Topic: NASA May Have Invented Warp Drive (A.K.A. : Perfect engine for a 1000yo human?) (Read 3439 times)

I'm sure he simply means that all the while we have been evolving over those hundreds of thousands of years or whatever, there have been many other races that have evolved way faster, way beyond us, in other parts of the universe.

He probably is thinking about the one guy in one of those far-advanced races, who was so advanced that he turned into God, controls the whole spectrum of the space-time continuum, and entirely got rid of evolution from ever happening, while replacing it with something else that is a whole lot quicker and way, way better.

Exactly what that something else is, however, none of us cockroaches knows.

 

Care to elaborate?

We are them.

Sir, should you yourself be an extraterrestrial, your reference to "cockroaches" could be deemed brazen and offensive.

The preponderance of cockroaches disagrees with you.

Yours is an appeal to false authority.

I have a talking cockroach that says otherwise.

I contend that what we have discussed - the scope of the powers of an interstellar, governmental body - is, indeed, a matter of law.

Neither is this law nor have you presented any proof.

Have you not understood this to be a matter of law (here, interstellar politics) replete with the "burden of proof" thereof?

You don't have any preponderance of the evidence, given that no evidence of negative matter exists.

Regardless, science is not decided by opinion or "a preponderance."  So do you have ANYTHING?  ANYTHING AT ALL?

My "preponderance of the evidence" (TheFreeDictionary) exceeds that of yourself.

It could also come to be the case if the civilization observed the barbarism of those that did.

I wonder if consciousness is locked by the limit of the speed of light... Could the speed of thought be its limitation instead? In one way it would be millions of times slower than the speed of light. On the other end you could project your consciousness anywhere in the universe at any time, if you can "visualize" it, meaning knowing "where" you want to be, the next "moment".

I believe consciousness needs a shape for it to communicate with other shaped consciousness simply because my mind cannot compute how consciousness can be without an anchor made with stuff like atoms. But this is my own limitation with my shaped consciousness... A consciousness without a shape can be facing me right now but I won't have the natural tools to recognize it as such...

What are we talking about again?

Oh yeah... Warp drive...

 

A better alternative is that each individual lives with God. His consciousness is the part of him that pulls the levers in this body to direct it in its thinking and activities.

The bodies and lives of people with regard to this earthly material life is simply that of highly complex machinery in which their consciousness rides at times, just like you might get into a car and drive it.

+1

Consciousness is NOT necessarily predicated on carbon, although carbon has huge advantages for creating creatures.   Creature is not requisite for consciousness.

Given the obvious implications of that, I see two general alternatives - the universe is rich in consciousness, but it exists in "bubbles", around areas such as planets with the necessary element fractions to create it.  In other words, it exists locally.    Generally speaking this implies the speed of light is a limit on propagation of consciousness.  In turn this means that the universe must be bigger than the areas which contain life or consciousness.   Note a barren rock in vacuum with diverse minerals might be much more interesting as a home for consciousness than a lush forest.

That would be true if a life, then becoming a 3 million year old civilization was forged from a defensive mechanism within a predatory environment. That scenario is the one life followed on this planet. That story is coded in our DNA. First Nature tried to wipe us all (just after creating us) many times over, so we don't trust Nature. Then we evolved not to trust each other as we became a tasty meal to each other. The interstellar body you are describing could very well be the one from our own making, based on our history, from the first mono cellular creature to us a 1000 years from now.

The game theory the cosmos is playing would predict the existence of a life born on a planet never hit once by killer asteroids like our planet. Maybe their planet had many small volcanoes but no super volcanoes. Maybe their planet is a moon, etc, etc. All those parameters would create a civilization that may not have a predisposition for conflict, war, doubt or the automatic suspicion of others. Maybe there consciousness is distributed across a coral like formation, or a forest.

If we are opening our mind to truly believe in any shape and form of life+consciousness we need to stop projecting our human nature across the universe as a divine substratum...

I do not think so, unless the presumption was that only the existence of negative matter would explain the observed phenomena.  But that is not the case, is it?

Russon is just a reporter, she doesn't even seem to understand physics.   

