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Aether is back

U

Uncle Bob

SOC-14 1K
Uncle Bob,
I blame you for destroying my productivity here at work.

Read the two published papers, fascinating stuff. I can only approach this stuff from the viewpoint of a well-educated layman (no astrophysicist but do know quantum mechanics rather well). His quantum foam approach to space as he describes it does appear to account for things Einstein's theories do not. I have always been bothered myself by the postulate that 90% of the matter in the galaxy must be dark matter, the need for "dark energy" or "vacuum energy" to account for various observations, and the inability to connect the quantum description of reality to Einstein's formulation, etc.
It's the anomolies and unexplained in a theory that point us to new ones. Einstein's theories have several of these, as did Newton's. It would be exciting to see some of the fundamental physical theories revamped in one's lifetime. I hope I live to see it. If history is any measure, even if this guy is right and has a slew of experimental evidence, it could take decades to convince the scientific community. Hopefully, people will not resort to attacking his character and pedigree if they cannot refute his experiments.
 
Yep very interesting. Somehow I'm relieved and not too surprised, which rather bothers me. That and trying to nail down vague recollections of this matter coming up before are hurting my brain
 
The cover story in Scientific American is "Spacetime ... hint that it could be a kind of fluid" Maybe I wasn't joking about the Aether.

It also makes sense of Mach's explanation of inertia, which at least one scientist (Woodward) has been using to make a "maneuver drive". NASA has looked into it, but the BPP office was de-funded before it was tested.
It look to me like 1G would take at least 4+ GW/ton, so maybe not.

The other big benefit would be scragging causality. If there really is one frame of reference that really matters, as long as there are no paradoxes in that frame of reference causality is not violated. Good for wormholes and lots of FTL.
 
Actually I am digging thru MTWs "Gravitation". One feature of the GR that strikes me a bit, is that energy conservation is just a *local* effect, meaning that on larger scales energy may not be preserved (e.g. this becomes visible with cosmological redshift).

Perhaps this gives a hint, where Traveller maneuver drives energy comes from....
 
Also, one of the papers on their work, "Engineering the Quantum Foam", looks at the warp bubble idea for FTL and proposes ways of getting the bubble by engineering the quantum foam (duh) rather than relying on exotic matter.

To quote from the introduction:
In 1990 Alcubierre, within the General Relativity model for space-time, proposed a scenario for ‘warp drive’ faster than light travel, in which objects would achieve such speeds by actually being stationary within a bubble of space which itself was moving through space, the idea being that the speed of the bubble was not itself limited by the speed of light. However that scenario required exotic matter to stabilise the boundary of the bubble. Here that proposal is re-examined within the context of the new modelling of space in which space is a quantum system, viz a quantum foam, with on-going classicalisation. This model has lead to the resolution of a number of longstanding problems, including a dynamical explanation for the so-called `dark matter’ effect. It has also given the first evidence of quantum gravity effects, as experimental data has shown that a new dimensionless constant characterising the self-interaction of space is the fine structure constant. The studies here begin the task of examining to what extent the new spatial self-interaction dynamics can play a role in stabilising the boundary without exotic matter, and whether the boundary stabilisation dynamics can be engineered; this would amount to quantum gravity engineering.
Click to expand...
The paper is available as a PDF here:
http://www.mountainman.com.au/process_physics/HPS26.pdf
 
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