NASA Paper Measuring Thrust from EmDrive Replication Has Leaked

Quote from MrSelfSustain

These devices may produce thrust via a few different methods (in atmosphere they can create ionic wind), but at their root they are "aetheric density modifiers" (my term created just now on the fly) that block the flow of aether in one direction so as to get a push in the other direction.

This sounds like Münchhausen...

How do you know in which direction the ether flows and it will push you??? I guess, if ever, the explanation must be more physical...

Quote from damn_right _man

Even worse, the aether does not exist.

Aha. And what is vacuum energy? The universe is filled with virtual particles etc.? You can call a table "chair" or a horse "dog", but what is written down in the linked wiki article reads more or less like the definition of an aether.

And I could add this (wiki):
Robert B. Laughlin, Nobel Laureate in Physics, endowed chair in physics, Stanford University, had this to say about ether in contemporary theoretical physics:

It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] The word 'ether' has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum. . . . Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that any such matter must have relativistic symmetry. [..] It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with 'stuff' that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.[9]

Quote from damn_right _man

So, there is, in this meaning or any other, no aether.

Sounds like it's time for a reminder class at the School of Logical Arguments for you my friend.

If X ≠ Y, then Z ≠ A or B or C or.........?

Great. Another logical fallacy: Appealing to your own authority. Oh dear.

If you cannot see the error in your 'argument', specifically in your denial that words can have two meanings, there's little hope for you.

Oddly, it doesn't surprise me that you are a computer programmer. Having met a few. I'm clearly not talking to an English teacher. What you just wrote is a garbled mess.

Also you seem to have adopted Wyttenbach's old (and now corrected) habit of capitalising the y in you. Tsk Tsk.

It is wrong. "You" in the middle of a sentence isn't a salutation either, it's a pronoun. However, some languages, such a German, do (mostly?) capitalise Die and Sie.

You are getting hung up on the fact that the word aether can have different connotations. There's the Michaelson and Morely aether (or more accurately, there isn't). There's also the shorthand way it can be used... See Epimetheus's quotation:

Quote

And I could add this (wiki):Robert B. Laughlin, Nobel Laureate in Physics, endowed chair in physics, Stanford University, had this to say about ether in contemporary theoretical physics:

It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] The word 'ether' has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum. . . .

Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that any such matter must have relativistic symmetry. [..] It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with 'stuff' that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.[9]

I like to visualize. While the physics of Bohmian mechanics is a hot topic. It (fluid mechanics) helps me visualize the double slit experiment. It took me a long time to visualize e=mc2. The math of light speed x light speed is a bit abstract let alone the visuals . So like other ways to visualize I find pilot waves are useful for me.

The MiHsC theory is interesting as it is new and unique deserves to be scrutinized. I find it somehow comforting that we have a lot of LENR folks interested in this (with an open mind). It gives hope that there is something new to learn. I hate to tie in *aether as it is polarizing and a thread of its own, but all of this... is on a new boundary of knowledge is it physics? Well at least it’s new ideas that have the potential to be.

With physicists like J Maclenda and L Susskind it seems that there are new ways of looking at existing physics. I have come to think that at least Susskind believes we are on an expanding 2D waveform boundary. And he and Maclenda (and others) have visualized it (e.g. Escher). I think that some substrate like *aether has to exist, as virtual pairs have been proven with SQUID. I have more to write but this is too long already and I have segued from the EM drive, and AlainCo has covered the similarities.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/r…30082804.htmDate:November 30, 2016

Source:European Southern Observatory - ESO

Summary:
By studying the light emitted from an extraordinarily dense and strongly magnetized neutron star, astronomers may have found the first observational indications of a strange quantum effect, first predicted in the 1930s. The polarization of the observed light suggests that the empty space around the neutron star is subject to a quantum effect known as vacuum birefringence.

The universe is a string-net liquid

http://dao.mit.edu/~wen/NSart-wen.html

When virtual particles come into existence, their spins are aligned at random with no preferred orientation. Light interacts with these particles and progresses through space one particle at a time in a constant rate of speed.