Presently, we discuss a legal matter; therefore, the "preponderance of the [circumstantial] evidence" (TheFreeDictionary) quoted above should be sufficient to decide in my favor.

You first need to demonstrate the existence of "negative matter", which is impossible.

An interstellar body might consider that criterion in the defence of a less capable civilization against a more capable one.

The cosmos is pretty, pretty big. We have room to create our own interstellar community. "Clear and present danger" concept may not even be part of the first billionth of second of a thought inside an alien mind. That would be their doom if their green skinned women look tasty to us...

 

It must merely be demonstrated, to the interstellar community, that our isolation of negative matter does not occur "in such circumstances and [is] of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that [it] will bring about the substantive evils that [an interstellar governmental body] has a right to prevent" (U.S. Supreme Court).

... Then it does not matter and we should simply do what we do, until we get hit by an artificial gamma ray burst shot from a death star far, far away....

Evolution (at least, that by natural selection) hones certain traits (e.g., the sincere pursuit of survival).

It is already problematic among humans to try to read each other's mind. Now we want to read the mind of hypothetical advanced civilizations light years away from us, but having the 'same' mindset as us, reacting the same as us? Some would see this as a lack of imagination.

1000 of roaches are plotting right now to take over your kitchen. You only deal with them when they bother you. They would react and run the opposite direction. They will never comprehend what an ipad is for. In one scenario we are the advanced civilization. The other is the exact reversal.

We should not worry too much about advanced civilizations (billions of them?) trying to stop us from doing anything. There is nothing we can do about it, nor can they.

Taking the first article, it says this -

Because of the equivalence principle of general relativity, the attraction towards the center of a gravitational potential well, produced by a positive mass, is for negative masses the same as for positive masses, and large amounts of negative masses might have over billions of years been trapped in these gravitational potential wells.

Is not this the reverse of your claim, that the positive and negative matter would accelerate forever?

In any case, since no two masses can be exactly identical in weight, I would assert that instead of a 100g -M and 100g +M accelerating forever, they would always join in short order.

This article continues -

Now it just happens that the center of the moon is a potential well, not too deep that it cannot be reached by making a tunnel through the moon, not possible for the deeper potential well of the earth, where the temperature and pressure are too high. Making a tunnel through the moon, provided there is a good supply of negative mass, could revolutionize interstellar space flight. A sequence of thermonuclear shape charges would make such tunnel technically feasible.


This is wronger than wrong - lunar gravity is substantial, therefore pressures deep in the core would be enormous.  And it isn't certain that the Moon is frozen all the way through, IIRC.  However one might conjecture running a tunnel through Ceres, some 590 miles in diameter and with surface gravity only about 1% of the moon.   Of course this presumes that the "negative mass" actually is trapped in the core.  Hard to see how to disprove this assertion, since even if you drilled through Ceres and found none, it might be lurking in the next planetoid.  Oh, and no, thermonuclear shaped charges don't generate a 600 or 2000 mile long cylindrical hole.   

The second article, I am not familiar with the equations and thus can't follow it.  But I am not seeing the relation between any article and the subject at all.

It does not matter if scientists here believe negative matter to exist: what matters is whether or not it does and whether or not the local interstellar community would tolerate our isolation of it. (Note: extraterrestrial views on our isolation of negative matter could be akin to American views on Iran's enrichment of uranium.)

You present negative matter as if it were a fact, but I do not think that any modern physicists believe that.  This puts it in a different category than say "virtual particles", which do not exist but are handy to use to describe various phenomena.  Similarly, "anti matter" we know does exist at least individual particles are easily produced by particle accelerators. 

Because of this, your paragraph about negative matter should perhaps be disregarded? 

Quoting from the Wikipedia article...

