EM Drive Rises Despite Pathoskeptic Dirge

EM Drive Rises Despite Pathoskeptic Dirge

New Physics is rising despite our age of science over-flowing with countless legions of puppy farmed Phd’s always making a ridiculous ruckus

It’s all the rage amongst the frustrated and dim-witted pups to bite, claw, and pee all over whomever they perceive as having a chance at becoming an alpha

Ardent, outrageous skepticism becoming patho-skepticism often cloaked on the internet but also to be found in the journals of science is where one is made to listen to the pesky yapping almost unavoidably

The EM Drive and Cold Fusion are the most beset upon of all new physics but the world does turn

Image above shows Shawyer next to his working EM Drive

Fifteen years ago Roger Shawyer a scientist/experimentalist in the UK created something he called him EmDrive (Em as in ElectroMagnetic waves). It is a propulsion technology that creates thrust without expelling the mass of burned propellant out the nozzel of a rocket engine. Shawyer simple uses microwaves precisely the same as are found in the most inexpensive micrwave overn and showed in his experiments that IT JUST WORKED.

Only one other discovery in the recent history of science had matched the EM Drive for being utterly outside of the box of established physics and that was/is cold fusion. The EM drive will revolutionise space travel allowing us to get to Mars in 10 weeks without propellant powered by a few solar electrical panels! Travel to and from near-by stars will take mere years not generations.

Martin Fleischmann holding one of his cold fusion cells

Martin Fleischmann holding one of his remarkable cold fusion cells 1989. If your professor ‘dissed’ cold fusion demand a refund from the idiot! Click to learn more about Martin in his own words

In spite of Shawyer’s working model, or perhaps because of the working model, much like Fleischmann and Pons original cold fusion test tube displayed in hand during March 1989 press conference the plentiful puppies of physics began to howl, snap, nip, and yap in an incessant posturing protest.

To say the EmDrive wasn’t accepted by the scientific community would be an understatement of epic proportions. Puppies and Professors alike swore upon their holiest of holies that for it to work the EmDrive must defy (and up-end) our current understanding/dogma of physics.

Shawyer and his creation have become the target of pathological skeptics wearing the gowns of science and have been relegated by those stupid dogma preaching fiends into being categorized as either a fool or a fraud.  What the puppy/professors have steadfastly refused to acknowledge is that 4 independent labs, including NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory, have recreated the drive and reported that it does create thrust.

The labs and Shawyer though have not been able to offer a ‘theory’ to explain the observed experimental evidence and as we know in this day and age that ‘theory’ precedes ‘facts’ or the facts must be false, or so say those who do nothing but pontificate upon their interpretation of dogma. Alas humans, and clearly scientists, know it easier to be a common missionary than an incredibly rare messiah.

As simple as bouncing microwaves inside a closed cone

The EmDrive is also known as a radio frequency resonant cavity thruster. A magnetron, some successful experimental copies have simply cannibalized the part out of a cheap microwave oven, creates microwaves, which are bounced back and forth inside an enclosed cavity that’s a small truncated cone sealed at both ends. The resulting ‘internal’ thrust pushes the thruster in the direction of the small end, aka forward.

Nothing more than simple electricity is needed to run this thrusting ‘microwave oven.’ There’s no fuel tanks or rocket engine and nothing is expelled with great heat and energy out of one end to make Shawyer’s thruster move. That absence of propellent is what makes the puppies howl, according to all they have been taught and dutifully memorized that makes the EM Drive pure heresy. Even worse it offers little known, non-institutionally affiliated white-haired Shawyer up as the penultimate alpha dog of physics and rocket science resulting in no shortage of big dogs adding their barks and bites to the story.

Thrust sans Viagra

Spacecraft can’t move forward unless propellant is expelled or the spacecraft is pushed or pulled by something that is expelling something. All forms of propulsion use heavy fuel to make them move, even futuristic solar sails will reflect infinitely tiny photon particles opposite of the direction of thrust desired.  One simply doesn’t get off and have a moving moment by doing nothing… save perhaps with the ephemeral EmDrive.

New Scientist magazine published an article about the drive and said it was plausible, there was an outrageous backlash from physicists claiming sensationalism.

Physicist Paul Friedlander wrote: “As I read it, I, like the thousands of other physicists who will have read it, immediately realised that this was impossible as described. Physicists are trained to use/recant certain fundamental principles to analyse a problem and this claim clearly flouted one of them…

The Shawyer drive is as impossible as perpetual motion.

Relativistic conservation of momentum has been understood for a century and dictates that if nothing emerges from Shawyer’s device then its centre of mass will not accelerate.”

