by Ian Brown
Centauri Dreams’ discussions of a foundation to support research into interstellar flight caught the eye of Edinburgh-based science writer Ian Brown. As far as I know, the article that resulted is the first appearance of the new foundation in the mainstream media, and it is reprinted here with the permission of its author and The Scotsman, where it ran on February 4 of this year. Brown discusses the background and thinking behind the still unnamed foundation with Marc Millis, the group’s founding architect. We are very close to a final decision on the name, incidentally; Centauri Dreams will post that news as soon as it is finalized.
The staggering claims submitted in a scientific paper last month (see The Scotsman, January 5th) that we might be able to travel to alien star-systems in months rather than millennia were sensational enough to make the cover of New Scientist magazine.
Don’t plan that trip to Alpha Centauri just yet, though. The ‘hyperdrive’ – which would allow a spacecraft to take a shortcut through an extra dimension of space-time – is based on dauntingly abstruse equations by the late Burkhard Heim. A reclusive German physicist, Heim reads like a character out of Metropolis. Badly disabled in a laboratory accident in his teens, he first mooted the hyperdrive concept in 1957 but lapsed quickly back into obscurity (he died virtually forgotten in 2001). Bemused scientists reviewing the paper’s claims already complain they find much of his work incomprehensible.
But the hyperdrive has at least propelled the tantalising possibility of interstellar (as opposed to mere interplanetary) travel back into the headlines. Could we ever actually bridge the insane distances to the stars within human lifetimes?
NASA scientist Marc Millis, founder and former manager of the agency’s now defunct Breakthrough Physics Propulsion Project (BPPP), remains cautious. “The hyperdrive approach is in such an early stage of development that it is premature to judge its viability,” he warns. “Fortunately, relatively low-cost next steps could be taken by its proponents to help assess the prospects, such as confirming the ability of the Heim theory to predict the masses of sub-atomic particles, and showing the derivations and equations necessary to comprehend the other assertions.
“But it is important to remember that there are many other approaches out there,” he adds. “The best way to determine which of these might merit support is to conduct a competitive research solicitation.”
Millis established the BPPP in 1996 to do just that – act as a clearing house for research into identifying what future technologies just might one day make interstellar journeys possible. But three years ago NASA shelved it to focus its travel plans nearer to home (the Moon by 2018, Mars by 2050). Undaunted, Millis, and a network of collaborators he has built up, aim to launch a separate not-for-profit foundation this year to continue to promote such research.
“Interstellar flight broaches the possibility of finding another place on which to live so that our survival is not limited to one pale-blue dot in the cosmos,” explains Millis. “That has so many profound implications.”
Not least among them is the sheer enormity of what that challenge entails. Even light, travelling at 186,000 miles a second, takes over four years to reach just the nearest star to our own Sun. The Voyager space-probe, the fastest man-made object ever built, would take over 80,000 years to get there. No wonder many scientists think interstellar travel is a goal far too far.
“When it comes to travelling faster than light the challenge is indeed daunting,” agrees Millis. “There is plenty of physics to suggest that this is impossible, and the theories that challenge this limit all evoke time travel paradoxes. On the other hand, when it comes to the goal of a ‘space drive’ – a non-rocket breakthrough – there is no physics to say that it is impossible, but conversely, no proven physics yet to suggest how to achieve it.”
That’s where the proposed new foundation comes in. It will create a network of researchers amongst academia, industry, the military and government to explore the most promising candidate technologies. They will share information, review and critically assess each other’s work. “The immediate core already spans Belgium, Italy, Austria as well as the US,” Millis says. “I have not yet tapped into the deeper network of interstellar practitioners out there, including some in the UK.
“We won’t be able to offer research grants, however, until after we secure substantial philanthropic donations. So far we have one financial benefactor who is taking care of our start-up costs in addition to all the volunteer help from my network of professionals. We don’t yet have a sales-pitch document to seek serious funding. But the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) institute is one model I’ve looked at.”
Possible names for the foundation include the Interstellar Propulsion Foundation, the Deep Future Foundation, the Centauri Foundation and the Blue-Shift Foundation. “One thing that we have adopted,” Millis says, “is the sub-title ad astra incrementis, which means ‘to the stars in steps, where each is larger than before’.”
Millis joined NASA in 1982. His earliest publication on interstellar propulsion was in 1990. “From there I started to encounter other like-minded researchers. That was the start of the group that led to this foundation.”
So what are the most promising candidates to propel Earth’s first starship? They range from near-term technology – light-sails, anti-matter, ion engines – to the seemingly fantastic -warping space-time (or ‘metric engineering’ in the new buzz-word) or tunnelling through wormholes. All are up for serious consideration.
“All of the options, even those based on technology we could launch today, have pros and cons,” Millis emphasises. “If the emphasis is on ‘cheap’ and ‘launch now’, with little regard for how long an interstellar probe will take to reach its destination, the clear winner is some form of solar-sail. If shorter missions or larger payloads are desired, the choices become more difficult. From here it breaks down into two branches; emerging technology, and undiscovered physics.
“The challenge with the emerging technology, which builds on known physics, is the ‘incessant obsolescence postulate’. This states that no matter when an interstellar probe is launched, it will be passed by a more modern probe launched later. The question then isn’t so much ‘can we’ but what are the most important design factors to work toward: cheap, available now, quickest trip, size of payload, etc?
