Environmental effects of various propulsion systems

[Crazy Eddie]

As an aside, I never really got how a warp field was supposed to lower mass, and even if it could, so what? Even if mass is zero, it's still limited to the speed of light.

Here's what I figured out.

A subspace field is a region of space that is expanded or contracted in some way such that the speed of light within the field is different from the speed of light outside of it. As per E=mc^2, if E is a constant, then a higher C (light speed) means a lower m (mass). In an impulse engine it would be pretty simple: form the subspace field so that the region around the ship has a much higher C while the area just aft of the driver coil has a much lower C than normal space. This kind of field remains in balance overall and is therefore not a warp field, so it's much easier to generate and maintain for a smaller amount of power.

 

[Myasishchev]

^That makes mathematical sense, but not physical sense. The universe doesn't measure c in meters per second. In natural units, the speed of light is equal to one. The equation may be simply and accurately stated E = m. Changing the absolute velocity of light is irrelevant; in a universe where light goes 200,000km/s instead of 300,000km/s, mass and energy and still equivalent at the same rate because they are the same very thing.

And even if we were to assume that the ship may trade mass with the fuel, from whence does the ship gets it mass back?

I really do like the notion of trying to explain impulse through a process that increases the mass of the impulse reactants and hence their release energy (as E = m), potentially through control of the Higgs mechanism, but conservation rules kick in. Where does the mass come from?

You know what sucks, though? I never thought there would be a need to rationalize impulse. Warp, yes, but not impulse.

 

[Timo]

There's a name for that, I think. You know, the phenomenon where a committee can easily and swiftly make decisions about nuclear power plants costing hundreds of millions, but will bicker for half an hour about what type of office chairs to buy for the personnel. The closer things get to our everyday competence level, the more we get hung up on tiny little imperfections between what we're presented with and what our instinct and experience makes us expect.

Impulse is more imaginable than warp, which means it's a tougher sale...

As for conservation laws, I'd argue they go out the subspace window pretty easily. These folks have a whole alternate realm where they can dump excess inertia, charge, color or other sort of parity. Really, the only element of physical mystery there is why they worry about energy any more, when they could exploit the various gradients between realspace and subspace for all sorts of perpetual motion setups.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

No chairs for the drones, and no violation of mass-energy conservation.

The thing about conservation is that it isn't just a physical principle, it's a logical one, that can't be logically broken in a universe with physical laws symmetric in time and space. (Personally, I don't believe it can be broken in any logically possible universe, even one with asymmetric physical laws, although I question whether asymmetric physical laws are logically conceivable either.)

But I do think you're right, it's easier to accept warp because it's so necessary to any Star Trek story, whereas impulse can be slow if it physically and logically needs to be, because no one's getting anywhere on impulse anyway (except in Destiny, where an NX-class gets up to .9c... somehow).

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^That makes mathematical sense, but not physical sense. The universe doesn't measure c in meters per second. In natural units, the speed of light is equal to one. The equation may be simply and accurately stated E = m. Changing the absolute velocity of light is irrelevant; in a universe where light goes 200,000km/s instead of 300,000km/s, mass and energy and still equivalent at the same rate because they are the same very thing.

No, they are equivalent, such that the exact relationship between them is given by the equation E=mc^2; if you leave the C^2 out of it, the equation is meaningless, because energy is not measured in kilograms nor is mass measured in joules. The C^2 is therefore a constant on which the conversion of matter to energy/energy to matter depends. Given that the total rest energy of a particular object does not change, then any increase in the speed of light implies a decrease in mass to provide the same value of E. Since matter and energy are equivalent, the ship possesses the same amount of matter and energy with respect to an outside observer, the only thing that's changed are the proportions thereof.

And even if we were to assume that the ship may trade mass with the fuel, from whence does the ship gets it mass back?

Nobody said it traded mass with fuel. What it does is trade mass with energy. To wit, kinetic energy, that is the energy of the ship as it moves through space. This trade can only be sustained while a warp field is in place, since the warp field basically creates a pocket of the universe where the laws of physics are modified so that "at rest" is a condition that implies X amount of kinetic energy in a forward direction (where in normal space "at rest" implies ZERO kinetic energy in any direction).

