Ask any question you want about Physics

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: MasterAtArms

Does a high energy photon have enough energy to break a bond between atoms and "blow off" an atom...

Depends on both photon and material, probably with other things as well like incident angle.

If you have a high enough photon energy, you can cause an atom to fission, if you've got the right material.

But you normally get thermal ablation.

Out of curiosity, is there a lower/upper limit to how much energy a photon can have?

originally posted by: MasterAtArms
Does a high energy photon have enough energy to break a bond between atoms and "blow off" an atom (physical erosion) or is it rather those photons are causing a slight temperature increate in the material that causes the atoms to vibrate more (heat up) which causes the erosion process through other means? (vaporisation, sublimation etc)

In the case of the nylon flags on the moon, nylon is made of molecules called polymers which are long chains of atoms. Nylon is particularly susceptible to UV light because its amide bonds absorb UV, whereas other polymers like polyethylene don't have that problem and don't degrade as quickly in UV. So in nylon the amide bonds are broken by UV relatively easily and that's why we are surprised 3 of the flags on the moon haven't disintegrated yet.

However, the "blow off" part is probably what's lacking and why 3 flags are still there. The flags are probably as fragile as a burned lantern mantle. If you ever tried to touch one of those, it basically disintegrates at the slightest touch, and I suspect the same thing would happen if you tried to touch the nylon flags on the moon. For the three that already disintegrated, I doubt the photons alone caused the disintegration. After the photons make the nylon flag fragile, those big temperature swings between day and night actually cause moonquakes and that vibration could help shake the flags to dust, or impacts from micrometeorites, or both.

originally posted by: mcsjr454
Pi=4 also known as Manhattan Metric, used by many engineers in the rocketry field. Outside of 2 dimensional thought process, I haven't found a single use where pi=3.14........ to have any practical use in application. Thus why I was asking if I am overlooking something.

Take a tape measure and wrap it around the circumference of your spare tire (use the spare because it's not deformed by contact with the ground). Then measure the diameter. Divide the first measurement by the second measurement, and that's Pi, although if your measurements are crude or if the tire isn't quite round you'll deviate slightly from Pi but Pi is what you get doing that for a perfect circle, it's the circumference divided by the width.

The Pi=4 garbage is the circumference of a square divided by the width of a square. I hate to break it to you but that's not Pi because Pi applies to circles, not squares. The manhattan metric says you can take the 4 right angle corners of the square and fold them in, so you now have something closer to a circle, but it still has all right angles and the circumference hasn't changed. In the limit as you keep folding in the corners you can make all the right angles smaller and smaller but eventually the square becomes a circle if you use a calculus approach. The guy making this Pi=4 claim has been told that but he refuses to accept it, and he thinks all the calculus professors are wrong and he's right.

In rocketry, corrugation or something along those lines can improve strength, so if you look at this photo of the Saturn V you can see some type of corrugation or strengthening structure above and below the "USA".



If you measure the circumference along all those wiggles in the surface of the corrugation and divide by the diameter I can see where you might get something along the lines of 4, but that's not Pi because a corrugated circle isn't a circle, and besides where the USA is painted, there is no corrugation. It's a smooth cylinder there so you'll get something close to the standard value for Pi when you divide the circumference by the diameter at that location.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

seems my simplistic questions developed into a rather interesting discussion, thankyou

originally posted by: mcsjr454
Pi=4 also known as Manhattan Metric, used by many engineers in the rocketry field. Outside of 2 dimensional thought process, I haven't found a single use where pi=3.14........ to have any practical use in application. Thus why I was asking if I am overlooking something. (to note: by practical use, I mean in actual product development outside of being used to measure static volume.)

Well the measurement of static volume is a practical use, it is used in the level measurement of storage dewars that cannot use a dip stick, capacative, laser, or ultra sonic probe. So its like saying "Ignore all the hundreds of uses and you find no uses"

Pi is used in lots of things in industry.
Want to figure out how much metal you bought in the roll of sheet metal without unraveling it all? Pi
Want to any kind of frequency analysis? Pi
Want to do fancy wavelet analysis and forerunner transforms (photoshop anyone?) Pi
Want to know how your pendulum clock works? Pi

The number Pi appears in so many places... it is quite possibly one of the most important ratios discovered.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I think in the case of objects in space, it can be described as thermally driven desorption and phase change in the case of a comet, although it is a very good point since the overall effect is the same.

