UFO propulsion, metric engineering, and horizon physics

[marduk]

Apparently, there is no problem with thermodynamics, because they are not actually moving. Negative mass has negative momentum and sum of momentum is zero. Negative mass has negative energy and positive mass has positive energy, so sum is again zero.

Martin Tajmar explains it quite well here @8:54 and onwards:

Uh, no. I mean yes, that's what the math says but it's not what would actually happen - which betrays a problem.

The guy specifically references weaponizing this. Take two masses, one positive, one negative. Let them accelerate for free to near relativistic speeds. Aim at enemy. When the resultant positive and negative masses impact you at .99C, do you think nothing will happen?

Same goes for perpetual motion.

Same goes for free energy.

Seems like a 'something for nothing' deal that the universe doesn't seem to like. The house always seems to win.

 

[marduk]

I’m totally open to suggestions. So how do you get low silent hovering without wind or propellant, apparently instantaneous accelerations from a dead stop to thousands of miles per hour with no indication of a reaction medium, and acute-angle maneuvers with no signs of slowing or banking at thousands of miles per hour, without some kind of gravitational field propulsion principle that obviates g-forces completely?

Man, that's the rub, isn't it?

I've seen these things move, and they move like a mother. But I've never been in one while they do it, so I have no idea if they have no inertia.

I don't know how they do what they do. Me not having an answer doesn't mean you're right. It's the invisible unicorn living in my anus problem again, right? You can't prove it's not there, therefore I'm right.

 

[marduk]

I'm just saying that belief and disbelief are two sides of the same coin - you can take either one too far, and proponents of either position often end up defending their belief or disbelief, rather than debating the issues in an unbiased manner. It's best not to plant your flag in either camp, and just impartially let the facts speak for themselves rather than starting with a position and then arguing to defend it. That's the true meaning of skepticism.

That just caused a segmentation fault in my brain. This makes zero sense, man.

I don't believe things for which there are no reason to believe them. That's skepticism. The facts say that there is no reason to think that anything exists except the material universe. Believe it if you want, fill your boots. Just don't pretend that it makes sense and that my disbelief in your faith is some kind of faith of it's own.

There's being open minded, and then there's letting your brains fall out because your mind is too open to anything.

 

[marduk]

I'm just saying that belief and disbelief are two sides of the same coin - you can take either one too far, and proponents of either position often end up defending their belief or disbelief, rather than debating the issues in an unbiased manner. It's best not to plant your flag in either camp, and just impartially let the facts speak for themselves rather than starting with a position and then arguing to defend it. That's the true meaning of skepticism.


I like the middle road: "all that we can prove is what we can observe with the senses and measure with physical instruments, but there may also be aspects of the universe that we can't observe with the senses or measure with physical instruments." I think it's good to have some sense of humility and acknowledge that not only may we be missing unseen factors, but we may be missing fundamentally unseeable factors too.

Here's just one example: Dr. Itzhak Bars, one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in the world (and a professor at my alma mater actually - I used to try to read his superstring papers when I worked at the graduate physics dept., but they were outlandishly sophisticated), has proposed a fascinating theory that describes our universe as 6-dimensional (2 time and 4 space dimensions, all macroscopic), where the laws of physics are constrained by a specific simple gauge symmetry that perfectly produces the illusion (or "shadow") of our 4D universe. So the only way to detect that it's actually a 6D universe, is by discovering unexpected symmetries in a wide variety of seemingly uncorrelated physical phenomena (and conjugate variables like position and momentum), which we do in fact observe. But there's no way to *prove* it, because in his theory the laws of physics perfectly mimic a 4D universe. However, it may be true - we may be embedded in a 6D universe.

Baloney.

That's the point of science, man! Science ain't science unless you can test it.