A large magnetic field organizes the spin of these virtual particles in a fixed and well ordered alignment so that when the light that is hopping along the chains of these virtual particles, the spin of that light is also modified by the preferred orientation of the magnetized vacuum.

This indicates that EMF can affect and/or move the vacuum to compress or deplete the virtual particle activity into zones of positive and negative vacuum energy.

The ability of EMF to affect the virtual particles in the vacuum must be how the EMDrive archives thrust.

A space ship can modify the nature of the vacuum by applying EMF stimulation in the proper sequence forming a space-time bubble.

The space-time bubble is the closest that modern physics comes to the "warp drive" of science fiction. It can convey a starship at arbitrarily high speeds. Space-time contracts at the front of the bubble, reducing the distance to the destination, and expands at its rear, increasing the distance from the origin (arrows). The ship itself stands still relative to the space immediately around it; crew members do not experience any acceleration. Negative energy (blue) is required on the sides of the bubble.

This is rather long, it is on Virtual Particles. It came from a search of "Virtual Particles what are they" from Prof. Matt Strassler. Disclaimer* It through a PUP from McAffee so I am inlining it. But following it I think it is a false positive and I am being proactive.

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IMO there is a substrate regardless of it's either called Vacuum or Aether- so it is makes for interesting discussion. This may explain how the underling field works without addressing the magnetic effects previously mentioned by another poster.

Anyway here goes, sorry for the formatting:

Virtual Particles

The term “virtual particle” is an endlessly confusing and
confused subject for the layperson, and even for the non-expert
scientist. I have read many books for laypeople (yes, I was a
layperson once myself, and I remember, at the age of 16, reading
about this stuff) and all of them talk about virtual particles and
not one of them has ever made any sense to me. So I am going to try a
different approach in explaining it to you.

The best way to approach this concept, I believe, is to forget you
ever saw the word “particle” in the term. A virtual particle is
not a particle at all. It refers precisely to a disturbance in a
field that is not a particle. A particle is a nice,
regular ripple in a field, one that can travel smoothly and
effortlessly through space, like a clear tone of a bell moving
through the air. A “virtual particle”, generally, is a
disturbance in a field that will never be found on its own, but
instead is something that is caused by the presence of other
particles, often of other fields.

Analogy time (and a very close one mathematically); think about a
child’s swing. If you give it a shove and let it go, it will
swing back and forth with a time period that is always the same, no
matter how hard was the initial shove you gave it. This is the
natural motion of the swing. Now compare that regular,
smooth, constant back-and-forth motion to what would happen if
you started giving the swing a shove many times during each of its
back and forth swings. Well, the swing would start jiggling
around all over the place, in a very unnatural motion, and
it would not swing smoothly at all. The poor child on the swing
would be furious at you, as you’d be making his or her ride very
uncomfortable. This unpleasant jiggling motion — this
disturbance of the swing — is different from the swing’s natural
and preferred back-and-forth regular motion just as a “virtual
particle” disturbance is different from a real particle.
If something makes a real particle, that particle can go off on
its own across space. If something makes a disturbance, that
disturbance will die away, or break apart, once its cause is gone.
So it’s not like a particle at all, and I wish we didn’t
call it that.

Fig. 1: Two electrons approach each other; they generate a
disturbance in the electromagnetic field (the photon field); this
disturbance pushes them apart, and their paths are bent outward. One
says they "exchange virtual photons", but this is just
jargon.

For example, an electron is a real particle, a ripple in the
electron field; you can hold one in your hand, so to speak; you can
make a beam of them and send them across a room or inside an 20th
century television set (a cathode-ray tube). A photon, too, is a real
particle of light, a ripple in the electromagnetic field, and you can
make a beam of photons (as in a laser.) [Can’t have one
in your hand though, since photons (in vacuum) are always moving.]

