There are more mysteries remaining to be solved in so many areas of science

Human’s for the most part are wildly afraid of the dark so we live in what we think are well illuminated boxes.

Sometimes though the walls of our boxes can be seen to be transparent.

Don Hotson

The rare jewels of science are those people who live without boxes, transparent or otherwise. This is what it takes to understand the environment and ecology of the atom. One person who I have recently been reminded of is Don Hotson. He’s passed now into the great beyond but he left us with some incredible notions. That’s about the best anyone can do is work out the details/devils of some great ideas.

I think it was my friend JP Vigier who put me on to Don Hotson as having ideas far enough outside our ‘cold fusion’ box as to just possibly be the right answer. Vigier while spending most of his life very much inside the illuminated world of conventional physics kept some gigantic French doors that allowed him to be commonly found outside the box by those of us who frequented that mysterious outer forest. Hotson lived a long life as a Shakespearean actor, surveyor, and closet physicist and mathematician who some few rightfully ranked with the likes of Einstein. He passed into the ether in 2014 after a long life.

An EM Drive under construction in Romania using a bit of copper sheeting and parts cannabilzed from a second hand microwave oven. It just worked! Click to enlarge.

What got me renewing my long forgotten knowledge of Hotson has been the mystery of the EM Drive. The problem with the drive is that it is a sealed vessel, a truncated cone frustum in which microwaves are bounced around. That one can make such a thing is nothing special, that it displays thrust when nothing has been put into it that can be expelled has the dogmatists of physics all jumping wildly about with the knickers in a knot. The box, the EM Drive box, is perfectly illuminated and clearly in violation of all that is Holy.

Here’s a link to a collecton of Don Hotson’s work.

But the dang thing works so either it is creating a Warp Bubble that is directing it on its course or it is expelling something out the ‘back-end’ that is propelling it so.  Now I will be delighted if it turns out to be a Warp Drive, nothing could be more wonderful for an old star trek fan. But I tend to think that the more simple explanation is that in this universe that we inhabit the ether is not nothingness and a vacuum but rather filled with something aka epos/dark matter. What the ether is has been a long-standing fascination of countless brilliant minds.

So along come Hotson, his notion was that the ether is filled with particles he calls ‘epos’, they are pairs of electrons and positrons that are entangled and by any of our means to date immeasurable. He muses as to whether ‘epos’ have positive or negative mass! Others like Casimir have invoked a very similar ecology and environment, the ether, the dark matter, that lies everywhere inside and outside our usual box.

Hotson developed a large body of ideas wherein the principal participant in his ecology are the infinitely abundant ‘epos.’ His work was thoroughly based and versed in the context of Dirac of whom no physicist living or dead has dared to eschew. Hotson’s modified Dirac equations are noting short of being worth a large part of a lifetime of study.

The crux of the EM Drive solution is that ‘epos’ while little influenced by what we are accustomed to are not entirely outside of our influence. Indeed a near perfect environment where we might ‘touch’ the ‘epos’ , the dark matter, of our universe might just be inside an EM Drive. The microwaves bouncing infinitely back and forth inside the drive ever more and more concentrated by the conical shape of the drive frustum might just be colliding with epos and nudging them along.

Given that the epos see the metal which the EM Drive is made of as nothing at all, indeed perfectly transparent to epos it is the strange environment of microwave light that the EM Drive creates. The metal drive frustum can and does contain and organize the microwaves. It’s rather like waves pounding on a beach and producing a mysterious rip tide that send water straight out through the waves, along with any swimmer who finds themselves inside the rip.

The beauty of the EM Drive concept is that the efficiency, or Q, of the microwave frustum is quite well understood and predictable according to well proven electrical engineering principals and formulae. The higher the Q the more power as effectively what high Q is doing is corralling epos from the surround ether and sending them in the prescribed direction. Since the entire universe is filled with limitless epos there is no end of a supply of epos to be used as EM Drive thrust.

It seems quite likely that EM Drives are in fact spectacularly effective ‘dark matter’ detectors, even better they have engineered ‘dark matter’ into practical use. Mainstream physics is also convinced that microwave Q environments are a likely place to search for dark matter as this team at Yale illustrates.

DARK MATTER Detector with a ‘great’ Q of 40,000 achieved in microwave frustum at Yale, which isn’t bothering to look at thrust. EM drives prototypes are already observed to to attain Q values of 5 x e9 (BAUER, S. et al ‘Production of Superconducting 9-cell Cavities for the Tesla test facility, Standford University and Forschungszentrum Rossendorf’ Accel Instruments GmBh). This would lead to a static specific thrust of 3.15 x e4 N/kW (3.2 tonnes / kW), that’s a lot of Dark Matter/EPOS being managed for practical use!

Now the question does arise according to Hotson, and curiously the famed Richard Feynman, do ‘epos’ have positive or negative mass? Presumably the answer to that will tell us which direction we should point the EM Drive and why. But regardless the experimental evidence of thrust as shown by the EM Drive makes this question somewhat moot. It Just Works.

The best of all for me in this story of the EM Drive and the late great Don Hotson’s notions is that it proves that ‘boxes’ are immaterial and indeed are not at all necessary depending on which side of the universe you come from, inside or outside of the box.

Dang it all now I have to go find my mathematics goggles and polish them up and renew my studies of Don Hotson and Dirac. I’ve been able to long rely on great friends and tutors who had the patience and focus of mathematicians to coach me as we pondered the more intangible mysteries of our ecology which in its essence is so complex as to defy mathematical treatment. Alas so many of my old mathematically inclined friends have passed into the great beyond, just when things are getting interesting.

Atom ecology like ocean ecology demands an intuitive understanding for the environment containing more unknowns than knowns. If you must have certainty then ecology is not the path you should choose.

As Krishnamurti used to say, “One does not catch the unknown in a net of the known.”