Ellen Ochoa's Warp Drive Nonsense Is Now Officially Published U.S. Government Research
Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio-Frequency Cavity in Vacuum. AIAA Journal of Propulsion and Power
“This material is declared a work of the U.S. Government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States. … The team would like to thank NASA for organizational and institutional support in the exploration and analysis of the physics in this paper.”
Keith’s note: Congratulations, Ellen! You have funded the development of a revolutionary (or so the authors would have you think) propulsion system. But will NASA issue a press release or provide a link to this paper? Of course not. You and the rest of NASA are too embarrassed to admit that you ever funded this nonsense. Too bad. Everyone at NASA is soooo nervous about what comes next – so some good old hype and dazzle to get the new Administration excited is called for, right? Just think of the new hashtag and buzz line for all of NASA’s media releases #JourneyToTheStars – very Trump.
This rocket engine breaks a law of physics. But a NASA test says it works anyway, Washington Post
“This doesn’t mean that the Eagleworks EM drive definitely functions. Peer review is designed to make sure that studies are well designed and executed, and that the conclusions are reasonable – it’s not an endorsement. And plenty of findings published in solid scientific papers have later been found to be incomplete or incorrect. That’s how science is supposed to work: You draw conclusions based on the best evidence available, present them to your peers, and revise and refine as you conduct more tests and gather more data. The authors of the paper list nine possible sources of error in their experiment, and indicate that they need to do more tests to try to rule those out.”
NASA’s EM-drive still a WTF-thruster, Ars Technica
– Hooray – JSC Warp Drive Confirmed !!!!, earlier post
– Ellen Ochoa’s Warp Drive: Smoke and Mirrors, earlier post
– Clarifying NASA’s Warp Drive Program, earlier post
– NASA: We’re Not Working on Warp Drive, earlier post
– Earlier posts
So it’s out in public now? That means it can be tested to see if it can be independently duplicated.
As ALL research should be – The Scientific Process…
Thing is, very few papers have independent duplication done unless someone is trying to build on the results directly. It’s hard to get grant money to duplicate results. See the recent scandals involving chemistry papers from some overseas labs.
At least this paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal and had some independent eyeballs on it.
I’m a little concerned about that. Their “test article” isn’t very well described. There is about one page describing it, and I’m not sure if that’s enough for someone else to independently duplicate it. The only references are to a couple of conference papers on previous tests, and those sorts of papers can be pretty terse. I’m also concerned with some of the text about needing to tune the device and experiment. It seems to take lots of fiddling with, in order to make it work (not uncommon for a lab experiment.) In that case, if someone else can’t duplicate the results, could they write it off as someone else not fiddling around enough to get tune it properly?
Don’t get me wrong. This paper is certainly a step in the right direction. But to be convincing, I think they need to do a whole lot more. At the same time, a step in the right direction may help them get funding for further steps.
Has it been debunked yet? Is there good reason to dismiss it as nonsense at this point? Maybe the peer review process will lead to that.
No, the peer review process isn’t that good.But this hasn’t been debunked either (yet.)
The problem is that the force in question is extremely small. Any very subtle interaction between the test article and the rest of the experiment could produce such a force. The authors did try to make measurements which rule out many of those possible interactions, and convinced the reviewers they had. But they did not rule out all possible interactions, and I don’t think that’s possible. They list nine possible sources of error and explain why they do not consider them significant. But even they admit that this isn’t certain, for example, “To definitively rule out any residual concerns about thermal error sources, future test campaigns could…” This could end up being a large number of iterations, where they publish one paper, someone else says, “but what about X,” they do another experiment, and publish another paper saying, “no, we checked, it isn’t X.”
I think the real problem is the lack of any theoretical underpinnings to the whole idea. The paper contains a fairly vague discussion of quantum effects, but nothing like a solid theory predicting that momentum is not conserved, or that this particular apparatus would do what they observe. I’m not saying every valid observation needs a theoretical explanation to be credible. But this is going to turn into a debate over which is more plausible. Is it an unsuspected, subtle interaction, involving known physics, between the apparatus and environment? Or is it a fundamental, but essentially unexplained, flaw in out understanding of physics? The later is going to be a hard sell. If they had an alternative theory which explained their results, that would be a big step in the right direction.
It is hard to believe that technology has gotten so far for me to say this with a straight face, but: “The simplest test would be to strap a couple of these RF-cavities & Amps on a cubesat and test it on orbit”
Apparently someone is trying to put one together. But the thrust/mass ratio is so low that you’d still have trouble measuring it against the natural noise (variations in atmospheric decay, etc.) Which means even when the creator invariably claims to have detected positive thrust, it still won’t be convincing to anyone who isn’t already a Believer.