“When it comes to undiscovered physics, where the intent is to circumvent all our current technological limits with faster-than-light breakthroughs, the question isn’t so much which is better but rather what are the next steps that we need to take to sort through all these crazy ideas? The point is to figure out the most reasonable next steps that we can actually afford and then have the best practitioners explore them and share the lessons.”
Does he think in his gut we’ll ever be able to reach across the light years to other solar systems? “I am certain that a dedicated interstellar probe will one day be launched,” he says. “I’m not sure when or by whom, but it is inevitable if humanity sustains some degree of vision about its future. But even if the desired breakthroughs turn out to be impossible, we will at least add to scientific and technical progress.
“What I am absolutely certain about is that we stand far more to gain in the attempt than to give up without trying. Discovering the means to allow humanity to live beyond Earth deals with our very survival and destiny as a species. It is not a trivial, discretionary issue. It would be socially irresponsible not to be asking such questions.”
For news about the foundation’s progress, visit www.centauri-dreams.org
For a further outline of the challenges involved in interstellar propulsion, visit www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/warp.html
Very interesting. We should fully fund this type of research. If we don’t try, we will die. If we really try and don’t quit, we will eventually succeed.
at this moment i do not have anything to say except that i agree 100 percent with sid above. a good idea would be if we all used this heading to take our best shots at the problem to see what shakes out – then i will talk your ear off ! can’t wait for all of the ideas to start pouring in.and dont worry if you think the idea has been heard before or is not the best.what you say may just trigger another idea in its reader and then we will be off!!! i’m very glad that i found this site and look forward to making the most of it.respectfully,your friend george scaglione
what i don’t get is…how come a subject like this…pregnant with possibilities just sits untouched week after week!? come on folks – stardrives – the reason for this site!!how can nobody have anything to say since july 18th and october 7th ?!! but ok let me have a look from another point of view.stardrives,i know,are not easy! but consider this : in a couple of hundred years the human race will probably be all over this solar system with bases in every reasonable place ! propulsion will be fusion engines and matter/anti-matter (maybe not the same as star trek but pretty cool none the less!! maybe at that point the workable star drive breakthrough will emerge and that then my friends will be about time!! thanks your friend george scaglione
WE NEED THE HYPERDRIVE PROPULSION IF WE WANT TO SURVIVE
What is the US government do about it? As you all can see the TV show “Big Brother” nobody sustain long enoght for 3 months. Only one person(with limited psychically condition) survives to the end. And NASA want to send people to Mars with traveltime 8-9 months!? If we want to explore OUR Solar system(first before the stars) we need Hyperdrive propulsion to reach our targets in a matter of hours and days, not in months and years! The resorces are quickly exhausted and in 30-40 years we will have Earth population 20 billion and even synthetic materials can’t help us to survive! I DON’T CARE IF IT IS WARP DRIVE, SLIPSTREAM DRIVE, WORMHOLE, HYPERDRIVE OR ANY OTHER FTL DEVICE! WE NEED ONLY ONE OF THEM AND QUICK!
You do realize that the list of FTL and “hyperdrives” that you
talk about are hypothetical at best and bad science fiction at
their worst.
Do you have any idea of what it would take to build FTL ships,
or if they are even possible due to the laws of physical reality?
We can build ships to reach the nearby stars in human lifetimes,
but unless some aliens with FTL drive starships decide to contact
humanity and give us the technology, we need to be a bit more
practical in how to explore the galaxy. We are still being surprised
by what is out there just beyond the realm of our planets.
No space engineer or funding agency is going to take seriously
a group of people who shout WE NEED HYPERDRIVE TO CONQUER
THE STARS without a real, practical foundation of engineering and
science behind them, or a goal besides “We wanna know what’s
out there.”
Real life is not Star Trek.
There is no economical need for now to make Hyperdrive propulsion system. NASA will not control the future of space exploration and space colonization! NASA in 20-30 years will collapse! The MEGACORPS WILL MAKE THIS POSSIBLE! DONT FORGET IT!
THANKS FOR YELLING! I AM SO SURE NASA WILL BE GONE
IN 20 YEARS NOW THAT YOU HAVE SHOUTED IT!
Speaking about NASA and GlobalCorp controls…..
I just now tried to find photos of the Blue Angels crash site.
Couldn’t. Nothing on any major media site. Wasn’t looking for gore,
was seeing how much our military controls the media. I’m thinking
that, given the lack of photos — including on CNN — there’s a sore
thumb, red flag, Big Brother, tell that’s easily seen here.
When the space shuttle crashed we had detailed photos of almost
everything, but that was NASA getting a black eye — not our
military’s beloved symbols of macho white knight kickass warriors of
righteousness who fly 30 million dollar God’s Wrath death machines.
I’m thinking the military is showing much more media clout than NASA.
I call myself a soft conspiracy nut. I think this sort of thing is
well within my parameters of “being real.” What would it take? I
think that maybe a dozen phone calls from the staff of a Navy Admiral
to the bosses of media was all it took — that and promises of special
offers to be invited on various luxury junkettes. See? Not much
doings, not much of a paper/phone-trail to uncover, and done deal.
Only a few people have to be trusted, and each of the trusted ones
have so much to lose if they rat-out the deal, that silence reigns.