Such matter would violate one or more energy conditions and show some strange properties, stemming from the ambiguity as to whether attraction should refer to force or the oppositely oriented acceleration for negative mass. It is used in certain speculative theories, such as on the construction of wormholes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass

Negative matter, having negative mass, responds to forces related thereto in the exact opposite direction that matter with positive mass does. For example, if one were to take 100 kg of negative matter and affix it to 100 kg of matter, Newton's third law of motion implies that the negative matter will accelerate in a direction opposite that which matter would (i.e., towards the matter) while the matter responds in the typical way (here, away from the negative matter). This has the result that, with equal masses, both the matter and negative matter would accelerate, in the same direction, forever if left undisturbed. The results of this could be catastrophic over great (e.g., interstellar) distances. If someone, say 50 ly away, sends one such bundle (or, yet more perilous, a guided one) of matter and negative mater towards one's planet (i.e., where it will be in the amount of time that it would take the bundle to reach the planet), depending on the absolute value of the mass of the matter and negative matter, how forcefully they are initially collided, and whether the negative (or, if the target consists of negative matter, matter) can be jettisoned, one's planet could be impacted by a macroscopic body traveling at superluminal speeds!

Why would an advanced (by local interstellar standards) civilization permit a primitive (by local interstellar standards) one to develop such capabilities if it could put an end to that?

This emDrive idea was mocked by everyone. NASA was not into it until very recently. To prove or disprove it. As long as 0bama does not take this the same way as al gore inventing the Internet if something more concrete happens...

I agree.

Does the warp drive act directly on every particle of the ship it drives? Or does it simply "push" the ship along. If it doesn't react on all the particles of everything in the ship it drives, then everything inside the ship will be forced by inertia through the rear bulkhead, provided the bulkhead is strong enough to keep from disintegrating, itself.

We are so far away from having a practical warp drive that, maybe the first thousand year old person will live that long before we have it.

It's call job security for NASA. Do some faulty advertising so that the people let government spend more of our tax dollars on their useless salaries.

If this is proven to be true, that would be amazing.
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[–]daneagles 391 points 9 hours ago

I'm not a physicist but maybe I can give you a more ELI5 answer to why everyone is freaking out about EmDrive right now.
The thing with the EMDrive system is that it's really a fundamental departure from previous engines in two major ways. For one thing, it doesn't require a propellant. Everything that we've ever sent into space since the first satellites and Apollo has been strapped onto a gigantic tank of fuel, which we then lit on fire and sent it into the upper atmosphere.

EMDrive achieves this by essentially "pushing off" the quantum vacuum, which causes the spacecraft to recoil in the opposite direction of motion and produces a small amount of thrust. As an analogy, consider a submarine: a submarine's propulsion system doesn't have to make use of strapping some giant fuel tank onto it - it can take advantage of the fact that it's submerged in its propellant (water) and instead we simply attach a rotor on the end which propels the submarine along. The EMDrive concept is doing the exact same thing, except this time the medium that we're "submerged" in is space itself. This explanation is a little light on a deeper scientific level but hopefully gets the general idea across.

The second reason why this is so revolutionary is because not only is the EMDrive much more efficient because it doesn't require a fuel tank to use, it also holds the possibility of travel faster than anything we could ever possibly build in the next century or more. I want to stress that this hasn't been confirmed for sure, and that for now this is just speculation, but what a more technologically mature version of the EMDrive would do is essentially contract the space directly in front of the spaceship, and expand the space behind the spaceship, meaning that when the spaceship is travelling, it's not moving straight through space; space itself is being contracted to make the journey much shorter. Think of sending a spacecraft from Earth to the moon; the distance is about 200,000 miles away. However, imagine now that instead of having to travel 200,000 miles, you only had to travel 100,000 miles because the space between Earth and the moon was contracted to make the distance shorter. You'd still be going the same speed, but the distance you'd have to travel would be substantially less because spacetime is being curved in your direction of motion, resulting in much faster travel times both around the solar system and beyond.