1 mN is pretty respectable(*), 86.4 Newton-seconds per day. Applied to a 1,000 kg satellite, it would give a delta-V of 86.4 cm/sec per day. That should produce easily detectable perturbations on the orbit of a MEO satellite.
(*) If it’s real, that is. I’m not putting any money on that.
Even if the results do end up getting refuted or failing some future replication study (which, I agree, they probably will) can we at least give Eagleworks credit for doing what we have been asking them to do for years: “Stop doing makeshift experiments in your basement and promoting the results on internet forums; do a controlled experiment with a proper sensitivity analysis and get it through peer review.”
Nonsense remains nonsense, wherever it is published. In the words of RAH, TANSTAAFL.
I fear that you are confused (like so many others). There is nothing about the proposed operation of this device that makes it a “perpetual motion device” OR that violates the conservation of energy. It DOES violate the conservation of momentum if we assume that the sea of virtual particles (that it supposedly pushes on) is NOT included in the total momentum of the “system” (universe). A person rowing a boat would violate the conservation of momentum law if we did not consider the water to be part of the “system”.
Trust me, I am not confused in any regard. Snake-oil is snake-oil.
I would be fairly certain that the same was said to Louis DeBroglie when he claimed that electrons have wavelengths. Do you dispute the Casimir force as well? It is just as weird.
The difference is that the Casimir force was predicted by theory with such clarity and precision that it wazs already accepted as real and an experiment to confirm it was considered almost anticlimactic and routine.
So the casimir force is ‘accepted and real’. The effect is proof that virtual particles interact with our universe enough to exert a force on a mechanism. Yet you find it absurd that it may be possible to exchange momentum with them?
Casimir exerts a symmetrical force. By necessity. Virtual particles can’t exert asymmetrical force on a system.
However…
…even if we pretend you can interact with the “sea of virtual particles” in such a magical way, it doesn’t change the fact that above a critical velocity, any such magic thruster will violate CoE.
This is because the interaction with virtual particles is velocity independent (by the fundamental nature of virtual particles), hence the acceleration is linear with power input, but the kinetic energy produced by that acceleration varies with the square of velocity relative to an energy harvester. The input is linear, the output is squared. At some velocity the latter exceeds the former and the device is putting out more energy than it uses. Free Energy Machine.
Many people (far more versed in the topic than I) have proposed that there IS an asymmetric casimir force. I will not bother to post links as I found dozens with a google search. And the simplest solution to your explanation above is that perhaps the EM drive will NOT work above a certain velocity ‘relative to the sea of virtual particles’. Does that mean there is such a thing as zero velocity wrt to ‘space’? – Perhaps.
Virtual particles don’t work like that, by their very nature they are velocity independent.
The proposed operation.of the device was not really covered by this paper. They do not discuss how, exactly, this device pushes against a “vast sea of virtual particles.” Until they can explain that, they have hand waving and a (documented and somewhat interesting) anomalous measurement.
On the one hand: a peer-reviewed piece in a Famous Journal (AIAA Journal!) documenting the effect (albeit quite small).
On the other hand: on-going dissing by a Famous Blogger who just knows this project is a wasteful black hole.
I’m really skeptical that this ‘effect’ will either scale or prove to be real. And I’d like to know who reviewed the paper, and I’d like to know how many ‘peers’ refused to referee (both will remain unknown).
But I’d say that the score is Magic Science 1, Doubters 0. Stay tuned.
And I would also say that our efforts in space remind one of the transition from horses to internal combustion. We’re still riding horses.
I’m not sure if it’s a point for “Magic Science”. The paper says they placed a poorly-described “test article” in a vacuum chamber and made very precise measurements, which they describe. The real meat of the paper is the measurements, and that’s what the reviewers would have paid attention to. The source, which would be the “magic science” part is limited to a very speculative bit at the end. It comes across as, “we don’t know but it could be…” I’ve never reviewer for AIAA, but that’s the sort of thing reviewers wouldn’t pay much attention to. Even if it could be something else, and the reviewer really suspects it’s something else, speculation about an unknown cause probably wouldn’t get shot down. So, basically, they made a measurement and don’t know what caused the observed force. With forces that small, it could be a result of the test environment. They tried to remove most of those artifacts, but they may have missed some.
We, the readers, are the only peers that count.
Now we just need to perfect the Cold Fusion reactors for power and the stars will be ours!
