NASA confirms thruster actually works

[Wickian]

NASA confirms ‘impossible’ thruster actually works, could revolutionize space travel

When Roger Shawyer first unveiled his EmDrive thruster back around 2003, the scientific community laughed at him. They said it was impossible, that it was based on a flawed concept, and couldn’t work because it goes against the laws of conservation of momentum. But somehow, despite all of the reasons it shouldn’t work, it does.

https://uk.news.yaho...44.html#gTeWVWg

I remember reading about this thing more than once, and every time it's because another team tested and proved it worked even though they don't know why.

Edited November 7, 2015 by Saru
Updated news link

[bubblykiss]

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have now entered the age of magical propulsion.

Never thought I would live to see the say.

Wake me up when we have water computers a la Asimov.

[ShadowSot]

Thats from last year. The problems with the tests still haven't been addressed. Chiefly that the motion was measured regardless of the engine being on or off, and the detection being well within the error bars of the equipment.

[Wickian]

Thats from last year. The problems with the tests still haven't been addressed. Chiefly that the motion was measured regardless of the engine being on or off, and the detection being well within the error bars of the equipment.

Looks like you're right, I wonder why it was posted as new news where I found the link...

I found it, I copied the old link from the wrong tab by accident, here's the new one.

Edited November 3, 2015 by Wickian

[ShadowSot]

Though no official peer-reviewed lab paper has been published yet, and NASA institutes strict press release restrictions on the Eagleworks lab these days,

I'm going to put a hold on optimism until the results pass through examination. Been burned to often.

[The Necromancer]

I'm going to put a hold on optimism until the results pass through examination. Been burned to often.

I only wish I could...

*screams...jumps around....cries....*

*then goes and finds out how they actually proved that RF caused the thrust and not just the measurement of thrust being recorded.

My "Interdimensional RF portal' is one step closer to being completed this day.

Now all I have to do is relate this information to how Wi-Fi can see through walls using an RF capture device, study the Cannae drive yet again and go back through Tesla's old stuff again (but I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel there).

Maybe one day before I die, I'll 'break on through to the other side'....but until then...enjoy a tesseract rotation:

Edited November 3, 2015 by The Necromancer

[qxcontinuum]

they don't know how it works because it it alien technology

[Duke Wellington]

[/color]

https://uk.news.yaho...44.html#gTeWVWg

I remember reading about this thing more than once, and every time it's because another team tested and proved it worked even though they don't know why.

They know why it works: Electro-magnetic waves have a length meaning if you have a hollow object in space only those wavelengths short enough to exist between its walls can. The others are excluded creating an area of low EM pressure inside the hollow object. This pressure difference, which can be quite high for carefully designed hollow cone shapes and quite high if extra EM waves are artificially produced, is used to propel the object forward. The high pressure outside the object pushes it along (if its the right shape). It doesn't violate the laws of physics either, that is unless people believe Classical Mechanics is still valid in the 21st century which sadly some people do.

Edited November 7, 2015 by RabidMongoose

[HeisenbergC10H15N]

they don't know how it works because it it alien technology

Not alien technology, British technology actually. The yanks are good at stealing others inventions. We Brits are like Atlantis at inventing stuff but unbelievably poor at investing in it and keeping hold of the technology for ourselves.

[fred_mc]

I think that when searching for news articles about this on Google News, sources for the articles seem highly suspicious or entirely absent. In one article, they refer to a one year old article, which contains largely the same information and the same picture. In almost all articles, there are references to NASA but I can't find any information on NASA sites about this. There is according to several of the pages somebody who has claimed on the forum http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com to have made some work on EmDrive but to me it looks like that is a forum where anybody can register and write so that doesn't prove that NASA has made any work regarding this.

Edited November 7, 2015 by fred_mc

[Harte]

"New" update appears to based entirely on a post made by Paul March (Username Star-Drive) -page linked, not the post - in a thread of the forum at Nasaspaceflight.com.

I'd hold the champagne.

Harte

[EllJay]

Something I would really liked to see have worked is the Searl Effect Generator. http://searlmagnetics.com/

As always the "breakthrough is always around the corner" they say, when it comes to claims like this, so I'm not holding my breath. But it would have been neat if this worked on a grander scale.

Searl Effect Generator

http://youtu.be/zZ8KVzDeYaI

[Ell]

They know why it works: Electro-magnetic waves have a length meaning if you have a hollow object in space only those wavelengths short enough to exist between its walls can. The others are excluded creating an area of low EM pressure inside the hollow object. This pressure difference, which can be quite high for carefully designed hollow cone shapes and quite high if extra EM waves are artificially produced, is used to propel the object forward. The high pressure outside the object pushes it along (if its the right shape). It doesn't violate the laws of physics either, that is unless people believe Classical Mechanics is still valid in the 21st century which sadly some people do.

