NASA Veteran's Propellantless Propulsion Drive That Physics Says Shouldn't Work
thedebrief.org
thedebrief.org
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220007230/downloads/Fi...
Here's an article on the NASA web site from April 10, 2024 quoting him:
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/kennedy/nasa-tec...
which says he is a lead researcher on the Electrodynamic Dust Shield project at NASA. Here's a similar article quoting him:
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/nasa-eds-techn...
He's playing with alternative propulsion engineering on his own as a side project. If you watch the video of his presentation at APEC he says two groups have replicated some of his work. He's tested it in a vacuum. He has not tested it in space but would like to. Maybe that will make the effect disappear. But he's a leading expert on electrostatics at NASA, currently working for NASA, and he thinks this is real and he's been playing with it for a long time. He says it is trivial to reproduce, you need like $10 worth of material (more to do it in a vacuum). It's hard to see why he would make false claims and jeopardize his day job.
He lie.
Crookes radiometer don't work in really high vacuum, which is not cheap, if do all things with boring rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer
Without rules, high vacuum is achievable on just ~150km, with amateur rocket, I hear in US somewhere about thousand dollars for sub-orbital launch (smallest orbital rocket cost about million).
For example in electronic microscope also used high vacuum, and such microscope usually cost about million dollars and as I remember, it need about tens hours to achieve such high vacuum, so could easy calculate, about thousand experiments in 3-4 years (accounting amortization period for high cost equipment), and also each experiment will cost about thousand dollars without interest rate.
I think, he is typical NASA scientist, bored at his work and have spare money to play game with fake patent.
As NASA worker, he really have possibility to place his experiments in high vacuum chamber, and I'm sure he have experience and seen nothing.
And I'm sure, he understand well, mentioned in patent configuration is very hard to research, and very easy to accidentally achieve some extraordinary results.
But you, humble reader, don't have such opportunities, but you could donate to him for his crazy experiments.
-New fundamental force
-Explains warp drive (??)
-Requires exquisite measurement methods and cancelling out all other interfering forces (which inevitably they won’t do well)
-Ex-big institute head scientist to lend credence
-No supporting scientific papers in a reputed journal
-Big claim of legitimacy based on a patent being granted
This is far sketchier than even Ranga Das’s superconductivity claims.
Does it cure cancer like sea algae grown in mountain stream water?
I don't see any discussion of FTL speed, so not clear what you're talking about.
> -Ex-big institute head scientist to lend credence
I believe Buhler is currently the lead research scientist at the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy. Do you have evidence otherwise?
> Big claim of legitimacy based on a patent being granted
A patent was granted, but that isn't the source of any particular claims of legitimacy I see.
> This is far sketchier than even Ranga Das’s superconductivity claims.
I disagree. While I do think the odds are high that this is the result of the non-obvious intetaction of knowm forces, I suspect the mystery behind this unexplained result will be more interesting once solved.
Also, I hope he's wrong. Reactionless drives in space are potential civilization destroyers.
But it was part of a conference and they moved to next speaker.
He does say he has a working model and video. Just isn't in this link.
If he had something concrete he'd lead with it rather than make himself look like raving madman. He's talking about the Bob Lazar ufo at some point ffs.
If you get rid of the reaction mass requirement, accelerating a superheavy object to a horrendous velocity takes time instead of a steady stream of resources.
Here's more from someone with way more citations than me: https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/reactionlessdr...
And the people in charge of not having done so are pretty stupid in other areas, so there's that.
Incidentally, that is another reason this won’t work: It violates conservation of energy.
If you convert a stored battery charge, to a thrust?
EV Cars aren't violating anything.
Nothing is saying the thrust is producing more energy than stored in the battery.
But in space, we don't have roads. Rockets push against their reaction mass.
What is a hypothetical drive with no reaction mass pushing on?
The device might not work far from the Earth, but only in the neighbourhood of other bodies, due to some kind of interaction with them.
Moreover, while around the beginning of the 20th century it has become fashionable to rebrand what was called previously "aether" as "vacuum", this change of name has been just a useless cosmetic change.
The mathematical description of vacuum has remained the same as that of the aether as conceived by Maxwell and the other physicists who opposed the theories based on action at a distance, i.e. the vacuum is something that mediates the interaction between bodies. Regardless whether it is called aether, vacuum or electromagnetic field, in most theories it is endowed with properties like energy and momentum.
So it could happen that there would be a way for a device to push on the ubiquitous electromagnetic field.
This device may be a hoax or a honest mistake, but the current theories of physics are much farther from being completed than most people believe.
Much of the physics taught in school is full of junk that is more definitely wrong than the claims of this patent.