Also, if you don't have a science background it might be a bit overwhelming to understand why this is such a big deal in and of itself. You've probably heard that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and you may have also heard that as you approach the speed of light, anything travelling that fast has to have its mass approach 0 - this is why photons, the particles of light that move at light-speed, have no mass. Because of this, it is quite literally impossible to build a ship that could travel at anything even CLOSE to lightspeed, because in order to accelerate an object with a non-trivial mass (in fact, a HUGE mass, given that this is a spaceship), it would take more energy than we could ever possibly load onto a spaceship. This means that without the (eventual) invention of some kind of Alcubierre drive, it would be realistically not possible for us to even consider a mission shorter than the century+ timescale to any star system outside of ours. With EmDrive, that possibility could potentially be realized since you're not actually accelerating the spaceship to a high fraction of the speed of light; you're simply changing the space that it moves through.

This second application of the EMDrive is what's still very much contentious and still has yet to be proven, and you could probably see why - rigorous proof of this engine doing what its inventors claim it can would be a revolution of mind-boggling proportions and would completely change how we view space. This is the piece of the theory that Sonny White and his team are testing now; essentially what they're doing is setting up a small table with two beams of light going in opposite directions, where a beam of light is being forced through a test article designed to contract the space around it and thus make the beam of light appear at the detector SLIGHTLY faster than the control beam. If they compare the two beams of light and find that one arrived sooner than the other, it means the device has succeeded in shrinking the space in front of it which would be really huge news for the theory and device, and would definitely prompt the scientific community to turn a lot of their attention towards trying to disprove it since it's such a revolutionary idea.

Sorry this was so long but hopefully it helped answer your question.


http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/34lkqw/eli5_the_emdrive_warp_field_possible_discovery/cqvumbs

Real science is pushing science fiction out faster and faster. Everything is moving forward in parallel, faster and faster.

Today's fairy dust will be tomorrow's common concept, even throw away products in some cases.

imho if such exists they would ignore us as we ignore some tribes in new guinea.........not worth the effort ...but for maybe an extra terrestrial anthropologist passively watching
us once in awhile would be my guess (shaking its head/thenacles/robot body/wings //// whatever in pure dismay

as to interstellar......with so much real estate out there doubt that would be an issue either

the distances involved......if they have come this way they likely would not bother to come back .....not sure I would just looking at the state  of affairs the last 1000 years

 

How did the United States respond when it found out that the U.S.S.R. could deliver nuclear warheads to targets within its borders? How do you believe extraterrestrial governments would respond if civilizations such as those presently located in Earth developed the interstellar equivalent of that capability? (E.g., respond with preemptive strikes, the singular [i.e., black hole] option, etcetera.)

well if such technology worked..it would probably get us funny hairless monkey primates to get our heads out of the dirt and look at the stars maybe even slow down some of
the squabbling and mucking around in circles we seem to do as normal policy....

we probably need a truly stupid/silly/senseless gesture of some kind to get humanity to get its 'ducks in a row' and think more in the long term as a species a frigging hot
space ship would probably qualify from just a human knocking about the solar system point of view...

something like this would certainly qualify imho to get folks to sit up and take notice thats for sure.....would be nice I think humanity needs a kick in the ass to think bigger anyway

 

http://emdrive.com/

Probably a good idea to read the scientific articles.

There are unanswered questions - but the very point is that it is plausible that something works, but we don't know exactly how.

I'm not that good at maths so I'm glad you realise that but the thing is people are just going to decide themselves it IS powered by magic that's my point lol even though I'm not good at equations I know that thrust doesn't come from nothing.

I don't know much about negative mass unfortunately to comment on it, what pisses me off though is rather than say that people will jump to their own conclusions and claim it's magic, the point is though the thrust isn't produced by anti-matter or any bullshit like that. It seems to me though that he just found a clever way to reverse the thrust and people are trying to figure out how he actually did it while others are just trying to dismiss his work. I'm not saying don't be skeptical, technology like this should be scrutinised like crazy, but don't dismiss it out of hand like idiots did with the Hadron Collider.

In the end, the reason people were saying that is because they didn't want the Higgs Boson particle being found in the same way that they couldn't believe that we might finally have a real chance of leaving this planet. The information is all there on his website though so it's just a matter of going through it and taking the actual time to figure it out.

Good luck with your travel to Alpha Centaury, idiot. Don't forget to give them all your money. You can also give all your money, house, etc. to me. Since your're not gonna be needing them in space.

can it do time travel also.