By your logic, we may yet find the planet the crew of the USS Enterpoop was looking for in Bloom County:

I mean, you can't prove there's no 'Wild Sorority Girls of Planet Playtex," right? That means it's possible, or even probable! Because QM means anything is possible! Let's go come up with some wild ass theory about it! I mean, it would be super cool to go find it, right? I'd like to check out that planet. Besides, there's some evidence it exists, I mean, the invisible unicorn living in my anus says it's true.

Of course we're going to discover stuff we don't know. We're going to discover it based on what we currently know, and what evidence for testing a hypothesis that it may exist.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Man, that's the rub, isn't it?

I've seen these things move, and they move like a mother. But I've never been in one while they do it, so I have no idea if they have no inertia.

I don't know how they do what they do. Me not having an answer doesn't mean you're right. It's the invisible unicorn living in my anus problem again, right? You can't prove it's not there, therefore I'm right.

Eh - that's not how I see it. Here's how I see it:

Performance characteristics of metric propulsion

- silent hovering without a reaction medium
- dramatic and virtually instantaneous accelerations
- hairpin maneuvers at extreme high speeds without the classical requirement of slowing or banking (aka typical inertial characteristics)
- ideal interstellar travel principle due to extremely low (essentially nil) energy requirements and prospect of superluminal speeds

Performance characteristics of countless independent ufo sightings

- silent hovering without a reaction medium
- dramatic and virtually instantaneous accelerations
- hairpin maneuvers at extreme high speeds without the classical requirement of slowing or banking (aka typical inertial characteristics)
- ideal interstellar travel principle due to extremely low (essentially nil) energy requirements and prospect of superluminal speeds

Other viable proposed explanations for for these characteristics

Nil

Sure, that's not indisputable proof that we have the correct physics explanation. But how cow - the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. And we have no other suspects.

So in my mind, it 100% makes rational sense to pursue gravitational field propulsion. And if anyone can explain these characteristic with another model someday, then we should lean into that idea full-steam too. Because what we've seen simply can't be explained with conventional reaction propulsion methods, and yet we've observed that these performance characteristics are physically realizable. Ergo, we should be working like gangbusters to figure it out and emulate it experimentally someday, and the sooner the better.

Uh, no. I mean yes, that's what the math says but it's not what would actually happen - which betrays a problem.

The guy specifically references weaponizing this. Take two masses, one positive, one negative. Let them accelerate for free to near relativistic speeds. Aim at enemy. When the resultant positive and negative masses impact you at .99C, do you think nothing will happen?

Same goes for perpetual motion.

Same goes for free energy.

Seems like a 'something for nothing' deal that the universe doesn't seem to like. The house always seems to win.

On the other hand, the universe is the ultimate free lunch, and that seemed to work out.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that a gravitational field propulsion device colliding with another object, won't obliterate them both. I'm just saying that once you do all of the energy and momentum accounting on all of the shrapnel, it'll all balance out to zero net change in energy and momentum. For example, the positive mass in the propulsion device will make some of the pieces of the collision object gain positive kinetic energy, but an equal amount of negative kinetic energy will be imparted to the negative mass of the device, because the conservation laws still apply. If folks like Bondi and Forward missed a violation of the conversations laws with this idea, nobody's every published such a finding - not that I'm aware of anyway.

The perpetual motion objection doesn't seem to apply because the device has zero net mass, zero net momentum, and zero net kinetic energy, and it's always in an inertial reference frame - having never undergone acceleration, it's not really even moving through space (like a rocket, for example), rather, the spacetime is undergoing deformation. So it's a sort of loophole via post-Newtonian physics.

And I've never seen any reputable papers looking at this notion of free energy in this area, either pro or con, so I dunno. But here's the wild thing: once you have a body with negative inertia, then you can use it to produce energy as long as that body gains an equal magnitude of negative energy. So it looks like cheating, but in the end the energy accounting should work out down to the penny. That's my assumption anyway, given what I've read so far.

