Cannae/EmDrive

[ZetaX]

No, it is not a red herring. It is a simply analogy for why you should apologize for making the "argument" above: it comes down to the very same dishonest reasons. You do not understand entanglement, yet try to "disprove" physics using it; and you claim physics as a whole is wrong cause it cannot (yet!) explain some borderline cases. It is not a red herring to point out that you do something that you would find depicable in other contexts. Simple as that.

And by the way, no, the standard model is not contradictory to dark matter. Stop making things up.

Really, your argumentation is pretty bad right now. Please stop that. I might not agree with several others, but those seem to know what they talk about and/or are doing a resonable debate.

And by the way, a lot of things that turned out to be false were initially verified by several (even independent) experiments. Some have been named in this thread already.

[Mazon Del]

What false things are you referring to exactly? If you mean that various theories about how the EMdrive works have been proven false, sure, that happens all the time. But it doesn't actually have any affect on the fact that so far we have not figured out an error source that is causing the anomalous thrust to be produced. Additionally, more and more teams are (slowly) starting to pick up the project. In a funny way, the project is now reaching the point where the possible "scientific glory" of being the one to figure out what mistake everybody else is making with the EMdrive is now exceeding the credibility hit you get for investigating it. Given that nobody has yet run around declaring the smoking gun has been found, some optimism is not necessarily misplaced.

[ZetaX]

Things that have absolutely nothing to do with EM-drives. Things like FTL neutrinoes, those rays from the beginning of the last century (forgot the name) and such. Just check the thread for them (I find it weird that you, who seems to have been here all the time, don't even remember those).

It is very easy to have false positives, both by pure chance and by methodological errors.

But anyway, this has still not that much to do with the EM-drive but more why I consider PB666's post to be very unscientific by making many claims (stated as if they were facts) that are simply wrong.

[PB666]

No, it is not a red herring.

It is. A creationist has the conclusion of the argument before he/she starts. I have never said it works one way or the other, I said, the manner which is currently being testing a fruitless future utility. Nor have I said the standard model needs to be thrown out or summarily replaced, this seldomly happens in science, but old ideas are modified to fit new understandings. That summarily requires scientist, however, to be open to new understandings. It is perfectly rational to question the stringency of held scientific beliefs, particularly the way they explain things at extremes. You're argument is that once a consensus has determined a particular thing to be true, then it cannot be refuted. This in science is called cementing a theory into a dogma. You can chose that path on your own, but don't insist that others, particularly those who have spent decades observing science and who have studied the history of scientific fields, to follow your lead. Truth lies at the intersection of valid perspectives, the more perspectives you have on the truth (that is a well defined reality) the more limited the confidence interval is. The Cannae drive creates a perspective on momentum but the validity of the perspective is in question, not falsified. Thus the perspective itself needs to be defined, and that cannot be done by repeating the same experiment ad-nauseum.

It is a simply analogy for why you should apologize for making the "argument" above

<----- where is the moderator?

it comes down to the very same dishonest reasons. You do not understand entanglement, yet try to "disprove" physics using it; and you claim physics as a whole is wrong cause it cannot (yet!) explain some borderline cases.

<----- Moderator.

I understand it, I just don't accept the results of the first experiment. Its just one of many examples where publicly scientist are dubious about something. Another example, dark matter interactions, its matter therefore it has inertia, it must have gained inertia somehow, and yet it does not interact. How exactly do we know that dark matter cannot interact, how can we be sure that for the briefest moment that the Cannae drive transferred inertia to dark matter and then the dark matter quickly transferred inertia elsewhere. This is not a situation where I am trying to create a scenario and say 'look it can be true', but the fact of the matter is that 1000s of scenarios might explain how it works, including scenarios that fall into standard explanation. But unlike others here, I am not trying to lead the argument with a foregone conclusion in order to negatively influence the direction of future experiments, because if I were to do that, it would be wrong. The only point I am making is that if you repeat the same experiment over and over again and get the same result - -future repetition is not science. Science is that which expands on the boundaries of science. As I defined clearly in the philosophical section, the self-defining statistical parameters will come from testing under a range of conditions, potentially extreme conditions that not only can find the happy center but also define distributions and ranges. Without such experimentation one cannot to be confident in any explanation

It is not a red herring to point out that you do something that you would find depicable in other contexts. Simple as that.

And by the way, no, the standard model is not contradictory to dark matter. Stop making things up.

Not just 30 minutes ago I saw two scientist on Nova say just that about dark energy. 'Our current physics has no explanation for this'. They were the ones that discovered that so I would take their authority on this more than yours.

And by the way, a lot of things that turned out to be false were initially verified by several (even independent) experiments. Some have been named in this thread already.

