With magnetic bearings in vacuum and superconductor for the coil the only energy loses would be the ones that this theory predicts due to mass fluctuations I think?
So either it does nothing and stays where it is, or it converts energy into movement at 100% efficiency?
Electric motors can be ~90% efficient, or even higher for really well engineered ones, so very high efficiencies in converting electricity into movement are common. Electricity is basically movement already -- of electrons -- and is usually generated by spinning conductors and magnets around.
It wouldn't be 100% since some energy would be lost due to internal friction and the need to actively cool the thing to maintain superconductivity (and pump away heat generated by friction). You'd also lose energy in the electronics in generating the oscillating signals, switching, power conversion, etc., and in EMF losses. If it really does work I could imagine it approaching the efficiency of a good motor, just one that creates directional force in a vacuum by pushing against... umm... something. That'd be a question for the theoreticians. :)
Actually it is a useful thought experiment because it cuts to the heart of the problem. You 'temporarily' reduce the effective mass of something. So understanding how that is, or is not, possible lets you follow the rest of his reasoning. (on the record, I'm not sure I buy the variable mass argument).
That said, and I've suggested this before. The minimally sized mechanism is well within the mass capacity as a 'ride along' on a Space-X resupply flight to the ISS. Put it up in orbit and have it move itself to Geosyncrhronous orbit without fuel. Nobody would argue about the physics after that.
don't really know what the power requirements are for his device as it currently stands. generating enough power in space would probably weigh enough to make the effects of the current device they've built all but unnoticeable over a reasonable amount of time. if they can advance their modeling of the effect and figure out what effects efficiency they'd likely be able to design and launch a device that could deliver much more convincing results.
If that orbital transfer took a long time, someone would argue it's interacting with the Earth's magnetic field.
The only real absolutely unambiguous test I can think of -- other than finding a way to massively boost the effect to the point of undeniability -- would be to launch something at Earth-Moon escape velocity and then see if it can continue to accelerate as long as it's got solar power to do so. For a small test rig this could be done with a small SRB booster from the ISS.
... though on second thought ... I wonder what would happen if you put one of these on a centrifuge? It should spin faster, and faster, and faster... or not. :)
If the effect is too small to overcome friction you could do an experimental / control setup with two centrifuges, one with this device + a normal motor and one with only a normal motor and a ballast of equal mass to the device. Then swap which centrifuge has the device. Repeat many times. The one with the device should consistently accelerate more.
The heat problem sounds like they need to be using superconductors or some means of high-efficiency cooling. I'd look into Peltier effect cooling built into the device or something if superconductivity isn't an option.
reducing the mass of something by relativistic acceleration is easy, especially if that something is electrons. Keeping in mind that magnetism itself is exactly a relativistic effect of reducing the charge density of electrons.
Although such an effect should be about 10^-35 of "what you could get from electromagnetism".
I know about increasing the mass of something dew to relativity, but I never heard of decreasing the mass of an object.
To increase the mass you need energy, to get the energy you have to decrease the mass of another part of the ship (the nuclear reactor or the battery), so the total mass doesn't change.
"The problem is, crowd funding requires a significant investment of time, which might be applied more productively to research."
So they can't arrange for a capable student to take care of that as part of a work-study program? WTH. Perhaps I'm underestimating the amount of work involved, but it's not like they need to have contributor tiers with silly T-shirts.
Try to crowd fund this and you'll bring out hordes and hordes of Skeptic Movement Skeptics who will scream "con man!" and "pseudoscience!" and do everything they can to sabotage the campaign. Kickstarter would probably start getting e-mail campaign letters to de-list his account for fraud, etc.
You see, he needs more money to try to boost the signal and further test the effect. But since the effect is novel and controversial, attempting to raise such money means he's a con man and invites comparisons to that e-Cat dude from Bologna.
If I were him I would avoid publicity outside the scientific community simply to avoid the character assassination. I'd work with interested other scientists and publish in obscure journals until I could either find the flaw my measurements or generate data so unambiguous that it overcomes the howling.
Have other crowdfunded scientific projects had this problem? It's easier to see why people might unleash a lot of criticism at projects that might receive federal funding, but wouldn't the critics just... not back a crowdfunded test of Woodward's work?
I think that would depend on how it is marketed. If they clearly state that it's a novel effect and that it's really likely that it will turn out to be a measurement error, then nobody can accuse them of being dishonest.
This seems much more plausible to me than the microwave thruster previously reported all over the internet. I think it's a clever application of relativity and motion. It feels crazy to say this, but it seems to be on a solid theoretical footing.
My thoughts exactly. Why don't they crowdfund this? For about $200k they could probably stick a prototype on a nanosat and just hit go. With the right tracking equipment the results should be pretty conclusive.
From my limited understanding, it seems that the current prototype requires a ton of power (far more than you could fit in a nanosat) and produces a miniscule amount of thrust (even in space with a nanosat it might not move much).
1) "Foundations of Physics" is closer to a philosophy journal than a physics journal. It's full of fascinating stuff, but it's far more speculative than any other legitimate journal. When libraries were cutting budgets in the '80's and '90's it was generally the first to go.
2) When highly theoretical phenomena are talked about in engineering terms, the odds of confirmation bias are huge. Who wouldn't want a reactionless-ish thruster?
3) Measuring transient forces of the kind being applied here is extremely hard, and the number of confounding factors is extremely large. The article mentions a mu-metal shield, which will screen some of the Earth's magnetic field from the apparatus but which is useless for screening transient magnetic fields, which get generated by transient electric fields thanks to the magic of Maxwell. Ampere's law tells us CurlB = mu_0epsilon_0dE/dt. So the possibility of residual electro-magnetic forces is non-trivial to say the least, particularly in a room full of conductors and time-varying EM-fields (from the wiring, the pump, etc).
Putting the whole apparatus in a Faraday cage would help, but the history of measuring small (and transient) forces in physics in the past couple of decades (the fifth force mess, Joe Weber's coherent neutrino scattering work) argues that we take these experimental measurements with a large grain of salt, unless they can be shown to be in precise numerical agreement with the theory's predictions over an order of magnitude variation in power input and rate of variation.
The theory may not be wrong, but it needs a lot more experimental investigation and likely theoretical examination as well. Theorists tend not to spend a lot of time critiquing things that look really likely to be wrong, because proving something that everyone thinks is probably wrong, wrong can be incredibly time-consuming and utterly unrewarding. So the lack of theoretical disproof is not very compelling. So far as I know Joe Weber's coherent scattering theory was never dis-proven in publication, either: it was mostly dismissed by informal but compelling arguments at conferences (the best one was simply that there was nothing special about neutrinos in Weber's theory, so if what he said was correct single crystals would coherently scatter x-rays in exactly the same way, which would have shown up as an anomalous low-energy contribution to EM cross-sections that would have been an obvious problem for decades if anyone had observed it.)