 

[marduk]

Eh - that's not how I see it. Here's how I see it:

Performance characteristics of metric propulsion

- silent hovering without a reaction medium
- dramatic and virtually instantaneous accelerations
- hairpin maneuvers at extreme high speeds without the classical requirement of slowing or banking (aka typical inertial characteristics)
- ideal interstellar travel principle due to extremely low (essentially nil) energy requirements and prospect of superluminal speeds

Performance characteristics of countless independent ufo sightings

- silent hovering without a reaction medium
- dramatic and virtually instantaneous accelerations
- hairpin maneuvers at extreme high speeds without the classical requirement of slowing or banking (aka typical inertial characteristics)
- ideal interstellar travel principle due to extremely low (essentially nil) energy requirements and prospect of superluminal speeds

Other viable proposed explanations for for these characteristics

Nil

Sure, that's not indisputable proof that we have the correct physics explanation. But how cow - the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. And we have no other suspects.

So in my mind, it 100% makes rational sense to pursue gravitational field propulsion. And if anyone can explain these characteristic with another model someday, then we should lean into that idea full-steam too. Because what we've seen simply can't be explained with conventional reaction propulsion methods, and yet we've observed that these performance characteristics are physically realizable. Ergo, we should be working like gangbusters to figure it out and emulate it experimentally someday, and the sooner the better.


On the other hand, the universe is the ultimate free lunch, and that seemed to work out.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that a gravitational field propulsion device colliding with another object, won't obliterate them both. I'm just saying that once you do all of the energy and momentum accounting on all of the shrapnel, it'll all balance out to zero net change in energy and momentum. For example, the positive mass in the propulsion device will make some of the pieces of the collision object gain positive kinetic energy, but an equal amount of negative kinetic energy will be imparted to the negative mass of the device, because the conservation laws still apply. If folks like Bondi and Forward missed a violation of the conversations laws with this idea, nobody's every published such a finding - not that I'm aware of anyway.

The perpetual motion objection doesn't seem to apply because the device has zero net mass, zero net momentum, and zero net kinetic energy, and it's always in an inertial reference frame - having never undergone acceleration, it's not really even moving through space (like a rocket, for example), rather, the spacetime is undergoing deformation. So it's a sort of loophole via post-Newtonian physics.

And I've never seen any reputable papers looking at this notion of free energy in this area, either pro or con, so I dunno. But here's the wild thing: once you have a body with negative inertia, then you can use it to produce energy as long as that body gains an equal magnitude of negative energy. So it looks like cheating, but in the end the energy accounting should work out down to the penny. That's my assumption anyway, given what I've read so far.

All fair.

But as I've said, I still don't buy it's possible for reasons we've beat to death repeatedly in this thread.

So for me, everything you've just said is logically equivalent to 'angels did it' because they also supposedly have the same flight characteristics of these things.

And this:

The perpetual motion objection doesn't seem to apply because the device has zero net mass, zero net momentum, and zero net kinetic energy, and it's always in an inertial reference frame - having never undergone acceleration, it's not really even moving through space (like a rocket, for example), rather, the spacetime is undergoing deformation. So it's a sort of loophole via post-Newtonian physics.

Doesn't work at all. If this thing works, it violates entropy, period. Which is cool if it worked, but for me is a giant red flag that it won't.

I mean, sure the hand waiving says it would have zero net mass and momentum. But I bet that the things I saw would still have flattened me like a pancake if they turned the switch off and I was standing under it.

Where would the energy to do that come from? Nowhere.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Baloney.

That's the point of science, man! Science ain't science unless you can test it.

By your logic, we may yet find the planet the crew of the USS Enterpoop was looking for in Bloom County:

I mean, you can't prove there's no 'Wild Sorority Girls of Planet Playtex," right? That means it's possible, or even probable! Because QM means anything is possible! Let's go come up with some wild ass theory about it! I mean, it would be super cool to go find it, right? I'd like to check out that planet. Besides, there's some evidence it exists, I mean, the invisible unicorn living in my anus says it's true.

Of course we're going to discover stuff we don't know. We're going to discover it based on what we currently know, and what evidence for testing a hypothesis that it may exist.

I think you missed my point: some stuff may be both unknowable, but true. I know that's heresy to the scientific ear, but - omg, Timmy cover your ears - there may be more to existence than the physical sciences.

But my example also points out that there could be more to scientific advancement than physical proofs. Because if we do live in a 6D universe that simply appears to be a 4D universe in every observable way...but the 6D universe model does a better job explaining the underlying fundamental physics of our universe across a wide variety of disparate phenomena - and thereby gives us powerful news theoretical tools for predicting new phenomenological opportunities to exploit technologically, then why not go with the 6D model? It's an issue of pragmatism. If a theory elucidates the nature of physics with superior equations and helps us develop ideas that would simply never have occurred to us otherwise, then I call that a better theory.

After all, physics doesn't really model reality, it just gives us better and better models to envision what we observe, and to predict outcomes, and to develop technologies. It's perfectly possible to have several different models that make the same predictions, for example. Maybe spacetime is actually curved; maybe an underlying quantum field model only makes it appear to be curved; or maybe the laws of physics themselves follow a curve - it's conceivable that all three three models could predict the exact same observational and experimental results. So which one is "the reality?" Well, does it even really matter? What matters is what works. So we go with the model that works best at any given time in history, until a new and better model comes along, which may speak an entirely different language. And that's fine. We may never understand the "true nature of reality." But as long as what we do have works for us, then that's really all that matters.

 

[marduk]

I think you missed my point: some stuff may be both unknowable, but true. I know that's heresy to the scientific ear, but - omg, Timmy cover your ears - there may be more to existence than the physical sciences.

Sure. And there may be an invisible unicorn living in my anus that only talks to me.

We're going around in circles, man. Believe in all things that are possible that you want. That set of things contains a 6D universe, but it also contains leprechauns, unicorns, angels, tarot cards, and an old bearded white guy sitting on a cloud controlling the universe.

Believe it all you want, but don't tell me that me not believing in it because there's no rational, verifiable, testable evidence for it is a belief system.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

So for me, everything you've just said is logically equivalent to 'angels did it' because they also supposedly have the same flight characteristics of these things.

No - that's totally intellectually dishonest. Physicists independently developed a flight principle based on GR which just so happens to match ufo performance characteristics perfectly. And ufos are real, observed and recorded physical phenomena, unlike angels.

Doesn't work at all. If this thing works, it violates entropy, period.

Fine - prove it. I think you'll find that the mathematics of entropy gets weird when you're dealing with negative mass, and that when you do all of the accounting mathematically, it'll all balance out. Because if the energy works out, the entropy works out, imo.

But if you can show me a credible paper that says I'm wrong, cool - do it.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Sure. And there may be an invisible unicorn living in my anus that only talks to me.

We're going around in circles, man. Believe in all things that are possible that you want. That set of things contains a 6D universe, but it also contains leprechauns, unicorns, angels, tarot cards, and an old bearded white guy sitting on a cloud controlling the universe.

Believe it all you want, but don't tell me that me not believing in it because there's no rational, verifiable, testable evidence for it is a belief system.

I hate to break it to you, but physics theories are also belief systems - a very specialized system of beliefs, granted. But theories get overturned all the time, because theories aren't inviolable truths, they're our best guesses. And they only work until they don't. Then we dream up new ones. Like I said before, ultimately theoretical physics s just a highly rigorous and mathematical form of conceptual art. It's unhealthy to worship our own creations. And counterproductive - because we make the biggest leaps forward when our current models fail, and we replace them with better ones.

 

[marduk]

No - that's totally intellectually dishonest. Physicists independently developed a flight principle based on GR which just so happens to match ufo performance characteristics perfectly. And ufos are real, observed and recorded physical phenomena, unlike angels.


Fine - prove it. I think you'll find that the mathematics of entropy gets weird when you're dealing with negative mass, and that when you do all of the accounting mathematically, it'll all balance out. Because if the energy works out, the entropy works out, imo.