Desorption allows a chemical that is within bulk material to diffuse to the surface and then release into vacuum, You will find that for water ice that has volatiles dissolved in it, the ice will remain solid while the dissolved components will slowly release. At the same time the water will be sublimating under vacuum.

I always figured the definition of erosion was to do with basically a physical removal of particulates, promoted by the physical contact with a moving media, so like as you say, shot blasting, water sweeping over rock and sand... maybe that definition doesn't work fully.

I suspect that the flags, if they remain (evident from the shadows they cast) that they are extremely brittle, if we were to go back to the location and prod it with a finger or a stick it would probably just turn to dust or fall to the lunar surface.

originally posted by: MasterAtArms
Out of curiosity, is there a lower/upper limit to how much energy a photon can have?

I suppose the lower limit would be a photon with a wavelength the size of the universe, lower than that and it wouldn't fit. Although it would take an eternity for it to find out it wouldn't fit. So that's an issue.

"0" is a lower limit, too, I'd suppose. Maybe 0+delta.

On the upper end, beyond a certain point, a very energetic photon will become a particle pair the first charge it hits. So in a sense, that's a limit. You can make one higher, but it won't last long before it's turned into matter and some spare change. One reason you don't see a lot of super energetic photons from deep space.

Thank you gentlemen and gentleladies for the responses. It has cleared up a few misconceptions I was having. However, I am finding better results in what I call discharge nozzle design for amateur rocketry. In my calculations substituting 4 in place of PI, I am getting within 2% of what the on paper calculated thrust insists it should be. However using PI, I am consistantly 20% over the actual measured thrust.

Keep in mind I am not a rocket scientist, nor am I a studied professional of any kind. I am just the average Joe that is fascinated how Math rules the environment around us. Amateur rocketry just provides me with fun, and has presented me with a problem I can't explain.

Again thank you all for the responses. It has been very informative.

a reply to: mcsjr454

For this calculation what it sounds like to me is just a difference between theory (idealized) and reality. There are many factors in the design of equipment that can give a reduction in ideal performance. I suspect if you changed the design, that the use of PI=4 wont hold to the same 2% difference between calculation and measured. Best example of this in engineering is the Carnot cycle heat engine.

The engine cycles in changes of Pressure and Volume in order to do work, and the ideal theory can be drawn by making two approximately parallel curves (upwards towards zero, separated in height), intersect those curves with two more parallel lines with a much steeper gradient... you end up with a diamond like shape on its side.
Reality, due to friction, heat transfer inefficiencies etc mean that the REAL cycle is usually a rough oval drawn within the diamond, representing the difference between the ideal (theoretically efficient) to the reality (not efficient).



Also depends upon how thrust is measured, which i know nothing about as you do not say. It could easily be lost thrust due to inefficient nozzle design or loss of compression due to the heating of the nozzle, which would depend upon the design, mass and materials used

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: MasterAtArms
Out of curiosity, is there a lower/upper limit to how much energy a photon can have?

I suppose the lower limit would be a photon with a wavelength the size of the universe, lower than that and it wouldn't fit. Although it would take an eternity for it to find out it wouldn't fit. So that's an issue.

"0" is a lower limit, too, I'd suppose. Maybe 0+delta.

On the upper end, beyond a certain point, a very energetic photon will become a particle pair the first charge it hits. So in a sense, that's a limit. You can make one higher, but it won't last long before it's turned into matter and some spare change. One reason you don't see a lot of super energetic photons from deep space.

That's interesting!

Lets say you devise some method to super energize a photon so it turns into "mass and spare change". What would the velocity of that mass be? it cant be light speed any more but I assume a photon is always in some kind of motion at light speed velocity until it converts to mass at super high energies. Would the mass velocity be just below LS or much, much, lower? Lets assume this happens in a perfect vacuum with nothing for it to hit

a reply to: MasterAtArms

The photons would be moving at the speed of light.

To do this... the photon doesn't simply turn into mass and some spare change. It will convert into a matter anti-matter pair with what ever spare change going into the momentum of the particles. If you have some other effect occur you get very much the same, with a Z exchange which converts into a matter anti-matter pair and the photon of reduced energy simply carries on at the speed of light, the particles produced move with a momentum as defined by the invariant mass

M^2 = E^2 - p^2


If the photon interacts with a particle, it may Compton scatter which would result is momentum energy transfer between the photon and the particle... specifically in this care an electron.