On the other hand, it might not be a cover-up. In today’s world, even
though the crash site was literally hundreds of yards long with dozens
of small fires, in a neighborhood, and given that just about everyone
has a cell phone camera, there must have been thousands upon thousands
of photos taken before the authorities surrounded everything with
yellow-don’t-cross tape. So, alternately, if we ask where are the
photos, we might just only now start seeing them being released — the
photographers are all probably thinking they’ve got shots that the
media would pay big bucks for and they’re still negotiating for the
purchase of the photos.
But if we don’t get to see these photos, then, just like the coffins
of our dead Iraq soldiers, we the masses are being psychologically
manipulated. This isn’t necessarily a sign of some wicked back room
cabal ruling the world, but it sure could be one Admiral with a bug up
his ass.
This is the environment that FTL research must find a way to politically survive.
Good luck, eh?
Edg
I know about the work of Professor Jochem Hauser for the US Government. I also know about the “Z machine” that could generate the kind of magnetic fields required to drive the engine(Hyperspace engine). The last news about this project was announced in 05.01.2006 http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=16902006 The problem is that there is no new news about the work. Can anyone tell me if there is something new? I’m searching in CNN and somewhere else, but I find every time the same information. I BEG YOU TO TELL ME WHATS GOIN ON! I WANT MORE INFO!
I am currently trying to obtain funding for postgraduate study into gamma-ray bursts. For those who do not know, gamma-ray bursts are sudden random releases of huge bursts of broadband energy. Their appearance is unpredictable, and the number observed is now into the thousands.
Now, why should this impinge upon the search for FTL?
Let me propose the following to you:
as a vessel accelerates towards relativistic velocities, space compresses in front of it forming a bow-wave. Of necessity, time must dilate at normal to the direction of travel, so, say, for example, 10 LY compresses to 1000 miles, while time, dilating laterally to keep the sums right, collapses to 10 seconds. The vessel punches through the bow-shock, and the result would be an enormous burst of energy. Since the various parts of the math are self compensating, Einstein would not be spinning in his grave.
Now, we have been told that it is impossible for any large body to remain intact as it approaches relativistic velocities. This argument is used to excuse the apparent lack of real evidence of relativistic mass increase in the universe. If large objects would disintegrate at these sorts of velocities, then they would not be there for us to observe, – Q.E.D., – and yet a star has been discovered which is travelling at 0.05 C, and the proposition is that there will be many others, some even faster.
It’s just a thought.
Daft thought number two:
accelerating at a constant one G, an object would only take about 355 days to reach C.
How does the university or whoever you are working for feel
about your incorporating FTL starship travel in your concept?
This is not a comment on you, it is just my concern that any
mention of starships and/or especially aliens tends to make
most so-called higher educational institutes and their embedded
staff clench.
If you can work on this concept and it is based on real physics
and does not go off into la-la land, then more power to you.
I am not introducing these concepts into the rarefied atmosphere of academe, – I am simply suggesting that someone, far much cleverer than I, may be able to make sense out of my pathetic meanderings, and thereby advance the matter just a teeny bit further.
It may be total nonsense: I don’t know. I only suggest it as a possibility to allow others who are much wiser and more sensible than am I, to consider it as a possibility. No more than that.
IF, however, I get my grant, – then I will try to tie the matters together, since I sense that it could be possible, – but first I need about nine thousand pounds stirling, – and that is not forthcoming. Hence my desire to tell others about my crackpot ideas, in order that they do not die with me.
Over the last fifty years, I have built and proven inertial engines, – in boats because that way you can see what is happening, – and I know that we could build an inertial drive which would give a constant standard acceleration, – but, hey! what do I know? I am only an old fart. I studied decades ago and have just come back to study and have finished my third year, hoping to do a PhD.
I was a working scientist/physicist for nearly half a century, and a good inventor, with several hundred patents which were either in my name or my employers’ name, – usually the latter.
I forgot to mention that we run a BSc in Science Fiction, which includes science communication, astronomy, astrophysics, science fiction and life in the universe (LITU) at my university. So aliens are given serious treatment as are such matters as non-anthropocentic views, and alien communication problems. As a bit of a linguist, I find this fascinating!
Ta ta.
Bob
Bob, that’s interesting re the BSc in science fiction — what university are you affiliated with?
University of Glamorgan, Trefforest, Pontypridd, CF37 1DL, Wales, UK.
Phone no.(44) 1443 480 480.
Hi Bob
Particle accelerators have to compensate for mass-increase all the time, so what’s the “non-evidence” for relativistic mass-increase you’re talking about?
That being said I’m not personally convinced that every case of visible super-luminal motion in the far cosmos is just a subluminal relativistic illusion. Some pretty tricky geometry is needed to look like super-cee motion.
Don’t know about your “bow-wave” idea, or your inertial drives. How do they work? Can you elaborate on the set-up and how they’re hooked up to boats – not a bad idea for a test-rig that.
Well, I would expect to see macro evidence. A particle accelerator does just that, nothing more, and in the micro cosmos, whereas the star which is travelling at 0.05 C is existing in the macro cosmos contrary to everything we were once told, yet appears to be exhibiting none of the distortions which I would expect to see as a result of its velocity. But like I said, what do I know?
The idea of using a model boat as a test rig seemed obvious when examining the way in which stepping motors worked, – you know, – one step forward, grip, next step forward, grip etc.
In water there is not much grip, so that if an engine could exert a directional intertial thrust then it would become apparent. You can blame John W. Campbell for getting me onto this tack about fifty years ago in his Analog editorials.
