NASA JSC's Warp Drive Flops During Independent Tests
NASA’s ‘Impossible’ Space Engine Tested–Here Are the Results, National Geographic
“The ‘thrust’ is not coming from the EmDrive, but from some electromagnetic interaction,” the team reports in a proceeding for a recent conference on space propulsion.
NASA’s EM-drive is a magnetic WTF-thruster, Ars Technica
“The best part is that the results are the same when the attenuator is put into the circuit. In this case, there is basically no radiation in the microwave cavity, yet the WTF-thruster thrusts on.”
– Ellen Ochoa’s Warp Drive Gizmo, earlier post
– JSC’s Warp Drive: Fact or Fluff?, earlier post
– Clarifying NASA’s Warp Drive Program, earlier post
– JSC’s Strange Thruster Violates The Laws of Physics, earlier post
Previous posts
I suppose Sonny White still has the Alcubierre warp drive hustle, even if the EmDrive unsurprisingly turned out to be nothing.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. Might as well use an electrodynamic tether instead.
Only near certain planets. Electrodynamic tethers need a planetary magnetic field (ideally a strong one) and a reasonably dense plasma environment. You can use them in less ideal environments, but the tether would have to be longer and the acceleration would be unpredictable. You’d basically have a propulsion which was sensitive to space weather (solar wind conditions, magnetospheric disturbances, etc.) in the same way sailing ships are sensitive to normal weather. I wouldn’t object, but the there are plenty of people who would freak out at the idea.
We’re still waiting for Zefrem Cochrane to do his magic.
Has he been born yet? The real problem is that we haven’t even discovered the planet Vulcan yet!
Live long and prosper!
And now: The Department of Speculative and Possibly Humorous Future History brings us this item from 2063:
Cochrane Gets Last Laugh, Changes History
Dr. Zephram Cochrane’s suit jacket holds his readily available and ever-present notebook that has been, until now, private. It’s an assiduously maintained list, actually, a small tool, reminding him just how many others find his ideas wrong or this, his favorite: “bad science”. He jokingly calls it his “I told you so” list.
Why? For decades, Dr. Cochrane has been the butt of late night jokes and scientific ostracism over his firm position that his “EmDrive” was actually the tip of the iceberg.
And Dr. Cochrane will be first to admit that nobody really cares. Certainly the science community did not care. And the public? Let’s just say that his visibility was low.
Fly Me to The Moon…err, Pluto?”
Dr. Cochrane has become an overnight sensation. How? By making a spectacular trip to Pluto. And back.
Overnight. With pictures.
Now, back to the notebook.
Dr. Cochrane’s “notebook” is actually a simple list. Or two simple lists, actually, of names. The first is populated with a “Who’s Who” drawn from the world of Nobel winners and similarly admired physicists, cosmologists, and the like, all of whom dismissed the EmDrive.
The second includes journalists and comedians, politicians and other high-visibility names from around the world, naysayers all.
The first name on the list? It’s the ever-present Mr. Cowing, of course, that Cheerleader of Naysayers.
Yes, THAT Mr. Cowing, the same who turned a nearly invisible ‘blog’ of the 1990’s into a reliable inside source of information about the space industry; a few decades later his ‘blog’ became today’s multi-world media conglomerate.
We made several attempts to reach Mr. Cowing at his home in luna City without success.
This doesn’t really pass the falsifiability test. If other tests have gotten positive results, that over-rides the fact that this study didn’t get positive results. It looks more like they just couldn’t get it to work, but it is being presented as if the other positive results were a mistake, which is not really accurate. It doesn’t even explain the positive results the lead author, Martin Tajmar, got in his own lab a few years ago with a cavity that DID pass the null thrust test. it’s much more in keeping with the results that their system just didn’t work; it does not generalize to all other tests.
No, the German system did work. That’s the problem. They did it as described by the original authors, and got the expected acceleration. Then they added something to damp out the microwaves in the system. According to the original work, that should have cut off the acceleration. But they German experiment still saw acceleration. That means it isn’t coming from the supposed source. Remember, the original paper had lots of words about possible, external sources of apparent acceleration. They talked about how the tried to eliminate as many of them they could, but admitted they couldn’t completely eliminate all of them. This new experiment strongly suggests the whole thing is one of these external effects.