For example, the so-called Lorentz force, which is taught as the way how the electromagnetic interaction happens, does not satisfy Newton's law of action and reaction, so it also does not push on what it should push. (When the Lorentz force is integrated over closed loops, it gives correct total results, but when the forces that act on parts of the circuits are computed, the actions and reactions are not equal.)
Only the Ampere force, which nobody learns, has a form that is compatible with Newton's laws.
There already exists examples where you don't need an actual physical material being expelled in order to have thrust. The key in this example is they are saying they have reached a force great enough to counter gravity.
The presentation is not advocating that they are violating the 3rd law. Most people's argument here boils down to 'but but , thrust, the 3rd law, duh, I read an engineering book in school once'. And dismiss this out of hand.
He provides a prototype, at least give it the same attention as the high temperature superconductor and replicate it, then provide some explanation where the force is coming from that negates any benefit. Like find if there is some static charge at play that is causing the measurement error and would make it useless.
When you drop a body near the Earth, it begins a continuously accelerated motion. If you look just at the body, it would seem that it gains energy from nowhere. Only when you consider the complete Earth-body system you see that in fact the energy is conserved.
The same could happen for their device. Supposing that it really creates a force, it may happen that it would not create any force if it would be located in the outer space at a great distance from any planet or star, but it would create a force only in the proximity of other bodies, with a corresponding potential energy depending on its location.
There have been in the past some attempts to create a theory that connects electromagnetism with gravity and inertia, where the gravitational attraction is a consequence of the fact that the positive charges of the nuclei and the negative charges of the electrons are slightly separated in space, which in a modified theory of electromagnetism could create a residual force of attraction that would explain the gravitational attraction.
If such a connection between gravitation, inertia and electromagnetism would really exist, there would be chances for such a device to work.
Nevertheless, for now it is not possible to decide whether their experiments may be valid, because there are not enough details about them.
What is described in the patent is not good enough. The complete experimental setup would be needed, including a detailed description of the surrounding laboratory, because such small effects could be caused by longer-range interactions with some close enough equipment that is not supposed to be a part of the experiment.
Someone wtih this level of credentials and reputation presenting an effect that they have spent years trying to explain with a competent team and failing is absolutely interesting, even if it isn't caused by a new force and is more akin to a 'perpetual' motion machine created by an obscure interaction of existing forces.
Given the apparent openess towards reproduction and collaboration, I would the chances this is a hoax/fraud as very low, the chance that this is at least the result of an interesting mistake as high and the chances that this is a new discovery as excitingly non-zero.
If we hope to advance as a civilization, we need to discover new stuff and new ways of doing things. So in my mind we shouldn't focus on him being "WrOnG", because that will only deter others from trying. We should encourage out of the box thinking and experimentation, and celebrate people who are willing to try new things and look at things with a fresh perspective.
The poor headline suggests that, but the inventor claims “the highest we have generated on a stacked system is about 10 milliNewtons.” Of course it would be revolutionary either way.
But too much of what is hoped negatively by people somehow gets converted (at 100% efficiency no less!) into "absolute scientific truth" or in your case very high probability :) hahah
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/nasas-em-drive-is-a-...
He mentions aliens multiple times. Not a good sign when claiming to have discovered a new force coming out of a static electric charge.
Crookes radiometer don't work in really high vacuum, which is not cheap, if do all things with boring rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer
Without rules, high vacuum is achievable on just ~150km, with amateur rocket, I hear in US somewhere about thousand dollars for sub-orbital launch (smallest orbital rocket cost about million).
For example in electronic microscope also used high vacuum, and such microscope usually cost about million dollars and as I remember, it need about tens hours to achieve such high vacuum, so could easy calculate, about thousand experiments in 3-4 years (accounting amortization period for high cost equipment), and also each experiment will cost about thousand dollars without interest rate.
I think, he is typical NASA scientist, bored at his work and have spare money to play game with fake patent.
As NASA worker, he really have possibility to place his experiments in high vacuum chamber, and I'm sure he have experience and seen nothing.
And I'm sure, he understand well, mentioned in patent configuration is very hard to research, and very easy to accidentally achieve some extraordinary results.
But you, humble reader, don't have such opportunities, but you could donate to him for his crazy experiments.
His "quantum" explanations are even worse (just some hand-wavy BS with the fine structure constant thrown in.)
I don't doubt he has managed to generate 1 g of electrostatic force on a charged object - but that force has to be reacted against something else. Otherwise Newton would be spinning at an ever-accelerating rate in his grave.
I'm not a physicist and don't know if this is ion wind, if it works in a vacuum, or if this (and the Biefield-Brown Effect) is just dodgy science. Merely saying that the claims seem similar enough that it feels like nothing new.
There's videos of Biefield-Brown devices ("lifters") online, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVVJwObmTAk