Cannae/EmDrive

[ZetaX]

You mean like pesky little dark matters and energies or pesky little neutrinos that have mass, those kind of pesky problems. Or the pesky little variants of Higgs fields with unknown properties that the SCSC is going to explore. Ah but my house is clean everyone elses is a mess. They are all a mess, the scientific credo is that the more you know the more you know that you don't know. The more questions that are answered the more questions there are to be asked.

If you really think that medicine is as rigid, has the same scrutiny and is and as orderly as physics, then you have a very weird understanding of at least one of them. It is simply impossible to do the kind of experiments physics does in medicine, and there are so many reasons: moralic/ethical reasons, number of experiments that are possible in reasonable time, isolating the object and effects from outside influences, costs (the LHC, which is arguably the most costly one, may sound expensive, but ever cared to calculate number of experiments per money used¿ It may even win out at number of relevant results per money over many medicine trials), ...

And you did not answer my question what that disease was.

Virtual particles theoretically can exist on a gradient from unmanipulated transients to manipulated particles that exist for short times.

[Citation needed] (depending on what exactly it means, it may even be correct, but as given it sounds sketchy)

[perk]

You mean like pesky little dark matters and energies or pesky little neutrinos that have mass, those kind of pesky problems. Or the pesky little variants of Higgs fields with unknown properties that the SCSC is going to explore. Ah but my house is clean everyone elses is a mess. They are all a mess, the scientific credo is that the more you know the more you know that you don't know. The more questions that are answered the more questions there are to be asked.

You seem to have no amount of perspective. Your argument that there are unanswered questions, does nothing to invalidate what we already know. Nothing about your wishful thinking will suddenly change a century of observations. Maybe you really deply hold the believe that newtonian mechanics is total and utter crap and wrong to the core, and every prediction of a ball rolling down an incline made from newtonian mechanics must be wrong, because we have quantum field theory and general relativity now. And of course in such a world where newtonian answers suddenly dont work anymore for the phenomena it was designed to explain, it is also possible that this new super duper wishful thinking QMVPEM-Cannae drive physics makes all particle accelerator experiments invalid in the sense that we know not even the weigth ratio of protons and electrons anymore........

Good luck in your solipsistic universe....

Virtual particles theoretically can exist on a gradient from unmanipulated transients to manipulated particles that exist for short times. Everything on Planck's scale obeys QM but it remains to be shown whether VP diced into other 'states' transcend these limitations. I was only stipulating a universe were this might happen with 16w of >um hv, whether it does happen is something that must otherwise be proven.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

[PB666]

(the LHC, which is arguably the most costly one, may sound expensive, but ever cared to calculate number of experiments per money used¿ It may even win out at number of relevant results per money over many medicine trials),

...

Its not that it is expensive, its that there are others areas that need resources also, there has been a retraction of science expenditures per capita in the West, and growth in the East. Unless we want space program to go to Asia, we need to spend on all. I for one would like to see genome sequencing for everyone (1M SNPs would suffice). Look at per capita spending on Space program in US. We can't even send a man to the moon anymore without people in congress screaming bloody murder.

[Citation needed] (depending on what exactly it means, it may even be correct, but as given it sounds sketchy)

Manipulated means you have found some obscure way to energize the VP pair so that they can not return their energy before annihilation.

[ZetaX]

@all that think the virtual particle explanation is worth anything: I have another allegory for you.

Lets compare physics to arithmetics. Simple real life one we can test. So if I put a sheep besides another sheep, we have two sheep, right¿

1 sheep + 1 sheep = 2 sheep.

We can surely also check that

1 sheep + 2 sheep = 3 sheep.

Now lets assume someone tested really many, say a thousand or even a million, cases of adding sheep (as shephards were around for millenia, this is probably a safe assumption). For example:

2 sheep + 3 sheep = 5 sheep

17 sheep + 11 sheep = 28 sheep

Some time after the first shepard, someone invented simple arithmetics and realised:

x sheep + y sheep = (x+y) sheep

Now if counting sheep is physics, then the virtual particle claim is the analogue of someone claiming that

47584 sheep + 129379 sheep = 3 bananas.