This is not true. Every test experiences some thrust from thermal affects, or other things, that are then controlled for and subtracted out. Other tests have shown a remainder unaccounted for by the other affects. This team did not achieve a remainder. If the question under test is: Is it possible to create a net thrust from an asymmetrical microwave resonance cavity? then all the negative results in the world cannot prove it is impossible, but positive results can demonstrate that it is possible. There have been positive results from other teams; that is not negated by this team’s negative results any more than your car failing to start is a disproof of the internal combustion engine.
What I would require to believe the EM Drive is not possible, at this point is: 1. an explanation of why the Eagleworks test and others did work (which I do not believe this has provided since the experiment is citing causes that do not apply to the Eagleworks test), and 2. an explanation for why Maxwell’s equations seem to indicate that a thrust is possible in violation of other physical models. I have not even been able to find a good explanation for why radiation pressure in a waveguide is scaled by the wave impedence; Cullen (1952) really only asserts it and then demonstrates it experimentally, but there’s no good explanation for why the same power output with the same photon flux will create a lesser pressure over a smaller area in a narrower waveguide. There’s no explanation where the other pressure goes in a frustum-shape. We are expected to believe that the greater pressure over a larger area is matched by … what? Pressure exerted against the sloped walls so much greater than against either flat end in the axial direction that it balances the great force against the large plate? That certainly isn’t intuitive.
It’s not unheard of for Maxwell to disagree with Newton; reconciling another disagreement is how we got Relativity. E&M is the only branch of physics that did not have to be re-envisioned to accomodate Relativity, because it already had relativistic effects built in (magnetism itself is a relativistic effect). This may be one of them. Dismissing positive results because we cannot explain the results is the exact opposite of science. Science is about believing the experiment when it disagrees with theory; it should never, ever be about believing theory at the expense of experiment.
“There have been positive results from other teams; that is not negated by this team’s negative results any more than your car failing to start is a disproof of the internal combustion engine.”
No, there have been results which showed that were _either_ positive _or_ the result for some extraneous factor. Since a flaw in the original experiment is possible, those results can not be automatically taken to be positive.
What if someone told me a car could run with an empty tank, and proved it by draining the tank and starting the engine? He’d just have proven the car would start on residual fumes.
It’s certainly a pertinent negative when the unit isn’t producing microwaves but yet still exerts a torque on a torsion balance, a torque that matches well the torque predicted to be produced by the interaction of the electrical cables in the “drive” and Earth’s magnetic field.
If there’s any good news here for Sonny White, it’s that at least he didn’t have a news conference like Pons and Fleischmann
Its an Earth magnetic field detector.
There is a possibility the thrust is from heat expansion. EW’s test setup used a tof distance measuring sensor to indicate thrust. I did a rough calculation 2 years ago that showed that displacement from heat expansion of the fustrum could produce the same displacement the tof sensor was indicating. I don’t know it Tajmar’s experiment is exactly the same. Another test to rule out ambiguous results would be to apply A.C. power to a resistive load inside the fustrum. If the same displacement was observed with that test it would rule out a Lorentz force and instead indicate a thermal effect. I have believed this to be a thermal effect for a few years now because the thrust waveform always has the shape of a second order step response. The capacitive thrust calibrator used by EW does not show this second order response. It is very difficult for them to do tests like this because the thrust magnitude is so low and any small change in the apparatus can result in unexplained results.
That’s the point: NASA Eagleworks did isolate the device. Ambient magnetic fields did not affect their device the way it affected this one. The Eagleworks team, I believe, only had a single control signal to the device that initialized the variable oscillator in the PLL circuit. Low voltage, not an issue. This paper is claiming to refute the entire technology because they did not isolate the device, and then discovered that not isolating it was a mistake.
The Germans did a better job at testing this device than the NASA JSC people did. Guess what: they proved that it does not do what the NASA guys said it did.
