Direct to Inertia Propulsion

If there are any return visitors to Brink you might have assumed I was no longer continuing with this Blog project. In truth I don't know if I ever will finish the originally promised 25 entries -- this makes the eighth. I had been studying for the General GRE and now I'm studying for the Computer Science GRE subject test. So this may be the last entry until late November after I return from celebrating my first year anniversary to my wife Nian in China.

In June I posted 10 high priority topics and 25 low priority to my main blog Bare Naked Larry that Brink might cover. The low priority topics tended to be advances unlikely to occur in our life time, if ever, while the high priority topics were on subjects that are likely only engineering challenges or require basic research that doesn't require new understanding of the basic laws of nature.

Of course science breakthroughs don't come along with any degree of predictability as evidenced by Dolly the cloned sheep born in 1996 or high-temperature superconductors in 1986. 2004 may be a year that goes down in the history books as an example of another breakthrough year -- or not -- just has cold fusion, bubble fusion, and superconducting-antigravity failed to pan out; though they seemed intriguing possibilities at one time.

This week's "New Scientist" magazine has an article about a microwave cavity device built by Roger Shawyer. The article is entitled "Relativity drive: The end of wings and wheels?" According to Roger Shawyer his device produces reactionless thrust by exploiting the power of microwaves (or any other electromagnetic wave) to impart momentum. Depending on how they are generated and contained certain quantum effects give rise in an imbalance in forces these waves impart. I don't pretend to be a quantum physicist, but Roger Shawyer's explanation that this imbalance within properly shaped microwave cavities is due to the waves travelling within their own inertial frame of reference has an air of plausibility. Shawyer makes explicit predictions about performance based on the Q factor of the cavities created. Q factor being a real property of microwave cavities that goes up with efficiency of containing microwave energy.

Here is a link to a web article published in August of last year A force for space with no reaction (microwave spacedrive?)

I'd put the odds of Shawyer having the real thing as high as 1 in 4. Unlike many pathological science pronouncements in the past Shawyer seems to be going directly to Governments and NASA to evaluate the veracity of his claims. Still 2 years has passed and opinions seems split 50:50 between experts as to whether this is a real effect and that it will scale up with Q. You can rest assured there will be a follow up post if I see the odds changing in either direction. With the recent "New Scientist" article this discovery will undoubtedly get more scrutiny and it will not be another 2 years before we know what is up with Shawyer's possible reactionless drive.

I probably don't need to go on much about possible applications of a reactionless inertia drive. Shawyer's device if real has some interesting drawbacks, chief among which is it current inefficiency (which may scale with Q, and Q is not known to be bounded). Also as a consequence of the quantum trick of extracting inertia from microwaves, the device is better at hovering than accelerating. Allowing acceleration to occur in the plane of its thrust drains the cavity of its energy quickly causing thrust to decrease. I find this fact one that makes Shawyer's claims a little more believable since he hasn't provided us with a free lunch or perpetual motion machine or some other 2nd law of thermodynamics violating concept.

I've already stated my current gut hunch of odds of 1 in 4 for Shawyer's claims turning out to be true. I suspect if this doesn't pan out to be the real thing, we can scratch reactionless drives off the list of discoveries likely to be seen in our life times.

Current Google News on Roger Shawyer