"When highly theoretical phenomena are talked about in engineering terms"
That may be true, but you also mention that measuring tiny transient forces is incredibly hard. Thus, the only way to actually get an accurate measurement for this thing is to attempt to scale it up until the force is either unambiguous or the confounding culprit can be found. You've got to try to amplify the signal.
I also don't get the impression that these folks are dummies. I'd be surprised if they haven't done experiments to attempt to rule out electromagnetic effects. Simple ones would involve moving stuff around, doing this in the presence of various magnetic fields imposed by outside sources to see if the underlying effect is still there, etc.
"In 2004, Paul March of Lockheed Martin Space Operations, who started working in this research field as of 1998, presented successful replication of Woodward's previous experiments at STAIF."
There are a few other less conclusive attempts at replication, but only one claimed negative result. But as you say, measuring forces this tiny is hard.
Check out the comment from dnautics below, which has a link to a really nice description by one of the experimenters, who was a grad student of Woodward's. I agree these people aren't dummies, but when effects scale down in step with the sensitivity of the apparatus there is something fishy going on.
The description on the Great Wiki actually made me more suspicious of the device, not less.
anyone who understands that it's a device for turning bricks into weapons of mass destruction. not that a conventional nuclear reactor isn't one, it's just that it uses more sophisticated bricks.
Reactionless doesn't mean "free." This device requires a vast energy input. I have no idea how efficient it could get if it's developed (assuming the effect is real in the first place), but I doubt it would come anywhere close to "effortlessly."
A reactionless drive, if possible, would still require "effort" to produce thrust in the form of energy. It is not a "free energy" device. The only difference between a reactionless drive and a rocket is that a rocket must carry its own fuel with it, so that it can expel the fuel to generate thrust. The fuel adds additional mass to the whole rocket, so in a way, a rocket requires extra fuel to carry its fuel. Since a reactionless drive does not expel anything, a reactionless drive would not carry any fuel, and therefore could be more efficient by way of lower mass, but it would still need to carry an energy source of some type, such as a nuclear reactor, or a radioisotope thermoelectric generator.
Rockets are certainly capable of accelerating a mass to a significant fraction of the speed of light. However it is important to note that it becomes more difficult to accelerate an object as the object gets closer to the speed of light. You need more energy to add a constant amount of velocity as your current velocity increases. This applies regardless of what kind of method you are using to accelerate - doesn't matter if it's a rocket or a reactionless drive. The difference is only in efficiency - it is thought that a reactionless drive might be more efficient. However if a reactionless drive really is possible, it might provide a lot less thrust than you think.
So even if reactionless drives are developed, they might be more efficient than rockets, but far less timely. I think you'd be waiting quite a while for the reactionless vehicle to attain any sort of appreciable velocity - perhaps decades. As far as weapons go, humans have not met any aliens yet (to my knowledge) and our species currently only resides on planet Earth, so any weapon would be ballistic in nature, to strike targets on Earth's surface. A reactionless drive would be ill-suited for ballistic propulsion because it doesn't give enough thrust. If it was launched from the ground like an ICBM on a suborbital trajectory, it wouldn't be able to escape Earth's gravity, it would just sit on the launch pad. If it was placed into orbit using a rocket as a first stage, and then activated later, it would take a while to deorbit rather gently. The vehicle's velocity would slow down due to air resistance, and its kinetic energy would not be usable as a mass destructive weapon. This is why large explosions are used as weapons of mass destruction, and not kinetic energy alone. Kinetic energy is simply used for timely delivery of the explosive device from a great distance away.
Now, for interstellar warfare, a reactionless drive could be useful if you were extremely angry at another planet in another star system located many light-years away. The large distance between the aggressor and the victim allows the kinetic vehicle a lot of time to accumulate velocity. However the steering of such a kinetic weapon must be very precise in order to hit the target planet, so the vehicle must have the means to estimate its current location/speed/direction, compute the orbits of itself and its target, and apply the necessary course corrections in order to hit that target. It is possible that a reactionless drive might provide vectored thrust, but if it does not, then attitude adjustment thrusters would be needed (either reactionless or conventional.) Accurately steering a vehicle traveling near the speed of light does not seem like an easy task. If the target was missed, the vehicle would be traveling so quickly that it would escape the star system on a hyperbolic escape orbit.
Such a weapon would be quite the undertaking and would be a large energy expenditure for a civilization. It might be more worth it to focus that energy into colonization and defense instead.
>>> Rockets are certainly capable of accelerating a mass to a significant fraction of the speed of light.
Well, yes and no. The speed of a rocket is limited by the specific impulse of its engines. That means that hydrogen-oxygen rockets aren't going to go very fast. Ion thrusters will go a lot faster, but take a long time to get up to speed. If you want to go really fast you need something really exotic like antimatter, but the technical challenges are quite daunting. Theoretically you could use a flashlight, but the batteries would run out before you could get anywhere.
The allure of a reactionless drive is that you aren't limited by the the rocket equation. You may still need a big energy source, but your speed isnt limited by how fast you can spit stuff out your backend.
It's fun reading to look up things like specific impulse, the rocket equation, relativistic rockets, even project Orion.
To be precise, the ultimate speed of a rocket is limited by the specific impulse of the engines and the mass fraction i.e. how much of the rocket is fuel versus how much is not-fuel.
There's nothing that theoretically prevents a hydrogen-oxygen chemical rocket from approaching the speed of light. But it would need an amount of fuel roughly the size of the Sun to do it with any appreciable payload.
To clarify a bit, the fuel in a chemical rocket is both a source of energy, and a reaction mass that is thrown out the back to move the rocket forward (via Newton's third law).
A reactionless drive still needs to carry an energy source, but does not need to carry reaction mass to throw out the back. Hence the term "reactionless."
Well, physics tell us that any conventional way of interplanetary travel with reasonable timespans (days/weeks instead of years) is also a weapon of mass destruction due to energy levels involved. So we need to pick - either we deal with it, or stay on this rock forever.
The force of these kinds of thrusters are so low that they are insignificant for Earth-based movement; only in space, if you keep the thruster running for a long enough time, would they make a difference; same with ion thrusters.
So many pseudoscience articles today! We got one about solving NP complete problems in polynomial time with a new kind of "brain-like" computer, and now there's one about violating conservation of momentum. Next up: Peano arithmetic is inconsistent & telepathy proven to work based on quantum mechanics.
