Author Topic: Hyperdrive  (Read 84738 times)

Offline Bob B.

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Re: Hyperdrive
« Reply #15 on: January 18, 2006, 08:40:55 AM »
i mean what groundbreaking individual's ideas were not dismissed by main stream science as crap, stupid, crazy, crackpot?
It is true some groundbreaking ideas are have been initially dismissed with skepticism only to be later accepted by the mainstream, however it is a myth to say this always happens.  This myth is largely perpetrated by the real crackpots of the world who are trying to convince others to take them seriously.  If a theory has merit, it will eventually gain momentum and acceptance.  If a theory is without merit, it will rightfully find its way to the dustpan of history.

Take Albert Einstein for example.  It took a little time for scientists to notice and digest his theories, but once they did Einstein's theories were, for the most part, widely embraced.  Of course his theories weren't blinded accepted without subjecting them to experimentation and validation, nonetheless most of the scientific community was initially enthused by what they saw.

(edit spelling)
« Last Edit: January 18, 2006, 01:18:07 PM by Bob B. »

Offline Nik

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What goes around...
« Reply #16 on: January 18, 2006, 11:09:22 AM »
Big problem with rotating fields and their ilk is second and higher order effects, and keeping track of their complex and varying influences...

Consider how much confusion Centripetal / Centrifugal cause casual calculation. Then add accidental and/or transient multi-poles, eddy currents, homopolar generation, magneto-restriction, hysteresis etc etc-- and windage !!

One issue is that a century of electrical engineering has minimised wasteful side-effects, core losses etc. There could be some interesting 'stuff' lurking in cracks, but where do you start ? And, how do you track and account for the many now-trivial losses that may mask a genuine, slight anomaly ??

Whatever else you do, shun any support for anti-gravity, zero-point energy production, perpetual motion etc etc !! But, you could copy some of those weird whatsits, to study what is actually happening. When you can honestly account for their entire energy budgets, your own experiments should not embarrass you. And, if you serendipitously stumble upon something interesting, you're primed to spot it...

First, get SciAm's 'Amateur Scientist' archive on CD. Wonder at what may be built with limited resources, take note of the safety issues and --most important-- HAVE FUN !!

Offline DonPMitchell

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Re: Hyperdrive
« Reply #17 on: January 18, 2006, 12:59:59 PM »
Agreed, scientists are curious and really do appreciate exciting new truth.  Folks like Heim or Velikovsky or Intelligent-Design advocates always claim that they are being supressed by some ill-defined conspiracy by real scientists to prevent the truth from being told.  Nonsense!

I was at Caltech in the early 1980s, when some scientists had done a new form of the Miliken Oil-Drop Experiment and seemed to find 1/3 and 2/3 electron charge units.  Were these free quarks?  There was a lot of excitement about this possibility.

The scientist came to Caltech and there was a big meeting in the auditorium.  He described his experiment carefully.  Then he said, "this is so unusual, I want us to brainstorm about things that might explain this".  Folks like Richard Feynman were there, and they came up with one idea after another -- were the drops assymetric, were there impurities, etc.  I believe that eventually, and to everyone's disappointment, the result was shown to not be due to a true 1/3 unit of charge.

Crackpots never operate like this.  They are super skeptical about everything EXCEPT their own idea.  They will insist on the truth of their theory, and invent a whole series of improbable and complicated explainations to support it, including new unknown forces and conspiracies to suppress their work.

With regard to Heim, one of the physicists I talked to made the point that if Heim's theory was true, its effects would have been observed in rapidly rotating neutron stars, which have tremendously strong magnetic fields and have been studied very closely for many years.
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Offline Nik

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Treading very carefully...
« Reply #18 on: January 18, 2006, 06:51:42 PM »
Agreed, 'fast' neutron and magnetars provide an essential 'reality check' for predictions.

Snag is that Heim's math may only apply during transient phase, and the objects we see have already gone beyond that stage...

An example: Shades of 'Hitch-hikers Guide', recent work on supernova explosions suggests that *sound* may influence their cataclysmic outflows...

There are some head-scratchers about. I remember reading about 'Self-Exciting GeoDynamo' studies, whose experimenters spin larger and larger tanks of liquid metal in hope of modelling Earth's magnetic field. Similar, but un-spun tanks strive to weigh fleeting neutrinos. Monopole hunts are currently out of fashion. Gravity-wave sensors await an unambiguous event. IIRC, the shockwave-bouncing hypothesis for hyper-high energy cosmic rays has spawned desk-top mini-accelerators and neutron sources...