Photons move at the speed of light in the medium they are in, always.

originally posted by: mcsjr454
Thank you gentlemen and gentleladies for the responses. It has cleared up a few misconceptions I was having. However, I am finding better results in what I call discharge nozzle design for amateur rocketry. In my calculations substituting 4 in place of PI, I am getting within 2% of what the on paper calculated thrust insists it should be. However using PI, I am consistantly 20% over the actual measured thrust.

I think Eros nailed it when he said it's possibly a difference between idealized theory and reality.

If I put on my engineering hat your statement translates into saying that you have something like 27% of losses you haven't accounted for theoretically so applying a 27% fudge factor for unknown losses makes your performance match idealized theory (4/Pi =1.27). No good engineer would ever interpret your statement as inferring that Pi has any other value than the standard value, but good engineers are often trying to better characterize the losses that Eros is talking about which are not a part of idealized theory. I think you can put that idea of Pi being 4 in the grave and bury it, as it's not a sound engineering approach.

If you wanted us to review your math you could post it to see if we can tell you what's missing, but first you might want to review this rocket science website for the layman to see if it has anything that can help you. Here's the propulsion page:

www.braeunig.us...

originally posted by: mcsjr454

#3. Now this one I know has an answer, but no one I ask can give it to me. Lets start with Helium. To my understanding helium is just two fused hydrogen atoms. We can pull them apart and get two hydrogens. Well when we pull 1 hydrogen apart, what and where do it's parts go? I know this is a simplistic view of how a Hbomb does its magic, but I want to know does it just fall apart forever into tiny quarks, or does it come back together to form something? I mean there are charged particles that have to go somewhere.

Thanks in advance!

Simplistic answer - You can have free electrons/protons, so if there is high enough energy available an atom can be broken up. You can also heat hydrogen into a type of plasma and then use an electric field to separate electrons and protons.
Like someone mentioned you probably can't get the quarks to roam free. If you put enough energy into smashing the proton the energy will just create more particles or end up converting the proton to energy.

There might be free quark balls in neutron stars however but that's a very extreme and special circumstance.

There a thread on Reddit regarding the Emdrive and some news about a theory on why it might be producing thrust but it's not visible.

Basically the physicist says the emdrive is actually producing thrust that is not visible because the em radiation is an overlay of 2 antiphase photons. And that such a pair will pass though the cavity walls.

www.ibtimes.co.uk...

Now back to the Reddit topic which discusses the theory by Arto Annila, someone says something interesting... That Arto is confusing the 2 photons going in the same direction but opposite phase WITH photons going in the same direction that have opposite polarisation which causes the photons to materialize into scalar particles... In the case of microwave rf into cavity you get neutrino/antinutrinos out, and if you'd use higher rf than microwave, like gamma, then you'd get electron/positrons out of cavity.

Here's the Reddit and the posts are those of Zephyr _aw
m.reddit.com...

Also there are some other theories that follow the same line... The rf waves interact by themselves inside the cavity and there's a byproduct that generates the thrust.
m.reddit.com...


What do you guys think?
Is there something happening with the polarisation/phase of the rf waves bouncing inside?

Also any thoughts on the 5x10^10 q factor of a superconducting cavity?
There's talk it could provide 3 tons of thrust with 1 kw.

originally posted by: IVANV
There a thread on Reddit regarding the Emdrive and some news about a theory on why it might be producing thrust but it's not visible.

Basically the physicist says the emdrive is actually producing thrust that is not visible because the em radiation is an overlay of 2 antiphase photons. And that such a pair will pass though the cavity walls.

www.ibtimes.co.uk...

I skimmed through the paper and was thinking "this doesn't agree with my understanding about how photons behave." Then at the very end of the paper, the authors say their ideas aren't in line with current consensus thinking:

scitation.aip.org...

We reason that the thrust of EM drive results from the efflux of photons that have paired with opposite phases. The paired photons are without net electromagnetic field, and hence they will escape from the metal cavity. This loss of momentum, when anisotropic, produces the thrust. Thus, our explanation complies with conservation of momentum but departs from the current consent about photons by regarding photons as indivisible and indestructible basic building blocks of nature.

