Mach Effect progress

[Giorgio]

McCulloch is also talking to a consortium in California who are creating their own Horizon Drive experiment. This group includes the University of Southern California and an organization, which he is only allowed to describe as a ‘major aerospace company.’ Their goal is to demonstrate the effect “viscerally” so that, unlike micro-thrust demonstration, anyone who sees it will believe. McCulloch says that results should be released this month.

So a test in space, or maybe aboard a vomit comet? I wonder whether we'll hear anything. Sounds too good to be true.

Quantised Inertia theory for now suffers from the same flaws of Dark Matter and Dark Energy theories. You can't experimentally test it.
I will wait with curiosity the results of his tests because while I do not know enough of McCulloch as a person to judge him, for sure Roger Shawyer and his EmDrive lost any credibility to me long time ago....

[williatw]

I will wait with curiosity the results of his tests because while I do not know enough of McCulloch as a person to judge him, for sure Roger Shawyer and his EmDrive lost any credibility to me long time ago....

Shawyer as a theorist yes; though he may or may night be a competent experimentalist. But what about DARPA greenlighting a phase 2 version of their research into EmDrive? Implies they must have gotten something positive from the Nov'18 study. Surely DARPA has cred with you?


As for McCulloch:

Not to be snarky, but I can't help but point out that McCulloch's PhD is in Physical Oceanography.

I gained a BSc in Physics at the University of York, and a PhD in Physical Oceanography (ocean physics) at the University of Liverpool. I have suggested (and published in 21 journal papers) a new cosmological model for inertia (called Quantised Inertia, QI or MiHsC) which predicts galaxy rotation without dark matter and cosmic acceleration without dark energy, without any adjustable parameters. QI predicts that inertia is controllable & lab tests of this are continuing. QI suggests a new, propellant-less, way to launch spacecraft and propel them.

https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/staff/mike-mcculloch

I guess you were right...apparently I was mislead by the article calling him a "physicist" and adding the "Dr." before his name; a little misleading that.

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2949&p=131596&hili ... ch#p131596

Make of that as you will.

[Giorgio]

Shawyer as an theorist yes; though he may or may night be a competent experimentalist. But what about DARPA greenlighting a phase 2 version of their research into EmDrive? Implies they must have gotten something positive from the Nov'18 study. Surely DARPA has cred with you?

DARPA is just doing their job, which is prove or disprove new alternative theoretical and experimental frameworks that could open new technological windows. From what I read untill now of the results from the other teams, the values reported are so near to background noise that even claiming that there is "an effect" is already a wild guess. So, kudos do DARPA for throwing some money at it and hopefully clearing the doubts once for all.
I have always been a strong believer that endorsing an idea and financing a research into it to prove once for all if it works or not is always a good step forward in our knowledge from a scientific evolution point of view, regardless of the final results.

As for McCulloch:

Not to be snarky, but I can't help but point out that McCulloch's PhD is in Physical Oceanography.

Make of that as you will.

For what I am concerned he could also have a diploma in bakery, I am not really interested in his academic background. I am more interested in how he plan to support his theory and what logical/mathematical construct makes him put so much faith into this theory.
The idea of the Unruh radiation as a medium to explain that inertia is a consequence of a quantised pressure against an object that is accelerating, is indeed something elegant and has similarities in what we see (as example) in fluid-dynamic in some type of viscous fluids. Additionally it does get rid of the need of Dark Matter, which is even an added bonus to me (but I have a personal bias on DM, so do not make it a focal point).

Unfortunately so far the lectures he made (and the videos he published) offered a very weak mathematical support to the theory and if he cannot bring at least a positive experimental result, than the whole theoretical framework becomes just a simple "idea" (albeit interesting).

[williatw]

DARPA Laser Version of EMDrive Has a Test Result Better Than Commercial Ion Drive
Brian Wang | September 21, 2020


If we could have a space drive that did not use fuel then we could accelerate for decades using a nuclear power source. This would allow a spacecraft with a tiny amount of propulsion to accelerate to near light speed. DARPA has been funding the Nascent Light-Matter Interactions (NLM) project for about three years. This project is looking for functiojnal variations of the super controversial EMDrive. EMDrive was first created twenty years ago and claimed that a conical copper device bounced magnetic radiation in the chamber to generate propulsion without using fuel.