But if you can show me a credible paper that says I'm wrong, cool - do it.

Ok, so what do you think would happen if you stood underneath a saucer the size of a city block and they shut the motor off? Nothing?

 

[marduk]

Another thought experiment. Take two 5kg masses, one positive, one negative. Let them accelerate for free to .99C in empty space.

Aim it at me, who sardonically sits on his asteroid home base denying anything that he can't see.

The -5kg mass will hit me first. This should in theory reduce my entropy. How it does that is anybody's guess, but it should result in a more ordered state. Very much so, because -5kg moving at .99C should do a lot. So in a nanosecond, it will wash my dishes, make my bed, fold my clothes, and balance my check book. Or something - that results in an entropy reduction.

Then along comes the 5kg mass a nanosecond later, which vaporizes me, my asteroid base, and my smug grin.

Where did all that come from?

 

[Realm]

I've seen these things move, and they move like a mother.

Care to share some details what you saw, or have you given those elsewhere? Like how many, were they clearly physical objects or just lights, and was it day or night?

But I've never been in one while they do it

So I guess it wasn't those anal probe cases then, one that could explain this:

It's the invisible unicorn living in my anus

Is that the famous pink one?

 

[marduk]

Care to share some details what you saw, or have you given those elsewhere? Like how many, were they clearly physical objects or just lights, and was it day or night?

One sighting was as a child, but was clear and close up, with a buddy of mine. Huge, slow, silent. Cylindrical.

One was as an adult, posted here somewhere. Essentially saw 4 classic discs about a mile away. 747-sized. Over a congested intersection. The only person that seemed to notice was me.

They seemed playful, lazy. Just kind of hung there, doing lazy motions with each other, like you'll see birds do when they're just hanging out. Then they shot off into a cloud bank miles away in a split second.

All of them had absolutely zero surface features that I could make out. No wings, vents, portholes, nothing. Sealed solid objects. Like a pancake. No dome, nothing.

So I guess it wasn't those anal probe cases then, one that could explain this:



Is that the famous pink one?

I didn't make that one up: Unfalsifiability

 

[DROBNJAK]

@marduk would you care to do some drawings?

Like, how it looked from where you stood & reference points, like the intersection, horizon, physical properties etc. With right internal scale, like how thick were they compared to width, did they have a ledge going around etc.

 

[marduk]

@marduk would you care to do some drawings?

Like, how it looked from where you stood & reference points, like the intersection, horizon, physical properties etc. With right internal scale, like how thick were they compared to width, did they have a ledge going around etc.

My art sucks.

Imagine a featureless silver pancake. Looked perfectly circular. 747 sized in diameter (a plane flew by the same spot a bit later) and they were similar in scale.

In height somewhere around 15 feet high or so. Edges were slightly rounded along the rim. Imagine Apple designed a UFO. No ledge, no portholes, no exhaust vents, no features of any kind at all that I could see.

Silver, featureless, hanging there the way bricks don't. Approx a mile or so away, say 300-500 feet up. Viewed towards the east from the intersection of 162 ave and Macleod at about noon on a Saturday. If you know Calgary, they were probably either over the industrial area in Sundance or in the Sikome part of Fish Creek.

 

[DROBNJAK]

so it was 4 of them.

Any kind of movement, like wobbling? Did they change color before they departed? What time of the day was it? When you say like "pancake", did you get impression that they were circular when seen from above (although you were looking side on)?

There seems to be a class of craft that is like that, completely enclosed inside a hull. Can be some design principle.

 

[marduk]

so it was 4 of them.

Any kind of movement, like wobbling? Did they change color before they departed? What time of the day was it? When you say like "pancake", did you get impression that they were circular when seen from above (although you were looking side on)?

There seems to be a class of craft that is like that, completely enclosed inside a hull. Can be some design principle.

It started with three of them, and then a fourth came in from the north.