But if two electrons pass near each other, as in Figure 1, they
will, because of their electric charge, disturb the electromagnetic
field, sometimes called the photon field because its ripples are
photons. That disturbance, sketched whimsically in green in the
figure, is not a photon. It isn’t a ripple moving at the speed of
light; in general isn’t a ripple at all, and certainly it is under
no obligation to move at any one speed. That said, it is not at all
mysterious; it is something whose details, if we know the initial
motions of the electrons, can be calculated easily. Exactly the
same equations that tell us about photons also tell us about how
these disturbances work; in fact, the equations of quantum
fields guarantee that if nature can have photons, it can
have these disturbances too. Perhaps unfortunately, this
type of disturbance, whose details can vary widely, was given the
name “virtual particle” for historical reasons, which makes it
sound both more mysterious, and more particle-like, than is
necessary. [Students of math and physics will recognize
real photons as solutions of a wave equation, and virtual photons as
related to the Green function associated with this equation.]

Fig. 2: As in Figure 1, for a positron (an anti-electron) and an
electron; now the slightly different disturbance causes the two
particles to attract one another, and their paths are bent inward.

This disturbance is important, because the force that the two
electrons exert on each other — the repulsive electric force
between the two particles of the same electric charge — is
generated by this disturbance. (The same is true if an electron and a
positron pass near each other, as in Figure 2; the disturbance in
this case is similar in type but different in its details, with the
result that the oppositely charged electron and positron are
attracted to each other.) Physicists often say, and laypersons’
books repeat, that the two electrons exchange virtual photons.
But those are just words, and they lead to many confusions if you
start imagining this word “exchange” as meaning that the
electrons are tossing photons back and forth as two children might
toss a ball. It’s not hard to imagine that throwing balls back and
forth might generate a repulsion, but how could it generate an
attractive force? The problem here is that the intuition that arises
from the word “exchange” simply has too many flaws. To really
understand this you need a small amount of math, but zero math is
unfortunately not enough. It is better, I think, for the layperson to
understand that the electromagnetic field is disturbed in some way,
ignore the term “virtual photons” which actually is more
confusing than enlightening, and trust that a calculation has to
be done to figure out how the disturbance produced by the two
electrons leads to their being repelled from one another, while the
disturbance between an electron and a positron is different enough to
cause attraction.

Fig. 3: An electron may naively be thought of as a ripple of
minimum intensity --- the minimal ripple --- in an electron field.
But the electron interacts with the photon field (i.e. the
electromagnetic field) and can create a disturbance in it; in doing
so it too ceases to be a normal particle and becomes a more general
disturbance. The combination of the two disturbances (i.e. the two
"virtual particles") remains a particle with the energy,
momentum and mass of the incoming electron.

Now there are many other types of disturbances that fields can
exhibit that are not particles. Another example, and scientifically
one of the most important, shows up in the very nature of particles
themselves. A particle is not as simple as I have naively
described. Even to say a particle like an electron is a
ripple purely in the electron field is an approximate
statement, and sometimes the fact that it is not exactly true
matters.

It turns out that since electrons carry electric charge, their
very presence disturbs the electromagnetic field around them, and so
electrons spend some of their time as a combination of two
disturbances, one in in the electron field and one in the
electromagnetic field. The disturbance in the electron field
is not an electron particle, and the disturbance in the photon field
is not a photon particle. However, the combination of the two
is just such as to be a nice ripple, with a well-defined energy and
momentum, and with an electron’s mass. This is sketchily
illustrated in Figure 3.

Fig. 4: The Feynman diagram needed to calculate the process in
Fig. 3. One says "the electron emits and reabsorbs a virtual
photon", but this is just shorthand for the physics shown in
Fig. 3.

The language physicists use in describing this is the following:
“The electron can turn into a virtual photon and a virtual
electron, which then turn back into a real electron.” And they draw
a Feynman diagram that looks like Figure 4. But what they
really mean is what I have just described in the
previous paragraph. The Feynman diagram is actually a calculational
tool, not a picture of the physical phenomenon; if you want to
calculate how big this effect is, you take that diagram , translate
it into a mathematical expression according to Feynman’s rules, set
to work for a little while with some paper and pen, and soon obtain
the answer.