The goal of NLM is to integrate emerging phenomena with fundamental models that can describe and predict new functionality. These models will provide design tools and delineate the performance limits of new engineered light-matter interactions. Important applications to be addressed in the program include synthesizing new material structures for sources, non-reciprocal behavior, parametric phenomena, limiters, electromagnetic drives, and energy harvesting.

The DARPA NLM project is currently funded until May 2021. Mike McCulloch is the current DARPA EmDrive project leader. Mike presented some interim results in an embedded video below.

There are reports that the DARPA project was worker with researchers in Spain who claim that forces of 0.1 newtons were generated. This needs to be confirmed. If confirmed then the system would be 5 times more powerful than the 0.02 newtons of some commercial ion drives.



























A Gravity Horizon makes Hawking Radiation


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=341Yk4k ... e=emb_logo






https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/09/d ... drive.html

[Carl White]

Latest from Mike McCulloch:

https://twitter.com/memcculloch/status/ ... 3534384129

Important to keep you honestly up to date on here. Just received an email from Tajmar that says the force he found was out-gassing from adhesive tape! So we're back to one positive, one negative. So nice to learn of this on the day of our presentation to DARPA. Fate is a comedian

[Giorgio]

Latest from Mike McCulloch:

https://twitter.com/memcculloch/status/ ... 3534384129

Important to keep you honestly up to date on here. Just received an email from Tajmar that says the force he found was out-gassing from adhesive tape! So we're back to one positive, one negative. So nice to learn of this on the day of our presentation to DARPA. Fate is a comedian

Total respect for McCulloch intellectual honesty and for Tajmar, that once again proves to be a great experimental investigator.

[williatw]

Total respect for McCulloch intellectual honesty and for Tajmar, that once again proves to be a great experimental investigator.

Yes. Agreed; this is also instructive:

The DARPA NLM project is currently funded until May 2021. Mike McCulloch is the current DARPA EmDrive project leader. Mike presented some interim results in an embedded video below.

Shows that DARPA has enough confidence in Mike McCulloch to trust him with running their project studying EmDrive. As an aside wonder why they didn't entrust it to say Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Eagleworks fame? Maybe DARPA and NASA don't talk much to each other?

[Carl White]

Here's a link to Martin Tajmar's recent paper, "Experimental investigation of Mach-Effect thrusters on torsion balances":

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 6521001119

"Claim on Mach-Effect propellantless propulsion scheme identified as vibration artefact."

[hanelyp]

"Claim on Mach-Effect propellantless propulsion scheme identified as vibration artefact."
exactly what every skeptic had at the top of the list of suspects. And sadly the proponents never appeared to take that possibility seriously.

[kunkmiester]

Complicated thing about these is that you NEED vibration to get thrust. The engineering there is a great promise, but also a great problem.

It's also absurdly easy to rule out though, I thought a basic part of their testing was running the stack without charging the caps, a vibration driven signal would show up all the time, while a mach effect signal will only show up part of the time.

I'd had the thought of a strictly em driven stack--cap stack on a floating slide, driven by an electromagnet, think a speaker with the cap stack instead of the cone. The two challenges are getting it driven at a useful frequency, and the host of new interferences to sort out and eliminate.

[Giorgio]

Here's a link to Martin Tajmar's recent paper, "Experimental investigation of Mach-Effect thrusters on torsion balances":

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 6521001119

"Claim on Mach-Effect propellantless propulsion scheme identified as vibration artefact."

For the one without access, a free PDF is available here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... n_balances

[hanelyp]

Complicated thing about these is that you NEED vibration to get thrust.

As I understand how the Woodward effect is supposed to work, not quite. You need cyclic acceleration. Putting the "transient mass" cells on a spinning wheel should provide that without (ideal engineering) vibration in the null hypothesis case. But last time I suggested this it was rejected as reducing the frequency and intended signal too much.

[kunkmiester]

IIRC there was at least one experiment with a centrifuge. I don't remember any details.

Lower signal should be matched by lower noise floor if done right, but I don't have enough understanding to tell if it would work. I do know that they are running well below what they'd like to run at, but haven't the money to get the power supply they'd need made.

[pbelter]

IVO Ltd Introduces the World’s First Pure Electric Thruster for Satellites


They claim 45mN

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ivo-ltd- ... 00962.html

[Skipjack]

45 mN at 1 Watt?! Unless this thruster is quite heavy, this would enable this thing to fly on a light weight solar panel, on Earth!
I seriously doubt this claim!