Mach Effect progress

[GIThruster]

That sounds right to me! I would just remind that, we can describe this connectuion with the notion of a "fabric of spacetime" (which I personally like very much since I'm a proponent of Loop theory) or we can try to talk about these forces mediated through waves or particles we have no reason to believe exist, or we can do what Mach, Einstein, Sciama and Woodward do, and talk about a "gravity field" that connects all the Universe's parts.

Mach's Principle is the key here--basically that it is the action of gravity on local matter, and chiefly the action of the farthest matter, Far Off Active Mass (FOAM) that causes inertia.

Most people want a picture to go with when doing any sort of physics in their mind. Field theory is frustrating because it tends to thwart that intention. This is in fact WHY we begin to talk about particles when we have no reason to believe in gravitons, or in gravity waves when we've failed more times than we can count to detect them. It's why we talk about a "fabric" of space-time. This is all fine just so as we remember than the pictures in the mind, illustrations complete with captions, are just like metaphors and analogies: if they are not completely accurate, they will be wrong at places. Big Surprise!

Just so, it is good to keep in mind that the only completely proper way to illustrate or describe this stuff is with field theory.

[icarus]

Just so, it is good to keep in mind that the only completely proper way to illustrate or describe this stuff is with field theory.

From your obviously intimate work with field theory, what exactly does it have to say about Mach-Effect thrust and conservation of momentum then?

Which equations specifically?

[GIThruster]

Just so, it is good to keep in mind that the only completely proper way to illustrate or describe this stuff is with field theory.

From your obviously intimate work with field theory, what exactly does it have to say about Mach-Effect thrust and conservation of momentum then?

Which equations specifically?

icarus, as I've explained before, I'm not a field theorist and I'm not a physicist. I am skilled enough to know that the explanation's I've given preclude or answer any complaints about the conservation issue.

I've made the same arguments to engineers and physicists, from NASA to private industry to educators. Everyone who understands the issue well enough to know there's the threat of a conservation violation, has understood that the answers I've given are answer enough.

Everyone but you. . .

[icarus]

I am skilled enough to know that the explanation's I've given preclude or answer any complaints about the conservation issue.

Ha, that's a good one. You are not skilled with field equations or physics but you can answer all questions anyway ... and you are right, I guess it is just me that calls you on it. NASA pays extra these days for BS so you should be fine.

[GIThruster]

You can medicate for this issue. I have it on good testimony lithium works for delusions of grandeur.

You didn't call me on anything. You don't need to do the math to know the explanation works. What kind of person insists upon the kind of explanation they know they won't understand?

Scratch that. Please don't respond or post to me any more, icarus. I see you pick these kinds of fights with people all the time here, and I want no part of it.

[icarus]

Sorry that you feel the need to stoop to gratuitous abuse.

For the record, the fights just seem to come my way when I call people out who seem to be pushing questionable science. Who knows maybe M-E is experimentally real but the conservation of momentum question is not going away .... rest of the universe, uh-huh, lets see the integral that shows that then.

[MSimon]

Sorry that you feel the need to stoop to gratuitous abuse.

For the record, the fights just seem to come my way when I call people out who seem to be pushing questionable science. Who knows maybe M-E is experimentally real but the conservation of momentum question is not going away .... rest of the universe, uh-huh, lets see the integral that shows that then.

Feynman worked it out based on QM and Maxwell. He said that at minimum 1/2 of mass was EM in nature. And inertia depended on all the charges in the universe. So all masses in the universe are EM coupled.

Now if you could modulate that with EM fields......

[Betruger]

So Feynman was a pusher for questionable science.

[MSimon]

So Feynman was a pusher for questionable science.

It appears he did the math. Maxwell and QM.

Now why you would call Maxwell which has been around for 150 years questionable science is rather odd.

And he got a similar result using QM.

It seems rather a shame that it took 150 years to do the experiments. If they give results not in accord with theory that would be news almost as big as if they do correspond with theory.

Now I must say I'm not up to do the math. But Feynman has a reputation for being very careful. So until results are forthcoming I'm going to give his pronouncements on the subject more weight than I give yours.

[icarus]

Feynman said nothing about Mach-Effect thrust.
Maxwell said nothing about Mach-Effect thrust.

Maxwell's equations, EM nature of matter and 'borrowing momentum' from the rest of the universe are separate issues, your muddled brain has conflated them somehow.

You guys seem keen to stick the boot in ... so go right ahead, I could care less.

Can you point to the equations of Woodwards that show Conservation of Momentum is not violated? ... without throwing out red herrings like Feynman QM, re-casting my arguments to suit your own agenda, etc ... no I didn't think so.