Fig. 5: As in Figure 3, for a photon. The photon can become a
disturbance in the electron field. This disturbance has some regions
with negative electric charge and some with positive electric
charge, but with total charge zero, like the incoming photon itself.
The photon can do the same with other charged fields, such as the
muon field.

Another example involves the photon itself. It is not merely a
ripple in the electromagnetic field, but spends some of its time as
an electron field disturbance, such that the combination remains a
massless particle. The language here is to say that a photon can turn
into a virtual electron and a virtual positron, and back again; but
again, what this really means is that the electron field is disturbed
by the photon. But why are we seeing a positron — an anti-electron
— and yet I am only referring to the electron field? The reason
ties back to the very reason that there are anti-particles in the
first place: every field, by its very nature, has particle ripples
and anti-particle ripples. For some fields (such as the photon field
and Z field) these particle and anti-particle ripples are actually
the same thing; but for fields like electrons and quarks, the
particles and anti-particles are quite different. So what happens
when the electron field is disturbed by a passing photon is that a
disturbance is set up that has some electron-like disturbance with
net negative electric charge, and some positron-like disturbance with
net positive charge, but the disturbance as a whole, like the photon
itself, carries no net charge at all.

For those who learned (and recall a bit of) freshman physics,
what is happening is that the oscillating electric field that makes
up the photon is polarizing the electron field — inducing a dipole
moment. Remember dielectrics and how electric fields can polarize
them? Well, the vacuum of empty space itself, because it has an
electron field in it, is a polarizable medium — a dielectric
of sorts.

Fig. 6: The Feynman diagram needed to calculate the process in
Fig. 5. One says "photon becomes a virtual electron-positron
pair", but this is just shorthand for the physics shown in Fig.
5.

The same is true, by the way, for all the other electrically
charged fields, including those of the muon, the up quark, and so
forth.

[Here, by the way, we come across another reason why “virtual
particle” is a problematic term. I have had several people
ask me something like this: “ Since the diagram in Figure 6 seems
to show that the photon spends some of its time as made from two
massive particles [recall the electron and the positron both have the
same mass, corresponding to a mass-energy (E = m c-squared) of
0.000511 GeV],
why doesn’t that give the photon a mass?” Part of the
answer is that the diagram does not show
that the photon spends part of its time as made from two massive
particles. Virtual particles, which are what appear in the loop
in that diagram, are not particles. They are not nice ripples,
but more general disturbances. And only particles have the
expected relation between their energy, momentum and mass; the more
general disturbances do not satisfy these relations. So your
intuition is simply misled by misreading the diagram. Instead,
one has to do a real computation of the
effect of these disturbances. In the case of the photon, it
turns out the effect of this process on the photon mass is exactly
zero.]

Fig. 7: The electron can generate disturbances in the photon
field; the resulting photon disturbance can in turn create
disturbances in other electrically charged fields, such as the muon
field.

And it goes on from there. Our picture of an electron in Figure 3
was itself still too naive, because the photon disturbance around the
electron itself disturbs the muon field, polarizing it in its turn.
This is shown in Figure 7, and the corresponding Feynman diagram is
shown in Figure 8. This goes on and on, with a ripple in any
field disturbing, to a greater or lesser degree, all of the fields
with which it directly or even indirectly has an interaction.

Fig. 8: The Feynman diagram needed to calculate the process shown
in Figure 7.

So we learn that particles are just not simple objects, and
although I often naively describe them as simple ripples in a single
field, that’s not exactly true. Only in a world with no
forces — with no interactions among particles at all — are
particles merely ripples in a single field! Sometimes
these complications don’t matter, and we can ignore them.
But sometimes these complications are central, so we always have to
remember they are there.