That their idea "departs from the current consent about photons" doesn't mean it's wrong but it means they've got their work cut out if they want to try to prove it. Also the nature of their claimed "pairing" is likewise unclear.

It is completely true and accepted that the double slit experiment can produce interference patterns of constructive and destructive interference and that's completely accepted but there's no pairing of photons required for the destructive interference in that experiment. While no light is seen in the dark bands of destructive interference, that doesn't infer the photons would be undetectable by other means which rely on the statistical properties of photons to separate the destructively interfering photons so they can be measured.

That paper if I read it correctly seems to imply that such methods might not be available to measure the "paired photons" because if they are truly paired in some inseparable fashion then attempts to separate them will fail. Once again I can't say this is wrong with 100% certainty but the burden of proof is on the claimant and they don't even seem to offer any method of experimentally verifying their claim or if they do, I missed it in my skimming.

Now back to the Reddit topic which discusses the theory by Arto Annila, someone says something interesting... That Arto is confusing the 2 photons going in the same direction but opposite phase WITH photons going in the same direction that have opposite polarisation which causes the photons to materialize into scalar particles... In the case of microwave rf into cavity you get neutrino/antinutrinos out...
What do you guys think?

I don't think that's what he's saying, rather it sounds like he's trying to use neutrino/antineutrino as an example. On the other hand I'm with the replies he got that what he's saying doesn't make a lot of sense. It's not clear if he's talking about quantum tunneling or some other phenomena for photons "materializing" outside the cavity, but if there are photons outside the cavity, they should be detectable and measurable. So if someone is claiming there are photons outside the cavity they need to explain why measurements have failed to detect them and how measurement methods can be changed so that they can be measured.

If I was designing an EM drive I'd make an exit in the cavity where photons would escape as unidirectionally as possible, and this then would solve all the theoretical problems in the paper referenced above about how photons are leaking out of the cavity because in my design they wouldn't be leaking, they would be intentionally ejected through the opening.

There's talk it could provide 3 tons of thrust with 1 kw.

The problem with my design is that it couldn't produce that much thrust and I don't really see any theoretical underpinnings for claims of 3 tons of thrust from 1 kw from any of these designs, so let's cross that bridge when we come to it. When someone produces 3 tons of thrust from an EM drive using only 1 kw then we have some theoretical work to do to explain how they are doing that, but for now it would seem like an exercise to explain how superman can fly, because I'm not sure that he can, at least not without an aircraft.

For now, it's hard to rule out measurement error:

NASA Downplays 'Impossible' EM Drive Space Engine

Siegel said he is seeing claims of thrust happening just a few times over many tests, with a frequency that is "not inconsistent with random chance." Further, the thrust that was produced in these rare instances was apparently just above the margin of error for measurement, he added. [Gallery: Visions of Interstellar Starship Travel]

"It's tens of micronewtons, less than the weight of a snowflake," Siegel told Space.com. Specifically, Siegel said he is seeing reports of anywhere between 50 and 70 micronewtons. The error bar of measurement, however, is reported as between 15 and 30 micronewtons.

"You want a signal that's way, way bigger than errors you can measure," he said.

So getting thrust less than the weight of a snowflake which is barely above measurement error is hardly convincing enough to introduce new physics to explain because as Siegel says, you want to measure a signal that's way above the errors, not barely above the errors like we are seeing, and which could just result from subtle errors not accounted for.

originally posted by: IVANV
Basically the physicist says the emdrive is actually producing thrust that is not visible because the em radiation is an overlay of 2 antiphase photons. And that such a pair will pass though the cavity walls.

The issue here is, even if you uncapped the big end and let ALL the photons out, you still wouldn't get that much thrust.

OK... Maybe i didn't quite point to the proper thing to look at.
What i was pointing at are these statements made by the user "zephyr_aw".

" IMO this would be just a misunderstanding of the theory. In Dr. Annila's theory the emission is the result of materialization of photon pairs, which you can imagine like the very lightweight neutrino and antineutrino pairs (IMO they're merely scalar waves instead, because they have twisted structure of neutrinos or pions - but with no weak charge). The photons must have "orthogonal polarization" for to materialize mutually. What escapes from EMDrive are therefore not the photons itself, but the materialized portion of them.