What exactly makes this pseudoscience? Is it pseudoscientific to investigate unlikely or speculative possibilities?
They have presented evidence and a proposed mechanism, have fully published the details of their work, and have invited others to attempt to replicate it or to show where they're wrong. Where's the "pseudo"? It's also important to note that in experimental physics it's more than enough to show an effect that can be replicated. Their currently proposed theoretical explanation could be wrong, but that wouldn't matter.
They have an experimental setup that spits out some data. That data goes against the theory of general relativity. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The article also sets off various other pseudoscience alarm bells, such as the fact that their paper is published in a philosophy journal, and the guy having a history degree instead of a physics degree. But that goes against the naive rebellious spirit of HN that dictates that anybody can overthrow fundamental physics with an experimental setup in his basement, so downvote away!
Going against established theory has nothing to do with "pseudoscience". Pseudoscience is how you treat it. If you say, this is the next best thing, all my doubters are idiots, and invest now! Then that is pseudoscience. But if you just go, "hmm, that's funny" and keep investigating what's going on, that's just plain science.
The article is very much written in the second form, at least as far as I can tell.
"The theory has been sitting in peer-reviewed literature for more than fifteen years" (a single paper in a philosophy journal...)
"Those who are players in the field of advanced propulsion," he says, "feel obligated, for whatever reason, to dissuade people from considering seriously alternatives to their particular scheme. I think they may genuinely feel they are doing a public service when they say, 'Don't spend money on that, it can't possibly work.'" He gives me a wry smile. "But their own schemes have all failed." Implying that the space industry should invest in it.
She became "ninety-nine percent convinced." She started out skeptical until she investigated it thoroughly.
"Sitting in peer-reviewed literature" only applies to "something obviously wrong with it." He's saying that, if there's a flaw, it must be subtle. That's not saying "therefore it must be right" but merely that there are no obvious flaws.
And for space industry investment, I really don't see the problem here regardless of the context. Imagine, for a moment, that this was a completely legitimate thing that failed to attract any investment. Why would he not say those exact words? If this is something that could be said both by a kook and a legitimate scientist working on a legitimate theory, does that not mean the statement has no deciding power?
Meh, from those quotes it's 100% clear that the article presents a picture that is diametrically opposed to the picture that you said it paints. If it were painting a picture of good science where such an extraordinary claim would be approached with great skepticism, then it wouldn't contain phrases such as she's 99% certain, claims that it's peer reviewed when it's really not, and implications that the space industry should invest in it.
I simply don't understand how you reach that conclusion. What about "science" is supposed to prevent a scientist from becoming 99% convinced that an effect is real after extensively studying it?
It looks to me like this fellow has quite a few peer-reviewed papers out there. Most are indeed in that weird journal, but not quite all.
And I just flat-out disagree with your supposed implication about investing.
Let me be clear: I doubt this effect is real. The difficulty of reproducing the experiment and the fact that the observed effect got smaller as they refined their technique both imply that there's some confounding factor at work. But I don't see any "pseudoscience" here.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -- I don't hear anyone claiming otherwise. Woodward publishes all his work an has invited others to attempt to replicate it or tell him where he's wrong.
"such as the fact that their paper is published in a philosophy journal, and the guy having a history degree instead of a physics degree." -- argument from authority, very unscientific. If an unemployed poodle shaver publishes a replicable experiment, it is science.
"naive rebellious spirit of HN that dictates that anybody can overthrow fundamental physics with an experimental setup in his basement" -- if the experiment works and can be replicated, they certainly can.
There's also a misunderstanding of scientific epistemology in your last statement. Theories are seldom overthrown, but they are often extended. Einstein didn't overthrow Newton -- he provided an extension. Newton's equations still work, but with a very tiny error that only becomes visible at high velocities or with unbelievably precise measurements unavailable in Newton's day. A theory is not an absolute dogma, but a model that is deemed correct within its context -- namely all data and experiments available at a given time. New data or new experiments can extend the context, requiring an extension of theory. If this effect is real, it would not "demolish" or "overthrow" relativity, but would likely require some sort of extension to the theoretical framework. Who knows? Perhaps such a thing could point in the direction of the elusive quantum / relativity synthesis?
I am skeptical (lower-case S) of this, in that I wouldn't really believe it unless the effect could be reliably amplified. So far that hasn't been the case. But I don't consider it at all psuedoscientific to try it out. Even if the effect is a result of something else, doing so will refine your skill at measuring tiny forces and possibly advance the field of experimental technique.
The character assassination and arguments from authority are completely unwarranted, and is a major reason I am not a Skeptic (upper-case S).
P.S. a tangent:
Part of why I think CS advances so fast is that the unambiguous nature of computer "experiments" leaves little room for arguments from authority or character either pro or con. Either something works or it does not. Politics -- that age-old enemy of truth -- are clearly irrelevant.
> argument from authority, very unscientific. If an unemployed poodle shaver publishes a replicable experiment, it is science.
Except for the fact that he says: "The theory has been sitting in peer-reviewed literature for more than fifteen years, so if there was something obviously wrong with it, the odds are, more than one person would have said that it's not right.". I'm just counting that claim.
> if the experiment works and can be replicated, they certainly can.
And guess what, it wasn't replicated!
> There's also a misunderstanding of scientific epistemology in your last statement.
I understand that, but conservation of momentum is one of the most fundamental facts of physics, maybe even THE most fundamental fact of physics, certainly as fundamental as conservation of energy (in relativity it's basically the same thing -- both are components of the energy-momentum 4 vector). It holds in Newtonian mechanics, general relativity, and in quantum mechanics. It is at the very basis of those theories. Finding something that contradicts that would completely destroy that foundation. It would be the single biggest discovery in the history of science. To present that with such confidence as the article does is just ludicrous. If the article was about creating energy from nothing, should that be taken seriously too, with similarly weak evidence?
"It would be the single biggest discovery in the history of science."
Yeah, it'd be pretty huge, but it wouldn't "overturn" anything. All the science we've done to date remains quite valid.
Our current theories all state that momentum is conserved. That's because all our current experimental data shows that momentum is conserved.
Now let's say we had a new experiment that showed what appeared to be a violation of conservation of momentum?
This would mean we'd need a new theory explaining how this experiment worked. But this new theory would also have to explain all our previous experimental results -- in precisely the same way that Einsteinian mechanics encompasses, explains, and agrees with all of Newton's results. In other words you'd have to answer the question of "if momentum isn't always conserved, why does it almost always look like it's conserved?"