So I messed around with design and managed to get something which simply pulled the toy boat across the lake – jerkily, but with no external thrust to the water. Whether it would work anywhere else, I do not know, but at least I proved to myself that JWC’s theories had a possibility of success.
You see, the device- thruster- engine – what the heck you want to call it is simply fixed inside the hull of the toy boat, pointed forward, connected to a battery and allowed to pull away. So it goes all over the shop until you set two motors side by side running one clockwise, the other anticlockwise. This tends to cancel out the swerving attributable to the original design.
As it stands, it has no practical application except possibly to keep racing car tyres on the road, but it’s a fun toy to fart about with.
The idea of the ‘bow-shock’ seemed to me a possible effect of relativistic velocities in a macro cosmos if such existed. I wondered how they could be observed, how they would manifest themselves, and came to the conclusion that anything hitting those speed ranges must produce some observable effect, and because of, – or despite the Drake Equation, – I am convinced that there is ‘life, but not as we know it Jim’ out there, and that some will be ahead of us, some behind, I figured that if I was right then that manifestation would be a massive broadband energy burst, and that because of the nature of the beastie, these would be scattered at random through the universe. It may be that if we could discover millions of them, we would be able to observe distinct groupings which would indicate foci for shipping lanes, but it is highly likely that my ideas are total bollocks. However – the discovery of gamma-ray bursts sort of fits the bill, since these are very much short lived, and release the energy of millions of suns very briefly.
I am carefully avoiding specific figures here, because I don’t want to lose my audience. I am sure that there is someone out there who, with the right encouragement, will produce the answer. However, I doubt that he or she will be an academic, since almost every real new discovery has come from amateurs, and I don’t want them to lose the vague thread that I am trying to pursue.
As I said, probably total bollocks but – who knows?
Thanks for the interest.
Bob.
Hi Bob
Super-luminal shock-waves aren’t totally silly – that’s what Cherenkov radiation is after all, just not en vaco.
I don’t know about the energy level – if you liberate a gamma-ray burst every time you go super-cee it must be damned unhealthy for the local environment. I have seen a paper that links super-luminal motion and gamma-bursts… I think. I’ve browsed a lot of papers on the PrePrint arXive. I’ll dig it up for you and the rest of the Centauri Dreamers…
Your “impellor” sounds interesting – kind of like the Dean Drive – which unfortunately went to the grave with its inventor. I thought Davis mechanics had been disproven by experiment in the 1960s?
Adam
Hi All
Well that was easier than I thought it’d be…
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0701634
Are Radio Sources and Gamma Ray Bursts Luminal Booms?
Authors: Manoj Thulasidas
(Submitted on 23 Jan 2007)
Abstract: The softening of a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) afterglow bears remarkable similarities to the frequency evolution in a sonic boom. At the front end of the sonic boom cone, the frequency is infinite, much like a GRB. Inside the cone, the frequency rapidly decreases to infrasonic ranges and the sound source appears at two places at the same time, mimicking the double-lobed radio sources. Although a “luminal” boom violates the Lorentz invariance and is therefore forbidden, it is tempting to work out the details and compare them with existing data. This temptation is further enhanced by the observed superluminality in the celestial objects associated with radio sources and some GRBs. In this article, we calculate the temporal and spatial variation of observed frequencies from a hypothetical luminal boom and show remarkable similarity between our calculations and current observations.
Comments: Accepted for publication in IJMP-D (International Journal of Modern Physics D). 16 pages and 10 figures
Subjects: Astrophysics (astro-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:astro-ph/0701634v1
Bob,
I think the bow shock concept should prove to have some merit. Any given region of space is largely occupied by streams of photos (of varying energy wavelengths) criss-crossing it from every direction. A relativistic object moving through this medium should reflect this background energy. From its leading edges, these reflected energy waves should exhibit an increased momentum/energy that’s delivered to them from the momentum of the relativistic object.
That is what was infrared might become visible light, reflected forward from the leading edges of the passing object.
On all things to do with motion, according to the Usenet Physics FAQ the third derivative of position (i.e. the rate of change of acceleration) is known as “jerk” – it’s the official System Internationale term, though there’s no official symbol like “v” (1st derivative) or “a” (2nd derivative) but “j” is pretty common.
How bizarre. There is something new to learn every day.
Adam
PS The Physics FAQ also has some interesting discussions of super-luminal motion.
Hi. I have sent an email to Manoj Thulasidas inviting him to contribute to this site. Let’s hope he does!
Manoj has emailed me that he is out of the country on family matters for a couple of weeks, but will contact when he returns.
Hi Bob
That’s cool. Fantastic news! Wonder what he can tell us to add to his paper’s ideas?
Hi Bob, Adam and others,
Thanks for discussing my article here.
The article is basically a comparison between the frequency evolution in a sonic boom and the spectral evolution observed in GRBs and AGN radio sources. In other words, it asks the question if a bulk object (a star, for instance) moves across our field of vision at FTL speeds, what will we see? The answer is a good fit to GRBs and radio sources.
I have an animation in my website illustrating it, which can be accessed from the menu: Topics > Physics > Animation, or going directly to
http://TheUnrealUniverse.com/anim.shtml.
The main objection to this line of thinking is that nothing can travel FTL, so what is the point in speculating? The counter argument to this objection usually becomes an involved and lengthy philosophical expose (which is half my book :)). My view is that SR (the coordinate transformation part of it, that is) is a perceptual effect because space itself is a perceptual effect. IOW, objects may travel FTL. Just that we may see them as GRBs or symmetric objects or as obeying SR etc.