Always, there's the humble bee, whose vortex-shedding wings baffled traditional aerodynamic theory that relied on 'steady state' and near-laminar flows...

I'm not saying Heim's math is right. I specifically mentioned 'Bode's Law' because it was so neat, but wrong. IIRC, French studies of planetary orbit dynamics showed there was, yet, a germ of truth to the relationship. But you had to base it on Jupiter !! And, we now know that Pluto --like Ceres-- is just the 'first found' of a shifting population...

Tread carefully !!

Offline Nik

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98 %
« Reply #19 on: January 21, 2006, 04:19:48 PM »
Current 'Elektor' Euro-electronics mag's feature on different electric motor technologies and configurations mentioned that some manage 98% conversion efficiency.

So, I looked closer and, yes, this only applies to specific cases and conditions, but *some* motors really are that good.

Flip-side means anyone studying hypothetical Heim-like configurations has a lot to do: Where to start ? Where could such phenomena hide ??

Offline Spinalwayswins

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Re: Hyperdrive
« Reply #20 on: January 21, 2006, 10:49:12 PM »
Has anyone ever heard of "The Heaviside Papers Found at Paighnton"?
It discusses Heaviside's papers that dealt mainly with the problems connected with the EM energy, and the papers showed that Heaviside had extended Maxwell's Theory so that gravitation could be included with EM. A few years before Heaviside started the series of publications about "Electromagnetic Induction and its Propagation" which he concluded in 1887, Maxwell expounding Faraday's ideas, had clearly stated that the flow of energy depended on the association of the two vectors, namely the Electric force(E) and the Magnetic force(H). But in "A Treatise of Electricity and Magnetism," Maxwell did not develop the analytical consequences of this energy concept. The result was that engineers found Maxwell's chapter on the general equations of the EM field practically unreadable. Heaviside showed engineers that the descriptive equations of the EM field can easily be based upon the vectorial formulation of the circuital laws. The first states that the electric current(J) is the curl of the magnetic force(H), while the second states that the magnetic current(m; lower-case denoting that it isn't a vector) is the negative curl of the electric force (E).

--> One small step towards using EM to produce gravitational effects.

Offline Nik

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Google...
« Reply #21 on: January 22, 2006, 10:15:43 AM »
Use following search, but note spelling: Curious language, the English...

The Heaviside Papers Found at Paignton

Offline DonPMitchell

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Re: Hyperdrive
« Reply #22 on: January 22, 2006, 12:10:21 PM »
The modern state of the art on forces is based on quantum field theory.  Previous "classical" physics theories were eventually undestood as being related to conservation laws, which in turn were associated with global symmetry of space and time.  For example, the convervation of angular momentum can be shown to result from the fact that space behaves the same in any direction.  Convervation of energy is related to the fact that space behaves the same at any time.  Quantum theory has extended this idea to so-called local symmetry.  So for example, the imposition of local symmetry on the electron requires that you introduce another field, and that field turns out to be the photon field.  It is remarkably elegant.

Electromagnetic and the Weak Nuclear forces have been unified, and the theory predicts experimental results to the limits of measurability.  In the case of EM, Richard Feynman's quantum electrodynamic theory has been verified to 10 decimal places.

The Strong Nuclear force has been described by the theory of quantum chromodynamics (quarks, gluons, color, etc), which seems to be qualitatively correct, predictiong the existance and behavior of protons, mesons, etc.  However, the nature of the theory has made it difficult to precisely calculate numerical values of known measured quantities like the magnetic moment of the proton.  Physicists believe the theory is sound, computers are just not powerful enough to evaluate it yet.  The probelm is related to the fact that the nuclear force actually gets stronger at increasing distance, unlike gravity which falls off as 1/distance-squared.

Of course the first theories of gravity were proposed by Newton, and now the most successful theory is Einstein's theory of General Relativity.  But Einstein's theory is still "classical", and while it is very accurate, it is not correct.  A big unsolved problem in physics today is the development of a quantum field theory of gravity.  Gravitation turns out to be quite complex on a quantum level, requiring a tensor field and a spin-2 intermediate boson called a "graviton".  Because the force is so weak, it has been difficult to measure these quantum effects.  The current theory is based on a plausible extension of the techniques used in QCD and QEW theory, but it is untested because of this problem with the weakness of gravity.

So the holy grail today would be the unifcation of quantum gravitation, quantum chromodynamcis, and quantum electroweak theory.  Lots of hard work ahead for physicist.  Outdated pre-quantum theories like Heaviside and Heim's are no help.  They just aren't in the ballpark today, because those men didn't have access to what is known today about the nature of fundimental physics.

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Offline Spinalwayswins

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Re: Hyperdrive
« Reply #23 on: January 22, 2006, 08:50:55 PM »
Yes i could understand that a bunch of old guys with old outdated theories cant help todays ultimate goal of finding the newest particle or something which would need the most sensitive mechanisms to get the job done.....but if there are intrinsic errors in the most fundamental of our super theories, then what then? I mean if you built a building that took some 100 years on faulty foundation, then I'm pretty sure you would have a problem. And I'm not saying that there are problems, but does anyone know what 'mass' is? or time? or why is it that our current theories cant properly account for the force in a spiral galaxies arms? I mean this is just a terrible as gravity! its ancient and still not explained with our super duper theories, quantum chromodynamics, quantum electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, etc....This stuff seems just as bad as string theory which needs like a trillion dimensions! I had cracked an old physics text book open a while ago and turned the pages towards the discussion on particle physics, and they were talking about over a thousand particles that were found! I can understand that the truth hurt but people be serious!

And the reason that i had even mentioned Heaviside was because both him and Poynting had independently discovered the "flow of EM energy through space," O.K. no big deal this is known of course but was is interesting is that Poynting never considered anything but the divergent component of the energy flow, which gets diverged into the conductors of the external circuit of the generator. Heaviside on the other hand also considered the remained component of the flow that is nondivergent, because it is in curl form and the divergence of the curl is zero (IN FLAT SPACETIME). Note however that the divergence of the curl isn't necessarily zero in a CURVED spacetime!

Also the nondivergent Heaviside flow is enormously greater in magnitude than the diverged Poynting flow component. In the 1990s this huge nondivergent component had been discarded by Lorentz who stated that "it had no physical significance" because it did nothing. So, unable to solve the problem , he eliminated the problem itself. He simply assumed a closed surface around any volume element of interest, and proceeded to integrate the entire energy vector around that closed surface. That little trick neatly eliminates the nondiverged Heaviside component, while retaining the diverged Poynting component. All the engineers today still use Lorentz's neat little integration trick. Another reason i had Mentioned Heaviside is because of Prof. Eric Laithwaite who read upon Heaviside's Paignton papers and said "His (Heaviside's) postulation of a flux of gravitational energy could shake the foundations of physics."

Offline DonPMitchell

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Re: Hyperdrive
« Reply #24 on: January 23, 2006, 01:11:41 AM »
Now, speaking of thousands of particles, it is worth noting that Murray Gell-Man came up with a theory that reduced all those particles to simple combinations of just a few quarks.  For that outlandish theory, he was not suppressed by a conspiracy of orthodox scientists.  He was given a Nobel Prize.

I hasten to say, Heaviside is a respected scientist.  He was just speculating about classical field theories as they were understood a hundred years ago.  After Einstein's theory, attempts to unify the classical theories of General Relativity and Electromagnetism were made by Weyl, Eddington, Hlavaty, Misner, Wheeler and Einstein himself.  So this is not a topic that is being ignored or "suppressed" by the scientific establishment.

So, when someone like Eric Laithwaite comes along with a reactionless propulsion system based on gyroscopes, or someone like DePalma comes along with an N machine that pulls power of the "free energy of space", why don't they win a Nobel Prize?

Crank theories of grand unification are in fact a dime a dozen: http://www.crank.net/grand.html
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Offline Nik

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non-linear solutions...
« Reply #25 on: January 23, 2006, 08:50:32 PM »
I feel sorry for Prof Laithwaite: He took his ideas too far, broke down when he realised he'd goofed. A true Scientist / Engineer, he had the honesty and courage to admit it. Still, a sad end to a most innovative career...

IMHO, DePalma's N-Machine is shadier. Documentation is vague, each device is festooned with bizarre, inexplicable ornamentation, and cogent explanation is lacking. That approach is BAD Science. Given the internet, you would think they'd post 'student edition plans', with PDF down-load upon acceptance of experimental, non-commercial license, then tour the Science Fairs and cherry-pick improvements. Er, no. From what I've seen, they *shun* oversight.