That might make some sense, but I still do not comprehend it. Where are the schematics? Is there an energy input? Is there an energy output? What makes it go 'forward' instead of backward or sideways? How does one 'brake'?

[Trihalo42]

Biefeld Brown effect, aether / quantum medium distortion creating a gravity effect. All gravity really is is a kind of buoyancy. Einstein described gravity as a "curvature" because he was using a 2D example.

[Uncle Sam]

I actually got to thinking, what if this was a way to provide unlimited energy?

[Frank Merton]

This violates some very core ideas of physics, so one presumes there is some misunderstanding or error somewhere. If not it's gonna be damned important.

[sepulchrave]

They know why it works: Electro-magnetic waves have a length meaning if you have a hollow object in space only those wavelengths short enough to exist between its walls can. The others are excluded creating an area of low EM pressure inside the hollow object. This pressure difference, which can be quite high for carefully designed hollow cone shapes and quite high if extra EM waves are artificially produced, is used to propel the object forward. The high pressure outside the object pushes it along (if its the right shape). It doesn't violate the laws of physics either, that is unless people believe Classical Mechanics is still valid in the 21st century which sadly some people do.

Do you have a credible source for that statement?

I can't see how it would work. EM waves inside a metal cavity are limited in wavelength by the size of the cavity, but only with the cavity walls on both sides. There would be a pressure differential between the EM field inside and the EM field outside, but this pressure differential would be the same on both sides of the container.

If you made a cone, the only force generated would be parallel to the axis of the cone, and would be balanced on each side - because there is only confinement along the axis of the cone.

An isotropic electromagnetic field has zero average momentum. There is no physical geometric shape that can recieve more momentum on one side than on the other side when placed in an isotropic field.

A device might work if one side was completely absorbing while the other side was perfectly reflecting, but in that case the ideal geometry would be a flat sail and the operating principle quite different than the one you describe.

(Actually a sail as described above might violate the second law of thermodynamics, so I don't think it would actually work, but I can't think of the specific reason why it would fail at the moment.)

That might make some sense, but I still do not comprehend it. Where are the schematics? Is there an energy input? Is there an energy output? What makes it go 'forward' instead of backward or sideways? How does one 'brake'?

As I mention above, I don't think RabidMongoose is correct; I can't see how the device would work while still balancing momentum. However, from a purely energy-balance perspective the device is plausible: The energy input would come from the external electromagnetic field, the energy output would be from the kinetic energy of the device.

If such a device did work, "forward" would be determined by the direction the inner concave surface points, as that is the location that recieves the greatest. If the device was shaped like a "V", the device would move upwards (in the opposite direction that the V points; towards the low pressure area).

Braking could only be achieved by changing the geometry of the device.

Biefeld Brown effect, aether / quantum medium distortion creating a gravity effect. All gravity really is is a kind of buoyancy. Einstein described gravity as a "curvature" because he was using a 2D example.

No, Einstein did no such thing. Curvature is well-defined in arbitrary dimensions and is an appropriate word to use for gravity. Bouyancy is not, unless you consider bouyancy to include time dilation as well.

[Saitung]

This violates some very core ideas of physics, so one presumes there is some misunderstanding or error somewhere. If not it's gonna be damned important.

Not a misunderstanding of physics, merely a degree of physics we have not yet reached. We have to remember that our industrial age is only 255 years old. Crazy that we have done so much in so short a time.

[Saitung]

Looks like you're right, I wonder why it was posted as new news where I found the link...

I found it, I copied the old link from the wrong tab by accident, here's the new one.

Excellent find Doppelganger, thanks for the leg-work.

I'm amazed we found any substantial at all. just as you will you find any new or video footage of the early NERVA rocket engines tests. I remember seeing one of these tests on CNN back in the late 1980's. I was coming in the house from work and walked by the tele. The video footage was of the NERVA rocket capsule landing, gently coming down to land somewhere on earth. It was an actual rocket with flames landing in reverse how we are used to seeing rockets take off. I must have looked like I saw a ghost because my wife asked me what was wrong. My answer was that a conventional rockets doesn't have enough thrust to land like that in earth's atmosphere. Of course she had no idea what I was talking about.

