Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Is Gravity Control Propulsion viable? Part 6

Thought I might have some fun, I was thinking on some of the questions Marc Millis asked in his talk on Space Drives and Gravity Control Propulsion and it is useful to address his questions from the point of view of the model currently being worked on to see if there are any major logical inconsistencies with current Physics and if so why and if they can be addressed. Several screen grabs from Marc's talk are shown below to address the questions put forward. Note that I am answering the questions with the modified EMQG model in mind (which at this stage remember is a hypothesis which may have errors) however here we go.

Luke's Landspeeder (from the Star Wars fictional movie) has the ability to levitate above the ground and has some kind of jet engines to propel it forward. Will the frog get squeeshed if the speeder went over it?


No. The frog will become weightless while it is in the speeder's volume of influence on the local spacetime metric so the frog should survive. If the speeder parked above the frog, the frog would just be floating underneath the speeder as if it was in a space station in orbit. As the speeder approaches the frog, part of the frog's body will have weight and the other part will feel weightless which might confuse the frog for a moment (interestingly enough levitating a live frog on Earth has been done in the lab via different means: direct diamagnetic levitation). Note that Luke and C3PO will also feel weightless inside the speeder but a bird flying above the speeder outside the volume of influence will need to fly as normal to stop falling towards the ground.

What will happen to the speeder when it encounters the obstacles forward? It will clear the smaller ones but will crash into the higher ones unless Luke makes an altitude adjustment to the speeder. The GCP field of influence will act on the local spacetime metric causing objects to become weightless within, this may be a problem obstruction wise with loose objects if there are other influences involved such as wind etc. 


Which path will the speeder follow across the cliff? The green path, the speeder will go straight across as if there was no cliff at all. 

When the speeder is parked will it shoot off if pushed? (it appears rigid in the movie when parked). Momentum is conserved, there is no difference pushing the speeder in free space or at ground level when parked, it will drift away slowly, when parked the speeder will have to use an anchor of some kind or turn the vehicle off once on ground.



Ok so here is a list of GCP approaches Marc puts up and I've crossed out the ones which I think are either incorrect or unviable:
  • Zero out gravity of the vehicle? 
  • Zero out surrounding gravity?
  • Antigravity?
  • Force fields on space itself? Yes but depends on what is meant by "force fields" and "space" however this is the closest option which would agree with the model. Although the first two in the list regarding zeroing out gravity can be net effects they are incorrect because we cannot "zero out" the background accelerating virtual fermion field. Note that inertia is also not "zeroed out" in this process.
  • Shield gravity?
  • Ground repulsed?



The problem of providing a gravity earth-like environment in a starship (without relying on spinning structures or linear acceleration) can be reworded as: the flat spacetime metric inside the starship needs to be curved locally since gravity is curved spacetime. This is assuming the starship is in deep space, stopped and far away from a gravity well.

As far as keeping the artificial gravity net acceleration 1g inside the starship constant for the crew, the situation gets complicated if the starship is in orbit around a planet, undergoes manoeuvres ie accelerations, changes in altitude, course corrections etc. Speculating here, a super fast computer would have to evaluate the exterior spacetime metric curvature in real time and compensate the metric curvature inside the starship accordingly all this while taking into account the starship's own accelerations. It should be noted that there is no such thing as a pure flat spacetime metric anywhere in the Universe, however for discussion purposes far away from large masses it is a close approximation.

I haven't looked into this however it is quite feasible if the model allows one to change a curved spacetime metric to a flat metric then following symmetry principles in Physics, a flat spacetime can be curved artificially (not by using mass or energy-density as done by Nature). So in other words an acceleration needs to be imparted to the local virtual fermion particle field to obtain a net effect of curved spacetime which would result in local artificial gravity in the starship equivalent to natural gravity at ground level on Earth.


According to the model, Mach's Principle (and all the variants) is incorrect. Local physics is not determined by the large scale structure of the Universe. The large scale mass distribution of the Universe determines the widescale spacetime metric structure but within the spacetime metric inertia is purely a local quantum effect. The starship in the above slide is not pushing "against the mass of the Universe" but locally. As we'll see the model shows no inconsistencies with the Equivalence Principle which is an important test however other subtle problems are run into which will be explored in the upcoming paper I'm working on titled "A quantum model of spacetime metrics".

All in all an interesting talk by Marc, this is the last post on these GCP part series. The 100 Year Starship Symposium is coming up next month hopefully they'll have videos on the talks as well.

CI.

No comments:

Post a Comment