There's another possibility too. What if this thing works and momentum is still being conserved? What if it's pushing against something, such as some kind of dark matter field, WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), neutrinos, virtual particles, ...??? I'd start by asking questions like that before I'd toss conservation of momentum. Even the hardest vacuum is full of particles ejected from stars and other things flying all over the place and even "popping into and out of existence" (in quotes because that's only an analogy) as shown by things like the Casimir effect. What if it's a "WIMP thruster" or something weird like that? An interesting experiment would be to send one flying on a one way trip to nowhere out of the solar system and see if it works as well in interstellar space as near the sun. The sun's throwing out a lot of particles, could it be pushing against those? Has he ever tried running it at night (far side of Earth) vs. during the day (sunward side of Earth)?
Of course it'd still be really useful as a space drive if it could be scaled up, regardless of the mechanism.
I'd build two and have them push against or toward each other. Must be something funky in there.
I wonder if the thing, or a part of the thing, changes thermal energy more/faster than it changes kinetic energy? That would be an interesting conservation solution. If it would be energetically cheaper to just heat something up that has differential IR emission on each side...
> What if this thing works and momentum is still being conserved? What if it's pushing against something
That's what they are claiming: gravitational waves travel back in time, and move all the other matter in the universe a little bit so that momentum is conserved. Or something.
If they use gravitational waves, it's a gravitons thruster. It's essentially like a photon thruster (aka backlight). One of the problems is that the ratio of momentum to energy is fixed at 1/c, which is 3.3E-6 N/kW. It's very low and I guess they are getting more than this (and I guess that it's a measurement error).
If this were the case it would be no better than laser propulsion. You could theoretically propel a spacecraft with a beam of photons, but you'd need to borrow God's laser pointer and a power plant that pumps out a couple exawatts to get any meaningful thrust. But only a massless drive could beat the specific impulse... with an iSP of infinity. :)
My reading is that this thing, assuming it worked, would have the same problem as ion drives in that it would require a massive power plant. It solves about 1/3 the technical problem of a star drive: where to get the mass. But about 2/3 of the problem of star travel is where to get the energy. High-power-density fusion and antimatter-matter annihilation are the only sources I know of that make star travel thinkable on anything like a human time scale.
> High-power-density fusion and antimatter-matter annihilation are the only sources I know of that make star travel thinkable on anything like a human time scale.
Which, funnily, leads back to a point others and I were making in a different subthread[0] - that any device that allows interplanetary travel in timespans reasonable for humans is at the same time a weapon of mass destruction.
Humanity needs to get its act together if we're ever to get out of this rock :).
> Which, funnily, leads back to a point others and I were making in a different subthread[0] - that any device that allows interplanetary travel in timespans reasonable for humans is at the same time a weapon of mass destruction.
We already have plenty of weapons of mass destruction -- sufficient to eradicate modern civilization if not human life entirely -- so its hardly as if not developing technologies necessary for interplanetary travel protects us from such weapons.
The energy from the power plan comes from the transformation of a little of the mass of the fuel into energy. (This is usually explained for nuclear power plant, where the mass of the nuclei decrease in the fission (or fusion). But this is also applicable to electric batteries, gasoline+oxygen, ... where the mass comes from the breakup of the chemical bounds. In this cases the differences is completely negligible, but that means that you need a bigger fuel depot.) The mass of the photons is exactly the mass that the power plant loss, so this doesn't solve the mass problem.
That's a good indication that the effect isn't real. But it has nothing to do with whether this thing is "pseudoscience." Proper science produces negative results all the time.
Actually according to what I can find results have been mixed: one claimed positive at Lockheed, one claimed negative at a national lab, and several non-conclusive results. As others have stated it's incredibly challenging to accurately measure such tiny forces. The only logical thing to do is to attempt to amplify the effect, which Woodward is apparently doing by trying to build more efficient devices.
"such as the fact that their paper is published in a philosophy journal, and the guy having a history degree instead of a physics degree."
"-- argument from authority, very unscientific. If an unemployed poodle shaver publishes a replicable experiment, it is science."
Not only is it an unscientific argument, it's just wrong. The guy did his undergraduate and masters in physics, then switched to history of science for his doctorate because he realized that nobody was going to fund what he wanted to work on and he needed a job. He also works with other physicists who do have doctorates in physics.
"nobody was going to fund what he wanted to work on and he needed a job."
That's very logical -- it's incredibly hard to fund anything speculative.
My underlying point is that being honestly wrong doesn't make you a pseudoscientist, and should not result in character assassination or claims of being a fraud or a quack. That sort of thing contributes to a climate of dogmatism and extreme risk aversion in science that more or less guarantees that nothing new will ever be discovered.
To be totally fair to the dude, he's not claiming anything yet, because he maintains that the experiments he's done are inconclusive, and he still needs to control for additional effects. As far as I can tell, he's basically doing a series of experiments where he's trying to disprove his own project because he doesn't want another Dean drive.
The data can't 'go against' general relativity because it's agreed by everyone--the researcher included--that he hasn't got all the variables controlled, and so the data doesn't 'go' at all.
It'd be pseudoscience if he was cherry-picking data that shows his theory to be correct, or ignoring existing data that conclusively shows that his theory is incorrect. He doesn't seem to be doing the former; I don't really have a way of telling if he's doing the latter.
Dang, I see you consistently active in many a thread, always telling what was the original title when changing it, and asking for suggestions when you're not sure. Thank you very much for that. It feels much better when the reason for title change is explained and open for discussion. I like how HN is improving itself recently.
As time progressed and the experimental apparatus more refined, the “effect” seemed to get smaller, and that’s a REAL bad sign. It was already well below what the theory predicted. That sets off alarm bells. After all this time, if something isn’t in hand to float around a table top, its should still at least be producing unequivocal results.
I am aware of only one positive replication attempt, and even that experimenter (Paul March) had concerns over its validity. All other replication attempts have either been negative or ambiguous. My own experiments were ambiguous.
It seems to make the effect happen, a lot of parameters for the test devices, some not clearly understood, need to be “just so”. The question remains, are the devices being dialed in to create a real effect, or do things need to be just so to cause merely a false positive?
it's (sadly) very refreshing honesty from a scientist. In grad school, I counseled a junior grad student on this sort of phenomenon, she didn't take my advice and learned a very hard lesson - spending 4 years of grad school chasing down ghosts. On the other hand, it wasn't a waste, she got a very good job in the pharma industry on the back of her commitment to sussing out errors, her honesty and introspection.
Given the potential upsides, I would say it's worth finding the errors in this reactionless drive. Even if it turns out to be just a fantasy the poorly understood effects that need to be "just so" might be interesting in their own right.
That seems like a compelling position until you're exposed to a million such cases. There's no end to the number of weird, malfunctioning pieces of equipment or complicated many-body systems for which we have a theory that sort of explains them with a few poorly understood wrinkles.
In a world as big as ours, it's reasonable to diversify your investments and keep a few million to one long-shots going, but it's important not to lose sight of the odds. Buy a lotto ticket every now and again, but put the bulk of your money in a 401k or other solid investment.
In this case, I think we're giving this idea more or less exactly the right amount of attention: one dedicated crank (and I use that term lovingly) devoting his life to his crazy theory, and a handful of less invested others occasionally checking in on it. If he can make it work, fantastic, if he can't, well, we didn't waste too much on it.
I found Hamilton to be extremely bright and knowledgeable, although sometimes I wondered if there was more to him than it appeared. I knew he gave regular briefing sessions at the Pentagon, which seemed strange for an electric car guy. But there was also a time we were speaking on the phone about the possibilities of wormholes and the like. He asked me if I thought it would be possible to create a wormhole with one end being on the surface of the Sun and the other over an enemy on the battle field. I think I was stunned into silence for quite some time, but eventually regained enough composure to say while I had not thought about that before (an understatement!), I supposed it was theoretically possible.
Off topic rant:
Crazy conspiracy people have no idea about how this kind of stuff happens all the time. 99.99% of things never go anywhere, but 0.01% turn into DARPA projects, and 0.01% of those actually turn into better saucepans, and 0.01% of those turn into actual weapons.
It's late for me as I just finished my CS studies, but I realized recently that the university is nothing but a more formalized Hackerspace with much, much more expensive equipment. I'm thinking about re-enrolling, for biotech this time, to get access to the lab.
Jeeze, really HackerNews/BoingBoong news are not good science sources. This "reaction-less" drive is simple variation of the "Dean drive" (another "space thruster" that only works if it is on a kitchen floor so that it can do standard work and exploit the different scales of static and slipping friction). I thought this was at least going to be the "microwave thruster" that works in cheap partial vacuum (but not in actual deep vacuum). Not even new bad ideas.
It sounds like you know something about this topic. I don't, and I'm sure that many other HN users don't either. Your comment would be better, I think, if you assumed that people here are curious to learn and shared your knowledge in a way that was easier to absorb. If bad ideas are circulating, offer better ideas and explain why they are better. That strategy may not work everywhere, but at least some of the time it does work here.
I guess I would say if you are truly curious about physics read about conservation of momentum, Noether's theorem, and things like that. You get really neat things like: if you assume general relativity is position invariant then you can prove it has conservation of momentum (i.e. you don't have to directly assume conservation of momentum!).
> The result is a drive that exerts an intermittent net force in one direction. [...] Nor does it violate the principle of conservation of energy, because the system requires power for its operation.
Well, you actually can't do that. In special relativity when you change of reference frame, the momentum and energy mixes. If you break the momentum conservation in one reference frame, then you break the momentum conservation and the energy conservation in almost all the other reference frames.
If you do the experiment on Earth and in that reference frame the energy is conserved, then the astronauts from the ISS will see that the energy is not conserved, if Elon go to to Mars he will see that the energy is not conserved, even the people on the other side of the Earth will see that the energy is not conserved.
If you put two of these devices in opposite orientations in the opposite sides of a spinning carrousel (and assume that the angular velocity of the carrousel is small enough to ignore it in the calculations) you will see that each of the devices gain some energy and you can harvest it.
I found the mention of Mach's Principle beyond intriguing. How have I not heard of this?! I'm quite glad to ponder it [1]
You are standing in a field looking at the stars. Your arms are resting
freely at your side, and you see that the distant stars are not moving. Now
start spinning. The stars are whirling around you and your arms are pulled
away from your body. Why should your arms be pulled away when the stars are
whirling? Why should they be dangling freely when the stars don't move?
...There have been other attempts to formulate a theory which is more fully Machian, such as Brans–Dicke theory, but most physicists argue that none have been fully successful. At an exit poll of experts, held in Tubingen in 1993, when asked the question, 'Is general relativity perfectly Machian?', 3 respondents replied 'yes' and 22 replied 'no'. To the question, 'Is general relativity with appropriate boundary conditions of closure of some kind very Machian?' the result was 14 'yes' and 7 'no'.
Isn't it meant to help a spacecraft accelerate? And if that happens, doesn't that mean that its mass has accelerate? And thus its momentum has increased?
I don't know. It should only develop cyclical force (back and forth - but pushing against nothing).
I'm not 100% sure this thing actually is real, I'm just going by the description in the wired magazine, plus reconciling it with the statement that it doesn't violate Newton's laws.
This article acts surprised about the possibility of changing an object's mass by varying its energy, but I thought that was common knowledge among relativists, as per [the classic "a compressed spring weighs more than a relaxed spring" meme][1].
Um. From what I remember of having learned about capacitors in a basic physics course a long time ago, the net charge of the capacitor is always the same. When voltage is applied to a capacitor, it generates an electric field between the plates, which causes charge separation. The charge is already there, its source is the dielectric between the capacitor plates.
So charging the capacitor may make one plate slightly lighter, the other slightly heavier, but its overall mass is the same. Is it this mass change he's trying to use?
108 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadSo either it does nothing and stays where it is, or it converts energy into movement at 100% efficiency?
It wouldn't be 100% since some energy would be lost due to internal friction and the need to actively cool the thing to maintain superconductivity (and pump away heat generated by friction). You'd also lose energy in the electronics in generating the oscillating signals, switching, power conversion, etc., and in EMF losses. If it really does work I could imagine it approaching the efficiency of a good motor, just one that creates directional force in a vacuum by pushing against... umm... something. That'd be a question for the theoreticians. :)
You can only shift your location, you can not develop any speed.
That said, and I've suggested this before. The minimally sized mechanism is well within the mass capacity as a 'ride along' on a Space-X resupply flight to the ISS. Put it up in orbit and have it move itself to Geosyncrhronous orbit without fuel. Nobody would argue about the physics after that.
The only real absolutely unambiguous test I can think of -- other than finding a way to massively boost the effect to the point of undeniability -- would be to launch something at Earth-Moon escape velocity and then see if it can continue to accelerate as long as it's got solar power to do so. For a small test rig this could be done with a small SRB booster from the ISS.
... though on second thought ... I wonder what would happen if you put one of these on a centrifuge? It should spin faster, and faster, and faster... or not. :)
If the effect is too small to overcome friction you could do an experimental / control setup with two centrifuges, one with this device + a normal motor and one with only a normal motor and a ballast of equal mass to the device. Then swap which centrifuge has the device. Repeat many times. The one with the device should consistently accelerate more.
The heat problem sounds like they need to be using superconductors or some means of high-efficiency cooling. I'd look into Peltier effect cooling built into the device or something if superconductivity isn't an option.