In physics experiments looking for small anamolies, the sources of noise almost always exceed the actual signal, so simply measuring an unexplained force does not prove anything. Theory has to come first. Only when there is a consistent theory that makes predictions that can be tested from a variety of perspectives it is possible to draw any supportable conclusion. In this case there are many factors that could introduce an asymmetrical force, from radiation emissions from the outer surface of the resonator to interactions with air molecules.
This particular concept has been around for some time. The explanations of the theory appear (to me) to contain a relatively straightforward error. There is a well known phenomenon by which the phase velocity of microwaves varies with channel diameter, hence in the tapered resonator the phase velocity is higher at one end than the other. The proponents of the device, however, claim that the momentum of photons varies with phase velocity, thus the radiation pressure will be higher at one endplate than the other.
This simply isn’t the case; phase velocity is a function of the apparent movement of the wave envelope, not of the “velocity” of a photon as a “particle”. Photons are not billiard balls. The magnitude of the momentum of a photon varies only with its frequency. Frequency of microwaves can be measured with great precision and there is no evidence that the microwaves reflected from one end of the resonator are of a different frequency from those reflected from the other end.
Imagine driving along a freeway with, say, Isaac Newton in the passenger seat. General Washington is in the back seat.
White knuckled, Sir Isaac glances at the dashboard, asking what ’70’ means. You explain.
He blurts out: “Seventy miles per hour?? Surely not!” The passengers exchange glances, quite sure trickery is afoot.
But these are very smart guys. Top of their class and all that.
Looking out the window, Sir Isaac is not sure of the precise speed. But it’s pretty clear they are moving really, really fast. He starts to wonder how it’s done.
Horses? How would you feed that many horses? And anyway where ARE the horses?
You explain that there are ‘contained’ explosions happening under the hood, happening thousands of times a minute and timed just ‘so’.
Sir Isaac imagines the clock on his desk, always losing time. The General wonders how the gunpowder is shoved in. The General knows a thing or two about gunpowder.
These are educated men. And here they are moving at 70 MPH.
Neither has the tools – scientific or otherwise – to unravel the experience because it is in an unapproachable realm. The science behind automobiles is unreachable from where they stand. Or sit.
****
I have no idea about the so-called warp drive. I do know this: the notion that humans will populate and flourish off-Earth is preposterous without an alternative to action/reaction. We can re-use rockets over and over and the price will never be low enough.
There is a kingdom or realm of understanding far beyond what we have. Is the ‘warp drive’ an avenue of escape? Dunno. But I do know that the road through the future will be entirely completely unimaginable.
There is nothing wrong with action/reaction. Just bring enough energy – and, we kinda tapped fission almost 80 years ago already.
True, although the point remains, and perhaps better phrased; flourishing off-Earth without energy sources several orders of magnitude more dense is nonsensical.
Still, (at least in dreams) there is a future physics out there that will see us as immature at best. And this is why I lose patience with so much of the snark directed towards Eagleworks’ efforts.
Unless you are a politician, fantasy and reality are not equivalent. I would like nothing better than to see a valid theory for a reactionless drive. (I don’t believe this test was directed toward experiments the same group has conducted on warp drive.) I hope my analysis is accurate and objective. I read the original paper proposing the theory and discussed it with a graduate student and a postdoc at CERN, who were likewise sympathetic but found the theory flawed.
Questioning the standard model of physics is perfectly legitimate. Doing so without actually understanding the standard model and providing a consistent alternative theory is wistful thinking. As I mentioned before, the proposed theory appears to contain a straightforward error and the measured asymmetrical force is well within the expected systematic error level for experiments of this type. The least error prone way to determine whether photon momentum varies with the diameter of a resonator is by frequency measurement, not photon pressure.
I don’t think you picked the right folks for your imagined demonstration of your point. Both Newton & Washington very likely would follow an explanation of how a car could move thusly since it operates on principles & aspects of Nature they both studied (and in the part of Newton, derived). Explaining how they were transported into modern times…THAT would likely be a challenge…
Don’t know why everyone’s so negative. There is theoretical support – google Unruh radiation. See “Testing quantised inertia on the emdrive”. at https://arxiv.org/abs/1604….. Y’all sound like people saying that man will never fly.
No, just that he’ll never fly in this.
http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/8…
it doesn’t break the laws of physics. People just don’t understand what’s happening inside the cavity. Radio waves are magnetic fields, just changing polarity really quickly. In the cavity you are simply bouncing those waves off the other side, and when they return you are acting on them. Since the waves are out of phase with the magnetron you can either pull or push depending on how many degrees out of phase you are with the wave “ride the traveling wave”. Simply equal or opposite reaction just in a different point in time. You send a signal out and will take a while till it reaches it’s destination but that signal is doing work.