[Betruger]

Not my pronouncement. Icarus' -- Where he hides the supporting evidence for this absolute, inarguable conclusion, no one knows.

My pronouncement is that anything's possible; long-standing assumed absolutes being turned over is no exception. And I only believe what I see. Of course everything's a shade of grey where probabilities are concerned, but the previous sentence puts it in a nutshell. Another way to put it - everything's "questionable". That's a given..

E.G. I'll believe Icarus' rabbid and supposedly dispassionate insistence that the ME conjecture is rubbish when he produces airtight evidence for it. Which I'm sure Woodward and March are also all ears to.

[icarus]

I'm not the one turning over the prevailing paradigm ....

Can you point to the equations of Woodwards that show Conservation of Momentum is not violated?

NB: I'm not even asking for experimental evidence, just the theory.

[paulmarch]

I'm not the one turning over the prevailing paradigm ....

Can you point to the equations of Woodwards that show Conservation of Momentum is not violated?

NB: I'm not even asking for experimental evidence, just the theory.

Icarus:

I pointed out Woodward's pertinent M-E papers a few posts ago that address these M-E energy and momentum conservation issues you've raised. Did you read them yet? You also need to read Dennis Sciama's two papers from 1953 ("On the Origins of Inertia") and 1969 ("Generally Covariant Integral Formulation of Einstein's Field Equations"), for they both bear heavily on Woodward's M-E conjecture. Also checkout Wheeler and Feynman's work on radiation reaction forces and John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of QM for they provide the atemoral connections needed to make sense of the momentum conservation question in the M-E.

Alas, past the above and supporting papers, we have to wait for a cerified version of quantum gravity to become avaiable before further theoretical considerations in the M-E can be pursued. However, Woodward is an experimentalist and that is where it gets really interesting...for an engineer at least.

Best

[paulmarch]

GIThruster and Paul,

I have been thinking intently about this whole conservation of momentum thing when I thought up a analogy to try to understand what was going on.

Let's start with GIThruster's analogy of walking on the surface of the Earth. You said (I am going to do a lot of paraphrasing, so forgive me if I change the wording and in the process mess up your example) that as a person's foot pushes off the Earth, momentum is conserved because the person either makes the Earth spin faster or slower (depending on the direction the person is walking relative to the direction of rotation) directly proportional to how much momentum they pick up. When we watch the person walk along the street, conservation seems to be violated, because we don't see the street "changing momentum". But, if we zoom out and increase our detection capabilities, we would detect a change in the speed of rotation (and therefore momentum, albeit angular) of the Earth.

So, to put it in terms of ME. If we look at a ME thruster at work, relatively up close, it appears to violate conservation of momentum, because there appears to be no change in the momentum of the Earth, Moon, Sun, planets, and other associated mass within our solar system. But, if we could zoom out, REALLY OUT, and increased, REALLY INCREASED, our detection capabilities, we would be able to detect a change in the momentum of the rest of the universe. Here is where I think icarus has issues. Change of momentum of the rest of the universe (because in the person walking on Earth metaphor, the person is part of the "universe" called Earth, just as the ME thruster is part of the universe in reality.) Change relative to what? In the metaphor, it was easy (ier!), the change was in the speed of rotation.

I tried to figure out an easy answer for the ME thruster and the universe and fumbled my way along to a question. How could you describe how the momentum is transferred in a ME thruster? Well, how is it transferred in the person walking on the surface of Earth? Friction! If there was no friction between the person’s shoe and the surface of the Earth, the person would not be able to transfer momentum between them self and the Earth.

Back to reality and ME thruster. If one uses the concept of “the fabric of space and time”(ok, our time in reality was short lived), then we can look at the fabric as a surface to be traversed. Out away from objects (i.e. in outer space!) the fabric is flat, smooth, and nearly (as in so close, we have an extremely hard time measuring it) frictionless. Once you are moving along, you simply glide along with no friction to slow you down and the only way for you to change your momentum is to throw something away from you in the opposite direction of where you want to go (i.e. thrusters using propellant!). To get to this surface, you have to “climb” out of a depression in the fabric caused by the mass of the object you are on. So, we throw a whole lot of stuff really hard in the direction of the bottom of the depression and move up out of the depression. The more massive the object, the harder we have to throw more mass, because the depression is deeper with steeper sides. We are unable to push, pull, or grab a hold of the fabric of space and time. We are stuck using a Newtonian solution.

