So where is this testable claim you mention?
{…}
What is this "special material"? If it cannot be found, then it cannot be tested nor falsified.
If you don't mind explaining this "coupling" briefly that would be helpful to me and maybe a few others. Just because light is a mite slower in glass doesn't mean that the fundamental constant of c has changed.
Maybe you haven't read all the documents in my two previous posts? First, please have a look at
Low Power Warp Drive for Dummies where all is very briefly explained. I think Notsosureofit has read it and has understood.
The index of refraction
n given alone in my posts was indeed misleading, my apologies. It is the inner product of electric permittivity ε and magnetic permeability μ that enables Sarfatti to produce a local frame invariant 4D zero rank tensor. Then, appropriate tetrad transformations make his equations valid for any non-inertial proper accelerating frame of reference. It is how general covariance and background independence are satisfied in his equations. To give some physical effects noticeable in an experiment, high ε
alone is not enough if μ is low at the same time. Both need to be large enough.
Strong spacetime stiffness usually requires large values of mass-energy to induce noticeable curvature, due to the c
4 term to the denominator of Einstein's coupling constant.
Sarfatti does not propose to
change the value of the constant
c in the vacuum, but to include the 4D inner-product of permittivity and permeability in the field equations, which should be written according to him:
G
μν = 8πG(ε
γδ μ
γδ)
2 T
μνIn this field equation, it is easy to see that when the value of the inner product ε×μ becomes large enough, the coupling between G
μν (how much spacetime is distorted) and T
μν (EM energy required for the "engine", i.e. the amount of "fuel" of the warp drive) becomes large also. In other words, the stiffness of spacetime is not so rigid anymore and it should be possible to induce large curvatures very locally, with little energy.
This is Sarfatti's Popper-falsifiable prediction, as an experiment that could show any deviation from standard general relativity. Indeed, one could test this conjecture using an appropriate optically-pumpable anisotropic material with giant ε and μ. In Sarfatti's mind, this should be a special metamaterial made of a pixelated 2D-layered quasicrystal, multi-layered like Russian dolls (lattices within lattices) and resonant from at least angstrom scale to roughly micro-wave frequencies. Such material, also high-Tc superconducting, would activate into weightless warp drive when resonantly pumped into
Fröhlich macro-quantum coherent state, somewhat similarly to a Bose-Einstein condensate. I don't think such material has been produced yet.
If Sarfatti's conjecture is right, such material would obviously exhibit noticeable different physical responses to applied EM fields, with respect to what plain-vanilla GR predicts (that is, nothing special).
No such material has been produced yet, but up to now, physicists only considered the thermal equilibrium case for superconductors. The clue may be in lasers that are pumped open non-equilibrium complex systems. Herbert Fröhlich suggested that almost any many-particle system when properly pumped far off thermodynamic equilibrium can be put into a robust macro-quantum coherent state immune from environmental decoherence. Sarfatti has justly written some notes recently (Nov 2017) about
Fröhlich coherent state room-temperature superconductors.
As a side note, it is worth noting that a high-Tc superconductor proposal has been reported here by
Mulletron a few weeks ago, found in a recent US Navy patent application. Although quickly dismissed by meberbs, Sarfatti describes the device in the patent as follows:
The pulsed current coil is the resonant Fröhlich pump.
The effective non-equilibrium temperature of the pulsed device is:
T’ = T / [1 + k(pulsed current power)]
T is the ambient thermodynamic equilibrium temperature when the pulse is switched off.
Applying the pulse lowers the effective temperature to the critical temperature Tc for the onset of superconductivity (macro-quantum coherence).
May I add finally (and again, this is written in the document I linked to, not my analysis) that in order to satisfy general covariance, one needs to take into account both real particles in matter (on-mass-shell) and virtual particles of the ZPF (off-mass-shell) when doing calculations, i.e.:
ε
γδμ
γδ = ε
γδ(ZPF)μ
γδ(ZPF) + ε
γδ(ZPF)μ
γδ(Matter) + ε
γδ(Matter)μ
γδ(ZPF) + ε
γδ(Matter)μ
γδ(Matter)Then
ε
γδ μ
γδ → ∞ ⇒ T
μν → 0
for fixed G
μνSo low-power warp drive may be possible.