Oh fuck off, people like you are the type who believe the Hadron Collider could make a black hole aren't you? Also it's got nothing to do with breaking the laws of physics it's just that people are too stupid to look properly at the evidence presented, there's a clue in the name "EM" ElectroMagnetic, the engine generates microwaves and doesn't break the laws of physics at all.

Damn morons will believe anything that they read or are told.

Here's Roger Shawyers actual website, it goes into a full explanation of how it works.

http://www.rexresearch.com/shawyer/shawyer.htm#gb239

The official reason tha was given that the EMDrive 'didn't work' was because of the amount of thrust it produced was so small etc. but they've clearly been testing it properly now and trying to increase the power, but as the guy rightly said who invented the prototype they're going to be pretty far behind other companies who are more willing to experiment with this. From what I've seen it looks like if you want to produce any kind of real movement from it you're going to have to power it with an electricity source but that's a far better option than wasting a ton of fuel in space to get to where you need to go and then get stuck because there isn't any oil or gas elsewhere.

In theory, I guess you could use the solar energy from the sun to power this thing which is a far more efficient method than what's been come up with so far.


Oh and I just edited my post, I don't know why you didn't read anything but it even says in one line it uses electrical energy to produce thrust and that's the case in the actual document I gave you too. I worry for the fucking future of civilisation when people are practically handed space travel technology and just dismiss it because they're so proud of being stupid.

(Red colorization mine.)

NASA May Have Invented Warp Drive?
LOL, another science scam to attract taxpayers money. Laws of physics forbids it. Forget it people. We stuck on this planet. Everyone who saying different is a scammer who just want your money. That's all.

We would not? Are you sure about this or are you just writing nonsense? The mentioned Z8 GND 5296 is actually 13.1 billion light years away. 30 billion light years is the comoving distance to that galaxy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_distance

Not http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Impulse_drive ?

“NASA” (i.e., the Illuminati) was aware of the possibility that negative matter is freed inside “the EmDrive’s resonance chamber” (Russon): the velocity of “some of the laser beams” (Russon) was negatively decreased (i.e., increased).

hmm....

Well since the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, even if we went one way and an object went the opposite direction at the speed of light, it wouldn't be 30 billion light years away....LOL, does that prove FTL travel?

As for the quoted travel time to Mars, it's similar to travel time to Philedelphia from Rotterdam in the 18th century (60-80 days).  However, actual distance to Mars varies from 54M km to 400M km due to the orbits.

18th century German immigrant ships, which normally sailed from Rotterdam to Philadelphia via Deal, Portsmouth, etc. I'm researching the owners, ships, captains, and crews rather than the immigrants they carried. Sailing times for the westbound leg are fairly well documented, and normally 60-80 days, England to Philadelphia.

At least the fucking assholes mentioned Shawyer was the original creator of the EMDrive, these guys were originally dismissing it along with other scientists, it's quite simple really, they were likely dismissing his work so it wouldn't get as much interest then quietly working on it until they got a better version up and running.

At least, that's what I reckon they're up to.

I don't get it. Was following this for a while. Now nasa says it worked in a vacuum. I believe previous tests were not done in a vacuum. I still don't get it but nasa says the engine works...

It means what we know as "reality" is still very strange to me. Obviously not strange for the dude behind the idea and was mocked for it.


Although it is sad to see articles with over the top titles like this one, just for click baits.

That's true. I was saying that there was massive improvements when it comes to computer (i.e. informatics). I guess the upcoming years are going to be interesting when it all interconnects (it already has but to some degree).

How is it wrong? That might be wrong if you're looking inside the box. Mars is 225,300,000 kilometers away from earth (225,3 times 10^5). Z8 GND 5296 (it doesn't even have a proper name) is one of the most distant astronomical objects that we've discovered so far in the observable universe. It is 30 bly away (yes, billion light years); converting into kilometers would result in a very big number. Don't get me started on things outside the observable part of the universe.
So don't tell me that a 70 day trip to Mars, which is 0.00002381423ly away, is not slow.

Well.....