I really do like the notion of trying to explain impulse through a process that increases the mass of the impulse reactants and hence their release energy (as E = m), potentially through control of the Higgs mechanism, but conservation rules kick in. Where does the mass come from?

It doesn't come from anywhere, nor does it go anywhere. You're changing the energy conditions within the subspace field, not the CONTENTS of that field. Again, E=mc^2, not simply m. If c^2 is changed in a given region of space than the value of m changes for all objects within that space. Of course, as soon as the exhaust plume from the impulse engine leaves the subspace field it returns to its rest mass as per normal space and probably accelerates accordingly.

 

[JNG]

As for conservation laws, I'd argue they go out the subspace window pretty easily. These folks have a whole alternate realm where they can dump excess inertia, charge, color or other sort of parity. Really, the only element of physical mystery there is why they worry about energy any more, when they could exploit the various gradients between realspace and subspace for all sorts of perpetual motion setups.

Interestingly, the Voyager Technical Guide suggests that the Borg power source is something very much like that.

 

[Timo]

The thing about conservation is that it isn't just a physical principle, it's a logical one, that can't be logically broken in a universe with physical laws symmetric in time and space.

But logic, and especially the conservation logic of "x minus x equals nothing" to an amazing degree is a human invention, borne out of our everyday experience. For the past century or so, it's exactly the various assumed conservation laws that have been biting us in the ass the worst, until we have learned to ignore them and go for deeper detail where new and supposedly more fundamental sets of assumptions can be made.

We've already run badly aground on the assumption that the laws of nature would remain constant across the size spectrum. Why we cling on to the "cosmological principle" of them remaining constant across the universe or across time is quite a mystery... Which makes me think that if we ever meet alien intelligences, we will miserably fail in attempts to communicate on mathematical or physical principles, since our comprehension of those is so dependent on our biological nature and the history of human reasoning. I bet the common ground will be found from more universal and more elementary things, such as greed, love, hate and boredom!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

^The "size spectrum"? Yes, Newtonian mechanics isn't "real"--it's an approximation. General and special relativity are approximations. Even quantum mechanics is an approximation that says nothing about events below the Planck scale (if they exist). But that doesn't mean conservation of mass and energy isn't real.

 

[Timo]

It does mean that conservation of mass isn't real - it is an illusion deriving from our previous, limited ability to observe the universe only in such conditions where mass didn't change to energy or vice versa. We completely dropped the ball on that, even though to somebody like Dalton the conservation of mass was as fundamental as God herself.

Similarly, conservation of electric charge or momentum could turn out to be a false assumption, an approximation that only holds for specific circumstances. And the circumstances encountered in treknology would certainly go beyond the currently observed or observable...

Nothing objectively supports the idea that conservation laws, while certainly the most powerful and fundamental tools known to us currently, would be a fundamental characteristic of the true universe. In general, the universe as currently observed appears to hold a precious balance, as it definitely is a relatively unchanging structure. But that balance need not be anything more than a steady state of some sort, and the conservation laws just an illusion stemming from the currently maintained balance. That's how we've ended up with our previous false conservation laws (like conservation of mass), at any rate - by mistaking a momentary or steady state for an immutable fundamental structure.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

^It is true that conservation need not hold in a local system, and our current understanding of "local system" may be as large as this universe. But a global violation of conservation requires the creation of new material ex nihilo. And unless we want to posit the existence of the demiurge, I'm pretty sure that's logically unsound.

And like I said in the other thread, why bother powering your ship with antimatter when you have your magic energy box?

 

[Timo]

It might be a reason similar to why we don't have fission plants on every back yard yet (although there have been recent plans for doing exactly that!). Exploiting the weirdness of subspace to the hilt might be too risky and complicated compared with creating antimatter in some concentrated manner - perhaps indeed with (rare, expensive and risky) ZPE installations - and then using that aboard the starships.

And "creation of new material ex nihilo" is exactly what today's science believes in, as E=mc says. Our concept of "nihil" just has been altered a little in the recent centuries... We seem to agree that Trek subspace could reduce the universe to the status of a local rather than a global system, and it may turn out that something similar is true of the real universe as well.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

^I meant material to refer to energy and matter--I'm not sure if there's a good word to encompass both.