?-drive

Wired reports on a possible propellant-free drive that's confusing everyone.

3 comments:

Grim said...

I'll add "conservation of momentum" to my set of statements of physical laws that are probably not quite right.

E Hines said...

We also need to keep in mind what momentum we're conserving. It seems to me that, given that matter and energy are interchangeable, it's the total momentum of the energy and matter system that's being conserved.

Of course, that's also contaminated by what's going on with (being absorbed by? To what outcome?) the quantum plasma enfolding the system.

Eric Hines

james said...

From the comment section: "Cathal Ó Broin 'If it matches the null result there's probably just a minor systematic error in both.'"

The NASA report seems to simply be the abstract, so I have no idea what is going on. The first thing I'd try is changing the vacuum chamber to something larger. It would seem more likely that the RF was interacting with the vacuum chamber walls than with a Higgs field.