Yes, nobody might have ever tested that. But is it really plausible¿ Heck, no! Is it completely impossible¿ Also no, but without good evidence (either deduce it from known facts about sheep and bananas, or test it), why should we believe anyone claiming that¿ After all, such a weird rule is more akin to what we associate with magic or randomness than the type of structural result we are used to in science.

@PB666: I don't get why you respond on me explaining the structural difference between two fields of study with a lament that many such fields need more money. Yes, they surely do, but I don't see what this has to do with the topic.

Manipulated means you have found some obscure way to energize the VP pair so that they can not return their energy before annihilation.

I still can't put enough meaning into this (an actual scientific description might help).

Oh, and I still want to know that disease

[N_las]

I don't think that sheep and banana example is useful for anyone, no offense

[Rakaydos]

Regardless of what can be happening bellow Plank's Scale, the Poincare Symmetry absolutely holds above Plank's Scale. That means that on the scale of the ship moving through space, stress-energy is a conserved current. And so momentum cannot be generated or lost. Any recoil picked up by Quantum Vacuum must become excitations in a field with infinite range. That means, electromagnetic radiation or gravitational waves. Either one would require an energy input equivalent to a photon drive. We are back to 300MW per 1N of thrust.

It's a very fundamental limitation, which is rooted into all of Quantum Field Theory and all of General Relativity. Both of these theories have to be completely wrong and work as well as they do by total chance to allow for this sort of violation.

Not even talking about the EM drive at this point, but...

Why cant "recoil picked up by the Quantum Vacuum" be expressed in the strong or weak nuclear force? Is it that "infinite range" stipulation? Why is that a limit?

If it -can- be expressed as nuclear forces... what would that even look like?

[ZetaX]

I don't think that sheep and banana example is useful for anyone, no offense

None taken, but to explain maybe a bit why I do this:

I am trying to get through to a bunch of people that probably don't know any real QM. I am trying to bring it down to a very basic level where hopefully everyone can agree upon the conclusion being... very counterintuitive and very probably wrong.

Because most proponents of that thing ignored anyone citing aactual physics, or even claimed that they are wrong. I see no other way to express the weirdness of the claim than through such allegories.

Edited February 20, 2015 by ZetaX

[Rakaydos]

None taken, but to explain maybe a bit why I do this:

I am trying to get through to a bunch of people that probably don't know any real QM. I am trying to bring it down to a very basic level where hopefully everyone can agree upon the conclusion being... very counterintuitive and very probably wrong.

Because most proponents of that thing ignored anyone citing aactual physics, or even claimed that they are wrong. I see no other way to express the weirdness of the claim than through such allegories.

They why dont you explain what is wrong, rather than make analigies with unicorns and banannas. Because they really .... people off.

[ZetaX]

They why dont you explain what is wrong, rather than make analigies with unicorns and banannas. Because they really .... people off.

I did (as did N_las, K^2, |Velocity|, ...) several times, but everyone refuses to listen. We explained how it would break very basic and well understood laws of physics. Laws as basic as arithmetic of sheep.

[Bill Phil]

Is it that difficult to wait for more results? Maybe those basics are wrong. It's a longshot, but it's possible.

And if I only payed 3 bananas for all those sheep I'd call that a good deal!

[ZetaX]

Is it that difficult to wait for more results? Maybe those basics are wrong. It's a longshot, but it's possible.

And if I only payed 3 bananas for all those sheep I'd call that a good deal!

I am all for waiting for more results. But I am not sure if there even is an experiment in the making that will test the VP claim. They are mostly excluding other sources like ablation; they would then still not be able to distinguish between weirdly behaving VP, a new fundamental force or gnomes pulling it.

The real problem is actually not the lack of evidence but the insistence in a hypothesis that is rather absurd despite there not being a single grain of evidence. You can test for it all you want, but please don't act as if the hypothesis is true until proven wrong. That's plain unscientific. It being the only hypothesis (it isn't) for this doesn't make this any more right.

[Bill Phil]

I am all for waiting for more results. But I am not sure if there even is an experiment in the making that will test the VP claim. They are mostly excluding other sources like ablation; they would then still not be able to distinguish between weirdly behaving VP, a new fundamental force or gnomes pulling it.