– cheers,
– Manoj
Hello to everyone,
I´m from mexico, im following this news since it appers last year, and i have to say that it is very interesting, never the less we have to be realistics, this is only a theory, a very peculiar and interesting theory but just a theory and thats´s all, anything has been verified, i has not been tested and had no plans for it in the future, i hear that the Large Hadron Collider could give us some light in the bases of this theory but i dont know how much or even if it´s true that they will try it, anyway this concept is amazing, if true will change the vision of the universe from our viewpoint, a long time ago i read somewhere that earth is the craddle of mankind, mankind is growing and learning and maturing, we can not be in our craddle forever, we have to go and find new homes, new realms for mankind and this could bring us a light in our cloudy future, i hope that sandia labs put an effort and try this theory with the Z-machine, we can only hope for the best.
Vladimir Galindo.
Time passes and things change. For reasons which I do not understand, this discussion was terminated. Ho hum. The update is that having completed a Masters in Science communication by examining the “”Wow!” Signal”, I seem to now be doing a PhD in interpretation of the many extra-terrestrial signals which we keep receiving, by employing von Neuman Mathematics, Zipf analyses etc, cos we have received a shed load of signals which may or may not contain data and there is a way of determining whether or not an incomprehensible signal actually contains data or not. Translating that is several orders of magnitude up the scale – we still can’t talk to dolphins, despite many decades of trying, because we do not have a contextual framework in which to put their signals. Wish me luck! I’ll come back to the original subject once I’ve got this PhD out of the way. Most of it is done, but the uni always wants you to prove that you have spent years researching the study. Well, guys, I’m 70 next year, and I have spent years researching the subject. The only reasons I went back to academe (2004) were to plug in to the language , philosophy and methodology, and to update myself into the current mind-set, and gain current credibility.
See y’all
Bob
Oh yes, and to look at all the pretty girls!
Well done, Bob! What an ambitious thing to do, to go after a PhD in your 60s. Well done, and please keep us posted on how it’s going and where your current work leads.
Hi all,
I am very, very sceptical that – as far as FTL travel goes – relativity and/or quantum mechanics wil ever do it. If we want to travel interstellar distances measured in tens or hundreds of lightyears, and do that within practical timeframes (days, weeks – months at the most), we need to understand what spacetime really is. Has it ever occured to you that the standard relativistic definition of gravity (= distortion of spacetime fabric) doesn’t explain gravity at all?! How can you “explain” gravity by referring to a more fundamental concept (spacetime) that is completely unexplained?
Let me ask this: what is distance? Have you ever wondered? Think about it. What determines that two arbitrary points in space (or regions thereof) are distinct? Somehow energy and information, flowing and transforming, can “recognize” that distinction, but our current physics definetely cannot. The linear, cartesian type of space is treated in physics as a given. But why should it?
Let’s now go a bit further. According to general relativity there are no such things as separate space and separate time. There is only spacetime, whose nature is interpreted by our human perception as being composed of two components. If so, if indeed spacetime is a single quality, then there is a fundamental discrepancy between this conclusion of GR, and the rest of physics, which treats time very differently from space (e.g. Arrow of Time). What GR basically says is that if you really insisted on presenting spacetime as a cartesian coordinate system (for which there is no objective justification, btw), you’d need to draw 3 (three) axes, each being simultaneously an axis of space, and axis of time (but that only according to our classical schizmatic understanding of dual space-vs-time reality concept). Then if you’ve already drawn that 3D spacetime cartesian mesh, try to do some linear transitions or rotations of a point or a polygon. Will such a geometrical operation reflect our old good laws of mechanics and thermodynamics correctly if we count in the fact that every transition is taking place not only in space, but in time as well? … Or perhaps, comes a thought, we should altogether review our favorite coordinate system and replace it with something more accurate? Maybe cartesian, being admittedly very useful in classical regimes, is yet completely unfit for modelling true spacetime fabric interrelations?
What about matter? What is it really, in terms of EM waves? If matter is indeed composed of closed-loop resonant photons (as some claim), there should be obviously a whole spectrum of different wavebands that define basic properties of such matter. If so, then what are the principles of interaction between two matter particles that occupy different regions of the matter frequency spectrum? Can it be that particles resonating in significantly higher or lower bands do not easily interact with the so-called “common” matter, that we, humans see everyday around us? Would that lack of interaction account for the so-called dark matter? Would it allow two macroscopic objects whose molecules reside in two distant waveband regions occupy the same physical space simultaneously? Will higher/lower frequencies on the matter spectrum affect different physical constants, such as the cosmological constant or c? Will some novel, non-cartesian coordinate system show those relationships? Would spacetime vs velocity vs acceleration vs inertia relationships change in different frequency regimes? Does vacuum or spacetime itself stretch along a similar frequency spectrum? Would the lack of strong interaction between different wavebands of vacuum account for the so-called dark energy? Would vacuum frequency define the frequency of matter, effectively slicing reality into an onion-like structure of multiple layers of different frequency bands? Can a star system have its own “shadow” in another vacuum/matter waveband spectrum? How would we count or measure the differences between layers? In hertz? Seconds? Phase degrees?