Yes, that is built into alpha and we accept that risk. But you won't get anywhere if you keep insisting that type II errors do no exist in science, or denying that science has a problem in general of dealing with these types of errors. In the long term these problems are inevitably solved, you probably not get any pre-20th century scientist to accept quantum mechanics based on their observations of the Universe (cept maybe the occasional alchemist who work with mercury too long), even though there were tiny hints out there that it existed. If you look at the evolution of science you see easily a process of acceptance and then a questioning of what has been accepted creating a new acceptance/questioning cycle. Newtonian physics was not destroyed, it was modified into a new form, and that new form was modified again, and that form may be modified again in the future. Each form has created layers of consistency with the past form, but added to the explanations at the boundaries.

I look at it like this, to get out of a scientific rut often takes a new mind willing to take risk that the previous generation of thinkers are unwilling to take. These are the same minds that took on creationism and eventually brought it down. If you take a look at Hubble data, Hubble starts out a cripple, but then it was repaired by adding some new optics that allowed it to correct for the aberrations created by the primary reflector. However when we look deeply into space, the hardest task Hubble had to do, how much of what we are seeing is from the corrections and how much are that of the light itself and distortions of space-time. So even the acceleration universe model may not be correct or to the degree (or maybe to a greater degree) that is currently proposed (or for that matter the timing). But the fact that we have dark matter as something that does not require Hubble to justify and the possibility that the universe has changed its outward acceleration, means that we must face the prospect that known physics is not dogma. The same can be true with popular explanation of quantum entanglement. Does the standard model explain why the universe, with no obvious change in energetic in any other way (for example a transition of one form of energy to dark energy) suddenly change its acceleration, nope. IOW there is a interrogative dance going on between all kinds of dynamics, and Cannae has now fallen into that dance.

I don't believe there is any point of conversing with you on the matter, you seem to be driven toward dogma, and you like to use ad-hominems to emphasize your point.

[ZetaX]

I like how you try to silence my critique by calling for a moderator, ignoring everything I say, or putting it out of context, while calling me dogmatic. Seriously¿

You now continue to make false claims about entanglement. No, you don't understand it; ask K^2 if you don't believe me. You said completely false things that are not part of any actual physics. Not at all!

Then you iterate that "dark matter is not explained by current physics" is the same as "the standard model is wrong". What's next¿ The standard model not explaining why we have exactly eight planets in the solar system being disproval¿

But yeah, I am done here. Any actual scientist can see for themselves how ridiculous this is.

[DuoDex]

Whee. Looks like everyone needs to calm down a little

[Mazon Del]

Indeed, everyone take a breather.

[vger]

K^2 is absolutely correct. In an international forum in a thread talking about a sketchy new propulsion system that goes against known physics why should we think you mean anything less than what you say? When you said ISP you could have been referring back to the idea that was thrown around that it could be an ablating the walls of the device to produce thrust, or you could be referring to its efficiency with regards to power needed for thrust produced. Because ISP might not actually factor in to this engine (discounting nuclear fuel spent on generating electricity) we are left to guess what you mean by it. I mean this is "The Science Labs", I do think that it is fair to have a higher standard with regards to preciseness of our terms than the other subforums.

There, see? But you were able to ask for clarification on that without resorting to passive-aggressive insults. Yeah, my mistake was thinking of input energy as fuel, where in this case, the 'fuel' has no weight, so isp as a formula becomes "divide by zero." I still can't see this being powerful enough to fly people around Earth from point A to point B. If it's THAT good, then we should be able to build a space plane that completely eliminates the need for rockets, and that's a claim about the EMdrive that I've not heard mentioned anywhere.

[Mazon Del]

Well, strictly speaking Shawyer has made claims on estimated thrust levels with superconductors in his design, that if true would pretty much allow you to replace the engines in a Tesla with an EMdrive and have a flying car. Not many people actually believe that to be very likely though.

[SAI Peregrinus]

Well, strictly speaking Shawyer has made claims on estimated thrust levels with superconductors in his design, that if true would pretty much allow you to replace the engines in a Tesla with an EMdrive and have a flying car. Not many people actually believe that to be very likely though.

If it works the way Shawyer claims you can strap a few of the things to the input shaft of a dynamo so it spins, connect the output of the dynamo to the inputs of the EMDrives, and get infinite free energy. Flying cars are about the least outrageous thing implied by his claims. Whatever the mechanism of action (or source of error) is it's not (to a very high degree of certainty) what he's claiming.

[K^2]

Oh god no. Have you ever heard the phrase "the Chicago Pile moment"? For the longest time, proponents of nuclear power insisted it was possible to harness the atom in order to produce useful energy. But everybody was terribly skeptical and funding to investigate this was immensely difficult to come by. The largest source of it ended up being funds from the Manhattan Project. The Chicago Pile-1 was the first manmade nuclear reactor built in 1942, first chain reaction on December 2nd of that year. It demonstrated what many of the brightest minds considered impossible, that man could intentionally produce, and control to some degree or another, an artificial fissile nuclear reaction. The time in between this event and the worlds first commercial nuclear power plant? The Shippingport Atomic Power Station began construction on September 6th, 1954, producing power on May 26th, 1958. 12 years. Twelve years to go from something that was "obviously impossible and/or impractical" to a completed design and construction underway. That is unimaginably fast for a new technology back then. What changed investors minds? Some crappy little graphite box made a Geiger counter tick it's head off with no other practical application behind its existence.

There's a very big difference here. By the late 30s, nuclear reactions were fairly well understood. There were still a lot of questions about the source of the binding energy, but certain isotopes becoming unstable on neutron capture was well known phenomenon, and various relevant cross-sections have been experimentally measured. We had all the math and science to explain how a reactor would work. And nobody was skeptical that it can work in principle. There were simply a lot of people skeptical about feasibility of a controlled reaction. And most of these people were not actual nuclear physicists. The later have had a pretty good consensus on the subject.

What we have here is a system that has no explained mode of operation. No mathematical model that predicts its behavior. And all of the serious scientists agree that it can't work as advertised, that something else is going on. The only place where this looks similar is in a mind of a layman. And that just doesn't make a difference.

[Aanker]

And again, we should assume the EM Drive works according to known or mostly known physics (i.e., ion propulsion) before jumping to conclusions and assuming new mechanics are at play, let alone pull the device before the Tribunal of Crimes Against the Laws of Physics.

[vger]

If it works the way Shawyer claims you can strap a few of the things to the input shaft of a dynamo so it spins, connect the output of the dynamo to the inputs of the EMDrives, and get infinite free energy.

That just popped into my head this morning as well. If there really IS something previously unknown being tapped into, then we should be able to produce (based on our current understanding anyway) what appears to be a perfect machine.

[PB666]

Well, strictly speaking Shawyer has made claims on estimated thrust levels with superconductors in his design, that if true would pretty much allow you to replace the engines in a Tesla with an EMdrive and have a flying car. Not many people actually believe that to be very likely though.

A lesson learned in graduate school. Never assume scalability is infinite. The friction between the tire and the road gives far more efficient energy conversion than you might perceive can happen by scaling up transitorized EM drive 1000 or 1,000,000 fold. And you make the basic assumption that the scaled up transistors would not interfere with each other.

- - - Updated - - -

What we have here is a system that has no explained mode of operation. No mathematical model that predicts its behavior. And all of the serious scientists agree that it can't work as advertised, that something else is going on. The only place where this looks similar is in a mind of a layman. And that just doesn't make a difference.

The only thing that makes a difference is to begin altering the test platform in serious ways and observing how those changes affect the output. Neither does the opinion of serious scientist unless that opinion goes into a more insightful design or better experimental variation and neither the layman unless he is will to create his own random variants and through a process of hard knocks come up with new data on the matter.

Its not an issue of who's right, its only a matter of who puts there money where there mouth is and produces.

Here is something I read today.

http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2015/015808/physics-space-and-time

“This conflict is particularly seen when describing black holes, whose evaporation leads to an apparent paradox discovered by Stephen Hawking more than 40 years ago,.....Evidently part of our current foundation requires modification. Quantum mechanics is well-tested, but locality is ultimately difficult to even formulate, partly because quantum mechanics indicates that space and time themselves have a certain quantum fuzziness.†“In short, familiar space and time may be an illusion, emerging from a more basic quantum reality, . . . . . . Quantum observables can help us make contact between this more basic reality and what we describe as ‘happening.’†“In short, familiar space and time may be an illusion, emerging from a more basic quantum reality,†he said. “Quantum observables can help us make contact between this more basic reality and what we describe as ‘happening.’†- See more at: http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2015/015808/physics-space-and-time#sthash.xHJqK9v6.dpuf

- Steven Giddings

[Rakaydos]

We dont know hw it works, but it's doing SOMETHING that we havt explained yet. The expiriment has been tested at different Q values with results scaled to earlier empirical equations. The empirical observation is starting to give way to predictive modeling... we just need to figure out where the effect is coming from.

[Mazon Del]

Heh, I apologize if people misconstrued my statement about Shawyer's comments. I thought it implied that I was in the category of someone who didn't think his predictions were going to be terribly accurate. I'd love it if they were, but I'm right now just holding out for a weak-sauce magic space engine.

[RuBisCO]

Heh, I apologize if people misconstrued my statement about Shawyer's comments. I thought it implied that I was in the category of someone who didn't think his predictions were going to be terribly accurate. I'd love it if they were, but I'm right now just holding out for a weak-sauce magic space engine.

Agreed, more testing is needed first to prove it is actually producing thrust without propellant, then we can argue over theory.

[K^2]

I thought it implied that I was in the category of someone who didn't think his predictions were going to be terribly accurate.

Well, seeing how not only does it violate conservation laws and allows for generation of infinite energy, but the entire model was derived from misunderstanding classical EM wave guide equations, the fact that his predictions are inaccurate is the one thing we do know with absolute certainty. Otherwise wouldn't even be the plain old unicorns improbable that the reaction-free drive would be. We'd be on the scale of, "This guy makes stuff up, and universe changes to work that way," of improbable.

[magnemoe]

Well, seeing how not only does it violate conservation laws and allows for generation of infinite energy, but the entire model was derived from misunderstanding classical EM wave guide equations, the fact that his predictions are inaccurate is the one thing we do know with absolute certainty. Otherwise wouldn't even be the plain old unicorns improbable that the reaction-free drive would be. We'd be on the scale of, "This guy makes stuff up, and universe changes to work that way," of improbable.

Now it has been some speculations that efficiency tapper off over time so you can not get free energy, this is how it would work if the drive interact with something.

Else, more testing is obviously needed, also testing if your theories match the changes you do to the drive.

[wizzlebippi]

Well, seeing how not only does it violate conservation laws and allows for generation of infinite energy, but the entire model was derived from misunderstanding classical EM wave guide equations, the fact that his predictions are inaccurate is the one thing we do know with absolute certainty. Otherwise wouldn't even be the plain old unicorns improbable that the reaction-free drive would be. We'd be on the scale of, "This guy makes stuff up, and universe changes to work that way," of improbable.

How does the EmDrive allow for generation of infinite energy? Last time I checked, the big problem is momentum isn't conserved, putting it at odds with Newtonian physics. Electricity is still required to produce thrust meaning that energy is still conserved even if we don't know how.

[PB666]

Now it has been some speculations that efficiency tapper off over time so you can not get free energy, this is how it would work if the drive interact with something.

Else, more testing is obviously needed, also testing if your theories match the changes you do to the drive.

I think its more of the realm of testing many different things in very different ways to see if they can get a handle on where (or where not) the thrust is coming from. They need empirical data, all the theories in the world ain't going to help you unless you can start ruling some possibilities out.

[SAI Peregrinus]

How does the EmDrive allow for generation of infinite energy? Last time I checked, the big problem is momentum isn't conserved, putting it at odds with Newtonian physics. Electricity is still required to produce thrust meaning that energy is still conserved even if we don't know how.

No, the instant you break conservation of momentum you also break conservation of energy. My proposed method (stick a few so they drive a generator shaft in circles) is a layman's perspective. The more technical explanation is that by Noether's theorem (pure math) by breaking a conservation law you also have a break in the underlying symmetry of action. The conservations of linear momentum, angular momentum, and energy are all results of aspects of the Lorentz symmetry, so if you break one you break the others (in some frame of reference). So if the emDrive breaks conservation of linear momentum it also breaks conservation of energy.

[wizzlebippi]

No, the instant you break conservation of momentum you also break conservation of energy. My proposed method (stick a few so they drive a generator shaft in circles) is a layman's perspective. The more technical explanation is that by Noether's theorem (pure math) by breaking a conservation law you also have a break in the underlying symmetry of action. The conservations of linear momentum, angular momentum, and energy are all results of aspects of the Lorentz symmetry, so if you break one you break the others (in some frame of reference). So if the emDrive breaks conservation of linear momentum it also breaks conservation of energy.

Momentum is energy, but not all energy is momentum. Conservation of energy implies that the quantity of energy in the system is constant. In the case of the EmDrive, electrical energy is converted into thrust and thermal energy. Conservation of momentum implies that force creates equal and opposite force. The EmDrive is reactionless, so momentum is not conserved.

Edited August 15, 2015 by wizzlebippi

[Findthepin1]

999th post

Is the EmDrive based on acceleration or translation? This has probably been discussed already in the thread but I'm too lazy to go through it all.

[wizzlebippi]

999th post

Is the EmDrive based on acceleration or translation? This has probably been discussed already in the thread but I'm too lazy to go through it all.

Acceleration. They're pretty sure it's not a warp drive. Also this thread isn't exactly brimming with useful information so I don't blame you for not reading it.