NASA approves new engine

@Setanta,

Tell you what Setanta. You find someone else with a Physics degree who you trust. Ask them what they think. You might actually learn something.

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The implications of this effect, if it proves to be true, go much deeper than propulsion or space travel. Those would only be the tip of the iceberg compared to the changes in physics and technology that this effect implies.

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@rosborne979,

Yes, it is far more important in that respect than with regard to some notional propulsion system. Thanks for bringing that back to the fore.

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@Setanta,

I think (but I'm not certain) that Newton's laws of motion are intrinsically linked. So if Law #3 has a crack in it, then I think it also cracks #1 and #2 as well. I'm not sure how F=ma would work if no external force were applied.

In most cases, "crackpots" come up with a theory and then spend decades trying to make a machine which (never) works, always claiming that it isn't finished or isn't adjusted right. But in this case we have a machine which (apparently) works, but no precise theory to explain it. Also, NASA has a lot of credibility and a demonstrated track record of functional value, so it's hard to dismiss this one as easily as many of the others.

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The thing that i've been wondering about is whether or not it's an experimental artifact which won't be repeated at other scales.

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Let's put this in perspective.

1) There have been several titillating news stories in the past few decades that claimed to break a well established law of Physics. The two that come to mind right away are cold fusion, and superluminal neutrinos. Both of these had positive results from independent reputable labs. Both of them were ultimately discredited and discarded.

2) The idea that this will overturn physics is wrong. Even the revolutionary ideas that turned out to be true, like Einstein and Quantum, didn't change the way the world works. Newton's laws remained. Particles in motion continued to remain in motion.

If this engine turns out to be real, Jet engines will continue to operate, as they always have, based on on Newtown's third law and F will continue to equal ma.

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@maxdancona,

I didn't mean to imply that existing reality was going to change or anything.

What usually happens is that a more precise description of the physical laws would be defined mathematically in a way which doesn't invalidate the previous laws, but refines them to include the new evidence.

This wouldn't overturn physics, but it would (if it were true) add a new dimension to physics which might prove to be more relevant to future civilization than current technological methodologies.

The big question in my mind if this effect turns out to be true, is whether they even can come up with a refinement to physics which incorporates it, or if for a while this will just be the "Magic Propulsion Drive" which we can build and do stuff with but nobody can explain.

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@rosborne979,

Quote:

The big question in my mind if this effect turns out to be true, is whether they even can come up with a refinement to physics which incorporates it, or if for a while this will just be the "Magic Propulsion Drive" which we can build and do stuff with but nobody can explain.

Hmmm...

Is there any other example (in the past century) of a technology that went against the contemporary laws of physics?

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

Hmmm...

Is there any precedent (in the past century) for a technology that went against the contemporary laws of physics?

I was asking myself that question even as I wrote that sentence. I was trying to think of anything which has been invented without first understanding the physics behind it, and I'm not sure I can think of anything.

I wonder about Tesla. I'm not sure he understood everything about electricity even as he was building all his electrical devices, but I don't really know his history accurately enough to conclude that.

I agree with your implication that if it hasn't ever happened in the past then it probably won't happen now (or in the future), but I'm not ready to rule it out yet. Especially because it's fun to speculate about and we rarely get any thought provoking science threads on A2K any more, so I'm happy to give this one some leeway.

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@rosborne979,

I don't believe anything that Tesla accomplished broke any of the contemporary laws of Physics. He actually got some laws of Physics wrong, but that doesn't count since he still didn't violate them.

The things Tesla built were cool, but the science of the time was perfectly able to explain it.

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For an interesting narrative on Tesla, Westinghouse and Edison, i recommend Empires of Light. (The link to Amazon is posted for information purposes only, and is not to be construed as a recommendation or advertisement of their services.)

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A deeper reading of the NASA "report" reveals a lot of red flags. The main problem is that the experimental controls used were not sufficient to supersede the normal "noise" of the experiment.

So I would say this whole thing now falls squarely into the "pipe dream" category. Smile

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My apologies for starting this thread and then leaving it alone, it's basically outside of my areas of expertise.

Dumb question for anybody who actually understands this stuff... Is anybody claiming that this engine could ever actually lift a space vehicle from Earth into space or is it more like something you'd use to move a vehicle to Mars once the vehicle was already in Earth orbit?

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@gungasnake,

gungasnake wrote:

Dumb question for anybody who actually understands this stuff... Is anybody claiming that this engine could ever actually lift a space vehicle from Earth into space or is it more like something you'd use to move a vehicle to Mars once the vehicle was already in Earth orbit?

They are claiming it is a propulsion system that does not work by expelling reactive mass or energy. Such a system (if it existed, which this one does not) if it only produced very small amounts of thrust would still be useful for long range space propulsion. If such a system could produce a lot of thrust then it could be used for almost anything, like hovercraft (Star Wars style, floating speeders).

More importantly it would usher in a new era of physics in which we would be exploiting some type of static quantum vacuum resistance to create all kinds of magical effects.

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Here is why this new propulsion drive is just fantasy:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/outthere/2014/08/06/nasa-validate-imposible-space-drive-word/#.U_QAXLxdfss

Quote:

Did I say that was worst of all? I may have take that back. In the paper by White et al, they also write that the Cannae Drive “is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.” That last bit stopped me. What’s a quantum vacuum virtual plasma? I’d never heard the term, so I dropped a note to Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist whose work dives deeply into speculative realms of cosmology and quantum theory.

Carroll wrote back immediately, with a pointed message: “There is no such thing as a ‘quantum vacuum virtual plasma,’ so that should be a tip-off right there. There is a quantum vacuum, but it is nothing like a plasma. In particular, it does not have a rest frame, so there is nothing to push against, so you can’t use it for propulsion. The whole thing is just nonsense. They claim to measure an incredibly tiny effect that could very easily be just noise.” There is no theory to support the result, and there is no verified result to begin with.

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NASA approves new engine

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