Where’s the role of magnetism in all this, btw? What about sonic medium? Can we simulate multilayered vacuum in a lab with the use of sound? …
See? Just a few simple questions. AFAIK, none of them answered yet. Bearing that in mind, my plea to all researchers, thinkers and scientists is: don’t cling to relativity or quantum mechnics at all costs. Don’t ponder the significance of the 11th dimension of a vibrating superstring or M-brane. It simply won’t do. Think outside the box, and most importantly: design/propose relevant experiments. Or if you’re theoretically-inclined, always ensure that your theory makes measurable/verifiable predictions, always have the lab set in mind. Only this, only such an aggressive application-oriented approach will stand a chance of turning our shared dream into reality. All beyond that is just wishful thinking and load of unnecessary spam-talk.
And remember: always be bold with your hypotheses, theories and ideas, as only the crazy ones are likely to be deep enough to give us the true understanding.
P0wer to all!
P.S. I daresay, one day this blog will turn into a travel report from a place 4.35LY away.
I too am unable to find any information on Burkhard Heim hyperdrive more recent than 2006. What has happened in the past three years? I am also curious about high frequency gravity wave propulsion.
Mark, Eric Davis discusses Heim theory and the later Droscher/Hauser extension of it, in our Frontiers of Propulsion Science book, but even his comment is quite short. Basically, the problem is that the Heim theory variants are still in a highly theoretical state. What is needed is work done in the peer review process so that other scientists can examine and debate the results, so that the theory behind this can get fully worked out to the point where experimental options in the lab are available. Right now we’re at the earliest stages of investigation, and I don’t see new work coming out from the Heim theory proponents. I assume such is in progress, and given the complexity of the theory, I’m not sure how long this will take.
just found Bob Sunmans comments – one g it is!
Just a comment here…one thing we have to remember with talking about the possibility of FTL travel. Up until the last 40’s, many reputable scientists thought that travel even to the Moon would be impossible. Why??…because of the energy requirements needed to escape the gravity well of our planet. At one stage it was even considered impossible to fly at speeds faster than sound, or even to fly. During the middle of the 19th Century, many top scientists believed that traveling faster than 50mph was impossible for people, as the air pressure would crush them!!!. Yet only 20-30 years later, trains could routinely travel twice that speed along sections of track.
SR itself doesn’t explicitly forbid travel faster than light, only travel at light speed. The equations actually allow for objects to travel faster, only that they can’t travel at the speed of light by decelerating. There appears to be a barrier that prevents doing so. The scientific community have done themselves and the general public a great disservice in the last century or so by promulgating the false assumption of nothing being able to travel faster than light. In doing so, they have basically painted themselves into a theoretical corner by creating a paradigm of thought which has hindered their efforts. They need to look beyond their light boxes and start to think imaginatively, seek the weird ideas, propose the outrageous…because it might just be one of those ideas that gets us there.
It’s a pity that governments are too busy spending vast sums of money on pointless exercises (e.g. wars, bailing out corrupt institutions, feathering their own nests etc) than spending it on worthwhile pursuits such as this effort. The amount of money they would need for research and development would be a fraction of the amount they waste each year. In an aside, the NASA budget, $19billion/year, is a disgrace. 0.5% of the annual U.S. budget. It could be 3 or 4 times that and the government wouldn’t even know it was missing from their budget.
There is a difference between previous ‘barriers’ and lightspeed.
In times past, if someone thought that it was impossible for a human craft to travel faster than sound in air, then it was because it was not expected to be technologically possible to do so. While the skeptic may have been surprised – *very* surprised – to discover that it was, in fact, possible after all, it would not have shaken any fundamental parts of their philosophy. They already knew that it was physically possible for objects to travel faster than sound in air – even if just for small periods of time.
In the case of FTL, however, we have never seen *anything* travel faster than light. While SR itself does not rule out the possibility, it does imply that violations of causality can happen if objects can travel FTL.
So if FTL is possible, then either SR is wrong – or, more interestingly, we are misunderstanding what it is telling us – or something in our understanding of causality has to give.
I’m not going to say that FTL is impossible. I simply do not know one way or the other. I definitely *want* to know, because I want my starship to be equipped with the best drive money can steal.
My point is just that current objections to FTL are genuinely more fundamental than seemingly analogous objections from past times.
By the way, I would be interested to see evidence for the claim that “During the middle of the 19th Century, many top scientists believed that traveling faster than 50mph was impossible for people, as the air pressure would crush them”. I’ve heard similar claims before, and I don’t think they’re true. Top scientists of that time would have understood perfectly well that a one gravity acceleration of a sealed vehicle would produce an atmospheric pressure gradient equivalent to that of the Earth, so unless the vehicle was several miles long it wouldn’t be a problem. And even then, 1g is significantly greater acceleration than they were thinking of. And the vehicle isn’t sealed anyway. I suspect that such claims were actually made by lesser scientists at best, and more probably by non-scientists.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t affect the argument.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24211/
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Hyperdrive Propulsion Could Be Tested At The LHC
The principle behind a novel form of spacecraft propulsion could be tested at the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
In 1924, the influential German mathematician David Hilbert published a paper called “The Foundations of Physics” in which he outlined an extraordinary side effect of Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Hilbert was studying the interaction between a relativistic particle moving towards or away from a stationary mass. His conclusion was that if the relativistic particle had a velocity greater than about half the speed of light, a stationary mass should repel it. At least, that’s how it would appear to a distant inertial observer.
That’s an interesting result and one that has been more or less forgotten, says Franklin Felber an independent physicist based in the US (Hilbert’s paper was written in German).
