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The Alcubierre warp field concept is a useful thought experiment (physicists sometimes call it a “gedankenxperiment,” which is just German for “thought experiment”), for a few reasons:
Pares strikes me as a classic Trekkie. It’s easy to disparage the guy, but I have a lot of respect for experimentalists, so I won’t jump on the bandwagon. I hope he comes up with something cool. History is full of examples where experimentalists trying to do one thing, stumbled across something else that turned out to be important. There’s absolutely no down side whatsoever to people trying out their crazy ideas, so more power to him. My best guess is that the copper power lines he’s using are heating up and deforming, thereby pulling on his antenna array, and that he’s rotating metal with the Lenz law effect, but I’d love to be wrong.
Let's just say I'm skeptical, but I've always liked the idea of some guy tinkering in his garage coming up with the answer.
With Corso & Lazar neither story gets us any closer to what had already been conjectured and both appear to contain fabrication and misinformation, or possibly disinformation. I sort of like your theory that maybe Lazar's move was for self preservation. But then again, nobody had ever heard of Lazar before his UFO story broke, so they could have silenced him fairly easily and nobody would have been the wiser. Hmm. Either way it seems maybe there's something there. Knapp still seems to think so. I dunno. Friedman figures Lazar is a total phoney. When it comes right down to it, aren't all the aliens in the "grey" basket?
Trump is a snake in a suit opportunist whose main management strategy is firing people and issuing executive orders. I don't think he truly appreciates anyone or anything but his own ego. IMO he pretty much epitomizes everything that's wrong with government and corporate culture.
If they are, all the requirements for exotic propulsion needs go away.
(Hey I think you accidentally posted the wrong link – this one goes to a New York Times article about the alleged Trump/Russia connection)
I’m >90% confident that Lazar is a hired disinformation agent. For one thing, his public records paint a clear picture of a guy who was a shifty weasel long before his alleged hiring to work at S4 – a guy like that would never get the security clearance required for a program that sensitive…but he’s an ideal candidate for an intelligence operation. And he’s always surrounded by “minders” when he talks in public – that’s a dead giveaway. He’s being kept “on script.”
This little warp coil is fascinating stuff. It’s based on a higher-dimension physical theory that’s extremely speculative, but the notion of creating a dark energy effect using positive energy (circumventing the need for negative energy) is an audacious concept. Sadly, they haven’t detected a signal above the noise threshold. But maybe if they had a few million dollars instead of a few thousand to build prototypes, they could make some progress.
This paper came out last November – it’s about the dreaded “EM Drive,” not the warp field experiment (people have gotten them mixed up – they’re totally different experiments). It turns out that they measured a movement of 10 micrometers (millionths of a meter) and a force of about 100 micro-Netwons, which is 50 times smaller than a Hall thruster using the same wattage. The signal appears to be well above the noise level, but is it proof that we need to throw out the conservation of momentum, or did they miss some kind of tiny error in the experiment? Could go either way, but the Vegas money in on "experimental error." So the EM Drive is still in the grey basket. It would be cool if it weren’t just an experimental error of thermal or electrical origin, but it probably is. There’s still no intelligible theory for how a simple closed microwave cavity could produce thrust.
The interesting thing about this, beyond the nifty story about a secret demonstration at Lockheed, is the striking similarity to the interesting patent by Townsend Brown. Today the “Biefeld-Brown effect” is attributed almost exclusively to the dumb “ion wind” lifters that gained popularity in the late 90’s. But he patented a totally different idea that he called the “cellular gravitator,” which bears no resemblance to the popular ion wind devices. His cellular gravitator devices consisted of capacitor stacks wrapped in dielectric. It’s very difficult to attribute the effects that he reported with those devices, to an ion wind effect – to significantly move a dense block of material like that would produce a very audible hissing sound, for one thing, and he reported totally silent operation.
Nah – physics is physics. The energy requirements might be beyond our reach at present, but there’s no way to know for sure until we have a valid quantum field theory of gravity.
It seems very likely to me that some of the craft we’ve witnessed are AI probes. It’s good to bear in mind that if intelligent life is fairly common in the cosmos, then odds are high that most sightings involve entirely different civilizations.
RF resonant cavity thruster - WikipediaNoise or experimental error[edit]
NASA Eagleworks's illustration of the superposition of displacements caused by thermal expansion, a pulse, and the cumulative effect of a pulse + thermal expansion
Eaglework's displacement test results
The simplest and most likely explanation is that any thrust detected is due to experimental error or noise. In all of the experiments set up, a very large amount of energy goes into generating a tiny amount of thrust. The strongest early result, from Yang's group, was later reported to be caused by a large experimental error.[6]
The 2016 Eagleworks paper discusses nine possible sources of experimental error.[2][73] White argues that most of those error sources were eliminated "fairly definitively". The largest error source however is believed to come from the thermal expansion of the thruster's heat sink; as it expands this would lead to a change in the centre of gravity causing the resonant cavity to move. The authors attempted to model the thermal effect on the overall displacement with White saying "That was the thing we worked the hardest to understand and put in a box". Despite these efforts, White's team were unable to exhaustively account for the thermal expansion in full. In an interview with Aerospace America White comments that "although maybe we put a little bit of a pencil mark through [the error]... they are certainly not black-Sharpie-crossed-out.” Future experiments are planned to run on a type of apparatus called a Cavendish balance. In such a setup, the EmDrive would be able to rotate out to much larger angular displacements, so that the force of the thrust (if present) would dominate over any possible thermal effects. Testing a device in space would also eliminate the centre of gravity issue. [71]
Another likely source of error arrises from the possible electromagnetic interaction with the vacuum chamber’s wall.[71]
In other experiments that have seen positive results, possible explanations include publication bias, where positive observations have no statistical significance, with negative observations being thrown out without being reported.[20]
Close Look at Recent EmDrive Paper
That’s an excellent point. That’s how I choose to see it. We have no way of knowing what these craft are or why they sometimes perform mind-boggling acrobatic maneuvers in the sky, but it sure seemed to me like we were intentionally given an aerial demonstration of an exotic form of propulsion technology. Why perform zig-zag maneuvers at thousands of miles per hour, while glowing as brightly as the Sun, unless you actually want to draw attention to your flight capabilities, and perhaps get the witnesses wondering how such a thing is possible? I realize that’s an arbitrary way of looking at it, but it seems like the most productive perspective. We don’t get to choose most of our experiences in life, but we get to choose what use we make of them. So I choose to see it as a challenge: “figure out how we do this, and you people can come traipsing around the universe like we do.”
This kind of thing really upsets me actually. The popular science press has gone from bad to worse, and Shawyer is the least objective person to ask about his device.
Shawyer’s concept isn’t being suppressed at all – in fact we hear so much about it that I’m sick of it at this point. Multiple experimental groups have attempted to confirm that it works, but their results are so unimpressive that most scientists assume that any minuscule positive result is just experimental error. The first Chinese group to confirm the concept, later announced that it was experimental error.
No, there’s no reason to think that Shawyer’s device has anything to do with warp field propulsion. It’s a microwave oven. Microwave ovens aren’t warp field propulsion devices. There’s as much reason to think that his microwave cavity is a warp field device, as there is to think that my blender is a time machine.
