EM Drive To Receive Peer Review
- Thread starter Dryson
- Start date
I would recommend doing the mathematics, if possible.
At the risk of opening up a huge can of worms...
Mathematically, the reverse is also true, because the time dilation equations are based on special relativity which assumes all reference frames to be equivalent. This means that from the traveler's point of view, the EARTH is the thing that's moving at light speed, and therefore everything on Earth is moving more slowly than everything on the ship.
The observations concur, but cannot both be literally true in all reference frames. Once the traveler decelerates and matches relative velocity with Earth, he would find his clock is again in synch with his point of origin, despite the previous perception that it must have been running faster. Of course, since light can only travel so fast, he can only PERCEIVE that the clock on Earth is running behind his anyway because it takes the light from that clock a certain amount of time to reach him. Should he travel faster than light, he would perceive that Earth time has slowed so much as to actually be moving backwards, and when he stopped and looked back he would have a view of himself climbing into his ship and blasting off.
The only reason time dilation appears to happen is because is observed to propagate at the same speed in all reference frames. Time dilation can only ACTUALLY happen if one assumes it is possible to take observations of distant objects in real time -- which is to say, faster than light can actually travel -- which is impossible. Time dilation is an OBSERVED effect, not a real one, and is a consequence of the limitations of the speed of light.
If this were true how do you explain the subatomic clock experiments on airplanes? When the flight is over and both clocks are back in the same frame of reference sitting next to one another, they will not agree. The one from the flight will show a slightly slower passage of time.
Yes! A great example, a really terrific book.
I forgot to add in the equation of comparing distance traveled by Earth in a year compared to the distance a light photon travels in a year.
In a single year the Earth travels 940 million kilometers.
A light photon travels at 299,792 km/s.
A light photon would take less time to travel the same distance that it would take Earth to complete a full revolution around the Sun.
Without doing the math I would have to say that light aging based on light speed travel would add an exponential age to someone traveling at the speed of light that would be compared to the distance of the photon traveling at light speed and the distance that the Earth travels in normal calendar year.
The traveler would be older based on light aging which you s based on a total distance crossed but would still be the same DNA age that they were when the left the Earth.
I'm home now.
Let's begin. In a single year the Earth travels 940 million kilometers. A light photon travels 299,972 km/s. It would take a light photon 3,133.63 seconds or 52.227 minutes to travel the same distance that the Earth does in single calendar year compared to Earth taking 365 days.
Once the light photon has reached 940 million km in 52.227 minutes it will have aged one Earth calendar year. Back on Earth however only 52.227 minutes will have passed. So for roughly every hour that a light photon travels through space it has occupied the same distance that the Earth does in 365 days.
On average a light photon will age 25.06896 years for every day of travel through space as it occupies nearly 24 times the distance that the Earth travels around the Sun.
In a single year the Earth travels 940 million kilometers.
A light photon travels at 299,792 km/s.
A light photon would take less time to travel the same distance that it would take Earth to complete a full revolution around the Sun.
Without doing the math I would have to say that light aging based on light speed travel would add an exponential age to someone traveling at the speed of light that would be compared to the distance of the photon traveling at light speed and the distance that the Earth travels in normal calendar year.
The traveler would be older based on light aging which you s based on a total distance crossed but would still be the same DNA age that they were when the left the Earth.
I'm home now.
Let's begin. In a single year the Earth travels 940 million kilometers. A light photon travels 299,972 km/s. It would take a light photon 3,133.63 seconds or 52.227 minutes to travel the same distance that the Earth does in single calendar year compared to Earth taking 365 days.
Once the light photon has reached 940 million km in 52.227 minutes it will have aged one Earth calendar year. Back on Earth however only 52.227 minutes will have passed. So for roughly every hour that a light photon travels through space it has occupied the same distance that the Earth does in 365 days.
On average a light photon will age 25.06896 years for every day of travel through space as it occupies nearly 24 times the distance that the Earth travels around the Sun.
A photon traveling at the speed of light does not age. It experiences zero time.
In 1971, Hafele and Keating took atomic clocks for rides on jet aircraft and demonstrated the effect. In fact, they had to take into account the effects of both time dilation due to relative motion and depth in the Earth's gravitational field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele–Keating_experiment
Everything in space experiences time.
Another interesting thought I had is about a human body traveling at the speed of light. Since the human body is regulated by Earths core, traveling at the speed of light might throw the regulated heartbeat out of sync causing the heart to stop.
Would death occur or would the body go into a state of stasis?
Death is determined to have taken place when the body processes cease to function and natural decomposition sets in. If traveling at the speed of light stops the processes in the human body then traveling at the speed of light would also stop or stasisfy the bacteria that are responsible for natural decomposition.
Decomposition would not take place. All life in the module should go into a form of stasis or would be frozen in time.
The question is when the module dropped out of light speed and encountered normal gravity and the human was placed on a planet, would the planets core jump the humans heart like a defibrulator that is used in a hospital to restart a non-beating heart?
Would the human retain all memory of itself at the point it went into stasis and continue where it left at after coming out of stasis?
Not at light speed, which is the speed at which a photon (light) travels. I recommend a refresher on the fundamental concepts of relativity.
