Posted on 05/24/2018 7:31:11 AM PDT by BenLurkin
The laws of physics have won again, it would appear.
For the past few years, researchers at NASA's Eagleworks advanced-propulsion lab have been putting a controversial and potentially revolutionary space engine called the EmDrive to the test.
The EmDrive, which was originally developed by British scientist Roger Shawyer in the early 2000s, purportedly generates thrust by bouncing microwaves around inside a conical chamber. Because the engine doesn't require any fuel, it could theoretically make spaceflight far cheaper and more efficient, opening the heavens to exploration
The EmDrive really shouldn't work. The engine doesn't blast anything out a nozzle, so Newton's Third Law of Motion — for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction — doesn't come into play. Nobody really understands how the claimed thrust could actually be generated.
And now it seems that the previously detected thrust was illusory, at least according to a team of researchers in Germany. They built their own EmDrive and tested it in a vacuum chamber, as the NASA researchers did.
The German team picked something up as well. But follow-up analysis "clearly indicates that the 'thrust' is not coming from the EmDrive but from some electromagnetic interaction," the researchers wrote in their new study, which you can read here. That interaction is likely between EmDrive power cables and Earth's magnetic field, the team concluded.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
And it doesn't. Newton got it right it seems.
Imagine that...the laws of physics still apply. Obama should have signed an executive order decreeing them to be no longer valid.
It’s amazing how well experimental verification works to weed out false claims.
It’s not a coincidence, IMO, that today’s scientific establishment seems to prefer experiments that cannot be independently verified because they are too expensive to reproduce.
I suspect this will be studied for a long time by Garage physicists for a long time, like Cold Fusion.
Fanciest perpetual motion machine ever.
“That interaction is likely between EmDrive power cables and Earth’s magnetic field, the team concluded.”
Why couldn’t that be measured as the equal and opposite reaction?
One day chemical propulsion will ne obsolete.
5.56mm
Maybe they should try a BM drive. That is one powerful force.
I am not a physicist, but I did stay at a Holi.....nevermind.
I have often wondered if science is correct about either/or gravity being a constant or the speed of light being a constant throughout the Universe. (WHAT!!!?????) I think we have either one or both of these wrong.
Science says gravity can affect the trajectory of light, but light has no mass. (Black Hole Theories). Is that not a contradiction in science?
So..... Science knows there is something missing in the understanding of gravity. We think we can verify it as a constant related to mass in our own neighborhood. But we know something else affects it in places we can’t quite touch or taste (dark matter, dark energy, anti-matter, etc.)
I speculate (not hypothesize) that gravity can somehow be manipulated so that it’s “waves” or “influence” can be changes as it relates to the mass of an object. That would be important if we were going to find a completely new source of energy and/or propulsion in space.
But Light? Does light have mass that should be affected by gravity. If so, then mass “can” be accelerated to speed of light. If that is true, than mass should be able to exceed the speed of light.
I am sure I am not the first to consider this conflict. I am willing to bet there are some FReepers that can explain why I am a kook. ;o) Fire away.
The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood — and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess’s undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy.
Many respectable physicists said that they weren’t going to stand for this, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn’t get invited to those sorts of parties.
Another thing they couldn’t stand was the perpetual failure they encountered while trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralyzing distances between the farthest stars, and at the end of the day they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning in this way: If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must have finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out how exactly improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn it on!
He did this and was rather startled when he managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air. He was even more startled when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he was lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had realized that one thing they couldn’t stand was a smart-arse.
What’s “ne?”
Damn Russians.
5.56mm
It’s based upon the Covfefe Principle.
Gravity does not affect light, it affects the fabric of space around mass.
So, the light is still traveling in a straight line- but the line itself is in a curved space around the mass.
The same way gravity affects everything else. The earth is moving in a straight line too- but it moves around the sun only because it is in a path of distorted space that curves around the sun.
But NASA probably got 100M to study the problem.
So its ok then.
LOL.
5.56mm
Fine, then lets invent the magnetic field cable trust engine.
Interesting way to put it. Good post.
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