No, they didn’t do a better job of testing the device, because they did not isolate the device; they ran the power to the device down the torsion arm. Eagleworks did not do that. Tajmar et al manifestly did a poorer job. And getting negative results do not negate the positive results from a better test.
The WTF Thruster. Too funny. One could only imagine how far down the path we would be to inter-solar system travel if we would have taken SLS/Orion money and put that towards meaningful and realistic transport.
You cannot live off of the legacy forever.
You see a microwave WTF Drive. I see a steampunk Covfefe espresso machine. The difference is mine will actually move you…
There will be other tests, including at Johnson Space Center where they will be testing a similar (but not exactly the same) device as MT did but at higher power levels. Plus, most people working on this (not Sawyer of course, but to his credit, White has changed his mind and dropped HIS personal theory about how this works IF it works) seem to have moved toward a Mach Effect type explanation. Far as I know there are now a total of two teams affiliated with NASA in some manner working on this. Anyway, not much money has been spent overall and they should know within the next year if not sooner if this works (follow predicted thrust profiles) or not. That’s good news, I would think. So just to be clear, MT hasn’t tested every type of setup and the other groups who think they have something should know very soon themselves. I’m skeptical there is any ‘there’ there of course, but these people aren’t accusing Science of of conspiracies or anything like that (unlike Flat Earthers, anti-Vaxxers etc) but instead are trying to do experiments to prove or disprove what are (till now ) supposedly very small effects. As unlikely as this stuff is to produce a breakthrough, I think they are doing real science (by being willing to submit their stuff to peer review and accept the decision) , and , like this paper says: even if nothing is there, there is now an excellent amount of research into how to properly setup experiments for extremely small forces and EM effects.
NASA never peer reviewed this project prior to approval for funding.
I know but there was a peer reviewed paper released in 2016 or 17 in some second (not third rate or self published) journal by White and a few others. Obviously it was hardly conclusive of anything but its probably the biggest reason why Fearns etal even got Tier 2 funding. Anyway, I hope you are not thinking that I think this will pan out (though I do give it a small shot), I just don’t think this is fraud or outright quackery and I’ve read enough of their papers and stuff to know they don’t think they are working on a perpetual motion machine or something like that. Presumably Mach effects (if they exist, big ‘if’) steal energy from other parts of the Universe. Anyway, thanks for publishing my comment, you won’t believe how polarizing this subject is on some blogs. Quite a few dismiss it so totally out of hand that anyone that even says a fraction of what I have said is decried as a science denier or flat Earther or the equivalent. And all I’m really doing is defending the occasional ‘far out’ research provided the $ is small and the people involved are credentialed and work through regular journals and show (not hide!) their work.
These guys have yet to “prove” anything to suggest that these exotic drives work.
The problem is more fundamental than this particular assertion. The real problem is that we no longer teach critical thinking, the skill and habit of objectively examining our own ideas for weakness or error. Instead we believe that wishing will make it true and fail to do the hard work of learning the facts.
A couple of years ago I was a regular, but skeptical, contributor on a popular well-regulated forum. Every few months I would ask if anyone had tried putting an attenuator inside the cavity. I’m glad to hear someone finally tried that.
I hope or look forward to the day when an EM or WTF drive makes all rockets obsolete. I hope that is not too far off into the future. We can’t go anywhere worthy with chemical rockets.
JSCs most advanced R&D project, and it was a lie. About right for the class of managers they have there. If there was any money spent then the IG ought to be taking a look at who to lock up.
LOL
‘Ye canna change the laws of physics, Jim!’ – Montgomery Scott
“You just have to change the gravitational constant” – Q
Oddly, that’s what the math for some low thrust trajectories looks like. A solar sail pointed directly at the Sun, for example, produces a radial acceleration proportional to 1/r^2. The resulting orbit looks exactly like a Keplerian orbit for a different value of the gravitational constant. Of course, that changes if you start tacking.
“In every revolution… there is one man with a vision.”
“Captain Kirk…. I shall consider it.”
– Kirk to Mirror Spock
I hope everyone here knows how Emmy Noether proved (Noether’s Theorem), in 1915, that momentum conservation results inevitably unless there is some external asymmetry in the experiment, so that the effect depends on where in space your do it. Read all about it in Wikipedia.
