Higgs bosuns, inertial damping, artificial gravity, and Star Trek

[Ian Keldon]

I am excited by all this discussion of the Higgs Bosun particle/field in "real life". This has obvious implications for Treknology, offering an explanation of how some of it might work.

Since the bosuns are the means by which other particles acquire "mass", manipulating the bosuns in the field could either increase or decrease the mass of objects within the field.

Run a modified Higgs bosun field through deck
plating and it's apparent mass increases which in turn increases it's apparent gravity (since gravity comes from mass ultimately).

A computer calculated Higgs field applied to a ship and it's contents along opposing vectors to extant motion would cancel out inertial effects.

And lastly, the subspace driver coils said to be built into impulse engines (esp 24th century ones), hyper-accelerate the exhaust plasma, producing multiple times the amount of thrust per unit of mass expended that it should. Passing the exhaust plasma through a densified Higgs bosun field would be a good theoretical explanation for this effect.

Very cool to be able to tie real science into Treknology, isn't it?

[Ronald Held]

Gravity plating is alleged to be done via controlled use of gravitons. I do not recall how the IDF works.

[Ian Keldon]

Which does not mean that manipulation of Higgs bosuns cannot be part of the process. Since they impart mass, which carries with it gravity/gravitons, it is still a viable explanation of the mechanism by which artificial gravity works.

A simple, off the top of my head possibility would be that intensifying or supersaturating the Higgs bosun field of the deck plating would allow more "mass" to attach to each particle of the plating, allowing each plate particle to carry more gravity that it naturally would.

[JarodRussell]

I don't think the discovery of the Higgs Boson changes anything. I don't think it's something we can manipulate effectively or efficiently.

[SonicRanger]

Bosun: a petty officer on a merchant ship

Boson: any of a group of elementary particles, such as a photon or pion, that has zero or integral spin and obeys the rules of Bose-Einstein statistics

[Forbin]

I was gonna ask if the Higgs Bosun is the guy who pipes you aboard the USS Higgs.

[The Green Mushroom]

Wouldn't manipulating the Higgs Field to give the deck plates apparent mass to simulate gravity be effectively the same thing as giving them actual mass and actual gravity.

In other words, if the artificial gravity system worked like that, it would be a really bad day on any planet that a starship is orbiting.

[JarodRussell]

I don't think you can add or remove mass to a proton or neutron by playing with Higgs Bosons.

[Ronald Held]

if you could change the local Higgs field it would affect every particle.

[JarodRussell]

Ronald Held wrote:

---

if you could change the local Higgs field it would affect every particle.

If you could, everything would break apart or be smashed together, wouldn't it?

[Ian Keldon]

We don't know one way or the other...you could limit the manipulation of the boson field to just the parts whose mass you want to increase (in theory), which would leave nearby planets/other ships/etc unaffected.

At any rate, playing around with gravity fields is beyond us (for now and for the foreseeable future), so we have no idea how it is done. Maniuplating Higgs bosons makes as much sense as magically manipulating gravitons (which are not yet even proven).

[Forbin]

"Bosun Higgs, report to the bridge!"

[Forbin]

That's it, I gotta make a character named Bosun Higgs in a fanfic.

[publiusr]

Here are some papers that might help you out

The Gravitational field of a Cube--perfect for the Borg!
http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.3857

Here's your Heisenberg compensator: http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.5485
Open timelike curves, gravity and wormholes
http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.0505
http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.0047

Remember the DC comics tracing phasers? About that: Lightning guns http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=15308


For all the Star Fleet Battles folk--self-armoring seltorian asteroid ships
http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.5564
# body asteroid system http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.5755

Very fast pulsar http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.5149
I wonder if orbiting reflectors may allow a constant beam...

Hypospray-thruster http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.1844
Space weather simulator http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.1866

Future drives
New fusion drive proposed
http://uah.edu/news/items/10-researc...-to-deep-space
http://www.universetoday.com/95991/n...ks-not-months/
http://www.bautforum.com/showthread....eks-Not-Months
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105704136900260060076/posts
http://www.csnr.usra.edu/

More on the Z-pinch
http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/07/was...-euv.html#more

Plasma http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/ind...?topic=27082.0

Spiral waves
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1...ity-infinitely
http://www.grepscience.com/archives/...k-ever-created

Paint on batteries http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=15335

Universe in a nutshell
http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.1720

[SWHouston]

Nice post publiusr