Questions about Nasa's space drive answered

Any regular magnet stuck to a fridge is doing this too. Which is very much where a lot of the misunderstandings of people with free energy seem to stem from: they fail to recognize magnetism as no different to the force which is stopping the fridge, the floor and everything else from simply plummeting through the Earth.

I read them all, and I think you and Baez are making a mistake. Not on the science, on the style.

When a person "invents" something that is obvious bullshit, and uses that as a means to milk money out of investors or consumers, that is fraudulent. Over the past 30 years a style of communication has been developed that uses sarcasm and outright mockery to attack these people. James Randi practically invented this style of communication, or at least greatly popularized it, and now it has been adopted by a number of science bloggers.

Why, though? Because fraudsters are good at attracting attention, so to counter it, critics have to generate controversy. And there's no better way to generate controversy than to make things personal. In other words, it's done with a purpose.

But over time that communications strategy has been warped by people who don't understand it. They think the idea is to personally attack and mock ANYONE who reports a surprising result. We saw it with the FTL neutrino results, we saw it with BICEP2, we see it all the time.

It's a major problem. For one thing it trains non-scientists to auto-reject any scientific result that seems weird to them. For another thing it gives greater license to people who are not critiqueing science in good faith (like, say, Rush Limbaugh or Ken Cuccinelli) to attack scientists personally. It reduces its utility as a means of countering fraud, because people come to think that that is just how science communication is done. And it makes it harder to obtain sufficient funding to investigate areas of science that are not as well-known to the public.

What's happening here is not attempted fraud. A team at NASA [1] that is specifically employed and funded to test out crazy ideas, tested out a crazy idea, and published their results. That's it.

So, critique their methods and results? Yes. Critique the press coverage? Absolutely. Attack and mock the researchers? NO. Doing so is a fundamental mistake in communications strategy.

And some of the critiques are even self-contradictory. For example you suggest that they should go back and do it right, but you also don't want them to spend tax dollars on it. Well, the quality of an investigation is directly affected by its level of funding. The NASA crazy ideas lab is minimally funded, so of course not every detail can be worked out. The researchers explicitly state this in their paper.

[1] And yes, they are employees of NASA...saying "this is barely 'NASA'" is a nonsensical statement.

You know, that's a really good point, I hadn't considered that maybe virtual particles might act like a gas.

Imagine if they permeate everything and are generally nonreactive, but still have pressure and viscosity (however small). Maybe the engine is working like an airfoil, displacing the gas locally and using entrainment to create a pressure imbalance with the surrounding virtual particles to cause a larger flow (like in the Bernoulli and Coanda effects). A broken analogy would be the lift to drag ratio of a wing. If it’s 10:1, then you can lift a 1000 pound glider by pushing on the tail with just 100 pounds of thrust.

Maybe a black body is on par with light pressure because the radiation is concentrated like in a rocket, but other geometries are able to interact more strongly with the quantum foam or whatever you want to call it, because they don’t radiate energy in one direction but instead excite the foam enough that it becomes opaque to radiation and can be interacted with (like what happens when an inert gas becomes a plasma). Say the thruster excited the foam so that it was moving faster on one side of the chamber than the other, then that would work like the top and bottom of a wing (where the air on the top side moves faster) and create a pressure differential. The chamber would move to the side with the highest velocity. This might sound far fetched but there’s some evidence that the wave particle duality can be simplified to particles traveling along waves:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUBaBdl0Aw

Probably what we’re eventually going to find is that empty space is filled with these virtual particles, weighing much less than say electrons, and because of the uncertainty principle, they are spread over large volumes. So imagine the vertices being shed off of an airliner’s wing. Even though the wing is only a few feet wide, the vortices might be 100 feet wide, so maybe if you could put special glasses on, you’d see a big vortex being shed around the chamber, and if the foam weighs orders of magnitude less than air, the vortex could be really big. It’s probably even possible to tie the size of the vortex to the “lift to drag” ratio of the chamber. Now it doesn’t seem so far fetched that the engine could work when it’s pushing off such a large number of virtual particles.