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NASA veteran's propellantless propulsion drive that physics says shouldn't work just produced enough thrust to overcome earth's gravity.
- Thread starter Introvert
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There's no scientific principles that had to be overturned to achieve the requisite technological milestones from 1950 to next year to achieve GTAVI.
I think they are referring to literal physics, not just our understanding of it.
The opposite. "Physics" is not a collection of man made theories and proofs. Physics is a term for the natural world. Physicists can however be wrong and say things that turn out not to be right.
So they can technically have invented something that contradicts current -understanding- of physics, but not physics itself.
That's playing with words, "physics" can bot mean rules of natural interactions or our understanding of it. Actually, the latter is the most frequent use, as a quick search on reputable dictionaries like Oxford or Cambridge shows.
The universe does have rules and limits, not every conceivable thing is possible. It's not inevitable that we'll have anything. There's stuff like faster than light travel and perpetual motion machines that genuinely do seem to be actually impossible. If you took that GTA example and extracted it to "and so computing will inevitably increase forever", you'd be getting disproven right now by the past several years of computer engineers realizing they're at the physical limits of shrinking transistors, because they're running into the limits of the physics. Nullifying a fundamental force of nature is probably on that list too.
This still need electricity to work, so it doesn't sound like an infinite energy type of thing? You certainly can convert sun's light into work in a practically infinite sense on Earth, by having a motor spinning "forever", or at least until its materials decay due to friction. That doesn't defy any laws of physics. It's just that electricity can't be converted to propulsion in a vacuum - unless their claim is true of course.
Gravity comes from massive objects distorting space-time. I'm not sure how one would reverse that and not violate the first law of thermodynamics.
Its very possible that we might discover something that completely changes our understanding of physics.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence though and, if your claiming something does something that "physics says is impossible" you better have that extraordinary evidence on hand because most of the times that someone has made these types of claims, they were wrong.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence though and, if your claiming something does something that "physics says is impossible" you better have that extraordinary evidence on hand because most of the times that someone has made these types of claims, they were wrong.
Putting aside whether or not this is true, the laws of thermodynamics haven't been around very long in the grand scheme of human history, let alone the universe.
Yeah it's annoying when these articles say physics and physicists.
The blue LED was simply hard, not impossible. We had red and green LEDs, and ultraviolet LEDs, but tuning the band gap just right and getting sufficient brightness was the hard part. There was no fundamental physics being broken.
But this "drive" is quackery of the first water. It's just so obviously impossible, and violates so much of what we know about the natural world, that almost every experiment we have ever done would be hugely wrong if this drive were viable.
A drive generating 1g, as this article claims, would be bloody obvious as well. There would be no "I need funding" or quack science conferences or frothy conspiratorial articles.
It's not inevitable, and it's unclear if the idea of "anti gravity" even makes sense. If gravity is curved spacetime, then anti gravity would somehow require one to un-curve reality itself, for example.
Good luck with that in our lifetime. Remember, Star Trek is fiction. What is easy in science fiction is not necessarily actually possible.
Your claims are akin to that of a guy in 1950 claiming that one can change durum spring wheat into common autumn wheat just by planting it a few times in autumn. Similar confidence, similar lack of evidence.
Cool, how would it work? What are the underlying mathematics that could be used to formulate a theory on how such a system would function?
Oh, you don't know? Of course you don't…
I don't know what to say to his but ... Are you and engineer? A physicist? It's not inevitable, its basically impossible and would require a ton of known hard evidence both experimental and mathematical to actually turn out to be wrong. "Anti gravity" without a constant energy source like burning fuel is completely laughable, frankly.
And that's my professional opinion as a doctor of physics although not one particular focused on anything even close to rocket science or whatever you'd consider this, but let's be clear, virtually the entire scientific community would agree with me.
Well, since you're being pedantic, Physics is the *study* of matter in the natural world so yes, the study can be incorrect and that's what science is. Finding out where we're wrong and correcting it with accurate information.
You can contradict current physics.
Claims like this remind me of Steorn, which I nearly wrote a story about when I was a journalist.
en.m.wikipedia.org
Steorn - Wikipedia
Do we have a pseudoscience debunked OT??? I'd enjoy the hell out of that.
Yeah, someone saying they invented something that "physics says shouldn't work" and which allegedly uses a new fundamental force in the universe, immediately sends my bullshit detector into overdrive.
Won't completely discount it, but will need a lot of falsification. My own bet would be on some error in measurement that will be uncovered if others replicate it.
Science is never perfect, but the point of established science is that it can and has been replicated, and has a ton of peer review behind it.
Some new discovery could absolutely come long and blow things up, but the very nature of how scientific knowledge is accumulated makes that kind of scenario unlikely. More likely are lots of little breakthroughs at the edges of our current knowledge, not someone saying they invented something that breaks physics.
And if you're going to say you HAVE invented such a thing, the size of your claim will be expected to be proportional to the body of evidence you have. History is littered with people who claimed to discover something incredible only for other scientists not to be able to replicate the results, or for it to turn out to be some error in the methodology of the experiment.
Maybe before making these huge claims, they should prove it can produce enough power to run DOOM.
The site reporting this has an entire reporting category for UFOs. I don't see this being reported on any credible news sites.
Not that I think there was much doubt, but it's usually a good idea with unfamiliar news sites to take a closer look before spreading stuff.
Not that I think there was much doubt, but it's usually a good idea with unfamiliar news sites to take a closer look before spreading stuff.
No it wasn't.
It is not.
There's a common meme (in the original meaning of the word) that goes:
"Physics keeps getting rewritten all the time! Newton was wrong, which means so will Einstein be in the future! Here come flying cars!"
Newton was not wrong about gravity. For the limits of his experiments, he was completely correct. Inside the same limits, he still is.
Einstein did not wipe the slate clean, he offered merely (merely!) a refinement of Newton. For slow objects in flat spacetime, a bunch of the terms in general relativity go to zero and out pop Newton's laws.
The gaps in our knowledge of physics only ever shrink, and those gaps are never crowbarred open, merely filled in. It's getting harder and harder to do, but a reactionless drive will not be found in any of those gaps for the fundamental reason that any such thing would automatically be a perpetual motion / infinite energy machine, and there is nothing we are more certain of than the impossibility of that.
Fair. Not my native language. If that is how dictionaries defines it, that is fair enough.
Still think its all bs :)
Probably, these things tend to have a short shelf life. They come and go like UFO whistleblowers.
Great response and worded better than a similar response I was trying to write. It always feels disingenuous to compare to some point in the past because like you said we have filled in so many "gaps". The pure amount of observation and study that has been done since 1950 is astounding.
But along those lines how about an area where a lot of us thought advancements would revolutionize things but didn't live up to expectations....battery tech. Been around for 40 years and still waiting. Still using AAs.
This reminds me those bullshit infomercial/catalog products that come around, disappear for a few years and then come back again with a new name.
I just want to say this is a fantastic post and kind of encapsulates everything that bothers me in current pop sciences reporting. Great job.
It doesn't inspire much confidence when the article incorrectly says the EmDrive results were proven by NASA. They were not. Early tests seemed to show some very small thrust but when they did additional testing and accounted for other variables the "thrust" disappeared completely.
This new thing is making such unbelievable claims like achieving 1g of thrust it should be very, very easy to prove or disprove. But there's no videos, nothing.
This new thing is making such unbelievable claims like achieving 1g of thrust it should be very, very easy to prove or disprove. But there's no videos, nothing.
Dang, they invented the Faith Generators from Marvel's Universal Church of Truth! 😂
Universal Church of Truth (Earth-616)
28 appearance(s) of Universal Church of Truth (Earth-616) 2 appearance(s) in handbook(s) of Universal Church of Truth (Earth-616) 3 minor appearance(s) of Universal Church of Truth (Earth-616) 8 mention(s) of Universal Church of Truth (Earth-616) 2 mention(s) in handbook(s) of Universal Church...
marvel.fandom.com
We do know how bikes work. There's a tiny bit of gyroscopic effect but the main effect, by far the most important, is that steering into the fall is automatic and corrects for the fall. "Trail", where the front tire's contact with the ground is behind the projected intersection of the front fork with the ground, is not strictly necessary but it does help.
View: https://youtu.be/9cNmUNHSBac