The real problem is actually not the lack of evidence but the insistence in a hypothesis that is rather absurd despite there not being a single grain of evidence. You can test for it all you want, but please don't act as if the hypothesis is true until proven wrong. That's plain unscientific. It being the only hypothesis (it isn't) for this doesn't make this any more right.

Elimination is what science is all about.

I never said it is VP, and if I did I don't recall....

Anyways, it's probably something we don't know about. Maybe some other kind of particle besides VPs are there?

[Stargate525]

They are mostly excluding other sources like ablation; they would then still not be able to distinguish between weirdly behaving VP, a new fundamental force or gnomes pulling it.

And if they're excluding things, why worry about it? The thing works, it's not taking reaction mass, and it's producing thrust. Who cares how it works, just that it DOES?

[ZetaX]

Elimination is what science is all about.

I never said it is VP, and if I did I don't recall....

Anyways, it's probably something we don't know about. Maybe some other kind of particle besides VPs are there?

I did not say you did...

Well, science is not just about elimination. It's not like we only know that (this is simplified to state a point, not do perfectly valid science; don't anyone dare to throw in random nitpicking, be it be GRT or else!) know that planets don't move around their star in hexagons, triangles, weird looking helixes, but we know that they orbit in ellipses. No elimination alone can bring this up. Someone observed they probably move exactly that way and no other, then tested for it and saw that he is probably right. So he had good reason to think that it's ellipses; he could even predict things. And even better, later when the gravitational law, especially the square-distance part, came along, there even was a mathematical proof for the ellipses. So if the ellipses are wrong, so probably is our gravitational law. And so on.

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And if they're excluding things, why worry about it? The thing works, it's not taking reaction mass, and it's producing thrust. Who cares how it works, just that it DOES?

Obviously a lot of people in this thread do. I also do (and so should you; inquiry is what leads to new discoveries), but I don't favour any hypothesis for no reason.

[Bill Phil]

You could find out the shape of orbits through elimination. In fact, deriving from observations is elimination of things that don't fit the observation.

Anyhow, a guy can say they follow triangles. Someone can disprove it. The next guy says squares, and is disproved. The cycle goes on until someone gets it right. That is what science is. Eventually Einstein will be surpassed, perhaps within the century. And then he'll be surpassed. And so on and so on...

[Rakaydos]

Not even talking about the EM drive at this point, but...

Why cant "recoil picked up by the Quantum Vacuum" be expressed in the strong or weak nuclear force? Is it that "infinite range" stipulation? Why is that a limit?

If it -can- be expressed as nuclear forces... what would that even look like?

This was a the top of the page. No answers yet?

[K^2]

Not even talking about the EM drive at this point, but...

Why cant "recoil picked up by the Quantum Vacuum" be expressed in the strong or weak nuclear force? Is it that "infinite range" stipulation? Why is that a limit?

If it -can- be expressed as nuclear forces... what would that even look like?

You need something to pick up the recoil within range of the force. In vacuum, that means you need a force with an infinite range.

Or if you want an alternative way of thinking about it, the "propellant" is a stream of photons or gravitons. With strong nuclear force, you'd need to be producing a stream of free gluons, which isn't a thing^*. With weak force, you'd be producing Z bosons, and these have to decay into photons and neutrinos eventually. So again, you can't beat efficiency of a photon drive.

^* There is a theoretical edge case involving glue balls, but they'll have mass, so you'll be even worse off.

[PB666]

@all that think the virtual particle explanation is worth anything: I have another allegory for you.

Now if counting sheep is physics, then the virtual particle claim is the analogue of someone claiming that

47584 sheep + 129379 sheep = 3 bananas.

In other words you are refuting virtual particles and quantum mechanics?

Yes, nobody might have ever tested that. But is it really plausible¿ Heck, no! Is it completely impossible¿ Also no, but without good evidence (either deduce it from known facts about sheep and bananas, or test it), why should we believe anyone claiming that¿ After all, such a weird rule is more akin to what we associate with magic or randomness than the type of structural result we are used to in science.

