4 ms·

Wanted to jump in and ask, does anyone remember a site that went through the math of two magnetic rings being charged and discharged out of sync, utilizing the

Wanted to jump in and ask, does anyone remember a site that went through the math of two magnetic rings being charged and discharged out of sync, utilizing the delay in the speed of light between the rings to create a net force? Imagine a craft shaped like a dumbbell, with the rings where the weights are: |---| 1...2 The idea was that you'd create a strong magnetic field in ring 1, and then the wave would travel outward both directions (one away from the ship, and one along it) and interact with ring 2, which has the opposite polarity. Ring 2 would be attracted to the magnetism from ring 1, and pull the ship to the left. Then ring 1 would turn off, and by the time the wave from ring 2 reached it, there would be no interaction. So the craft would feel a net thrust to the left. The process would repeat over and over again at high frequency, propelling the craft faster and faster. I believe the site said the process was 25% efficient, and didn’t violate any laws of physics. The difficulty lies with hysteresis because it takes a comparatively long time to charge a magnetic field, compared to the time it takes light to span the distance. So it went off on a tangent about using lasers to charge a superconducting ring. But I’ve always wondered if resonance could somehow be used to take the coils out of sync automatically, a bit like a tesla coil but with an imbalance the puts one ring slightly behind the other in time with respect to their frames of reference. As they move more out of phase, the net force on the coils should get stronger and stronger. This sounds similar in some ways to the the way a magnetron works, so if it can be put out of phase in a similar way, then I’m not entirely surprised by NASA’s result. If it’s true that the time delay in the speed of light can be converted to a propulsive force, then it’s going to change, well, pretty much everything about space travel. I really wish I had the link to that site.

Terr_ 12y ago
Was it something like this? http://arxiv.org/html/physics/9908048v2/conclusion.htm http://arxiv.org/html/physics/9908048v2/conclusion.htm > Then ring 1 would turn off, and by the time the wave from ring 2 reached it, there would be no interaction. That sounds like the magic part. "Magically, nothing will occur." IANA physicist, but it sounds like Lenz's law might be relevant. > I believe the site said the process was [...] didn’t violate any laws of physics. Well, there's the rub. It sounds like it directly violates conservation of momentum and Newton's third law.
- zackmorris 12y ago
  That's not the one, but it's along similar lines. The site had lots of graphics and was written in layman's terms. I think I first read it around 1999 or 2000, and then lost it. I agree with the others that any force above light pressure would appear to violate Newton’s laws. However, I have never seen an analysis or simulation that incorporates the delay in the speed of light. Ring 1 would be limited to light pressure, and be symmetrical, but ring 2 would dissipate one half of the wave by canceling it, so technically only 3/4 of the energy would be emitted if we thought of the whole system as a black box. The other 1/4 would have to go somewhere, probably mostly heating the rings but some of it could go into the box as kinetic energy. I think an easier way to run the experiment might be to set up a square wave with a duty cycle of 25% and a period equal to the time it takes for light to propagate between the rings. Then it would just be a matter of varying the phase on one of the rings and seeing if there’s a net force on the setup. With a spacing of 10 centimeters, there would only be 0.33 nanoseconds to build a magnetic field, and it’s going to fall by the square of the distance between coils, unless we could use the long wire approximation for large coils which falls linearly by distance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampère%27s_force_law#Equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampère%27s_force_law#Equation The forces might be small but they should be measurable, and if they are even a fraction of a percent above light pressure, it’s a really big deal. Maybe the duty cycle should be 33% or 50%, maybe the period should be double or half this, maybe another waveform would be more efficient, but you get the idea. Blah what I wouldn’t give to have the disposable income to work on this and the hundred other half-baked ideas laying around the house. It’s a special kind of hell to toil away one’s life making rent while watching the wondrous breakthroughs of the world spring forth from other people’s minds.
lutorm 12y ago
I bet that if you actually work out what's happening, at best it's equivalent to just emitting photons, which you can do by just aiming a flashlight out the back. "Efficiency" isn't a well-defined quantity, though. What you are looking for is thrust/power, and even a device that converts energy to photons with 100% efficiency produces preciously little thrust per power used.
- darkmighty 12y ago
  Conservation of momentum dictates that the momentum gain follows from the net momentum of emitted photons, so it really should be simply a matter of shinning light away. dp=dE/c (and since magnets have histeresis losses as mentioned, they radiate energy isotropically due to heat, lowering efficiency).
  - lutorm 12y ago
    That's what I'm saying. But P/c is very little momentum compared to what you get from taking that power to throw anything with rest mass out the back.
    - zackmorris 12y ago
      Ya that's definitely true. You might check out JLN labs, they have a bunch of over unity and reactionless rocket experiments drawing from the work by TT Brown: http://jlnlabs.online.fr http://jlnlabs.online.fr Some of the more fascinating ones are in near-vacuum. I remember reading that asymmetric fields might be able to propel virtual pairs or interact with the interstellar medium, but unfortunately the effect seems to fall too quickly in relation to density. There was another article about how since cooper pairs are delocalized in a superconductor, they may not interact with gravity. It was trying to explain things like the electrogravitic effects near spinning superconductors: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/412674/if-superconducting-sheets-reflected-gravitational-waves/ http://www.technologyreview.com/view/412674/if-superconducti... I keep thinking that if any of these do stray from physics, it will be interesting to see how they reconcile it. So far it hasn't happened but days like today make me wonder if it's just around the corner.
datenwolf 12y ago
My approach as a physicist doing fundamental research is: I put a mental black box around the device. I don't want to know how it looks like and what it does internally. To me it's just a box into which some quantum numbers go in and some quantum numbers go out. I don't care about the complexity of your device. It doesn't matter, because that complexity tells me nothing about how the damn thing interacts with the outside world. Now when you speak about magnetic fields, inductors and resonances you're essentially using a lot of words to describe something that has been known for over 100 years and put to practical use in millions of devices: Radio Antennas. The one ring acts like a radiator element and the other ring is an actively driven director. Other names for this are phased array antennas. This is absolutely nothing new under the sun. And yes, this thing produces net thrust, because electromagnetic radiation carries momentum.

