Ellen Ochoa's Warp Drive: Smoke and Mirrors
That NASA Warp Drive? Yeah, It’s Still Poppycock, Wired
“The reason the Eagleworks lab presents results in unrefereed conference proceedings and Internet posts, according to Eric Davis, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, is that no peer-reviewed journals will publish their papers. Even arXiv, the open-access pre-print server physicists default to, has reportedly turned away Eagleworks results. Why the cold shoulder? Either flawed results or flawed theory. Eagleworks’ results so far are very close to the threshold of detectionwhich is to say, barely perceptible by their machinery. That makes it more likely that their findings are a result of instrument error, and their thrust measurements don’t scale up with microwave input as you might expect. Plus, the physics and math behind each of their claims is either flawed or just…nonexistent.”
Keith’s note: Wired.com did some leg work. Yet despite all of this speculative PR NASA JSC PAO has still not said a single thing about any of this during the recent online flurry of stories about advanced propulsion research that NASA is openly funding.
– Ellen Ochoa’s Warp Drive Gizmo, earlier post
As a physicist I was and still am skeptical about this drive. I remember a couple of years ago when some European scientists claimed they found neutrinos that traveled faster in light. Turns out they had experimental error.
Do we question that virtual particles exist? The results from the casimir force experiments say that they do. Where in the physics text books does it say that we are not allowed to push on the virtual particles during the microsecond that they exist in our dimension? Where do the virutal particles go when they cease to exist? Who says that the total system momentum law is violated when the virtual particles take some momentum with them when they go back to wherever they came from? Perhaps the “System” needs to include the momentum of the virtual particles….
In fact, doesnt hawking radiation violate this very same “total momentum” law?
A black hole can separate two virtual particles and hurl one away from the event horizon while hurling the other at the EH. Is total system momentum conserved in that case?
Virtual particles normally annihilate by merging with virtual particles of opposite momentum when they vanish, so CM is not violated. Here is an interesting paper on the dynamic Casimir effect, which is well substantiated in theory. Virtual particles are real, if that is not an oxymoron. http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.4714
Unfortunately the force the Casimir effect produces produces is never greater than you could get by taking the same amount of energy and radiating it behind you as a photon stream with a laser or similar light source.
Like I said Stuart I am a physicist. I am familiar with virtual particles. The idea of using them in this way does make some sense to me. That said I am skeptical until we have more evidence. Right now from what I have read the measurements are very close to the precision limit of the measurement device. More experiments need to be done. Other teams need to go over the data.
The European team who thought they found faster than light neutrinos were confident enough in their data to announce it to the world and yet they were wrong. Doesn’t mean they were malicious or stupid. Just sometimes smart people make mistakes. This needs to be checked thoroughly and it concerns me that no journal wants to touch it.
This “EM drive” story–in the public news organs and media, not this particular NASAWatch story–exemplifies part of the problem with releasing results early: the public and media are prone to misinterpreting the results. This is doubly the case when the agencies and/or people doing the research are silent on the issue, such as in this case.
I understand the desire to get results out early in order to engage the public in science and possibly drum up more support for research and research money, but the researchers have to do their due diligence first. That’s not the case here at all.
White has yet to provide any credible results from this EM drive or his space “warping” experiments.
This is all about jazzy power point slides and nothing about real data. But isn’t that how a lot of NASA projects get started anyway? What kind of self-licking ice cream cone is this?
Why does NASA keep funding Harold White and their ilk on this stuff? It just makes them seem less credible every time they put out some nonsense garbage that wouldn’t stand up to review in a scientific journal.
Rather them fund this than some pork barrel project that is nothing more than political maneuvering.
Those don’t have to be the only choices.
No they’re not the only choices, but imho NASA should be funding and supporting a varied space program which includes things like this, for the relatively small cost and potentially large pay off if on the off chance there is something to it I have absolutely no problem with projects like this, as I have said before some in the scientific community can be all to elitist when things don’t fit in with their view of how science should be conducted.
There is no elitism about sticking with a rigorous procedure for doing science. That’s what the Scientific Method is all about, and that’s why science has been so successful.
There’s little evidence of what White is doing and his theoretical explanations have no mathematical support, at least in terms of his “EM Drive.” It’s not sufficient to say that something is pushing against some “quantum vacuum.” Making up terminology doesn’t a theory make. It’s not even clear what his results are and if they’re valid. We don’t know because he’s yet to publish anything on any of his work: EM drive, warping, and etc.
“We don’t know because he’s yet to publish anything on any of his work: EM drive, warping, and etc.”
trouble is if his ideas don’t fit in with current thinking he has no chance of being published or taken seriously even if there is truth in his ideas, remember Galileo was considered a heretic!
I am clearly not saying I’m not skeptical, I am however I don’t believe that anything the “scientific community” dismisses as being flawed should then simply be dismissed as having no merit whatsoever.
You presume that if “his ideas don’t fit with with current thinking, he has no chance of being published or taken seriously.” No matter: that’s not justification for not publishing and instead just leaking dubious results, results which will always be dubious until they’re repeated by others or examined by others.