Given that, you must wonder if they've gone beyond their claimed 'Commercial Secrecy' into 'Cult' territory. Like Polywater and the N-Ray debacle, I hope they're just mistaken...

Offline Spinalwayswins

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Re: Hyperdrive
« Reply #26 on: January 24, 2006, 08:44:38 PM »
"... Supposing that the bodies act upon the surrounding space causing curving of the same, it appears to my simple mind that the curved spaces must react on the bodies, and producing the opposite effects, straightening out the curves. Since action and reaction are coexistent, it follows that the supposed curvature of space is entirely impossible - But even if it existed it would not explain the motions of the bodies as observed. Only the existence of a field of force can account for the motions of the bodies as observed, and its assumption dispenses with space curvature. All literature on this subject is futile and destined to oblivion. So are all attempts to explain the workings of the universe without recognizing the existence of the ether and the indispensable function it plays in the phenomena."
"My second discovery was of a physical truth of the greatest importance. As I have searched the entire scientific records in more than a half dozen languages for a long time without finding the least anticipation, I consider myself the original discoverer of this truth, which can be expressed by the statement: There is no energy in matter other than that received from the environment." — Nikola Tesla

So what of Tesla?

Offline DonPMitchell

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Re: Hyperdrive
« Reply #27 on: January 24, 2006, 11:59:35 PM »
I wrote a paper on Tesla, on my website: http://www.mentallandscape.com/Tesla.htm.

I haven't seen the quote above, but it looks like he missed the boat on curved space and rest-mass energy.  But he didn't know any of the physics in depth that Einstein later worked with.  At best, Tesla had a good grasp of basic electrical engineering.  For example, he didn't believe in radio waves, but thought wireless signalling worked purely by induction and currents through the ground.  He was more like Edison or DeForest; smart, dynamic, self-promoting, and something of a crank.  But definately a fascinating individual!

Someone who almost gave Einstein a run for his money was Ernst Mach.  A very smart guy, also had some odd ideas (he refused to believe in the existance of atoms!), but he came close to discovering special relativity.
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Offline Satanic Mechanic

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Re: Hyperdrive
« Reply #28 on: January 25, 2006, 11:15:42 AM »
He was more like Edison or DeForest; smart, dynamic, self-promoting, and something of a crank.  But definately a fascinating individual!
As an engineer, I would never equate Tesla with Edison and Deforest.  I have studied Tesla a lot when I was in college along with DeForest, E.H. Armstrong (inventor of FM, many other radio advances and one of my heroes) and others. 
Edison was more of a manager than an engineer since he had a group do his work. 
DeForest is a fraud in my opinion and not the "Father of Radio".  He claimed to invent the Audian tube (vacuum tube) and yet he did not know how it worked.
Tesla was amazing with his inventions of AC power transmission, radio controled devices, bladeless turbines and many others.  A true inventor.

My $0.02,

SM

Offline SCEtoAUX

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Re: Hyperdrive
« Reply #29 on: January 25, 2006, 01:43:25 PM »
DeForest didn't so much invent the vacuum tube, as the TRIODE tube.

The basic principle of thermionic emission was discovered (but not appreciated or understood) by Edison (who called it the "Edison Effect"), and first applied to radio by John Ambrose Fleming, who first used a diode tube as a detector of radio signals.

DeForest's standard procedure was to juggle different combinations of stuff around, and apply for patents. One of his prototype tubes included a control element (grid) placed between the plate and the filament. It proved a much more sensitive detector, and was actually capable of amplification. This is what went on to be called an "audion", but DeForest had no idea how it actually worked.

It was Armstrong who actually understood the technology, with the development of the regenerative circuit, and later FM. Unfortunately, he remains relatively unknown outside of technical circles. Many think he was driven to commit suicide by his ongoing legal battles with another man who would become far more wealthy and powerful, David Sarnoff of RCA.

There really isn't any ONE "Father of Radio". From Hertz and Maxwell, through Edison, Marconi, Fessenden, Poulsen, DeForest, Armstrong, and the rest, each built upon the previous work.

The development of radio is a history just as interesting as that of the space program. It was the "bleeding edge" technology of it's day. A good introduction to this history is the Ken Burns/PBS documentary "Empire of the Air".
« Last Edit: January 25, 2006, 01:46:48 PM by SCEtoAUX »