Felber has turned this idea on its head, predicting that a relativistic particle should also repel a stationary mass. He says this effect could be exploited to propel an initially stationary mass to a good fraction of the speed of light.
The basis for Felber’s “hypervelocity propulsion” drive is that the repulsive effect allows a relativistic particle to deliver a specific impulse that is greater than its specific momentum, thereby achieving speeds greater than the driving particle’s speed . He says this is analogous to the elastic collision of a heavy mass with a much lighter, stationary mass, from which the lighter mass rebounds with about twice the speed of the heavy mass.
What’s more, Felber predicts that this speed can be achieved without generating the sever stresses that could damage a space vehicle or its occupants. That’s because the spacecraft follows a geodetic trajectory in which the only stresses arise from tidal forces (although it’s not clear why those forces wouldn’t be substantial) .
That’s a neat idea and little better than science fiction were it not for one further corollary: Felber is proposing an experiment that could prove his ideas or damn them.
It turns out that when it is up and running, the LHC will accelerate particles to the kind of energies that generate this repulsive force. Felber’s idea is to set up a test mass next to the beam line and measure the forces on it as the particles whizz past.
The repulsive force the Felber predicts will be tiny but could be detected using resonant test mass. And since the experiment wouldn’t interfere with the LHC’s main business of colliding particles, it could be run in conjunction with it.
While the huge energy of the LHC make it first choice for such an experiment, Felber says the effect could also be seen at Fermilab’s Tevatron, albeit with a signal strength that would be three orders of magnitude smaller.
Perhaps that’s something to consider as a last hurrah for the old Tevatron, before they begin mothballing it sometime next year.
Ref: http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.1084: Test of Relativistic Gravity for Propulsion at the Large Hadron Collider
A bit of a sad update: I started working at Cardiff U. under Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, who is a polite and gentle gentleman, and who has served Cardiff for about 38 years. Because the powers that be do not understand what we are doing, they have closed the Cardiff Centre for AstroBiology (CCAB) down, and are refusing to renew Chandra’s contarct in August this year. My personal view is that this is a shameful way to treat a person. It has knocked all the stuffing out of him, and has had very negative effects upon his PhD students.
They are trying to place us in other disciplines, and that also is unwelcome.
SHAME on Cardiff University and on David Grant, the Vice Chancellor.
When man does finally make contact, and it will be sooner rather than later, let it be remembered that David Grant and his minions closed down a vital study centre.
We will survive somehow, but we are now in need of a new bulding, since we have been evicted from 2 North Road, Cardiff, as of yesterday, 20th March 2010.
We won’t let that shameful date be forgotten.
Sorry, that should read Contract, not ‘contarct’!
Jochem Hauser and Walter Droscher published a paper for an American Institute of Physics conference on “Space, Propulsion & Energy Sciences”. It concluded: “All trip times given in Dröscher and Hauser (2004) remain unchanged, but as can be seen from the specifications above, technical requirements were substantially reduced and should be feasible employing current technology. The reason for this change is boson instead of fermion (vacuum polarization) coupling.”
The conference took place February 23-25, 2010. You can’t get much more current than that.
Emerging Physics for Novel Field Propulsion Science
Jochem Hauser and Walter Dröscher
Faculty H, Ostfalia Univ. of Applied Sciences
Campus Suderburg, Germany
Institut fur Grenzgebiete der Wissenschaft
6010 Innsbruck, Austria
jh@hpcc-space.de
http://www.hpcc-space.de/publications/documents/AIP2010Hauser.pdf
Will faster than light travel permit backward time travel? And if there is more than one past, present and future, is it possible to control which one we end up in? It is not necessary to travel to an exact point on the time line which led to the present. On a dinosaur safari one could be off by millenia.
Random travel to parallel universes is even more fantastic. Anything would be possible, including travelling to worlds which were not denuded by people. Humans have been causing mass extinctions since the ice age. The sensible thing, however, is to travel to the future first. That is definitely possible.
Suppose one were to travel to a galaxy 33 million light years away at 33 million times the speed of light, and suppose one returned at the same speed. Would one travel 65,999,998 years backwards in time, and would one end up in a world which split off from our time line two years earlier? Travelling to an exact point on the time line which led to the present is a contradiction and unnecessary.
One could instantly communicate with the present by relaying a directional signal to the galaxy and back to Earth. According to Faster than Light: Superluminal Loopholes in Physics, by Nick Herbert, light produces advanced waves, which travel backwards in time. That would permit sending a reply.
Just come back for a look at your comments, world: can anything travel faster than light?
Light propagates in two planes, the p and the s. If you slow down the p, then the s accelerates to compensate andkeep the sum tidy, so it actually exceeds the propagation velocity of light in a vacuum. This leads me to consider that it may not be possible to travel at C, but it should be possible to exceed it. The piper would need to be paid somehow: we just need to find out how.
Other evidence of effective FTL apparently lies in experiments with identical twins, where one twin experiences the pain of a stimulus applied to the other, even when separated by half the world, at exactly the same moment at which the stimulus is applied.
Another, so I have read, is the behaviour of quantum entangled particles, in which practical instantaneity is claimed to occur.
Can I have my spaceship now please?
Having just had the pleasure of watching the movie, “Mouse on the Moon”, I am struck by the essence of this, in that it, as a joke, emphasizes the weak force as a propulsive mechanism rather than using huge amounts of power to achieve the same end. As an apprentice engineer, I was often told that the secret of success was to “simplicate and take away weight”.
