I'm still not sure of course whether the emdrive is a real effect or not, but for fun I've written a humorous dialogue about it and MiHsC, so in the spirit of amusement here it is: Kirk, Spock and McCoy travel back to 2014 curious about the early origin of the theories that lead to inertial damping and faster than light travel..
Spock: Captain, I've found some recent references to a theory called MiHsC and an experiment on something called the emdrive.
Captn: Alright Spock, let's have it!
Spock: I'll come to MiHsC in a moment, but the emdrive is a resonant microwave cavity, cone-shaped, that appears to move slightly towards its narrow end..
McCoy: Now just wait a minute Spock, I'm a Doctor not a physicist, but doesn't that violate the old conservation of momentum?
Spock: You are, surprisingly, correct Doctor.
McCoy: Why thank you Spock. I suppose that ends that conversation..
Kirk: Don't bet on it bones!
McCoy: Sounds like another crackpot lead to me.
Spock: I find it fascinating.
McCoy: Why doesn't that surprise me!? But it still violates momentum conservation.
Spock: Doctor, the medical physics courses you took, even in our time, are still based on old 20th century physics and skim over the new physics, but the Enterprise would not move without it.
McCoy: You're telling me they repealed the conservation of momentum now?
Spock: No, but at this time, humanity is still mostly unaware of the momentum obtainable from the zero point field.
McCoy: But this emdrive looks like baloney: you can't make something move without applying some sort of detectable force!
Spock: Indeed you can if you know how. Even in this backward time period that was possible, though the wider potential was not realised until MiHsC was proposed. Are you aware of the Casimir effect?
McCoy: Forgive me Spock, I was busy curing real people while you were devoting your life to inanimate objects and impenetrable ideas.
Spock: Very commendable Doctor, but the Casimir effect is produced by putting two parallel plates close together, so that they damp virtual particles of the zero point field between them, so that more particles hit the plates from outside them than inside, and so the plates move together very slightly.
McCoy: What's your point?
Spock: The system has moved without a 'detectable' outside force being applied to it.
McCoy: Sounds like a lot of goddamned voodoo to me.
Spock: On the contrary, even at this time the Casimir effect has been observed many times and was the first experimental inkling of the 21st century revolution in physics.
McCoy: Well, be still my heart, but if it's only a tiny effect..
Spock: We have a saying on Vulcan: "If a door is slightly ajar, it's wide open"...and there's a theory proposed in this time called Modified inertia by a Hubble-scale Casimir effect (MiHsC) that brought the zero point field and horizons into physics, and also predicts the emdrive quite well..
Kirk: MiHsC, MiHsC! That reminds me, Dr Carol Marcus used to go on about a funny old theory called MiHsC that started a paradigm shift and got rid of the need for something called dark matter and energy.
McCoy: Brings back fond memories does it, Jimmy boy?
Kirk: Bones, as a Doctor you ought to know better than to reopen old wounds.
McCoy: Very funny. I'm sure you've made that joke before.
Kirk: Good work Spock. It could be the beginning we need..
McCoy: (mumbles) Still sounds like a lot of baloney to me..
12 comments:
MiHsC has been mentioned more than once in the 'EM Drive' thread I have been following at the NASA Spaceflight forums. (I believe you posted there a few times).
I came across your solution to the 'Pioneer Anomaly,' and how it works at least as well as the conventional explanation. Thought occurred to me: there are other spacecraft (the 'Voyagers') still transmitting, at roughly comparable distances. Don't know if they are experiencing the same anomaly, but it might be worth checking, and seeing if MiHsC can account for the presence or absence of such an effect.
The great advantage of the Pioneers was they were spin-stabilised so didn't need frequent engine firing for course correction, so they made ideal ballistics experiments. The Voyagers were not, so their acceleration data is too noisy from engine firings that are difficult to model. However New Horizons, going to Pluto, may be a better bet since for part of its trajectory it's spin stabilised.
Having said that, the Voyagers are not course correcting now, so maybe you have something... All it'd need is at least three, preferably more, distances derived from the signal delay to get an acceleration. The data might be available on NASA's spacecraft tracking data website http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi
Found this. Good enough?
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/
Another possible avenue of testing MiHsC comes to mind: double stars with very wide separations. Not binaries, but 'common proper motion' stars with actual separations on the order of hundreds or thousands of AU, yet still gravitationally linked - something that puzzles some astronomers. Catalogues and papers I've looked at, taken collectively, say there is a 'fish-tail' motion between the stars. Would MiHsC figure into this somehow?
Regarding your Voyager suggestion, the NASA data on the web involves some prediction. We need raw data, so I'm going to email someone I know at NASA. Regarding double stars: I did compare MiHsC with wide binaries separated out to 10,000 AU (data from Hernandez, 2011) but the data was too noisy to be conclusive. Do you have a reference for that fish tail motion?
Another Voyager data website: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly-reports/index.htm
I first noticed the 'fish-tail' motion in wide double stars by comparing measures from different catalogs: instead of remaining constant, the Position Angle and/or Separation would 'wobble' slightly. At first I thought this was instrument error as the wobble was tiny, but it kept turning up over and over again with different systems.
Later, I found (by accident) a paper that accepted this wobble or fish-tail motion as fact. That was years ago, and it was buried pretty deep in the ADS archives. Don't remember the author, though it was part of a comment on measures made of selected double stars.
I did put together a catalog, part of which contained a long lineup of double star measures - as many as six or seven in some cases, but that might not help you - I was using a photometric distance system for stars without parallaxes, error margin on the order of 19-20%.
That said, there is a lot of fuzziness in Double Star data.
Now that I think about it, there is a catalogue or two on the 'Vizier' site that gives multiple measures for wide double stars:
http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-3?-source=J/AJ/132/50&-out.max=50&-out.form=HTML%20Table&-out.add=_r&-out.add=_RAJ,_DEJ&-sort=_r&-oc.form=sexa
Wycoff: Double Stars in Astrometric Catalogs.
Failing that, the 'Washington Double Star' catalog is the most comprehensive I know of. It gives first and last measure for each double, though it lists how many others there are, and I suppose additional measures could be requested.
This just turned up in my inbox:
http://www.space.com/27682-rogue-stars-between-galaxies.html?cmpid=558602
Rogue stars between galaxies accounting for about half the stars in the universe. Seems a bit preliminary to me - really should have done more sky survey work...but assuming its true, does this affect MiHsC?
Interesting article about those rogue stars. MiHsC demands that a star in intergalactic space must still have an acceleration above 7*10^-10 m/s^2, so they could provide a test of MiHsC if they can be seen individually.
At least some of those rogue intergalactic stars should turn up in the Gaea Catalog, when that gets released in a few years, along with parallax distances and maybe proper motions.
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