The whole theory has undoubtedly many other experimental consequences, but its basis is, for photons the polarization is something like the spin for material particles. And the particles of similar nature but opposite spin annihilate during mutual contact, whereas the photons will materialize instead. This is very clever and insightful idea, which could change the future physics a lot, not just toward further optimization of EMDrive. It just means, that EMDrive could perform a much more effectively, if we would polarize photons inside it in perpendicular way, for example by their reflection and leave to interact mutually in equal parts. As you may guess, such a polarization and mutual interference in current generation of EMDrive is merely accidental, which would also explain, why some EMDrives perform well, but their replicas not.

Best of all, this theory is easily testable, as the escaping beam of scalar waves should be detectable by wide range of materials by pushing force acting behind EMDrive running at distance like the charged capacitors, superconductor and topological insulator junctions (water soaked graphite), ferromagnet pairs in repulsive arrangement and so on. All these materials exhibit Dirac/Weyl/Majorana fermions, which should interact with scalar wave beams under macroscopic force and also charge separation effects, i.e. the voltage noise.

For amateurs the charged mica or similar planar high voltage capacitor would probably most easier to test: this capacitor should generate variable voltage or spikes behind EMDrive, once we would modulate its power.

EMDrive beam detector

On the other hand, if this theory is true, then the McCulloch theory would be rather schematic, as it doesn't account to the crossection of polarized photon interaction. Whereas in Dr. Annila's theory the geometric factor of resonating cavity would play a significant role there. "

+

"IMO these photon pairs should be understood rather like the matter-antimatter pairs. They're already materialized into another particles (scalar waves), despite these particles are nearly as lightweight, like the photons itself. You may imagine this materialization like the formation of dropplets inside the resonating Tibet singing bowl. Their formation requires, the vacuum with photons of oposite spin must vibrate exactly in antisymmetric way in all three directions, or the materialization will not happen. Apparently such a situation is rare in common resonators, these plan-parallel ones the more. "

+

" The problem is the progress in physics is the more gradualist, the more serious the physicists are.

“If you are one step ahead of everyone, you’re a genius! If you are two steps ahead, you’re a crackpot!”

The physicists (Dr. Annila at all) are on the correct track, but they still don't understand the luminiferous concept closely. Their proposal, it's formed by photon condensate speaks for itself. So that they talk about antisymmetric photon pairs which would "nullify itself" despite they realize, such a photons would just materialize.

But how else to explain, the photons form pairs and leave the EMDrive together? In addition, the momentum of photons itself is too low for to explain the drag, as many people already said in another threads. Try to imagine, how the reactive engine utilizing gamma rays would work. The gamma rays have zero mass, so that they cannot generate reactive momentum. But once we allow them to materialize first, then the resulting beam would be formed with electron-positron pairs, which can already generate significant thrust being massive.

On the other hand, the particles formed by materialization of low-energy photons like these ones of microwaves will be very lightweight and also unstable being in dynamic equilibrium with vacuum fluctuations (which are of nearly the same energy of CMBR). They would probably decay as easily as they're forming inside the EMDrive cavity, so that they can be really substituted with photon pairs from most of practical perspectives. "

So...rf goes in, which are weightless cause it's just em radiation, and materialized particles come out, somehow through the cavity walls, to produce thrust.

Regarding the 3 ton per kw... Someone says it would reach that thrust level by using a cavity with a q factor of 5x10^9 (or 5x10^10 ?!?) which is already standard q factor in some particle accelerator cavities made of superconductors... Cause the current emdrive cavity is only like a q factor of 20. 5x10^9 is 5 billion...^10 is 50 billion.


With normal cavities, the best result seems to be 750 millinewton per 2500 watts by the Chinese.


This is an up to date regarding the emdrive regarding all tests and numbers.
m.reddit.com...

It seems the AIAA will publish a peer review on emdrive in December.

There's already been a leaked review from NASA.

originally posted by: IVANV
OK... Maybe i didn't quite point to the proper thing to look at.
What i was pointing at are these statements made by the user "zephyr_aw".

Oh I read it, and I was agreeing with the replies to those posts which said it didn't make sense. For one thing while it's possible to get something like scalar EM inside a waveguide, he's talking about scalar EM outside the waveguide which as far as I know is impossible, and if it's not impossible it will take a lot more than a random post by a random poster to convince me.