Although such an effect should be about 10^-35 of "what you could get from electromagnetism".
To increase the mass you need energy, to get the energy you have to decrease the mass of another part of the ship (the nuclear reactor or the battery), so the total mass doesn't change.
(And it's actually more complicated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_special_relativity#Cont... )
So they can't arrange for a capable student to take care of that as part of a work-study program? WTH. Perhaps I'm underestimating the amount of work involved, but it's not like they need to have contributor tiers with silly T-shirts.
You see, he needs more money to try to boost the signal and further test the effect. But since the effect is novel and controversial, attempting to raise such money means he's a con man and invites comparisons to that e-Cat dude from Bologna.
If I were him I would avoid publicity outside the scientific community simply to avoid the character assassination. I'd work with interested other scientists and publish in obscure journals until I could either find the flaw my measurements or generate data so unambiguous that it overcomes the howling.
1) "Foundations of Physics" is closer to a philosophy journal than a physics journal. It's full of fascinating stuff, but it's far more speculative than any other legitimate journal. When libraries were cutting budgets in the '80's and '90's it was generally the first to go.
2) When highly theoretical phenomena are talked about in engineering terms, the odds of confirmation bias are huge. Who wouldn't want a reactionless-ish thruster?
3) Measuring transient forces of the kind being applied here is extremely hard, and the number of confounding factors is extremely large. The article mentions a mu-metal shield, which will screen some of the Earth's magnetic field from the apparatus but which is useless for screening transient magnetic fields, which get generated by transient electric fields thanks to the magic of Maxwell. Ampere's law tells us CurlB = mu_0epsilon_0dE/dt. So the possibility of residual electro-magnetic forces is non-trivial to say the least, particularly in a room full of conductors and time-varying EM-fields (from the wiring, the pump, etc).
Putting the whole apparatus in a Faraday cage would help, but the history of measuring small (and transient) forces in physics in the past couple of decades (the fifth force mess, Joe Weber's coherent neutrino scattering work) argues that we take these experimental measurements with a large grain of salt, unless they can be shown to be in precise numerical agreement with the theory's predictions over an order of magnitude variation in power input and rate of variation.
The theory may not be wrong, but it needs a lot more experimental investigation and likely theoretical examination as well. Theorists tend not to spend a lot of time critiquing things that look really likely to be wrong, because proving something that everyone thinks is probably wrong, wrong can be incredibly time-consuming and utterly unrewarding. So the lack of theoretical disproof is not very compelling. So far as I know Joe Weber's coherent scattering theory was never dis-proven in publication, either: it was mostly dismissed by informal but compelling arguments at conferences (the best one was simply that there was nothing special about neutrinos in Weber's theory, so if what he said was correct single crystals would coherently scatter x-rays in exactly the same way, which would have shown up as an anomalous low-energy contribution to EM cross-sections that would have been an obvious problem for decades if anyone had observed it.)
That may be true, but you also mention that measuring tiny transient forces is incredibly hard. Thus, the only way to actually get an accurate measurement for this thing is to attempt to scale it up until the force is either unambiguous or the confounding culprit can be found. You've got to try to amplify the signal.
I also don't get the impression that these folks are dummies. I'd be surprised if they haven't done experiments to attempt to rule out electromagnetic effects. Simple ones would involve moving stuff around, doing this in the presence of various magnetic fields imposed by outside sources to see if the underlying effect is still there, etc.
Edit: some more info here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodward_effect#Test_devices
In particular:
"In 2004, Paul March of Lockheed Martin Space Operations, who started working in this research field as of 1998, presented successful replication of Woodward's previous experiments at STAIF."
There are a few other less conclusive attempts at replication, but only one claimed negative result. But as you say, measuring forces this tiny is hard.
The description on the Great Wiki actually made me more suspicious of the device, not less.
anyone who understands that it's a device for turning bricks into weapons of mass destruction. not that a conventional nuclear reactor isn't one, it's just that it uses more sophisticated bricks.
A reactionless drive, if possible, would still require "effort" to produce thrust in the form of energy. It is not a "free energy" device. The only difference between a reactionless drive and a rocket is that a rocket must carry its own fuel with it, so that it can expel the fuel to generate thrust. The fuel adds additional mass to the whole rocket, so in a way, a rocket requires extra fuel to carry its fuel. Since a reactionless drive does not expel anything, a reactionless drive would not carry any fuel, and therefore could be more efficient by way of lower mass, but it would still need to carry an energy source of some type, such as a nuclear reactor, or a radioisotope thermoelectric generator.
Rockets are certainly capable of accelerating a mass to a significant fraction of the speed of light. However it is important to note that it becomes more difficult to accelerate an object as the object gets closer to the speed of light. You need more energy to add a constant amount of velocity as your current velocity increases. This applies regardless of what kind of method you are using to accelerate - doesn't matter if it's a rocket or a reactionless drive. The difference is only in efficiency - it is thought that a reactionless drive might be more efficient. However if a reactionless drive really is possible, it might provide a lot less thrust than you think.
So even if reactionless drives are developed, they might be more efficient than rockets, but far less timely. I think you'd be waiting quite a while for the reactionless vehicle to attain any sort of appreciable velocity - perhaps decades. As far as weapons go, humans have not met any aliens yet (to my knowledge) and our species currently only resides on planet Earth, so any weapon would be ballistic in nature, to strike targets on Earth's surface. A reactionless drive would be ill-suited for ballistic propulsion because it doesn't give enough thrust. If it was launched from the ground like an ICBM on a suborbital trajectory, it wouldn't be able to escape Earth's gravity, it would just sit on the launch pad. If it was placed into orbit using a rocket as a first stage, and then activated later, it would take a while to deorbit rather gently. The vehicle's velocity would slow down due to air resistance, and its kinetic energy would not be usable as a mass destructive weapon. This is why large explosions are used as weapons of mass destruction, and not kinetic energy alone. Kinetic energy is simply used for timely delivery of the explosive device from a great distance away.
Now, for interstellar warfare, a reactionless drive could be useful if you were extremely angry at another planet in another star system located many light-years away. The large distance between the aggressor and the victim allows the kinetic vehicle a lot of time to accumulate velocity. However the steering of such a kinetic weapon must be very precise in order to hit the target planet, so the vehicle must have the means to estimate its current location/speed/direction, compute the orbits of itself and its target, and apply the necessary course corrections in order to hit that target. It is possible that a reactionless drive might provide vectored thrust, but if it does not, then attitude adjustment thrusters would be needed (either reactionless or conventional.) Accurately steering a vehicle traveling near the speed of light does not seem like an easy task. If the target was missed, the vehicle would be traveling so quickly that it would escape the star system on a hyperbolic escape orbit.