Energy conservation says there is no effect due to WHEN you do it, and momentum conservation says there can be no effect due to WHERE you do it.
Personally, I think the effects are due to standing EM waves between the “thruster” and the external cavity it is mounted in. Make the cavity out of wood or some other insulator transparent to EM waves (or better still, put the “thruster” in space, away from any EMF reflectors) and it won’t work. “Ya gotta have something to push on”, as every kid knows.
Hmmm… Didn’t some eminent physicists or somebody say there is no way for a rocket to work in space as there is nothing for the exhaust to push against? That was back when a guy named Goddard was messing with liquid rockets. (I never was a rocket “scientist”. Just an “acid-on-the-hands” rocket ENGINEER!)
No not an eminent scientist. That was an editorial in the New York Times. That wasn’t one of their better days. They also published a retraction 49 years later, on July 17, 1969 (the day after the Apollo 11 launch.)
We’ve accumulated a long history of working with and using standing EM waves without ever recording any “thrust” from these standing waves.
Scott Manley’s got a great video explaining how this test worked:
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
This drive only turns on when I sneek beer into the employee fridge so its the field generated by the beer cans
Why the wide-spread disdain, derision, and denigration for this work?
It’s not likely that chemical rockets will provide the kind (and price) of transportation that we will need to ‘settle’ the solar system. Oh, sure, there’s lots of talk about cracking ice with solar energy; this is a necessary intermediate step, surely.
But we will need Something Else. But what? And (forgive me), whence? We don’t even know where to look.
We can start by looking to the big unanswered question in physics- and there are many. What about those “band-aids” that extend, in some fashion, modern theories. The examples are legion: start with GUT. Move on to inflation, to WIMPS, to multiverses.
Throw in Big Questions like: How Big Is The Universe? And don’t forget the really big questions: What The Hell Is Gravity, Anyway? What Is Spacetime? Is Time One Way? The questions go on, and on: What Is Locality?
There are many sincere attempts to make sense of the Universe. Some are theoretical, like the work of Lisa Randall and her multiverse compatriots, Brian Greene, and others. And some, just a few, are empirical.
Let’s give the Em-Drive researchers some breathing room, and wish them well. Why? The kind of breakthroughs that we need are going to come from so far out that the field looks like the Marlins are up to bat. Or something.
I understand your desire to see our dreams realized. In politics, business and law this works. Truth is whatever is decided. Holding a strong belief can convince other people you are right. In science, however, truth is discovered. Theories are constructed to incorporate centuries of theory, experiment and analysis. The rigor of a science is measured by its ability to predict. Theory makes a precise prediction, and experiment verifies or refutes it. Experiments can only be constructed to support or refute a rigoruous theory.
The Standard Model is the result of centuries of careful examination of the laws of physics and precise tests to refute or verify them and construct a coherent model of the way the universe works. Occasionally it is modified or extended, but its predictions are already phenominally accurate.
The fallacy of the EMdrive is the belief that finding a discrepancy in a measurement without a rigourous theory which predicts it “proves” that current theory is wrong. That is not the case; it simply means the result is an error.
In physics sources of error commonly overshadow predicted effects, so theory must come first. If a proposed theory is coherent, even if it is a change from the Standard Model, experiments can be developed which will identify error sources and either support the theory to acceptable precision or refute it. However Shawyer’s proposal makes such basic errors, i.e. claiming that radiation pressure is proportional to group velocity, that there is no coherent theory to confirm or refute.
Actual physicists who discuss the Shawyer hypothesis get so much flak from nonscientists who desperately want it to be true that they simply stay out of it. Greg Egan has taken the risk and provides an informative discussion showing that microwaves resonating in a closed tapering waveguide actually do not produce an assymetric force. http://www.gregegan.net/SCI…
Here’s an example of some of the considerations that are required for actually computing the force exerted by radiation on a object. The lack of comparable rigor in NASA research is much more worrisome than the actual money spent on it. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401….
A rush to publish ? A rush of blood to the head (finding something possibly incredible) ? Too bad they didn’t have an Oliver Cromwell around … “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”