“If you are one step ahead of everyone, you’re a genius! If you are two steps ahead, you’re a crackpot!”

If you're three steps ahead of everyone, nobody knows what you're talking about. Of course you could be totally on the wrong track and people might not know what you're talking about either, which I suspect is more the case with scalar EM outside of a waveguide.

By the way I'm not going to report it since it doesn't matter to me, but you crossed the line in your last post in breaking ATS T&C. You can post a reddit link and say "read the posts by "zephyr_aw"" which you did two posts ago and that was fine (and which I already did), but in your last post you copied what he said and that's not allowed from other forums, unless you have written permission from ATS owners.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: IVANV
OK... Maybe i didn't quite point to the proper thing to look at.
What i was pointing at are these statements made by the user "zephyr_aw".

Oh I read it, and I was agreeing with the replies to those posts which said it didn't make sense. For one thing while it's possible to get something like scalar EM inside a waveguide, he's talking about scalar EM outside the waveguide which as far as I know is impossible, and if it's not impossible it will take a lot more than a random post by a random poster to convince me.

Sorry about copying quoted stuff.

Regarding the guys comments... I'm not looking at convincing anyone of anything.
Let's just ignore the scalar stuff cause it's too teslaish.
I'm interested in finding out if there's any real physics with either of these that have been said by Dr. Annila and/or zephyr:
- the emission is the result of materialization of photon pairs
// Is this even a real thing ?

-photons must have "orthogonal polarization" for to materialize
// Orthogonal ... Wikipedia gives me sheet of a circular polarization like 2 Os overlapping, like a infinity symbol like a 8 on its side... Isn't that circular polarization like in passive 3d glasses?

-for photons the polarization is something like the spin for material particles. And the particles of similar nature but opposite spin annihilate during mutual contact, whereas the photons will materialize instead.
// Again, any real physics basis here?

-if we would polarize photons inside it in perpendicular way
//Now he says perpendicular polarization...it was original just before. Is this guy mixing his words by typing carelessly or can both types of polarized em photons sort of interact and materialise something/into something ?

-requires, the vacuum with photons of oposite spin must vibrate exactly in antisymmetric way in all three directions
// What is he taking about with the "3 directions"? Xyz axis? Or what? A photon is a moving dot, quanta, of light, em, right?...how would 2 photons have 3 dimensions for them to vibrate antisymmetrically in all 3 directions at once yet ?...and still have opposite spin... And polarization? Or is that spin already? And phase? I mean how many things do photons have all at once? And can we even control these things with current equipment? At once? Or at least phase and/or polarization at one?

Regarding the 5x10^9 q factor superconductor thingy...is it real for current superconductors?
I've just read online that Roger Shawyer , the British guy that invented emdrive in 1999 is looking forward to his new patent,5th or 6th by now for him, being granted soon, and it's got a SINGLE superconducting plate at one end of the cavity. I was expecting 2 plates.
Here's the patent and article.
www.ibtimes.co.uk...

And patent link from ipo.gov.uk
www.ipo.gov.uk...

He's the guy that also claimed that with a proper q factor , like above, it would end up producing 3 tons of thrust with about 1kw.
From what I've read online, q factor the higher it is the more energy you can cram into an object like resonating energy...a bell has a higher q cause it keeps ringing for a few seconds with one hit, a rock has low q cause it only makes a short bump sound from one hit.
So 5x10^9 q factor... Somewhere online there was an analogy that says if some famous dude, maybe Newton or someone, had set in motion a pendulum or something with that high q factor back in the 18th century, then by today the pendulum would still have half of its energy left..bla bla... What ever the case.
Back to the "give me my Jetsons flying car already" cavity...
Does such a high q factor mean that you could put in 1kw of RF and it would not dissipate within half a second or whatever and instead accumulate and superimpose and end up stuffed being refuse with a shedload of 1kw multiples of resonant rf ? Or what?
How would huge q factor increase efficiency?

What do you think of his new patent? Is this guy, or three Chinese or whoever, about to create a trillion dollar space economy? Send like we might just find ourselves thrust, pun haha, into a sci-fi future-like-reality in a few years... Like the insane adoption of smartphones.. Over night everyone got them and is used to them.