To understand look at the LAST 50 years  - 1965 to now.  Cars are about the same, aircraft have somewhat improved jet turbine engines.  Powerplants are somewhat better, a lot cleaner of course.

So in all these power systems what has improved tremendously?  All the monitoring and control and computer components.

Basic propulsion systems do not evolve according to the same trend as electronics.  Well of course unless you created a propulsion system embedded in a pc board somehow....

Oh, and saying going to Mars in 70 days is slow is sort of wrong, because it does not show a comprehension of the enormous distances involved.  Having said that, there look to me to be a lot of wild speculation and math/numerical errors in the press release/article/post.

As far as I can tell this is better than sci-fi. It is my understanding it is a closed system. It is also not a warp drive as it doesn't seem to involve bending the space around the device.

[...]
Moving out from LEO, Mr. March, from NASA EagleWorks, noted that a spacecraft equipped with EM drive technology could surpass the performance expectations of the WarpStar-I concept vehicle.

If such a similar vehicle were equipped with an EM Drive, it could enable travel from the surface of Earth to the surface of the moon within four hours.

Such a vehicle would be capable of carrying two to six passengers and luggage and would be able to return to Earth in the same four-hour interval using one load of hydrogen and oxygen for fuel cell-derived electrical power, assuming a 500 to 1,000 Newton/kW efficiency EM Drive system.

While the current maximum reported efficiency is close to only 1 Newton/kW (Prof. Yang’s experiments in China), Mr. March noted that such an increase in efficiency is most likely achievable within the next 50 years provided that current EM Drive propulsion conjectures are close to accurate.

Far more ambitious applications for the EM Drive were presented by Dr. White and include crewed missions to Mars as well as to the outer planets.

Specifically, these two proposed missions (to Mars and the outer planets) would use a 2 MegaWatt Nuclear Electric Propulsion spacecraft equipped with an EM Drive with a thrust/powerInput of 0.4 Newton/kW.

With this design, a mission to Mars would result in a 70-day transit from Earth to the red planet, a 90-day stay at Mars, and then another 70-day return transit to Earth.

[...]
However, EM drive applications are not limited to Mars or outer solar system targets.

Applications of this technology in deep space missions have already received conceptual outlines.

In particular, the Alpha Centauri system, the closest star system to our solar system at just 4.3 lights year’s distance, received specific mention as a potential mission destination.

Mr. Joosten and Dr. White stated that “a one-way, non-decelerating trip to Alpha Centauri under a constant one milli-g acceleration” from an EM drive would result in an arrival speed of 9.4 percent the speed of light and result in a total transit time from Earth to Alpha Centauri of just 92 years.

However, if the intentions of such a mission were to perform in-situ observations and experiments in the Alpha Centauri system, then deceleration would be needed.

This added component would result in a 130-year transit time from Earth to Alpha Centauri – which is still a significant improvement over the multi-thousand year timetable such a mission would take using current chemical propulsion technology.

The speeds discussed in the Alpha Centauri mission proposal are sufficiently low that relativity effects are negligible.



http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive/

"The results are actually down to fundamental physics, which has been well understood for the last 100 years. There are plenty of competent organisations in many countries who have been supporting my work over the past few years and plenty of other people including the Chinese have proved it, so it's not a surprise to me."

Shawyer spent years having his technology ridiculed by the international space community even though Boeing licensed it and the UK government was satisfied it worked. But on 29 April, researchers from Nasa Spaceflight confirmed an electromagnetic propulsion drive was successfully tested in a vacuum at Johnson Space Center.

Although it did not seem possible, Nasa found the technology did indeed work, and no amount of discussions from the space organisation or a large community of enthusiasts, engineers, and scientists on several continents on the NasaSpaceflight.com EmDrive forum had so far been able to disprove the results.

Shawyer says the technology will revolutionise the aerospace industry and change is coming whether it likes it or not.

