EM drive

hugbot

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/emdrive-nasa-eagleworks-paper-has-finally-passed-peer-review-says-scientist-know-1578716

The EM drive is fascinating. For anyone whose not been following it it's an engine that appears to generate (very small amounts) of thrust using microwaves in a way apparently defying the known laws of physics. It was independently discovered by two separate scientists, both of whom gave different theories of how it works.

up until now it's appeared to work under testing, though no ones prepared to properly vouch for it yet without proper scrutiny, But NASA are now apparently putting it to peer review:


I'm just going to copy the theory of this from Reddit because it's better than I could put it

"Basically, when something is accelerating (speeding up in one direction or changing direction at the same or higher forward velocity), in it's own frame of reference, it will get warmer. 

This change in warmth is (in simplified terms) "blackbody radiation". The longer the wavelength of BBR, the "cooler" the radiation.

What the article seems to be saying is that because the acceleration imparted by the microwave radiation is so immeasurably small, and because the wavelength of heat it would generate would be physically impossible in this universe, instead of that acceleration being expressed as an increase in warmth (BBR), it becomes "quantized" as a change in the object's inertia (the object gains "movement"/"push" in a certain direction). 

Ostensibly, doing this at a high frequency would manifest a measurable change in inertia/acceleration."

Or

"We found a rounding error in the universe"

Sporky

I for one am interested to see what the universe does to cheats.

Cirrus

EM drive? Do we really need another fucking booteek drive pedal? 


  

stickyfiddle

Assuming the calculations are correct, it's not that there's an error in the universe, it's that the assumptions and equations are just a little bit wrong (just as when Newton's laws were the be-all and end-all of motion. It's not that he was wrong at all, just that it's a bit more complicated).

That's not to say this isn't both fascinating and exciting, because it absolutely is both.

Sporky

I quite like the quote from the Brit who invented it first - "Any physicist worth his salt should understand how it works, or if they don't, they should change their profession."