Maybe – just maybe – the ways in which we are trying to “conquer” space- time fails to recognise that these themselves are weak forces, and that instead of trying to blast a hole through fog, we would do better to understand its characteristics, and slide gently through it: but what do I know? It’s just that I would like other, competent people to think about my stupid ideas, because what we are doing is like driving a six inch nail into oak with a hammer. It doesn’t work.
Dear Manoj and Bob,
i am a Diplom Biologist from Germany and also have a M.Sc. in microbiology with biological waste water treatment as thesis topic. Therefore i learned how to look at and plot data. Mathematics and derivation of formulas is not my world and thus breakthrough propulsion physics can only be a non-rigorous topic for me.
To come back to your posts from 2007 and after, can you identify any type of gamma ray burst that seems to concentrate in the plane of the milky way or at most also in nearby galaxies? Please post. I seem to remember a map of the sky with over which gamma ray bursts were spread fairly evenly.
Sorry to read about your institute, i hope you can find a better university for you and your grad. students. Until more is known about spacetime, nanotechnology might help. It seems a lot easier to accelerate a capable probe weighing a few grams to 0.1-0.5 c than a probe weighing tons. Thus places like Alpha Centauri or Gliese 581 might be within reach for a probe taking a 40 year trip.
Sincerely, Karl G. Themel
A recent article in New Scientist, examining extremophiles, mentions that the sphagnum moss ejects its spores so fast that they experience accelerative forces equivalent to 36,000 g. or 218 miles per second, putting c at 14 minutes and 13.2 seconds. So some earth-bound critters can’t half shift! I wonder if, at such an acceleration, relativistic forces apply to the spores? Happy 2011 everyone.
Hello world – or at least the three people who might read this if they have really nothing better to do, I think I must have had a bad night on absinthe or something, because I had the following thoughts, – which, in keeping with everything else I have posted, are undoubtedly nonsense.
Speed is not absolute but is relative. Therefore, the speed at which I travel from a to b is relative to both a and b. If the surface upon which I am travelling is also speeding from its own a to its own b, then that is not relevant to my speed, which is centred upon two loci.
Following from this, it becomes clear that travelling from earth to, say, alpha centauri, the important aspect of my travel is the relative datum points of earth and A centauri.
Ergo, there is no restriction upon my travelling relative to my departure point at a speed greater than the propagation velocity of light in a vacuum, because relative to the universe I am not even travelling, but am a static spot. Wherever I may be ‘c’ remains more or less constant, but since c is not relative to earth, or to me, or A centauri, no matter how fast I speed between the earth and another destination, I do not need to exceed absolute c, just relative c. That is, a conjugate of the separation between two points and the time taken to cross it. I can therefore accelerate away from earth, arrive at my destination a day later, having traversed the gap at apparently huge velocities, whilst remaining motionless relative to the universe itself .
It’s just a thought,
Bob.
Heim is the best approach..
Is anyone still active here?
The consensus here seems to be that pursuing a number of approaches in parallel is necessary. So let’s add one more: interstellar travel by many-generational colony ship at pokey slow speeds of perhaps 1% to 10% of c. This is an engineering problem rather than a fundamental science problem, so it might be considered worthwhile in some circles that are less friendly toward rethinking physics as such.
Consider a colony ship large enough to support a genetically viable population of humans plus other Earth-originated life with which to conduct a self-sustaining ecosystem that could later be transplanted to a candidate planet in another star system. Equip it with a propulsion system that can achieve a respectable single-digit or low two-digit percentage of c, and with landing craft to get down to the surface of the target planet and live while building a colony.
The one-way trip to another star system might take a few hundred to a few thousand years. During this time, multiple generations would be born, live their lives, and die, entirely onboard the colony ship: it would be their entire world, they would know of no other life except through their regular (and increasingly time-delayed) communications with Earth. The first generation onboard would mourn the deaths of their Earthbound family members from space, but after that, the continuity of lives and deaths would be contained within the ship.
The engineering problems for something like this are severe, and few complex mechanical devices humans have built have lasted more than a century. However all of the technologies that arise from new science will have their own engineering challenges.
One of the benefits of discussing this approach further, is that it puts interstellar travel on a footing that appears more practical, and thus more acceptable to a larger number of people. This would have the effect of encouraging discussions about interstellar travel, and spreading the awareness of the underlying ethical value: to provide for the continuity of Earth-originated life into the indefinite future (potentially as long as there are viable stars in our galaxy).
Once the *goal* becomes widely accepted, there will be wider discussion and speculation about the means. This will produce interest in addressing the engineering problems of fractional-c transportation, and in addressing the fundamental science questions that might lead to eventual breakthroughs and FTL travel. The key here is to change the *social* climate to make these kinds of discussions, academic studies, and empirical tests acceptable, and then to make them desirable, and then to make them occur.
BTW, I’m not a physicist, I’m a telecoms engineer (design & programming of PABXs, a wholly Newtonian exercise;-). But I have a decent layperson’s knowledge of relevant fields, and I keep abreast of the science news. I believe as a matter of ethics that humans should not foreclose their collective future by remaining on one planet that will some day become unsuitable for life (for example as the Sun increases in brightness over time), but that we should pursue additional ecological niches in the universe at-large. Natural selection is not confined to one planet: it also operates on a cosmic scale. The question for humans is, do we intend to pass the cosmic Darwin test?