Have you ever watched birds over the ocean at sunset? They will just sit there, riding thermals. These object’s motion reminded me of that. Honestly, if they weren’t giant silver discs, I would have thought they were birds. They seem to playful, almost social with one another.

They didn’t wobble. They didn’t bank when they moved. I believe they were circular from the top down - when one banked as it was sitting motionless, you could see the disc shape and it glinted in the sunlight. It just kind of went from horizontal and stationary to banking it’s leading edge towards me, and I could see the round disc in the sunlight top down. The underside of the discs were in shadow, and hard to make out, but they looked as featureless as the rest of the disc. I couldn’t tell if they were rotating, because they were so featureless.

Seriously, take on a frying pan, make a perfectly circular pancake, spray paint it chrome, and that’s what I saw.

No color change. No field effect or plasma or aberration around the object that I could see.

It was around noon. Partly cloudy sky. They were partly in front of a cloud bank, and partly in front of the blue sky.

 

[Realm]

One was as an adult, posted here somewhere.

Found it:
May "17th listener roundtable"

Certainly sounds interesting, and also weird if nobody else noticed them. Love it how you display the same sort of honesty there that we have talked about now:

Now I'm not saying that there wasn't some possible prosaic explanation for what I saw but damn it freaked me out.

Obviously I can't know what you saw, so could have been nothing or the real deal for all I know.

Since I haven't seen anything of that nature, I'm just trying to evaluate if there are individual cases that have the sort of features, evidence and credibility that aliens would seem like a reasonable consideration. Clearly the vast majority of cases that have been reported as UFOs are something else, and even the most intriguing stories tend to develop cracks sooner or later. Those that have only one eyewitness, no matter how honest and credible one, are quite problematic, since we all know how the eyes and human mind can perform all sorts of tricks of their own.

For those reasons, I'm not that interested in trying to make conclusions based on some common patterns, as most of the data seems to be noise. Also the stories come pretty much in all shapes and sizes anyway, so there doesn't really seem to be that clear patterns if you try to avoid selection biases etc.

That has basically left me with only a few interesting cases, especially O'Hare and Nimitz, and even O'Hare has just anonymous accounts. I think that in those cases the reported accelerations of those UFOs were high but not instantaneous, so that you could basically try to find an explanation based on e.g. low weight and/or high performance, instead of absolutely requiring something like anti-gravity. Both cases were also similarly characterized as having no obvious means of propulsion, but that also doesn't necessitate something like anti-gravity.

 

[marduk]

Found it:
May "17th listener roundtable"

Certainly sounds interesting, and also weird if nobody else noticed them. Love it how you display the same sort of honesty there that we have talked about now:


Obviously I can't know what you saw, so could have been nothing or the real deal for all I know.

Since I haven't seen anything of that nature, I'm just trying to evaluate if there are individual cases that have the sort of features, evidence and credibility that aliens would seem like a reasonable consideration. Clearly the vast majority of cases that have been reported as UFOs are something else, and even the most intriguing stories tend to develop cracks sooner or later. Those that have only one eyewitness, no matter how honest and credible one, are quite problematic, since we all know how the eyes and human mind can perform all sorts of tricks of their own.

For those reasons, I'm not that interested in trying to make conclusions based on some common patterns, as most of the data seems to be noise. Also the stories come pretty much in all shapes and sizes anyway, so there doesn't really seem to be that clear patterns if you try to avoid selection biases etc.

That has basically left me with only a few interesting cases, especially O'Hare and Nimitz, and even O'Hare just has anonymous accounts. I think that in those cases the reported accelerations of those UFOs were high but not instantaneous, so that you could basically try to find an explanation based on e.g. low weight and/or high performance, instead of absolutely requiring something like anti-gravity. Both cases were also similarly characterized as having no obvious means of propulsion, but that also doesn't necessitate something like anti-gravity.

I’d go off that post from 2009 - that means it took place in 2007, more than 10 years ago. Memory is what it is. Thanks for finding it!