Such a weapon would be quite the undertaking and would be a large energy expenditure for a civilization. It might be more worth it to focus that energy into colonization and defense instead.
Well, yes and no. The speed of a rocket is limited by the specific impulse of its engines. That means that hydrogen-oxygen rockets aren't going to go very fast. Ion thrusters will go a lot faster, but take a long time to get up to speed. If you want to go really fast you need something really exotic like antimatter, but the technical challenges are quite daunting. Theoretically you could use a flashlight, but the batteries would run out before you could get anywhere.
The allure of a reactionless drive is that you aren't limited by the the rocket equation. You may still need a big energy source, but your speed isnt limited by how fast you can spit stuff out your backend.
It's fun reading to look up things like specific impulse, the rocket equation, relativistic rockets, even project Orion.
IANARS.
There's nothing that theoretically prevents a hydrogen-oxygen chemical rocket from approaching the speed of light. But it would need an amount of fuel roughly the size of the Sun to do it with any appreciable payload.
A reactionless drive still needs to carry an energy source, but does not need to carry reaction mass to throw out the back. Hence the term "reactionless."
It does not accelerate at all! It allows you to move, but your net velocity is zero after each move cycle.
So you can shift your position in space, which is useful. But you do not speed up at all.
At this very movement Earth-dust is making its way into space and even leaving our solar system without fuel.
There's a group working on very low mass spacecraft to take advantage of this - http://www.spacecraftresearch.com/MII/MII_overview.html
They have presented evidence and a proposed mechanism, have fully published the details of their work, and have invited others to attempt to replicate it or to show where they're wrong. Where's the "pseudo"? It's also important to note that in experimental physics it's more than enough to show an effect that can be replicated. Their currently proposed theoretical explanation could be wrong, but that wouldn't matter.
The article also sets off various other pseudoscience alarm bells, such as the fact that their paper is published in a philosophy journal, and the guy having a history degree instead of a physics degree. But that goes against the naive rebellious spirit of HN that dictates that anybody can overthrow fundamental physics with an experimental setup in his basement, so downvote away!
The article is very much written in the second form, at least as far as I can tell.
"ninety-nine percent convinced" That's not "hmm, that's funny, let's investigate more".
"The theory has been sitting in peer-reviewed literature for more than fifteen years" (a single paper in a philosophy journal...)
"Those who are players in the field of advanced propulsion," he says, "feel obligated, for whatever reason, to dissuade people from considering seriously alternatives to their particular scheme. I think they may genuinely feel they are doing a public service when they say, 'Don't spend money on that, it can't possibly work.'" He gives me a wry smile. "But their own schemes have all failed." Implying that the space industry should invest in it.
She became "ninety-nine percent convinced." She started out skeptical until she investigated it thoroughly.
"Sitting in peer-reviewed literature" only applies to "something obviously wrong with it." He's saying that, if there's a flaw, it must be subtle. That's not saying "therefore it must be right" but merely that there are no obvious flaws.
And for space industry investment, I really don't see the problem here regardless of the context. Imagine, for a moment, that this was a completely legitimate thing that failed to attract any investment. Why would he not say those exact words? If this is something that could be said both by a kook and a legitimate scientist working on a legitimate theory, does that not mean the statement has no deciding power?
It looks to me like this fellow has quite a few peer-reviewed papers out there. Most are indeed in that weird journal, but not quite all.
And I just flat-out disagree with your supposed implication about investing.
Let me be clear: I doubt this effect is real. The difficulty of reproducing the experiment and the fact that the observed effect got smaller as they refined their technique both imply that there's some confounding factor at work. But I don't see any "pseudoscience" here.
http://www.wisdomquotes.com/quote/isaac-asimov-7.html
"such as the fact that their paper is published in a philosophy journal, and the guy having a history degree instead of a physics degree." -- argument from authority, very unscientific. If an unemployed poodle shaver publishes a replicable experiment, it is science.
"naive rebellious spirit of HN that dictates that anybody can overthrow fundamental physics with an experimental setup in his basement" -- if the experiment works and can be replicated, they certainly can.
There's also a misunderstanding of scientific epistemology in your last statement. Theories are seldom overthrown, but they are often extended. Einstein didn't overthrow Newton -- he provided an extension. Newton's equations still work, but with a very tiny error that only becomes visible at high velocities or with unbelievably precise measurements unavailable in Newton's day. A theory is not an absolute dogma, but a model that is deemed correct within its context -- namely all data and experiments available at a given time. New data or new experiments can extend the context, requiring an extension of theory. If this effect is real, it would not "demolish" or "overthrow" relativity, but would likely require some sort of extension to the theoretical framework. Who knows? Perhaps such a thing could point in the direction of the elusive quantum / relativity synthesis?
I am skeptical (lower-case S) of this, in that I wouldn't really believe it unless the effect could be reliably amplified. So far that hasn't been the case. But I don't consider it at all psuedoscientific to try it out. Even if the effect is a result of something else, doing so will refine your skill at measuring tiny forces and possibly advance the field of experimental technique.
The character assassination and arguments from authority are completely unwarranted, and is a major reason I am not a Skeptic (upper-case S).
P.S. a tangent:
Part of why I think CS advances so fast is that the unambiguous nature of computer "experiments" leaves little room for arguments from authority or character either pro or con. Either something works or it does not. Politics -- that age-old enemy of truth -- are clearly irrelevant.
Except for the fact that he says: "The theory has been sitting in peer-reviewed literature for more than fifteen years, so if there was something obviously wrong with it, the odds are, more than one person would have said that it's not right.". I'm just counting that claim.
> if the experiment works and can be replicated, they certainly can.
And guess what, it wasn't replicated!
> There's also a misunderstanding of scientific epistemology in your last statement.
I understand that, but conservation of momentum is one of the most fundamental facts of physics, maybe even THE most fundamental fact of physics, certainly as fundamental as conservation of energy (in relativity it's basically the same thing -- both are components of the energy-momentum 4 vector). It holds in Newtonian mechanics, general relativity, and in quantum mechanics. It is at the very basis of those theories. Finding something that contradicts that would completely destroy that foundation. It would be the single biggest discovery in the history of science. To present that with such confidence as the article does is just ludicrous. If the article was about creating energy from nothing, should that be taken seriously too, with similarly weak evidence?
Yeah, it'd be pretty huge, but it wouldn't "overturn" anything. All the science we've done to date remains quite valid.
Our current theories all state that momentum is conserved. That's because all our current experimental data shows that momentum is conserved.
Now let's say we had a new experiment that showed what appeared to be a violation of conservation of momentum?
