While photons cannot lose speed in a collision, they can lose momentum -- they wind up being redshifted (well, depending on the velocity of what they impact, they might end up red shifted, blue shifted, or not shifted at all, but in a situation where a molecule loses speed, a photon gets red shifted). That's the main way a photon sail works.
RW M-drive?
- Thread starter Uncle Bob
- Start date
daltoncalford
SOC-12
I think that is the main thing.
Too many times people will discount and not test. The entire point of science is to dream up something, and then find ways of proving it wrong or barring that, find out if the things it predicts actually come true.
If we just sit around and stop testing, we might as well be contimplating our navel and not science.
I don't care how many crackpot ideas get tested, as long as they are tested. If everyone discounted Columbus, why, we would still be falling off the edge of the world while battling dragons.
(this is meant to be sarcastic, I would assume the reader would know this, but, I have had others open up a flame war over a blatenly stupid assertment).
best regards
Dalton
Sorry, but no. Until publicly and thorougly tested, it's implausible. The burden of proof when making an unconventional claim lies with the person making the claim. </font>[/QUOTE]No, until it is shown that there was a mistake in his testing or that it happened for a different reason it is plausible. Just because we don't understand it doesn't mean it can't happen.
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
I'm with Anthony here. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. I see the extraordinary claims but not the extraordinary proofs. Until then it's just a theory.
If someone else took this data and did the proofs needed to verify it would they be properly credited as the true discoverer for doing the real work? Not likely. Therefore it is up to the person making the claim to provide the proof since there is no incentive for anyone else.
Now if he can convince someone to fund him (and it seems he has) then he should be able to set up all the needed gear to prove or disprove it.
If someone else took this data and did the proofs needed to verify it would they be properly credited as the true discoverer for doing the real work? Not likely. Therefore it is up to the person making the claim to provide the proof since there is no incentive for anyone else.
Now if he can convince someone to fund him (and it seems he has) then he should be able to set up all the needed gear to prove or disprove it.
I don't think 'plausible' means what you think it means. Plausible means 'likely to be true'. Something that contradicts basic physics is not likely to be true. It's not inconceivable that it's true, but it's certainly not probable that it's true.
In addition, his math is blantantly wrong, so if it does work, it works for a reason other than the reason he says it works.
TheEngineer
SOC-14 1K
Hi !
Maybe Mr. Sawyer would have gained some more "professional" interest, if he would just have presented the experiment and its results, without the flawed formal try to explain it.
Anyway, we should keep in mind, that many inventions were made by people, who where not at all able to explain their own invention/discovery correctly or describe it in a formal way.
It reminds me a bit on a situation I had years ago, when I was employed in a environmental engineering company.
An engineer (civil engineering) contacted us, in order to present/sell his invention, a kind of furnace driven by a set of UV light bulbs, which should be able to reduce any furnace input too nothing and create heat by direct matter/energy conversion. Well, he was a little bit mad, I guess.
Anyway he presented a documentation of his experiments with interesting energy flow calculations.
When we finally discovered, that energy output calculation was flawed, because of simple wrong unit conversions from J/s in kWh.
For him this discovery was a personal attack and we had a quite unfriendly seperation. I am pretty sure, that this man completely ignored his obvious flaw in the future.
For me this man, an otherwise perhaps experienced engineer failed because of his lost ability to check his own work via formal physical and mathematical methods.
And honestly there are quite a few friends of mine, working as engineers but also had lost contact to formal stuff just shortly after they started to work "practical".
So, there is kind of seperation between innovative potential and formal scientific abilities, which causes people to be unable to check things themself.
Life is hard sometimes....
regards,
TE
Maybe Mr. Sawyer would have gained some more "professional" interest, if he would just have presented the experiment and its results, without the flawed formal try to explain it.
Anyway, we should keep in mind, that many inventions were made by people, who where not at all able to explain their own invention/discovery correctly or describe it in a formal way.
It reminds me a bit on a situation I had years ago, when I was employed in a environmental engineering company.
An engineer (civil engineering) contacted us, in order to present/sell his invention, a kind of furnace driven by a set of UV light bulbs, which should be able to reduce any furnace input too nothing and create heat by direct matter/energy conversion. Well, he was a little bit mad, I guess.
Anyway he presented a documentation of his experiments with interesting energy flow calculations.
When we finally discovered, that energy output calculation was flawed, because of simple wrong unit conversions from J/s in kWh.
For him this discovery was a personal attack and we had a quite unfriendly seperation. I am pretty sure, that this man completely ignored his obvious flaw in the future.
For me this man, an otherwise perhaps experienced engineer failed because of his lost ability to check his own work via formal physical and mathematical methods.
And honestly there are quite a few friends of mine, working as engineers but also had lost contact to formal stuff just shortly after they started to work "practical".
So, there is kind of seperation between innovative potential and formal scientific abilities, which causes people to be unable to check things themself.