Terr_ 12y ago

Was it something like this? http://arxiv.org/html/physics/9908048v2/conclusion.htm http://arxiv.org/html/physics/9908048v2/conclusion.htm > Then ring 1 would turn off, and by the time the wave from ring 2 reached it, there would be no interaction. That sounds like the magic part. "Magically, nothing will occur." IANA physicist, but it sounds like Lenz's law might be relevant. > I believe the site said the process was [...] didn’t violate any laws of physics. Well, there's the rub. It sounds like it directly violates conservation of momentum and Newton's third law.

zackmorris 12y ago
That's not the one, but it's along similar lines. The site had lots of graphics and was written in layman's terms. I think I first read it around 1999 or 2000, and then lost it. I agree with the others that any force above light pressure would appear to violate Newton’s laws. However, I have never seen an analysis or simulation that incorporates the delay in the speed of light. Ring 1 would be limited to light pressure, and be symmetrical, but ring 2 would dissipate one half of the wave by canceling it, so technically only 3/4 of the energy would be emitted if we thought of the whole system as a black box. The other 1/4 would have to go somewhere, probably mostly heating the rings but some of it could go into the box as kinetic energy. I think an easier way to run the experiment might be to set up a square wave with a duty cycle of 25% and a period equal to the time it takes for light to propagate between the rings. Then it would just be a matter of varying the phase on one of the rings and seeing if there’s a net force on the setup. With a spacing of 10 centimeters, there would only be 0.33 nanoseconds to build a magnetic field, and it’s going to fall by the square of the distance between coils, unless we could use the long wire approximation for large coils which falls linearly by distance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampère%27s_force_law#Equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampère%27s_force_law#Equation The forces might be small but they should be measurable, and if they are even a fraction of a percent above light pressure, it’s a really big deal. Maybe the duty cycle should be 33% or 50%, maybe the period should be double or half this, maybe another waveform would be more efficient, but you get the idea. Blah what I wouldn’t give to have the disposable income to work on this and the hundred other half-baked ideas laying around the house. It’s a special kind of hell to toil away one’s life making rent while watching the wondrous breakthroughs of the world spring forth from other people’s minds.

lutorm 12y ago

I bet that if you actually work out what's happening, at best it's equivalent to just emitting photons, which you can do by just aiming a flashlight out the back. "Efficiency" isn't a well-defined quantity, though. What you are looking for is thrust/power, and even a device that converts energy to photons with 100% efficiency produces preciously little thrust per power used.

darkmighty 12y ago
Conservation of momentum dictates that the momentum gain follows from the net momentum of emitted photons, so it really should be simply a matter of shinning light away. dp=dE/c (and since magnets have histeresis losses as mentioned, they radiate energy isotropically due to heat, lowering efficiency).
- lutorm 12y ago
  That's what I'm saying. But P/c is very little momentum compared to what you get from taking that power to throw anything with rest mass out the back.
  - zackmorris 12y ago
    Ya that's definitely true. You might check out JLN labs, they have a bunch of over unity and reactionless rocket experiments drawing from the work by TT Brown: http://jlnlabs.online.fr http://jlnlabs.online.fr Some of the more fascinating ones are in near-vacuum. I remember reading that asymmetric fields might be able to propel virtual pairs or interact with the interstellar medium, but unfortunately the effect seems to fall too quickly in relation to density. There was another article about how since cooper pairs are delocalized in a superconductor, they may not interact with gravity. It was trying to explain things like the electrogravitic effects near spinning superconductors: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/412674/if-superconducting-sheets-reflected-gravitational-waves/ http://www.technologyreview.com/view/412674/if-superconducti... I keep thinking that if any of these do stray from physics, it will be interesting to see how they reconcile it. So far it hasn't happened but days like today make me wonder if it's just around the corner.

datenwolf 12y ago

My approach as a physicist doing fundamental research is: I put a mental black box around the device. I don't want to know how it looks like and what it does internally. To me it's just a box into which some quantum numbers go in and some quantum numbers go out. I don't care about the complexity of your device. It doesn't matter, because that complexity tells me nothing about how the damn thing interacts with the outside world. Now when you speak about magnetic fields, inductors and resonances you're essentially using a lot of words to describe something that has been known for over 100 years and put to practical use in millions of devices: Radio Antennas. The one ring acts like a radiator element and the other ring is an actively driven director. Other names for this are phased array antennas. This is absolutely nothing new under the sun. And yes, this thing produces net thrust, because electromagnetic radiation carries momentum.