My Favourite Notion of Explanation

Dr Mike McCulloch of Plymouth University, notes that the drive’s thrust might mean we need a new theory of inertia and he has some very specific ideas and simply testable suggestions to confirm his hypothesis. If true he can explain the EM Drive thrust without violating the conservation of momentum. Read about Physics from the Edge on his blog.

physics_from_the_edge_bookMike’s hypothesis (MiHsC) is said to be counter-intuitive as it suggests that momentum increases as the thruster moves, but his mathematical model has a wonderfully good fit for the reported results and some other observations already made in astronomical environs and experiments. His model reworks inertia, which is about how massive objects at rest or in motion resist having their state or rest or motion, their inertia, changed.

He says to imagine a planet hurtling through space at high speeds. It’s really difficult to stop it or even slow it down considerably or in other words it has a lot of inertia. Physicists have appreciated inertia for centuries but it isn’t clear why inertia actually exists or what it is.

Inertia as Unruh radiation

McCulloch proposes that inertia can be explained by the Unruh radiation predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Basically, the faster you move, the warmer things get for you. McCulloch’s idea is that inertia is just Unruh waves putting pressure on accelerating objects.

We don’t notice this phenomenon at the everyday speeds we think of as normal, but at tiny accelerations the wavelengths of Unruh radiation are so long that they don’t even fit within the observable universe. The result? At low accelerations, meaning given time, inertia is forced to use only whole-level Unruh wavelength values.

A phenomenal and unexplained but very real observation from our real universe is that when spacecraft accelerate around planets, they end up faster than we expect and nobody can figure out where they get the extra acceleration aka thrust. It is known as the Fly By Anomaly!

When spacecraft accelerate around planets, and inevitably end up faster than we expect, the speed of spacecraft appears to increase in small “jumps”. This McCulloch’s has made to fit into his model perfectly. He says the extra thrust comes from radiation pressure from Unruh waves. His model doesn’t stop there he takes on the largest issue in the universe and uses his model to explain the rotation of galaxies without the need for dark matter.

McCulloch proposes that Unruh radiation could readily explain why Shawyer’s, and the many replicators, EmDrive(s) work. The coned shape of the drive’s enclosed cavity means that Unruh waves are different sizes at the different ends of the cavity. With inertia resulting from Unruh radiation one expects photons bouncing around inside to have their inertia changed, with stronger radiation pressure in one direction than the other, exactly as seen in the EM Drive. Momentum is conserved along with precious (pernicious) dogma which is what puppies and professors have been howling about all along, that thrust results is now allowed and we are good to go!

em drive in romania

Garage science in Romania with a working EM Drive built at a cost of a few dollars – click to read more

While McCulloch’s notions are new they are easily testable. The simple test is to go buy a $59.99 Microweave from the local discount store, some copper sheathing and a few hundred dollars of bits and pieces and make an EM Drive as McCulloch suggests with the length of the EmDrive’s cavity the same as the diameter of the smaller end.

If Mike is right, Unruh radiation will fit better at the small instead instead and the thrust will be reversed. It’s a fairly straightforward test and hopefully we’ll know what happens soon. There is a crowd of open science experimentalists no doubt in their garages soldering up their own EM Drives at this very moment.

What Next?

As Shawyer has said countless times EM Drives can work well in the atmosphere as well as in space. All manner of transport ships will be able to ply the world’s airlanes moving as ultra-efficient EM driven massive freight carrying dirigibles, they won’t likely fly in the air as fast as present day jet lines more like the speed of supertankers at sea, slow but sure and very cheap. Flying cars… no problemo.  One side of this new technology is it is very low on emissions, offering a spectacular reduction in CO2 and other fossil fuel emissions!

The dreamscape for many is space travel, which with EM Drives in the vacuum of space will become incredibly fast and efficient. A journey from Earth to Mars will take just weeks not years. Since the drive can accelerate almost infinitely, we will be able to easily send spacecraft to other stars faster than we ever thought possible with round trips possible in a cosmonauts tour of duty not requiring an entire lifetime.

At present the yipping and snapping of the puppy mill pups and professors is sustaining a nearly perfectly overwhelming howl of noise as those minions and missionaries of dogma proclaim the EmDrive must be a load of nonsense, else they have wasted their lives and proven themselves senseless drones. It will be ever so nice to ride to their funerals in our EM drive powered funeral cars.

As for cold fusion you need do nothing more that cast you gaze to the many postings here on the Atom-Ecology Blog to read of its kindred nature to Shawyer and the remarkable EM Drive.

References: as quick as your fingers can type ‘EM Drive” into any search engine!