My ahh ha was thinking of the ME thruster as our “shoe with friction” to walk on “the fabric of space and time”. As we “walk on the fabric”, our “shoe” pushes off on it. Just as when we looked at just the person walking on the street, it appeared momentum was not conserved, it appears that momentum is not conserved when we look at an ME thruster in the lab (or on my spaceship parked in the backyard!). We have to look at everything when looking at a ME thruster, because everything, in the entire universe, is connected (through a gravinertial field?). So where does the momentum come from? Not sure, but perhaps someone else can continue the analogy and provide an answer. I want to say something like: the momentum comes from a change in the momentum of the universe from one point in time to the next. Just as someone looking at the person walking on the surface of the Earth is sort looking at something in two dimensions, they can’t see the change in the third dimension (i.e rotation in a third dimension of a seemingly two dimensional surface), we are looking at things in three dimensions and cannot picture the change in the fourth. (Thus today’s momentum from tomorrow?)

Continue for a little while longer with the “shoe on the fabric of space” analogy. The stronger our ME thruster, the more “friction” it has between it and the fabric. The more momentum we can transfer between us and the “rest of the universe”. The more friction, the steeper the side of the well we can climb. The quicker we can accelerate once we are out of the well. So, your discussions about thrust rating is equivalent to friction coefficients.

Well, that about ends my ah ha. I hope you enjoyed the read. If not, sorry to have wasted so much of your time!

ltgbrown:

As noted by Ron-S, your walking on spacetime friction analogy is very apt for how the M-E appears to function. In fact, finding a way to grab hold of or get traction on spacetime has been an intractable problem (except for rockets) until Woodward stumbled across his M-E mass fluctuation conjecture. This is because the magnitude of your shoe's spacetime “friction” is directly proportional to the magnitude of the M-E equation impulse term's difference in the "push heavy" mass verses its "pull light" mass, mass fluctuation signal used in any M-E based thruster. How one generates and maximizes these impulse term based plus/minus mass fluctuations in a given energy storing dielectric mass, and how one force rectifies these delta mass signals into a unidirectional force without them being killed off by phase induced force cancelling wave interference effects will determine how useful the M-E can become.

And then we have the always negative going M-E wormhole term that is driven by the M-E impulse term that could provide us a way to build traversable GRT wormholes, or generate Alcubierre like warp bubbles with our ship in the middle of its flat spacetime volume that can traverse normal interstellar 4D spacetime in arbitrarily short periods of time…

Best

[cuddihy]

I'm not the one turning over the prevailing paradigm ....

Can you point to the equations of Woodwards that show Conservation of Momentum is not violated?

NB: I'm not even asking for experimental evidence, just the theory.

I just stumbled into this thread. It looks from the run of this thread like icarus might be a sock puppet for Paul March or perhaps Woodward himself...He seems to be playing a "Simplicio to Galileo" role for M-E theory. Joe, could we check that IP address out?



Anyway, to get to the specifics of this glib, but actually too vague, question, just what prevailing paradigm is Woodward supposed to be turning over that has anything to do with conservation of momentum?

Fleshing out this question would clarify icarus's thoughts and objections more usefully and probably give a good purchase for exploring the more mundane edges of Woodward's theories.

"Paradigm" implies the existence of a broad consensus, like for instance the nature of space time as a 4-dimensional riemann space for general relativity. That's a paradigm that Einstein largely created in the process of overturning the paradigm of the 3-dimensional geometric universe. But Woodward actually relies pretty heavily on that Einstein paradigm.

Here's some other ("wackier") concepts that Woodward relies pretty heavily on:
-gravitational attraction as the origin of inertia
-time-travelling reaction forces would cause inertial effects to behave "instantaneously"
-4-d ripples in space-time shielding a "mass fluctuating" source from gravitational attractions to change observed inertia

What these three concepts have in common is that they are all "wacky." (actually, the first two are a starting assumption and a leading question. The third is a theoretical result) What they also have in common is that there is no "paradigm" currently in play for any of the three to overturn.
i.e.
-the source of inertia is not remotely agreed upon
-the cause of inertial reaction instantaneity is not agreed upon. Neither is the possibilty of time-traveling waves enabling "instantaneous" effects such as radiation reaction that are observed.
-the concept of mass fluctuations is not currently paradigmatically true or false -- it is just new
etc,etc

Anyway what they all also have in common is that none of them impact or overturn in any way conservation of momentum. That doesn't enter until you start talking about a specific application of the theory--ie development of an MLT.

I'm not going to explain that again, if someone wants to look at the Earth's magnetic field and demand over and over how it can change without violating conservation of energy, you can only point out the existence of the sun and rest of the solar system for so long before you realize that the question is not being honestly asked.

Anyway, I think it's otherwise a very useful question, if it could be asked specifically instead of tossed out there as a glib one-off.