserve momentum because the virtual particles cannot disappear after having exchanged momentum as this would violate conservation of momentum. This is true -- if momentum is transferred to a virtual particle, that virtual particle must transfer the momentum to a different virtual particle before it can disappear. Thus, the momentum of the ship would be propagated through the quantum virtual plasma as a wave until it reaches classical objects that can absorb the momentum permanently. Think of the QVP as water being acted on by the propeller of a boat, with the exception that when the wake of the boat hits the shore it is absorbed by
the shore instead of reflected back into the water (ie, there is no 'surf')
(3) Evidence in support of the QVP being mutable. a) the force measurements of the EM-drive, b) the Casimir effect, c) as explained here (
http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/02/more-emdrive-experiment-information.html), apparently Dr. White was able to show that the electron shell radii of all atoms up to atomic number 7 can be predicted based on the asumption that QVP is mutable. I haven't read the details of that and would be curious to read where this is published if anyone knows. d) A generic property of inflationary cosmology (as written about by Hawking, Alan Guth, Hartle, Turok, Pasachoff, Filippenko, Stenger, Vilenkin and others) is that the universe began from a small quantum fluctuation from the ground state, as stated by Vilenkin "small amount of energy was contained in that [initial] curvature, somewhat like the energy stored in a strung bow. This ostensible violation of energy conservation is allowed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for sufficiently small time intervals. The bubble then inflated exponentially and the universe grew by many orders of magnitude in a tiny fraction of a second". Thus, it seems that inflationary cosmology is founded on a principle of mutable QVP as well.
(4) As discussed here (
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive/), "The mainstream physics community assumes the Quantum Vacuum is indestructible and immutable because of the experimental observation that a fundamental particle like an electron (or a positron) has the same properties (e.g. mass, charge or spin), regardless of when or where the particle was created, whether now or in the early universe, through astrophysical processes or in a laboratory." My question to Dr. White's team is, if your theory is correct and the QVP is mutable, then how would this be predicted to change the mass, charge, or spin of any classical particles that happened to be in the wake of an EMdrive thruster?
(5) Follow up question: if it would change the mass, charge, or spin of classical particles then it seems this would change the stable configuration of molecules or atoms and could result in spontaneous chemical reactions or cold fusion or fission, and these reactions could potentially be exploited to help generate power needed to run the EM drive. Thoughts?
(5.5) If the EmDrive works out, then it seems a small Throium reactor might be the ideal power source for long term missions:
-- On the EM drive as a method of warping spacetime --
(6) In "The Alcubierre Warp Drive in Higher Dimensional Spacetime", White and Davis (2006) theorized that, under the Chung-Freese model they predicted any torus of positive energy density would give rise to slight negative energy density in its core due to classical energy in 3+1 dimensions being shifted "off brain" into the unobservable higher dimensions. They proposed an experiment to test this by constructing a charged capacitor ring. My question: under the mass-energy equivalence, wouldn't you expect to get much more effect by using a rapidly spinning torus made of lead?
(7) If it were true that any torus of positive energy density contributes to a "boost" factor inside the torus, then it must be to an incredibly small amount, or else people would have noticed by pure chance that objects inside torus tend to move faster, and nobody has noticed this. However, we have noticed that large heavy toruses require more fuel to propel. Thus it seems that the theory of a positive energy density torus giving rise to a net boost in thrust must be impossible.
( 8 ) I feel like the equivalence between "boost" and "off brain bulk" in this paper was entirely speculative and unsupported by any real sound argument.
(9) In "Experimental Concepts for Generating Negative Energy in the Laboratory" Davis and Puthoff (2006) showed that negative energy density was producible in the lab using high energy lasers and other methods, and this would not require the more radical assumptions of extra dimensions in the Chung-Freese model. Why weren't these methods explored?
(10) Supposing that you were able to engineer the required negative energy density around the craft in such a way as to produce a warp bubble. The spacetime curvature inside might be flat, but not around the region of negative energy density, thus it seems that the warping of spacetime would necessarily obliterate any toroidal design used to hold the negative energy in place.