"The aerospace industry needs to sit up and rethink things. The big aerospace companies have designed their last big jets, that's one of the implications. No one will be flying big jets for long-haul transportation in 20 years, and we won't be needing runways either," he said.


http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/nasa-validates-emdrive-roger-shawyer-says-aerospace-industry-needs-watch-out-1499141

Nasa has been testing a highly controversial electromagnetic space propulsion technology called EmDrive and has found evidence that it may indeed work, and along the way, might even have made a sci-fi concept possible.

The EmDrive is a technology that could make it much cheaper to launch satellites into space and could be key to solving the energy crisis, if solar power could be harnessed off the satellites and sent back to Earth.

It was thought up and developed by a British scientist called Roger Shawyer, who spent years having his technology ridiculed by the international space community even though Boeing licensed it and the UK government was satisfied it worked.

Nasa has been testing the technology for a while and it confirmed on 29 April that researchers at the Johnson Space Center have successfully tested an electromagnetic propulsion drive in a vacuum, and although it did not seem possible, the technology actually works.

"Thrust measurements of the EmDrive defy classical physics' expectations that such a closed [microwave] cavity should be unusable for space propulsion because of the law of conservation of momentum," Nasa's José Rodal, Jeremiah Mullikin and Noel Munson wrote in a Nasa Spaceflight blog.

What is EmDrive?

EmDrive is based on the theory of special relativity that it is possible to convert electrical energy into thrust without the need to expel any form of repellent.

Shawyer's critics say according to the law of conservation of momentum, his theory cannot work as in order for a thruster to be propelled forwards, something must be pushed out of the back of it in the opposite direction.

However, EmDrive does preserve the conservation of momentum and energy – to put it simply, electricity converts into microwaves within the cavity that push against the inside of the device, causing the thruster to accelerate in the opposite direction.

Shawyer proved that if you had a 100kg spacecraft, the thrust would be in a clockwise direction and the spacecraft would then accelerate in an anti-clockwise direction.

Nasa says it works when tested in a vacuum


The researchers explain that the reason why Shawyer's EmDrive models and EmDrive experiments carried out by Chinese researchers had been criticised in the past was because none of the tests had been carried out in a vacuum.

Physics says particles in the quantum vacuum cannot be ionised, so therefore you cannot push against it, but Nasa says Shawyer's theory does indeed work.

"Nasa has successfully tested their EmDrive in a hard vacuum – the first time any organisation has reported such a successful test. To this end, Nasa Eagleworks has now nullified the prevailing hypothesis that thrust measurements were due to thermal convection," the researchers wrote.

Nasa says its researchers joined forces with a large community of enthusiasts, engineers, and scientists on several continents to discuss EmDrive theories on the NasaSpaceflight.com EmDrive forum, and "despite considerable effort within the NasaSpaceflight.com forum to dismiss the reported thrust as an artefact, the EmDrive results have yet to be falsified".

At least now Shawyer's work is being validated and he continues to work on a souped-up second generation version of the EmDrive that uses super conductors and an asymmetrical cavity to increase the thrust by up to five orders of magnitude.

In an interview with IBTimes UK in August 2014, Shawyer said: "There was an element of not wanting to disrupt the industry, but also a total ignorance in the laws of physics. They did make life difficult for me for a while.

""The space industry doesn't want to know about it as it's very disruptive. If the customer will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on launching a satellite, why would you want to make something that could do it cheaper?

"This technology is a quantum leap – it would enable vertical take-off and landing for airplanes, it's quiet and it uses liquid hydrogen as a fuel, so it's green too."

Star Trek warp drive might also now be possible

Apart from the excitement over EmDrive possibly being a real thing, internet users also noticed Nasa could possibly have accidentally invented the warp drive – a faster-than-light propulsion system that enables spacecraft to travel at speeds that are greatly faster than light in sci-fi movies such as Star Trek.

Nasa researchers posted on the Nasa Spaceflight forum that when lasers were fired into the EmDrive's resonance chamber, some of the laser beams had travelled faster than the speed of light, which would mean the EmDrive could have produced a warp bubble.

A post by another user analysing the EmDrive experiment said "the math behind the warp bubble apparently matches the interference pattern found in the EmDrive".




http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/nasa-says-emdrive-does-work-it-may-have-also-created-star-trek-warp-drive-1499098