Ohhhh myyyy. For starters, I'd like to see your scientific source on the Gaia concept of the body.
Last edited:
^^That's some strong ganja, man.
"4N/kilowatt force/thrust will take us to Proxima Centauri b in 29.9 years."
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=40959.msg1573309#msg1573309
Here is what a deep space probe may look like (scroll down for probe):
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=40959.420
More: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?board=73.0
Here is what a manned EM-drive ship may look like:
http://crowlspace.com/?p=2863#more-2863
Paper to be released in December:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=40959.msg1581706#msg1581706
Don't get your hopes up
http://www.universetoday.com/130649/nasas-em-drive-passes-peer-review-dont-get-hopes/
Last edited:
A 90 tonne spacecraft with a power source that generates 2 MW -- most likely a nuclear reactor?
The diagram also shows a thrust of 4 N per kilowatt which I believe is something like 10 to 100 times more than what has been achieved in practice (supposedly).
I think some folks are getting ahead of themselves.
What's there to explain. Everyone knows Einstein Was Right so the results are totally legit.
They take one clock up to a high altitude (e.g. on a plane) and keep the other at sea level, but time dilation due to gravitational effects to be negligible enough to be ignored, which seems weird, but Einstein Was Right and Math is Hard so it's probably legit.
They measure a time discrepancy between the two clocks something like a few billionths of a nanosecond while also boasting a margin of error small enough to be measured with an electron microscope. Which seems like kind of extraordinary... but Einstein Was Right, so that's probably legit too.
But I'm an asshole and I question everything, and I DON'T think it's legit.
The thing is, time dilation due to relative velocity is only meaningful in an inertial reference frame. It doesn't hold true for two different objects in a non-inertial reference frame, both in different gravitational potentials, both co-moving with respect to a SHARED reference frame. IOW, the experiments appear to be conducted to test Special Relativity in an environment to which Special Relativity doesn't actually apply.
I have actually seen people perform "experiments" on hyper-velocity impact physics by throwing bowling balls into swimming pools (NOT an exaggeration). By the time they're done massaging the numbers to account for all the holes in that setup, the "experiment" is little more than an exhibition and doesn't actually tell you anything about the hypothesis except that the person who came up with it is REALLY good at math.
Which would explicitly contradict Special Relativity.
SR holds true that any particular observation is only true in the coordinate system in which that observation was made. This is why it only applies to inertial reference frames, where all coordinate systems are logically equivalent. Distortions of an object's length and the passage of time are therefore contradictory between two reference frames; the plane should observe the STATIONARY clock ticking slower because in the plane's coordinate system the stationary clock is the one in motion. SR becomes meaningless if one can assume that only one of the coordinate systems is the "true" one and that what holds true in one coordinate system will end up being true in all others.
GR, on the other hand, treats a non-inertial reference frame as a region of curved space where measurements of size, the passage of time, the movement of objects and potential energies depend on one's position relative to the a fixed point in that system. If you're IN a non-inertial reference frame (e.g. a gravity well) then individual coordinate systems are effectively invalid and all measurements are only literally true either on a very small scale or with respect to the reference frame both of them share. Usually, BOTH of these can be true, but on a larger scale -- with great differences in distance and velocity -- the normal predictions of SR would prove to be invalid and accurate observations can ONLY be made with respect to a shared coordinate system.
Perhaps you should start another thread if you want to discuss the perceived failings of the theories of Special and General Relativity. It's not really pertinent to the Em drive, is it? I'm more interested in divining how such a drive can possibly function, assuming it functions at all and isn't just pushing itself around due to some other effect such as EM interaction between the magnetron and the power lines.
30 years for a probe to reach Proxima Centauri isn't bad....its awesome.
Everything is space does a lifespan or an age. Black holes don't last forever so that would be considered a celestial object having an age.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/jul/24/what-is-the-lifetime-of-a-photon
The photon – the quantum of light or other electromagnetic radiation – is normally considered to have zero mass. But some theories allow photons to have a small rest mass and one consequence of that would be that photons could then decay into lighter elementary particles. So if such a decay were possible, what are the limits on the lifetime of a photon? That is the question asked by a physicist in Germany, who has calculated the lower limit for the lifetime of the photon to be three years in the photon's frame of reference. This translates to about one billion billion (1018) years in our frame of reference.
It is estimated that the diameter of the observable universe is about 28.5 gigaparsecs (93 billion light-years, 8.8×1026 metres or 5.5×1023 miles), putting the edge of the observable universe at about 46.5 billion light-years away.
Would the light photon traveling at the speed of light and never coming into the contact with anything ever reach the other side of the Universe?
It would take a light photon 46.5 billion years to reach the edge of the Universe from a central source. But what about sources of light that are closer to the edge of the Universe? Is the force of a light photon what is causing the edge of the Universe to actually expand and create new Universe?
If so what happens to that light photon?
Measurements of the curvature of space-time (inferred from observations of the CMB) indicate that the size of the observable Universe is much less than the size of the Universe itself, which may in fact effectively be infinite and in a state of eternal inflation. It seems likely that there is no edge and there is no centre. As for photon decay, I assume photons might decay into an axions for which experimental evidence exists (but is not definitive) and which are a potential component of cold dark matter.