Life is hard sometimes....
regards,
TE
Okay, we have a claim that (a) violates physics as we understand it, in a way that is quite obvious, and (b) is explained in a way that is demonstrably incorrect. How does that count as credible or believable? It might fit definition (2), but that's hardly a reason to be encouraged.
Deckplans group has provided acouple of new references, less breathy than New Scientist.
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/Article.aspx?liArticleID=295931
They still want to use it for low-g thrusters (which I don't understand), but in high g just to hover. Kind of like the way megatraveller used grav to support the weight and jets for propulsion. That gets
around the conservation of momentum and energy.
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/Article.aspx?liArticleID=295931
They still want to use it for low-g thrusters (which I don't understand), but in high g just to hover. Kind of like the way megatraveller used grav to support the weight and jets for propulsion. That gets
around the conservation of momentum and energy.
Icosahedron
SOC-14 1K
I think Dalton, Anthony and The Engineer all make good points here. Obviously, funding is limited and decisions have to be made about which of the myriads of possibly crackpot ideas may actually work before research money is wasted, but at the same time, if people who are not constrained by funding, and who have been asked for a considered opinion on a piece of work, cannot be bothered to read it fully, it perhaps says more about the readers than the writer. Maybe they think if they can reject a script in minimal time they appear more clever - 'a person with MY intelligence can see at a glance this is wrong.' I think it demonstrates conceit more than cleverness. In their conceit, they may easily miss something important later in the script. Maybe it doesn't work quite the way the author thinks, but maybe it still works. Maybe his initial assumption is wrong, but another mistake later on renders that assumption irrelevant. If the IQ men don't bother to read it through, and then ridicule the author so that any other discovery he might make is rejected with even less of a reading, I don't believe this is scientific enquiry. (a point I made on another thread). A hundred years ago, conceited scientists of the day thought that everything discoverable had been discovered. It seems we still have the same attitude today.
The guy (miraculously) has his funding to test the thing. It may work, it may not. Let's put our prejudices aside and see what the test results show.
The guy (miraculously) has his funding to test the thing. It may work, it may not. Let's put our prejudices aside and see what the test results show.
Commander Drax
SOC-12
Just for the record Uncle Bob, I am not so thick as to realise that it doesn't generate energy, but such a technology if it is valid, will help reduce demands on fossil fuels. Now just to make this clear, I am not an environment freak! I just don't think it's healthy that our entire civilisation, be utterly dependant on a resource that is quickly being used up. Let's see more alternative thinking and more alternatives to conventional engines and fuel sources. Even if it turns out that this device doesn't work, it should be followed up and researched until every aspect of it can be understood, if not for humanities gain, then simply for science. It takes guts to put your reputation on the line as a scientist and incur the wrath of a largely conservative peer group. So quite clearly the scientist in question wouldn't have done so, without being 100% sure of his work.
Icosahedron
SOC-14 1K
I read it fully. However, it often doesn't take much time to recognize a crackpot theory, and there is an opportunity cost to taking the time to read an entire article. </font>[/QUOTE]Agreed. As long as some people read it and evaluate it indepedently rather than everyone deciding that if prof X didn't bother to read it, then I won't either, and NOBODY ends up reading it (except maybe some third rate assistant who nobody will listen to anyway, whispering 'but it says here the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes'.)
If you read it, Anthony, you're in the clear in my books, whatever your opinion of it.
Personally, I have no opinion on it. I have the self confidence to admit that its proper evaluation is beyond me. The article clearly states (toward the end IIRC!) that the proposal depends on relativistic effects (and by implication that it cannot be evaluated non-relativistically). I just hope that IF there is something of benefit to humanity there, someone will recognise it and use it.
My comment was actually directed toward the situation described by Dalton.
The reason for desiring it as a low-thrust system is that, if the experimental data is accurate, and the theory is not, then the potential for achieving high-thrust is negligible.
If the theory and data are right, then it holds promise as a moderate or even high thrust system.... that's hopeful, but not assurable.
All that needs be right is the experimental data to make it a viable low-thrust system.
And to be honest, the fastest way to the outer planets, or even to mars, is 0.01G continuous instead of the current Burn-Coast-Burn models. Once you make it to LEO, you don't need much thrust to make it out.
If the theory and data are right, then it holds promise as a moderate or even high thrust system.... that's hopeful, but not assurable.
All that needs be right is the experimental data to make it a viable low-thrust system.
And to be honest, the fastest way to the outer planets, or even to mars, is 0.01G continuous instead of the current Burn-Coast-Burn models. Once you make it to LEO, you don't need much thrust to make it out.
Even at 0.01 G's, it's less than 3 months. FAR less than the 6 months of the burn-coast-burn of current hohman transfer orbits.
And there are numerous ways to get up to the point that that is useful. IIRC, one might be able to balloon high enough that a 0.1G could accelerate one out. *I've* not done the math, but someone did years ago on a Sp1889 page.
And there are numerous ways to get up to the point that that is useful. IIRC, one might be able to balloon high enough that a 0.1G could accelerate one out. *I've* not done the math, but someone did years ago on a Sp1889 page.