If you check now, NOTHING. Mainly this is due to three civilians being severely burned by radiation poisoning by one of this vehicle's test flights. The NERVA capsule strayed off course in Dayton, Texas. This carried it over the two lane highway where a Mother, Daughter and Son were traveling one night. The Mother who exited the car to get a closer look subsequently died of radiation poisoning. The UFO as the victims called it, was white in color and diamond shaped. the very same configuration I saw of the vehicle landing that day on television.

Later the Daughter died, leaving only the son, now in his thirties. To my knowledge no one else has ever put these two events together as I have.

Believe me when I say, (Ex-Military with a Secret Security Clearance). When the military releases anything publicly its because from their standpoint its already old tech.

Anyone believing that our government, or ANY smart government would publicly make available new groundbreaking technology is just plain foolish. We didn't want to share the Atom bomb with the rest of the world when the United Nations wanted us to. We refused. We learned the best way to avoid this in the future, was to just not tell anyone it exists. So in this fashion, any civilian academic looking to understand some of this will be lost forever. You will be working with a jigsaw puzzle wherein someone purposefully removed some of the pieces. We have to be careful not argue points of discussion on matters of scientific secrecy when we don't have all the information.

[Troublehalf]

Believe me when I say, (Ex-Military with a Secret Security Clearance). When the military releases anything publicly its because from their standpoint its already old tech.

This is exactly right. Everything the public is told is "high-tech" is in-fact, low-tech. In relative comparison. The "Big 5" of USA, UK, Russia, China and France will easily be ahead of anything the public has. Obviously other countries will be too, but I merely just used them as, depending on your views of the UN, they have the most power.

I always said, when the USA announced they were funding a "Warp-Drive" technology research, that it was simply laying the foundations for when "Warp-Drive" (or something similar) is released. Imagine it, nothing is mentioned about it, ever, then the news announces "USA has Warp Drive! It's like Star Trek man!" and people would be like "Huh? Really?" while some would be going "ALIENS! ALIIIEEENS! WE GOT THEIR TECHNOLOGY! PROOF!". But if you go "We are funding research into it", when you do finally announce it, you've got that to fall back, regardless of how it came to be. Let's say aliens do trade with Earth and USA has "Warp Drives" already, you'd need something to stop people questioning where you got it from. A public announcement of research is the best way to do it. Also, even if there is no alien trading going on, researching it isn't a bad idea anyway, lots of stuff can be discovered or improved upon, it's a minor research grant, sure, but it's still something. NASA is incredibly underfunded, but if the EMDrive actually works, it could mean easier exploration, while the military will look at it for use on missiles (no fuel needed? Then we put a bigger warhead on it!) or as propulsion for aircraft (no need for fuel? Then no need for refuellers!). If the Warp Drive comes into actually being a thing (assuming it isn't already, wink wink) then exploration would be even easier.

As it stands, I don't think anything will progress exceptionally in space until the world is out of carbon fuels. Look at it now, USA has 97% capped oil wells. They're obviously waiting till the rest of the world is dry, then drilling and going "Come on yall, buy OUR oil, what? You want the price it's always been? Too bad. Pay 1000x the amount or get lost.", but even that will eventually dry up. What do we do then? Simple. We drain Titan. Titan has huge reserves of hydrocarbons (I want to say more than Earth has ever had, but I can't be bothered to find where I read it) and that could be worth getting. So, you need to fund ships to go get it for us. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Or...

I actually got to thinking, what if this was a way to provide unlimited energy?

This. Couldn't you turn turbines and stuff with the EMDrive? If you could, then you wouldn't need fossil fuels as much. Or at all, depending on how much it produces. But, as I said, USA and Co won't want this to be possible. If you have a way of providing unlimited energy with no pollution, then that means people would demand it's used instead of fossil fuels. Which means oil and such lose their value. Which the USA and Co does not want to see happen.

[pallidin]

From what I've read, the EMDrive, if actually being investigated, is stated to currently produce a thrust equivalent to the weight of a single snowflake, which means that it still falls within "possible measurement error"

Hope to see how this pans-out... if it even does.

[Frank Merton]

Yea, seems to me an awful lot of chickens are being counted even before the eggs are laid.

[Rlyeh]

It doesn't violate the laws of physics either, that is unless people believe Classical Mechanics is still valid in the 21st century which sadly some people do.

That's a bold claim. Are you saying you can calculate the orbit of the moon using quantum mechanics?

[Emma_Acid]

I actually got to thinking, what if this was a way to provide unlimited energy?

No, because that doesn't exist.

[EllJay]

The fusion energy of the sun isn't unlimited & eternal per se - but it comes pretty close to be unlimited & eternal, for our needs.

If we could tap into, and harness, that energy fully, we would be set for "eternity".