Until he publishes, his claims merit little.
There are some papers, not peer reviewed of course, but certainly worth reading for anyone concerned about this field. Here are a few:
http://www.newscientist.com…
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.5…
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/…
Because without project like this we will never reach even Mars – it’s grasping at straws, but we don’t anything else right now that could allow proper space travel. And this project is probably quite cheap and should be tested quite fast if it works or not once and for all.
My personal guess about the effect, is that they have created a standing wave, really a reflection, in the vacuum chamber, where the effective flux in the EM field is something like Q times the EM power input, where Q is the Q of the metallic vacuum chamber. Then the force could easily be Q times the expected “photon rocket” thrust from the microwave beam, which would be P/c, where P is power input and c is the speed of light. In effect they are pushing against the chamber walls, which also feel a force from the EM fields.
Of course the proportionality between thrust F and power P would depend on the details of the construction and materials of the setup, and would be very small unless Q is huge.
If this theory happens to be right, then altering Q (by putting microwave absorbing materials around the setup) should show a proportionality between F and Q.
It was. Big difference.
Its curious most critique of such a device centers on being a closed system, conservation of momentum, pulling up oneself by ones boot-straps not being possible, etc. Yet the broader idea of zero propellant thrust doesn’t have to be closed, no? Energy can enter the system from the sun, right? We know how to convert thermal energy to current, Seebeck effect, and all that, used with RTGs. Umm…so how to take only energy in and get a mass needed for push, for thrust…ummm.
Technically you don’t need a “mass” for “push.” All you need is an exchange of momentum, and as such, photons will suffice. Granted photon momentum is pretty darn small (visible photons have a momentum on the order of 10^-27 kg-m/s). I believe white is claiming something entirely different, something which he has yet to experimentally or theoretically justify.
But as a physicist, shouldn’t we all open our minds to possibilities that apparently seem to violate physical laws in the hopes of refining those laws and making advances in physics, subtle, evolutionary or revolutionary? I agree that at this point, the full resources of NASA should be put forth to either prove or disprove the phenomenon RAPIDLY and perhaps by a parallel team not related to White or his team – but such a team must not be be composed of absolute elitist naysayers or psychological bias will poison the results and it may be a very long time before this research is revisited in any serious way and could delay our expansion into the Solar System and beyond for centuries if not millenia. Let’s get some resources on this and put it to bed one way or another.
I remain agnostic but I also approach this with an open mind.
Of course we need to keep open minds. I suspect that what we do not know vastly exceeds what we (think we) do know. If so, everything is tentative, and subject to revision. But I think skepticism is warranted here. In particular, conservation of momentum is deep deep in the roots of our understanding of physics, not to be given up easily.
Emmy Noether’s Theorem, established in the 1920s, says that for every invariance, we have a conservation law. Conservation of angular momentum follows from the fact that there is no preferred orientation in space (invariance of the laws of physics under rotations), conservation of energy from invariance under changes in the time we do our experiments, and momentum from invariance under where we do them.
Pretty basic stuff. An instant Nobel for anyone who can refute it.
I don’t recall the actual wording of the announcement but I believe you are correct that they asked for others to check their work. I don’t think they knew immediately that they were wrong.
That’s the purpose of the peer review process. “Hey, we found something funny. Can someone else take a look at this and see if you can tell what’s going on?”
This is exactly how science is supposed to work.
There is a history to this sort of nonsense@NASA
http://www.niac.usra.edu/fi…
Conservation of momentum can be circumnavigated in general relativity in at least two ways that pass the sniff test: Alcubierre’s controversial theoretical proposal which is the primary basis of White’s warp field experiment, and Jack Wisdom’s uncontroversial concept of “swimming in spacetime” ( http://web.mit.edu/wisdom/w… ). So it’s sensible to keep poking in that direction for a breakthrough. And as much as I dislike the “EM Drive” idea, the rotten thing keeps churning out positive results, so these efforts are a welcome departure from the noisy negativists who seem to be committed to grinding advancements to a halt. Yes, the theoretical explanations to date are far from compelling, but we won’t know if the nature of the effect has any useful applications until we actually know what’s causing the positive signal (the China team’s detection of a .7+ Newton force is certainly worthy of interest). Instead of harping on the Eagleworks team for failing to defy the known laws of physics before lunchtime, we should be grateful that at least a handful of scientists are willing to brave the derision of the popular press to seek new propulsion concepts. Heresy is always the only way forward. And if history is any indicator, they probably won’t find what they’re looking for, but they may find something interesting along the way…
I have the same concern about this statement: “Even arXiv, the open-access pre-print server physicists default to, has reportedly turned away Eagleworks results.” This is bad journalism. It gives the impression of some kind of scientific indictment with *zero* basis for belief – who reported this? A credible source, or the guy in the next cubicle? And arXiv isn’t a peer-reviewed journal, so their “possible” rejection would be meaningless anyway. Also, Davis co-authored White’s foundational papers for the warp field experiment…yet this article makes him sounds like an adversary. Very sloppy, contentious and dubious reporting in this Wired article.