I can give you a perfect example Genome wide associations studies are designed to detect genetic links between a proxy (SNP) and disease. It is not common to see GWAS random probabilities in the 10-4 to 10-8 range (thats more than 5 sigma used to prove Higgs) cast as insignificant even though the standard criteria for significance is 2.5 to 5.0 x 10-2. The reason for this is that as one uses more SNPs one has to engage more corrective power. A newcomer to statistics might argue its crazy to expect random probabilities below 10-8. They might argue you would never see associations with that low of an alpha, also wrong, associations have been seen with probabilities of in the 10E-400 range. When you have a machine sitting there throughputting 1000s of snps a minute and 10,000s of patients, eventually you can see things that happen quite rarely and p-values that supercede your typical statistics book.

So our machine is a test apparatus. Lets say it takes up a meter cubed. Planks' length is 10-35 and so there can be 1/10E-35^3 or 10^105 experiments going on in that space. Every now an then (10-44 seconds) there is a probability that a virtual pair appears and disappears. If I do nothing they should appear and disappear so quickly I should never notice them. If I perturb the hell out of the system, I could break up the pair creating a domino effect, that, for the most part, results in nothing.

In quantum mechanics 0 = 1 + 1* = 0, their argument would be that:

(static hv field) 0 -> x* x & hv -> x* x -> (x*x)dV -> 0 (hand waving argument about where dV went and how or where it might show up again)

I still can't put enough meaning into this (an actual scientific description might help).

(see above) x = an energized version of a normal particle.

Oh, and I still want to know that disease

I figure by now an inquisitive person would have already looked it up, but I see that your sheep kept you occupied.

I give you a hint, in 1856 Francis Adams presented a translation of Aretaeus of Cappadocia (2nd century BC).

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You need something to pick up the recoil within range of the force. In vacuum, that means you need a force with an infinite range.

Let me ask you a question, when virtual particles form where does the energy come from, does it create negative energy in the vacuum? If this was the case then energy or momentum could enter the negative energy of some other VP and cancel some of that negative energy out.

OK so if the vacuum could have a deficit from its 'normal' state while VPs exist why cannot it gain energy from recoil? According to your logic the sheer existence of virtual particles violates energy conservation. If the normal state of the vacuum is not normal but chaotic, the addition of energy to the vacuum would not offend the chaos. And things that are choatic generally amend themselves to diffusion, such that energy added to the vacuum in one place may diffuse to other places, and this could result in low frequency radiation more VP or different flavors of VP.

[meve12]

One thing which I haven't seen discussed much is the implications of such a drive should it turn out to be real. Due to its being propellant less as we all know it's delta v is effectively infinit (in the laymans sense). So let's say for the sake of conversation that next year NASA sends up a satellite with one of these drives attached and once and for all determines that yes it does work, what then?

I remember reading a statement from NASA which stated that if this drive did work then we could achieve an 8 month round trip to Mars including a one month stop on the surface.

So what would happen to the space industry, how big of an expansion would we see and how quickly?

Depends on how much thrust can be achieved.

If it can replace booster rockets? Expect a big boom as space suddenly becomes much more available.

If not, it's still a boon for stuff that's already in orbit, but the boom wouldn't be as big unless some other boost solution becomes available.

[PB666]

I am all for waiting for more results. But I am not sure if there even is an experiment in the making that will test the VP claim. They are mostly excluding other sources like ablation; they would then still not be able to distinguish between weirdly behaving VP, a new fundamental force or gnomes pulling it.

The real problem is actually not the lack of evidence but the insistence in a hypothesis that is rather absurd despite there not being a single grain of evidence. You can test for it all you want, but please don't act as if the hypothesis is true until proven wrong. That's plain unscientific.

You mean like the H+/ATPase proton pump that was eventually rediscovered as the mitochondrial ATP synthase, the process of elimination forced scientist to accept that the pump was running in reverse because no alternative mitochondrial ATP synthase could be found. Ironically this is the largest producer of ATP in the cell. Go figure.

Hmmm, god does not play dice with the universe.....whoops

Hmmm, Planks black body radiation . . . . . . . . . . .

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And if they're excluding things, why worry about it? The thing works, it's not taking reaction mass, and it's producing thrust. Who cares how it works, just that it DOES?

There are several things that come to mind.

If they are VP then the way it works tells us something about VP.

Second If you know how it works, the theory is clear, your future design is more directed and possibly more frugal and efficient.

