7 ms·

If anyone's lazy, I highly suggest at least reading parts 9 and 10. One of the interesting takeaways here is that Q * -thrust is 2 orders of magnitude stronger

by jayajay 10y ago

If anyone's lazy, I highly suggest at least reading parts 9 and 10. One of the interesting takeaways here is that Q * -thrust is 2 orders of magnitude stronger than Photon-thrusters, and about 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than Ion-thrusters. * A Q-thruster is a thruster which pushes off of the zero point fluctuations in vacuum, which is still not understood.

lisivka 10y ago
But if you will try to discuss pilot-wave and walking droplets here (they are mentioned in part 10), you will receive lot of downvotes here. Quote: Although the idea of a pilot wave or realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is not the dominant view of physics today (which favors the Copenhagen interpretation), it has seen a strong resurgence of interest over the last decade based on some experimental work pioneered by Couder and Fort [13]. Couder and Fort discovered that bouncing a millimeter-sized droplet on a vibrating shallow fluid bath at just the right resonance frequency created a scenario where the bouncing droplet created a wave pattern on the shallow bath that also seemed to guide the droplet along its way. To Couder and Fort, this seemed very similar to the pilot-wave concept just discussed and, in subsequent testing by Couder and others, this macroscopic classical system was able to exhibit characteristics thought to be restricted to the quantum realm. To date, this hydrodynamic pilot-wave analog system has been able to duplicate the double slit experiment findings, tunneling, quantized orbits, and numerous other quantum phenomena. Bush put together two thorough review papers chronicling the experimental work being done in this domain by numerous universities [14,15].
- highd 10y ago
  i.e. at best, it provides no new information at the expense of learning an entirely new framework.
  - lisivka 10y ago
    IMHO, if we will know better the physics of quantum and relativistic effects, we will be able to model them at macro level, so it will be much easier to understand and study these effects. Mathematics will not change, calculation results will not change, but understanding of processes will rise significantly, which may lead to new advances in physics.
    - highd 10y ago
      That would have to be worth the increased confusion in communication between experts using these different languages. Furthermore, given that the physics of the "pilot wave" are not significantly different from that of the wave function it seems unlikely that it will lead to any new intuition.
  - nardi 10y ago
    The same could have been said about heliocentrism.
    - highd 10y ago
      Heliocentrism makes different predictions, it's a totally different comparison.
      - nardi 10y ago
        I'm not a physicist, so my understanding of this is shaky. Can you explain to me how the ESSW paper could possibly have been seen to "disprove" PWT if it doesn't make any different predictions? Isn't the assertion that particles take deterministic paths a prediction?
        kobeya 10y ago
        I am a physicist, and you are not misunderstanding anything. ESSW defeated a strawman mis-generalization of PWT.
- amluto 10y ago
  > But if you will try to discuss pilot-wave and walking droplets here (they are mentioned in part 10), you will receive lot of downvotes here. If you try to claim, without evidence, that pilot waves predict different behavior than standard quantum mechanics, you might deserve that downvote. Pilot waves are a mathematical framework, they may be useful mathematical tricks in some cases, but they don't predict new behavior AFAIK. I've been to talks about Couder et al's work, and the authors don't argue that pilot waves are validated as descriptions of the universe by their work. They do demonstrate a novel macroscopic system that observes the laws of classical mechanics, and under certain circumstances, behavior emerges that is nicely described by the pilot wave equations. This does not mean that pilot waves are somehow a more fundamentally correct description of what's really going on.
  - lisivka 10y ago
    No, I don't claim that PWT predicts different behavior. PWT is reinterpretation of physic facts we already have. However, walking droplets shows that relativistic and quantum effects can be explained in terms of Newtonian physics. For example, just by looking at walking droplet experiment with two slits, I can say that speed of sound in water is constant and it isotropic regardless of speed of particle, because waves around particle are propagating, so water is not moving at all (unless wave is really big, so path to travel will be longer). It is easy to understand. It also explains why Michelson-Morley experiment failed.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 10y ago
      > I can say that speed of sound in water is constant It's not constant. It varies by temperature. This is why you're getting down voted. You're asserting a very minority view in physics as a certainty, while making sweeping statements that contradict a high school physics education. You are placing way too much weight on youtube videos of excited oil droplet propagation. Your lay understanding of these videos is not equivalent to the consensus of people who dedicate their entire lives to these topics.
      - amluto 10y ago
michwill 10y ago
I think, you can't simply push off zero-point fluctuations in vacuum w/o creating particles occasionally. And if you admit you do, you're at level of photon thrusters at best.
- jayajay 10y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. The way I understand it, the vacuum is capable of creating arbitrary particles as long as the quantum numbers are conserved and ΔEΔt >= ħ/2. With e- being the lightest (apart from neutrinos, which are negligible), the vacuum is producing virtual e-/e+ pairs, which are long lived enough to interact with real particles. As an approximation, the vacuum is exclusively an e-/e+ soup, since the other quarks and leptons require much too large of a ΔE to instantiate. The way I understand γ-thrusters is that they make use of the very tiny amount of momentum in a single photon, p = ħk, along with the large N of them bombarding the object. I haven't seen any calculations for γ-thrusters that take into account vacuum fluctuations, though.