Edit... I've just had a look at the patent. I was expecting the superconducting plate to be the business end of the thing.. Yet he's got a sapphire substrate on the inside, maybe for endurance purposes so but to get rf ablation damage?!?, And n actual "thrust" plate on the outside of the cavity itself, connected to the superconductor plate via thermal insulator and cooler...i was imagining it would be 2s.c. plates inside to have the rf bounce between them.
Also here's now implementing a loop feedback thingy ?! to compensate for the Doppler shift when the whole thing moves in regards to the internal rf waves.


Small edit... Looking at patent again... The superconductor is on the inside, it's just a thin film ybco deposition.
Can't it be deposited on a parabolic cavity at the same cost like on a flat surface? Or it the sapphire substrate impossible to make in a parabolic shadow? And why even use sapphire? A superconducting puck could be cnc machined to have a parabolic cavity in it, no? Or is it really that brittle? Maybe very slow telescope mirror grinding type process... Or is that way to slow? I'm just thinking that it would be even more efficient with 2 s.c. plates, instead of just one.

This is really interesting...9.92kN/kw with the new patented design... The pdf says "predicted" ... Now even half would be say 5kN...500kg per kw...at 0.05G acceleration... Enough to get off the planet... Showly but surely. And i think it's using just 3.7x10^6 q factor or something as per pdf.

www.emdrive.com...

originally posted by: IVANV
Regarding the guys comments... I'm not looking at convincing anyone of anything.
Let's just ignore the scalar stuff cause it's too teslaish.
I'm interested in finding out if there's any real physics with either of these that have been said by Dr. Annila and/or zephyr:
- the emission is the result of materialization of photon pairs
// Is this even a real thing ?

The original idea for the paired photons appears to be coming from the paper you cited where the authors themselves state their idea is not based on known consensus physics, so the authors are saying their idea is speculative. Then you have others either speculating further or going off on tangents like scalar EM outside the waveguide. It's not my style to ignore that and then try to glean other ideas from such a source.

The bigger picture you still seem to be missing is that no new physics such as all that speculation is needed to explain what is likely experimental error:

Here's why scientists haven't invented an impossible space engine

Similar problems were seen by the Eagleworks group, with thrust also mysteriously appearing in their control test. Taken together, these results strongly suggest that the measured signatures of thrust are subtle experimental errors. Possible sources include thermal effects, problems with magnetic shielding or even a non-uniform gravitational field in the laboratory leading to erroneous force measurements. ...

These scientists aren't actually claiming to have invented a warp drive or to have broken the laws of physics. All they're saying at the moment is that they've found something odd and unexplained that might be something new but is likely an experimental artefact[sic] that needs further study.

The control test isn't supposed to get thrust so when the control test in two different experiments gets thrust, that points more to experimental error rather than new physics of an em drive. Still I think NASA Eagleworks will want to identify all sources of experimental error if they haven't already but considering how small these effects are, it may not be easy to isolate all thermal effects. How long did it take to solve the Pioneer anomaly, over a decade? It was a small thermal acceleration. People were also speculating about new physics trying to explain that, when it turned out no new physics was needed.

If it does turn out new physics is needed to explain em drive experimental results, we can cross that bridge when we get to it, but despite what the headlines say, that's not very likely to be the case.

Enough to get off the planet...

That remains to be seen. I doubt it, but if my doubts are proven wrong that will be exciting. However there are more plausible alternative ways of getting off the planet which use the physics we already know:

Testing shows using microwaves to propel a craft into space might work
The physics isn't speculative for that method, but there are plenty of engineering and practical concerns which would need to be addressed and I'm not sure if those can be addressed satisfactorily or not. It's not "propellantless" like the "impossible EM drive" claims to be, but if propulsion is provided partly by means of energy beamed from Earth's surface, so the launch vehicle or space craft won't have to carry as much propellant with it and could get by with smaller amounts of on board propellant.

Today's rockets are all based on the same idea, a multi-stage rocket is used, each part filled with propellant that pushes the rocket into space as the propellant is burned. It is a really expensive way to go because the propellant is extremely heavy. ED's idea is to use microwaves beamed from the ground to heat hydrogen carried by the space-plane to push the craft into space, a much more efficient approach. They are reporting that testing done at their facility shows that the idea might be possible.