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EM Drive To Receive Peer Review

I thought that was mackerel-more

Latest claim: 1 Newton/14 Watts.
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=41732.msg1619135#msg1619135
Mach effect -- https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=31037.780
Laser thruster https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=41732.msg1619027#msg1619027

Yet more fusion talk:
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/lpp-fusion-reviewed-at-mars-conference.html

In 20 years--no...we mean it this time...

Now, I was matching Nat Geo's Mars.

I wonder if inflatable wind blades may be light enough to use in a dust storm--maybe a way to harness static...
 
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What is the lightest fusion reactor that can be built for the output required? Would it be practical to launch into orbit? Could it be assembled on orbit?
 
My guess is that--even if this pans out--it is still going to be like an ion engine--something that has to be built in space.

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36830

Right now--folks want to combine both nuclear electric and nuclear thermal:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20140017159.pdf

So an EM drive might look like that--just with frustrums in place of the NEP bits

NTR alone https://blogs.nasa.gov/J2X/2014/06/30/inside-the-leo-doghouse-nuclear-thermal-engines/ http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=33900

Bootstrapping
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1612/1612.03238.pdf
 
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An article with a critical review of "the paper" concludes with this:
Ultimately, the biggest concern Sedwick had was the popular press that surrounded this paper. “People were taking the fact that this peer review paper came out as saying that this technology was valid and the truth and was real. That’s not what the paper says. The paper says ‘hey, we did some experiments and did our best to drive down the uncertainty, and we still have this anomalous thrust that can’t be explained in classical physics,’” he said. “The paper does not say that this is a real, definite thing.”
Click to expand...
http://gizmodo.com/so-about-that-physics-defying-nasa-thruster-that-suppos-1790525676

I would add that anything similar to the phrase "breaks the laws of physics" is hype because physics defines itself. We don't fully understand something or there are physical laws yet to be discovered. We don't define the laws by popular vote. We merely observe and use them. Anything that expresses breaking the laws of physics is reporting, exposing or counting on ignorance.
 
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The point made that the device should be tested in a much larger vacuum chamber to help eliminate interaction effects with the environment is valid. Perhaps the large vacuum chamber at the Space Power Facility at NASA Glenn Research Center's Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio could be used if no space-based testing is feasible or too expensive?

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1281.html

If the device is proven to work, it would demonstrate that linear momentum is not conserved and would likely open up vast areas of research -- can the laws of conservation of angular momentum and energy similarly be overcome? If the device works against the vacuum field, it implies that space-time is not Lorentz invariant and that a preferred rest frame might exist. It might also explain why the Universe appears to be dominated by matter rather than anti-matter.

...Jing and I have contemplated an interesting idea: that baryogenesis becomes easier in the presence of Lorentz violation. Ordinarily, successful baryogenesis requires three ingredients, as first elucidated by Andrei Sakharov: violation of baryon number (i.e., processes which produce different numbers of baryons than antibaryons), violation of charge and charge-parity symmetries (i.e., processes which behave differently for particles and antiparticles), and a departure from thermal equilibrium (i.e., things don’t have a chance to settle down in to a quiescent state, in which baryons and antibaryons would presumably be equally abundant).

Sakharov’s argument, sensibly enough, assumes that everything is nice and Lorentz invariant. If you violate that assumption, an interesting thing happens — you can get different numbers of baryons and anti-baryons even in thermal equilibrium! This is an old idea, actually — suggested by Cohen, Kaplan and Nelson under the name “spontaneous baryogenesis,” and explored more recently in the context of evolving dark-energy (quintessence) fields by Mark and his students Antonio De Felice and Salah Nasri, as well as in the context of simple Lorentz-violating vector fields by Bertolami et al.

The loophole is easy enough to state (although more difficult to appreciate). In quantum field theory there is something called the CPT theorem, which (among other things) guarantees that particles and antiparticles have equal masses. But Lorentz invariance is an assumption of the CPT theorem, and a vector field with a nonzero value in the vacuum can violate it. If the vector interacts with baryons in a certain way (not so hard to arrange, really), it can make antibaryons be just a bit heavier than baryons. That means that the baryons can be more abundant, even in equilibrium, and this slight asymmetry can persist to this day — and provide the particles out of which we are all made.
Click to expand...

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2005/10/25/lorentz-invariance-and-you/
 
Yep.

Or local inequities will be compensated by nonlocal consequences.

By the way, there was recent confirmation that a hydrogen atom has exactly the same mass as an antihydrogen atom.
 
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Gravitational mass or inertial mass? I assume the latter. The two seem to be the same for matter but one shouldn't assume equivalence for anti-matter on that basis.
 
PBS Space Time finally makes an episode about the EM Drive, including addressing Pilot Wave Theory:

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