by jayajay 10y ago

lisivka 10y ago

But if you will try to discuss pilot-wave and walking droplets here (they are mentioned in part 10), you will receive lot of downvotes here. Quote: Although the idea of a pilot wave or realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is not the dominant view of physics today (which favors the Copenhagen interpretation), it has seen a strong resurgence of interest over the last decade based on some experimental work pioneered by Couder and Fort [13]. Couder and Fort discovered that bouncing a millimeter-sized droplet on a vibrating shallow fluid bath at just the right resonance frequency created a scenario where the bouncing droplet created a wave pattern on the shallow bath that also seemed to guide the droplet along its way. To Couder and Fort, this seemed very similar to the pilot-wave concept just discussed and, in subsequent testing by Couder and others, this macroscopic classical system was able to exhibit characteristics thought to be restricted to the quantum realm. To date, this hydrodynamic pilot-wave analog system has been able to duplicate the double slit experiment findings, tunneling, quantized orbits, and numerous other quantum phenomena. Bush put together two thorough review papers chronicling the experimental work being done in this domain by numerous universities [14,15].

highd 10y ago
i.e. at best, it provides no new information at the expense of learning an entirely new framework.
- lisivka 10y ago
  IMHO, if we will know better the physics of quantum and relativistic effects, we will be able to model them at macro level, so it will be much easier to understand and study these effects. Mathematics will not change, calculation results will not change, but understanding of processes will rise significantly, which may lead to new advances in physics.
  - highd 10y ago
    That would have to be worth the increased confusion in communication between experts using these different languages. Furthermore, given that the physics of the "pilot wave" are not significantly different from that of the wave function it seems unlikely that it will lead to any new intuition.
- nardi 10y ago
  The same could have been said about heliocentrism.
  - highd 10y ago
    Heliocentrism makes different predictions, it's a totally different comparison.
    - nardi 10y ago
      I'm not a physicist, so my understanding of this is shaky. Can you explain to me how the ESSW paper could possibly have been seen to "disprove" PWT if it doesn't make any different predictions? Isn't the assertion that particles take deterministic paths a prediction?
      - kobeya 10y ago
        I am a physicist, and you are not misunderstanding anything. ESSW defeated a strawman mis-generalization of PWT.
amluto 10y ago
> But if you will try to discuss pilot-wave and walking droplets here (they are mentioned in part 10), you will receive lot of downvotes here. If you try to claim, without evidence, that pilot waves predict different behavior than standard quantum mechanics, you might deserve that downvote. Pilot waves are a mathematical framework, they may be useful mathematical tricks in some cases, but they don't predict new behavior AFAIK. I've been to talks about Couder et al's work, and the authors don't argue that pilot waves are validated as descriptions of the universe by their work. They do demonstrate a novel macroscopic system that observes the laws of classical mechanics, and under certain circumstances, behavior emerges that is nicely described by the pilot wave equations. This does not mean that pilot waves are somehow a more fundamentally correct description of what's really going on.
- lisivka 10y ago
  No, I don't claim that PWT predicts different behavior. PWT is reinterpretation of physic facts we already have. However, walking droplets shows that relativistic and quantum effects can be explained in terms of Newtonian physics. For example, just by looking at walking droplet experiment with two slits, I can say that speed of sound in water is constant and it isotropic regardless of speed of particle, because waves around particle are propagating, so water is not moving at all (unless wave is really big, so path to travel will be longer). It is easy to understand. It also explains why Michelson-Morley experiment failed.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 10y ago
    > I can say that speed of sound in water is constant It's not constant. It varies by temperature. This is why you're getting down voted. You're asserting a very minority view in physics as a certainty, while making sweeping statements that contradict a high school physics education. You are placing way too much weight on youtube videos of excited oil droplet propagation. Your lay understanding of these videos is not equivalent to the consensus of people who dedicate their entire lives to these topics.
    - amluto 10y ago

michwill 10y ago

I think, you can't simply push off zero-point fluctuations in vacuum w/o creating particles occasionally. And if you admit you do, you're at level of photon thrusters at best.

jayajay 10y ago
I'm not sure what you mean. The way I understand it, the vacuum is capable of creating arbitrary particles as long as the quantum numbers are conserved and ΔEΔt >= ħ/2. With e- being the lightest (apart from neutrinos, which are negligible), the vacuum is producing virtual e-/e+ pairs, which are long lived enough to interact with real particles. As an approximation, the vacuum is exclusively an e-/e+ soup, since the other quarks and leptons require much too large of a ΔE to instantiate. The way I understand γ-thrusters is that they make use of the very tiny amount of momentum in a single photon, p = ħk, along with the large N of them bombarding the object. I haven't seen any calculations for γ-thrusters that take into account vacuum fluctuations, though.