This would mean we'd need a new theory explaining how this experiment worked. But this new theory would also have to explain all our previous experimental results -- in precisely the same way that Einsteinian mechanics encompasses, explains, and agrees with all of Newton's results. In other words you'd have to answer the question of "if momentum isn't always conserved, why does it almost always look like it's conserved?"
There's another possibility too. What if this thing works and momentum is still being conserved? What if it's pushing against something, such as some kind of dark matter field, WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), neutrinos, virtual particles, ...??? I'd start by asking questions like that before I'd toss conservation of momentum. Even the hardest vacuum is full of particles ejected from stars and other things flying all over the place and even "popping into and out of existence" (in quotes because that's only an analogy) as shown by things like the Casimir effect. What if it's a "WIMP thruster" or something weird like that? An interesting experiment would be to send one flying on a one way trip to nowhere out of the solar system and see if it works as well in interstellar space as near the sun. The sun's throwing out a lot of particles, could it be pushing against those? Has he ever tried running it at night (far side of Earth) vs. during the day (sunward side of Earth)?
Of course it'd still be really useful as a space drive if it could be scaled up, regardless of the mechanism.
I'd build two and have them push against or toward each other. Must be something funky in there.
I wonder if the thing, or a part of the thing, changes thermal energy more/faster than it changes kinetic energy? That would be an interesting conservation solution. If it would be energetically cheaper to just heat something up that has differential IR emission on each side...
That's what they are claiming: gravitational waves travel back in time, and move all the other matter in the universe a little bit so that momentum is conserved. Or something.
My reading is that this thing, assuming it worked, would have the same problem as ion drives in that it would require a massive power plant. It solves about 1/3 the technical problem of a star drive: where to get the mass. But about 2/3 of the problem of star travel is where to get the energy. High-power-density fusion and antimatter-matter annihilation are the only sources I know of that make star travel thinkable on anything like a human time scale.
Which, funnily, leads back to a point others and I were making in a different subthread[0] - that any device that allows interplanetary travel in timespans reasonable for humans is at the same time a weapon of mass destruction.
Humanity needs to get its act together if we're ever to get out of this rock :).
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8654683
We already have plenty of weapons of mass destruction -- sufficient to eradicate modern civilization if not human life entirely -- so its hardly as if not developing technologies necessary for interplanetary travel protects us from such weapons.
That's a good indication that the effect isn't real. But it has nothing to do with whether this thing is "pseudoscience." Proper science produces negative results all the time.
"-- argument from authority, very unscientific. If an unemployed poodle shaver publishes a replicable experiment, it is science."
Not only is it an unscientific argument, it's just wrong. The guy did his undergraduate and masters in physics, then switched to history of science for his doctorate because he realized that nobody was going to fund what he wanted to work on and he needed a job. He also works with other physicists who do have doctorates in physics.
That's very logical -- it's incredibly hard to fund anything speculative.
My underlying point is that being honestly wrong doesn't make you a pseudoscientist, and should not result in character assassination or claims of being a fraud or a quack. That sort of thing contributes to a climate of dogmatism and extreme risk aversion in science that more or less guarantees that nothing new will ever be discovered.
The data can't 'go against' general relativity because it's agreed by everyone--the researcher included--that he hasn't got all the variables controlled, and so the data doesn't 'go' at all.
It'd be pseudoscience if he was cherry-picking data that shows his theory to be correct, or ignoring existing data that conclusively shows that his theory is incorrect. He doesn't seem to be doing the former; I don't really have a way of telling if he's doing the latter.
http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/physics/graduate-studies-...
As time progressed and the experimental apparatus more refined, the “effect” seemed to get smaller, and that’s a REAL bad sign. It was already well below what the theory predicted. That sets off alarm bells. After all this time, if something isn’t in hand to float around a table top, its should still at least be producing unequivocal results.
I am aware of only one positive replication attempt, and even that experimenter (Paul March) had concerns over its validity. All other replication attempts have either been negative or ambiguous. My own experiments were ambiguous.
It seems to make the effect happen, a lot of parameters for the test devices, some not clearly understood, need to be “just so”. The question remains, are the devices being dialed in to create a real effect, or do things need to be just so to cause merely a false positive?
In a world as big as ours, it's reasonable to diversify your investments and keep a few million to one long-shots going, but it's important not to lose sight of the odds. Buy a lotto ticket every now and again, but put the bulk of your money in a 401k or other solid investment.
In this case, I think we're giving this idea more or less exactly the right amount of attention: one dedicated crank (and I use that term lovingly) devoting his life to his crazy theory, and a handful of less invested others occasionally checking in on it. If he can make it work, fantastic, if he can't, well, we didn't waste too much on it.
I love this little anecdote:
I found Hamilton to be extremely bright and knowledgeable, although sometimes I wondered if there was more to him than it appeared. I knew he gave regular briefing sessions at the Pentagon, which seemed strange for an electric car guy. But there was also a time we were speaking on the phone about the possibilities of wormholes and the like. He asked me if I thought it would be possible to create a wormhole with one end being on the surface of the Sun and the other over an enemy on the battle field. I think I was stunned into silence for quite some time, but eventually regained enough composure to say while I had not thought about that before (an understatement!), I supposed it was theoretically possible.
Off topic rant:
Crazy conspiracy people have no idea about how this kind of stuff happens all the time. 99.99% of things never go anywhere, but 0.01% turn into DARPA projects, and 0.01% of those actually turn into better saucepans, and 0.01% of those turn into actual weapons.
If you're in Austin: http://atxhs.org/wiki/Main_Page
Well, you actually can't do that. In special relativity when you change of reference frame, the momentum and energy mixes. If you break the momentum conservation in one reference frame, then you break the momentum conservation and the energy conservation in almost all the other reference frames.
If you do the experiment on Earth and in that reference frame the energy is conserved, then the astronauts from the ISS will see that the energy is not conserved, if Elon go to to Mars he will see that the energy is not conserved, even the people on the other side of the Earth will see that the energy is not conserved.
If you put two of these devices in opposite orientations in the opposite sides of a spinning carrousel (and assume that the angular velocity of the carrousel is small enough to ignore it in the calculations) you will see that each of the devices gain some energy and you can harvest it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle
It requires no energy or momentum to just change position. Except it's impossible to do in space, but this machine makes it possible (supposedly).
I'm not 100% sure this thing actually is real, I'm just going by the description in the wired magazine, plus reconciling it with the statement that it doesn't violate Newton's laws.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4196182
So charging the capacitor may make one plate slightly lighter, the other slightly heavier, but its overall mass is the same. Is it this mass change he's trying to use?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive