Cannae/EmDrive

[wizzlebippi]

7 hours ago, kunok said:

I think at this point supposing it works, we are not even sure if the magnetron is a necessary part because it works the microwaves, or it's simply a part that's is interfering somewhat.

Yeah I understand the idea of a prototype, but even if we put the device in space and it works, if we put latter after some test in a commercial satellite and stop working, we don't have any idea of why, and we can't really study why stop working because is in space.

I would be a lot more expensive than testing in a proper laboratory equipment in earth and would give less data. I want it to be tested, but seriously I don't think getting it to space is the best option.

I think you're underestimating the cost of testing on earth. The cost of man hours spent designing away test interference has likely greatly exceeded the cost of launching a cube sat. NASA Eagleworks probably spent at least a million just on having independent test experts analyze their rig and findings.

Bench testing, or basically all that has been done with the Cannae drive, is inherently flawed. There is always interference from the test setup, despite how carefully designed it may be. It takes a lot of time and money do design out flaws, and even then we can only account for known sources of error. The only way to truely eliminate error due to the test setup, it to put the Cannae drive in space. Yes, if it breaks we may never know exactly why, but if it produces the same amount of thrust in space, we will finally know it's not test error.

[Nuke]

http://hackaday.com/2016/04/11/flying-the-infinite-improbability-drive/

so someone is making a tiny em drive that can fit in a cube sat. except this one is running at around 24 ghz instead of 2.4 ghz, which means the device can be much smaller and looks like its running some kind of solid state rf supply. it probibly wont work but a cube sat is approachable with a crowd funding campaign.

[Rakaydos]

So I ran across someone using Higgs particles to try and explain what is being "pushed off of"

 

"But the idea that there’s a universal medium that light propagates in? That… actually turns out to be true. For instance, light exists because the Higgs field fills all of spacetime, and it has a non-zero energy density. You can actually think of it like a big fluid filling all of space, insanely enough. That field actually is what defines the way that photons can propagate without interacting with that fluid (i.e. how they can move at the speed of light).

The “quantum virtual plasma” is hand-wavy term for that sea of particles. So… yeah. Not really true that something like the aether doesn’t exist. Space isn’t empty."

 

What does that actually mean, in our context?

[Scotius]

Just another theory trying to explain why this thing works. People are looking for a scientific, logical explanation - and "Higgs field" is better than "unicorn's farts" Having said that,  i wonder when NASA will finally publish the report of Eaglework's research. Did they find anything or not?

[Aethon]

1 hour ago, Rakaydos said:

 

"But the idea that there’s a universal medium that light propagates in? That… actually turns out to be true.

 

I thought Michelson-Morley and relativity killed the idea of the "Luminiferous Aether" years ago.  Is it back in the form of the Higgs field?

[Darnok]

2 hours ago, Aethon said:

 

I thought Michelson-Morley and relativity killed the idea of the "Luminiferous Aether" years ago.  Is it back in the form of the Higgs field?

"Luminiferous Aether" had some assumptions and only those assumptions were wrong, not entire idea about aether filling space. Higgs and many others just took Tesla's ideas and rewrote them, in weird way, to get rewards and reputation.

[Frozen_Heart]

Still just waiting for the NASA paper. Hopefully they will disprove (or hopefully prove) this thing for good. Don't really care which, it is just this constant state of not knowing that bugs me.

[PB666]

6 hours ago, Rakaydos said:

So I ran across someone using Higgs particles to try and explain what is being "pushed off of"

 

"But the idea that there’s a universal medium that light propagates in? That… actually turns out to be true. For instance, light exists because the Higgs field fills all of spacetime, and it has a non-zero energy density. You can actually think of it like a big fluid filling all of space, insanely enough. That field actually is what defines the way that photons can propagate without interacting with that fluid (i.e. how they can move at the speed of light).

The “quantum virtual plasma” is hand-wavy term for that sea of particles. So… yeah. Not really true that something like the aether doesn’t exist. Space isn’t empty."

 

What does that actually mean, in our context?

The lowest energy state for the higgs is space that is not empty, this might be the energetic reasoning for virtual particles and propogation of fields in space might require this. The transfer of momentum across empty space with a field other than light, which produces thrust at 300MW/N defined by the speed of light, such as the movement of electrons between orbits occurs through virtual particles, but up until now these transfer can only occur at distances of less than 10 hydrogen nuclei. At one nano meter this is certainly much greater than Planks length and suggest that quantum distances can be skewed or chained to allow virtual transfers of non light propreties at much greater distances, possibly via the higgs mechanism. 

We live in a sea of virtual particles, even empty space, without these we would not exist, rhings like bioluminescense, emmision spectrum would not exist. So I don't think we have to have cannae to justify these. But if Cannae was in a chamber and its ende pieces were a meter from the nearest mass and was able to push off of a wall of the chamber then it would be transferring momentum 9 magnitudes further than current quantum mechanics would allow.  This is concievably possible if the pure theoretical diastance is 1.35E-35 and the observed limit is 1E-9, 9 additional magnitudes is concievable, but there has to be a special context, this is not happening everywhere or physics would be a mess. The drive does not seem to be especially interesting in what it does, the resonance wave is enclosed in a copper bell. Are the electrons being forced by the drive to swing out the distance of the chamber and push off electrons in the metal? How come the copper end plate does shlield this push off? Is there a special version of higgs that allows this? 

Anyway, we don't know because inadequate testing has been done, but the force is there, in a vacuum and in air. 

My prediction is that in space the force will nearly completely disappear, because the distances that virtual particles would have to travel is exceptionally great to find mass to push off of, the drive shouldn't work well. 

 

 

[p1t1o]

6 hours ago, Aethon said:

I thought Michelson-Morley and relativity killed the idea of the "Luminiferous Aether" years ago.  Is it back in the form of the Higgs field?

 

3 hours ago, Darnok said:

"Luminiferous Aether" had some assumptions and only those assumptions were wrong, not entire idea about aether filling space. Higgs and many others just took Tesla's ideas and rewrote them, in weird way, to get rewards and reputation.

 

As far as I know, any similarity between the Higgs mechanism and "Luminiferous aether" is purely cosmetic and is a significant distance from a reworded version of it. Tesla isn't even that closely associated with any work on it, he just liked the idea, an idea that many others had before him. You can call the things we find that seem to fill to fill free space "aether" if you like, but it doesn't mean it is anything like that aether.

Edited April 14, 2016 by p1t1o

[PB666]

39 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

 

 

As far as I know, any similarity between the Higgs mechanism and "Luminiferous aether" is purely cosmetic and is a significant distance from a reworded version of it. Tesla isn't even that closely associated with any work on it, he just liked the idea, an idea that many others had before him. You can call the things we find that seem to fill to fill free space "aether" if you like, but it doesn't mean it is anything like that aether.

Theoretically speaking the Higgs field may not be the only field occupies empty space. But it is impossible to sort this out since we cannot removed  electromagnetism, or even the influences of local space-time itself. Space is never truely empty at the level we can observe, and the level we could observe empty space is too small for our best instruments to observe.

Another way of treating the problem is to look at it like this. Once upon a time . . . . . . How do we get to our current state from a starting state based on a singularity. 
the universe appears to have been bounded in a singularity where the quantum forces of that universe bound it, if such is true then space-time did not exist in any intelligible form, maybe not at all.
So now we have space-time, comoving reference frames, black holes, etc. Without space time there is no way to have gravity, thus quantum gravity is the only theoretical force (known force) that can possible bind the singularity together in an unfathomable energetic form.

But its now less bound, and has fathomable energy in the form of mass and EM, potential energy.  This is an issue some have considered that other things need to be added to the standard model to be allowed to be unbound but have gravity communicate across the distances of the universe, quantum gravity maybe still with us, but the force it transmits is much smaller (or much less frequent). Its not the only problem
Thus you need some means, other explanations are things like string theory and 11,13, etc dimensional space. I think what they are trying to argue is that the universe is still strung together, but less cohesively, and it may have been made less cohesive by the pouring of energy into the universe at the end of inflation and subsequently as dark energy. There is an argument that the Higgs and other particles that are similar in action are the reaction of quantum space fracturing into space-time, that the universe had to convert some of its unfathomable energy to Higgs once it fractured as a sort of residual binding or interaction medium. This goes hand in hand with an inflation, which could be thought as quantum space expanding and ultimately failing to remain a quantum state. If this were true then quantum length is quite stretchable with the right kind of energy/state, maybe creation of these Higgs/unknowns allows this. Presumably this is a very low probability event. Which is why I argue that a true reaction-less non-photon emitting drive should loose thrust as it moves away from push off mass.  Theoretically it should do this at the distance of 1 atom, but we now see that these quantum fluctuations allow communication across distances a magnitude further away.

The universe is still strung together, some aspects like wires (gravity communication), other aspects like local fibers in a viscous fluid (quantum shifts in electron potential about atoms) that is completely transparent to us, but it is much less cohesive than the singularity. We observe things like quantum entanglement (what Einstein euphemistically called spooky interaction at a distance), there is a postulate that quantum gravity may operate in a similar way. So here in lies the problem, if there is a complex fabric to space, then it is unlikely composed of one thing, and all the things would have non-zero energy rest state, because if you tug on them the right way, they will resist. For example, Higgs prevents mass from ever reaching the speed of light and gives mass inertia. The problem with this energy going into the ground state is it does not have to come in packets of 124 GeV, it could be anything, dark energy pouring into our universe, it could be causing rarely quantum fluctuations that are far more extreme than expected. There was another theory reported last year that some of these vacuum space fields might integrate present state (relative comoving velocity, age, etc) that would be like a universal GPS signal but is only randomly accessible through quantum states (sort of like a stretch tensor). Again many hypotheses.

I don't know the answer to the question, the problem with theory, as noted with string theory, is that you can ignore Occams razor an come up with really complicated scenarios, but without empirical evidence its pretty much that. I can give you a reasons why other force communicators might exist but proving they have the effect we want to explain a result, thats completely different.

But I will note that in or observation process we start with the earth being the center of the universe, In every generation there are people who are sure they got the theory right and say that naysayers are just grasping at artifacts. Kepler and Newton and contemporaries go onto to prove that we clearly are not, Newton replaces with his laws of thermodynamics. But Einstein replaces gravity with space-time and puts in a mass energy conversion, he thoroughly rips omnipotent reference frames and replaces them with relative reference frames. Then this all lasts about a decade and eventually is mostly explained with a quantum mechanical explanation in which relativity breaks down at the small levels (lately have been increasing in size). There is no great reason to believe that this is this is the end of the story, what we have done is created a consistency down to a level of observation much larger than our theory suggests the universe truly functions at, the quantum scale, which for the most part we can interpret effects, and hypothesize consistence behaviors.  There are thousands of connotations to quantum mechanics we still have to work through, as a part of that process we might be avoiding inconsistencies for the sake of expediency.

There are many more hypotheses that never panned out than there are theories that actually held up to the test of time. The empirical test surprisingly come in strange forms, like the Cannae drive. Yes its pretty much true that things like this are generally the consequence of some overlooked artifact, but on rare occasion (like the double slit experiment) they are not. And so you have to keep testing these things until overlooked artifacts can or cannot explain them.

[FreeThinker]

A new theoretical explanation for the working of the Emdrive has been proposed

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601299/the-curious-link-between-the-fly-by-anomaly-and-the-impossible-emdrive-thruster/

Edited April 21, 2016 by FreeThinker

[PB666]

50 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

A new theoretical explanation for the working of the Emdrive has been proposed

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601299/the-curious-link-between-the-fly-by-anomaly-and-the-impossible-emdrive-thruster/

I have come up with my own theory, The RF radiation creates a series of electron clouds inside the neck of the device. Bizarrely these create atomic like orbitals with different stabilization, akin to resonance stabilized orbitals of p bonds in carbon graphene arrangments the electrons are free to flow over a wide area.  but the size of the orbitals is quite large, larger than the device itself. The orbitals are quite large although electron density outside the device is low and non-uniform. The rf pattern created by the device forces the electrons to move from smaller (neck) to larger (bell) orbitals and thus forces some of the cloud density outside the back, were it is free to push off of electrons outside the back of the device, dropping some their energy in the process the electrons retract back to the copper and then flow into the neck of the device and start over.

 

[Streetwind]

2 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

A new theoretical explanation for the working of the Emdrive has been proposed

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601299/the-curious-link-between-the-fly-by-anomaly-and-the-impossible-emdrive-thruster/

 

That is one heck of a crazy theory. o__O  I don't know nearly enough about physics to comment on it.

Though if it was true, that would mean that the EMDrive would be limited to extremely small thrusts, and hard to scale up... right?

Edited April 21, 2016 by Streetwind

[Rakaydos]

1 hour ago, Streetwind said:

 

That is one heck of a crazy theory. o__O  I don't know nearly enough about physics to comment on it.

Though if it was true, that would mean that the EMDrive would be limited to extremely small thrusts, and hard to scale up... right?

But at the same time IT scales arbitrarally small, And you can cluster and stack them.

[CptRichardson]

1 hour ago, Streetwind said:

 

That is one heck of a crazy theory. o__O  I don't know nearly enough about physics to comment on it.

Though if it was true, that would mean that the EMDrive would be limited to extremely small thrusts, and hard to scale up... right?

 

No, not really all that crazy, or hard to scale up.  Granted, at extreme power you'd probably strip electrons, but it's basically an electric sail if this is the case. Electrons on one end resonate at ultra-high frequencies, the other not so much. Electrons get bounced free of the high end, push through the low end and impart momentum in the process before getting drawn back by the electron-friendly nature of the copper and drawn down along the shell back to the UHF end.  Makes sense, but is unintuitive enough to be an utter pain to comprehend.  

[Rakaydos]

So the emdrive is exploiting quantized momentum to generate asymetric pressure?

[CptRichardson]

4 minutes ago, Rakaydos said:

So the emdrive is exploiting quantized momentum to generate asymetric pressure?

About right.  The drive imparts energy into the electrons using a quirk of physics we've known about for a bit from the flyby anomalies, which makes them try to run away to the lower energy densities and causes a thrust from conservation of momentum from the electron movement. A good portion of them return to the device as they de-excite from passing through the back wall, tricking back up to the front along the hull of the device, where they meet with new electrons and the cycle starts again.  It's a really fancy ion thruster, basically.

[FreeThinker]

4 hours ago, Streetwind said:

 

That is one heck of a crazy theory. o__O  I don't know nearly enough about physics to comment on it.

Though if it was true, that would mean that the EMDrive would be limited to extremely small thrusts, and hard to scale up... right?

Seems that way. They will probably never become powerfull enough to propel a vessel into orbit, but if it could prevent orbital decay at low earth orbits or slowly push fuel station to other planets , it would still be a game changer. For example  a fleet of low orbit vessels could collect small amount of atmosphere which over time could be converted into large amount of rocket fuel. It would make solar colonisation a lot more feasable. You could effectivly call it atmosphere farming. They are the key to unlocking space. Another application would be solar farming. As keeping them in orbit becomes cheap, you can create huge solar stations that send their power to either earth or nearby vessels

Edited April 21, 2016 by FreeThinker

[PB666]

1 hour ago, Streetwind said:

 

That is one heck of a crazy theory. o__O  I don't know nearly enough about physics to comment on it.

Though if it was true, that would mean that the EMDrive would be limited to extremely small thrusts, and hard to scale up... right?

I would not say its crazy, at least the articles description is not complete enough for me to judge one way or another. Remember the E=hv.

If the frequency is so low that it cannot fit in the known universe, then energy is so low that it would not produce anything. If we recall that

thrust of a photon drive is 300MW per newton and a watt is joules per second. The only way that the theory would work is to prove that it is a EM conversion device. IOW, if you converted say 1 rf photon into 100,000,000 universe wide photons then you should have some appreciable metric. 

Is it possible, here is the problem.

1. EM drive has produced thrust in several configurations (including in some guys garage and not in a vacuum)
2. Em drive neck shape and resonances may vary.
3. It appears that the electron resonances are critical, and so the distance between electron densities and the bell may be critical. But if we go about measuring the distances between the densities they are not infinitely large, they are on the order of 1/10th to 1/2 a meter. THis is the ultrahigh frequency microwave range, which makes sense because this is what the input frequency is.

So where in the device is there a something that would create this 1Pm wavelength that would be required. 

 

[Rakaydos]

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

So where in the device is there a something that would create this 1Pm wavelength that would be required. 

 

presumably it's the relativistic "echo" of the microwaves bouncing off one end of the drive (and thus acceerating it) and then the other (and decelerating it back). The results are SO weak, the "relativistic acceeration radiation" runs into quantum limits, and generates an asymetric force.

[PB666]

2 hours ago, Rakaydos said:

presumably it's the relativistic "echo" of the microwaves bouncing off one end of the drive (and thus acceerating it) and then the other (and decelerating it back). The results are SO weak, the "relativistic acceeration radiation" runs into quantum limits, and generates an asymetric force.

This can be done by anything it does not need you could bounce rf off of parts of the ISS and it should generate this. In the thrusters i have seen the rf is directed IIRC at the sides, The large copper device the rf comes in at the last node.

[Streetwind]

TMRO had an interview with Dave Distler this week, who is one of the people very active in the NasaSpaceFlight.com EMdrive community, and who builds and runs his own homemade test articles. Now obviously, don't expect hardcore physics discussions on a show that is just aiming to introduce the concept and potential impact of a propellantless drive to people who might not be familiar with it, but it was a decent overview of the topic. And it was very interesting to hear Dave talk about how he does his testing and what results he's been getting. So I thought, might as well link it here, since it's definitely on topic.

(As usual, the interview is the middle segment of the show, here starting about 25mins 10secs in.)

 

 

[PB666]

Well that leaves us pretty much nowhere, he's 60% sure that there something there which he is 100% sure he doesn't know what it is.

Who are these clowns anyway, they like the farmed a internet studio out of camping groundlay and a few dime store lights.

 

 

[Nuke]

the guy from hackadayio seems to have a more flight ready thruster. i have some question marks about his noisy test setups, but he has a 24ghgz rf supply (solid state), frustum (much smaller thanks to the higher frequency supply) and a mainboard for a 50mm cube sat. i have no idea how he intends to come up with the launch costs (kickstarter?). i kinda wish he would test the thruster on a more sensitive, less noisy test stand though. but he might be on to something trying to miniaturize it.

Edited May 10, 2016 by Nuke

[p1t1o]

The [alleged] thrust from these things is so small, I hope that they are being tested against "placebos", ie: against the "thrust" measured from an inert lump.