Third you may find the theory offers other spectra and other resonances, you could then throw more momentum and convert more energy per unit space.

Forth you might find other uses, you might find you could using the same field pull and push at the same time. Altenatively you might find that you could replace all steering thrusters with a single unit capable of changing direction of the craft, saving monoprop weight.

Fifth, it might be possible to steal energy from vacuum causing energy transfers over great spatial distances, this might be useful for interstellar journeys where you have enough energy to get going but are unlikely to have enough to stop.

[K^2]

Let me ask you a question, when virtual particles form where does the energy come from, does it create negative energy in the vacuum? If this was the case then energy or momentum could enter the negative energy of some other VP and cancel some of that negative energy out.

OK so if the vacuum could have a deficit from its 'normal' state while VPs exist why cannot it gain energy from recoil? According to your logic the sheer existence of virtual particles violates energy conservation. If the normal state of the vacuum is not normal but chaotic, the addition of energy to the vacuum would not offend the chaos. And things that are choatic generally amend themselves to diffusion, such that energy added to the vacuum in one place may diffuse to other places, and this could result in low frequency radiation more VP or different flavors of VP.

There is never a deficit of energy or momentum when virtual particles are involved. Simplest case. Electromagnetic interaction between two electrons. To first order, electron emits a virtual photon, which is absorbed by second electron. The energy and momentum of the virtual photon are taken out of the first electron and deposited into the second electron.

The part where people get confused is that kinetic energy of a virtual particle can be negative. There can be other weirdness as well, due to the particle not being on the shell. But the total energy and total momentum are always conserved.

[Rakaydos]

The part where people get confused is that kinetic energy of a virtual particle can be negative. There can be other weirdness as well, due to the particle not being on the shell. But the total energy and total momentum are always conserved.

Jumping for a moment to Dr White's OTHER pet project.... could you use the properties of virtual particles to "prove" that there is a ring around your ship that has negative mass?

(like the black hole example posted earlier, where the free-flying no-longer-virtual particle "proves" the virtual antiparticle must have had negative mass when it fell into the black hole)

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...you know what would be silly? if the increased virtual particle production was producing (among other things) enough gravitons on the foreward end of the device to pull the device foreward.

(gets lynched by the physisists in the audience)

[K^2]

Yeah... You know how quantum physics and gravity don't always mix well? This is one of these cases. You can do Quantum Field Theory in almost arbitrary fixed curvature. It comes with all sorts of problems, but they can be worked around in principle. That's how we can discuss what happens to virtual particles near black hole. We can go a step further and do a mean field approximation to a Quantum Gravity problem to discuss stability of a warp bubble, so long as bubble thickness is greater than Plank length. But when you're suggesting having enough interactions taking place so that virtual particles start to dramatically warp space-time? This is full on, no restrictions, no training wheels, cannot even be quantized, so nobody knows where to even start solving it sort of Field Theory.

The most infuriating part, we have all of the equations for it. It'd be sufficient, for a start, to simply consider the basic electroweak theory with gravity. We can state that problem exactly. Without the needless bells and whistles, the gauge symmetry is given by U(1) X SU(2) X R(1, 3) X SO(1, 3). Lagrangian is just a most general form with these symmetries on a basic lepton field. The interactions are given by Yang-Mills theory on this symmetry. That's it. Simple as pie. But that's stating the problem. Solving it has brought to halt the likes of Feynman and Hawking.

So to try and answer your question more or less directly, nobody has a stinking clue what will happen if you manage to force that sort of virtual particle density in one spot. Not to mention any ideas on how to accomplish it. Note, however, that it's not a failure of theory, so much as failure of our ability to apply it. Math gets impossibly hard in this case, and normal shortcuts we use to simplify it, like quantization, don't work there.

[ZetaX]

In other words you are refuting virtual particles and quantum mechanics?

No and I don't know how you got to that conclusion. I am refuting a very wrong _understanding_ of VP that is used to explain the EM-Drive.

As I said, counting sheep = physics; adding sheep and get bananas = EM-Drive is powered by VP voodoo.

[perk]

But what if we count the sheep backward, that surely must produce at least some bananas we can use for our pet project space travel? ....