China is now selling police laser guns to shoot down pesky drones.
A fouler way to quit smoking.
I’m not sure how practicable this is, but who knows?
Low mass star came mighty close to our solar system 70000 years ago.
So that’s what that was! I knew Alpha Centuri wasn’t the closest.
http://thespacereporter.com/2015/02/low-mass-star-came-mighty-close-to-our-solar-system-70000-years-ago/
I was going to edit then changed my mind but NOoooooooooo!!!
What do the more scientifically minded of you make of this? It’s way beyond anything I understand.
The always great Atomic Rocket has this to say about it (and reactionless dves in general).
Basically, the problem with reactionless drives in general is that depending on the observer, they don’t produce the same amount of kinetic energy when moving the ship at a given acceleration. Which means, among other things, that they are producing free energy
Which is a big no according to everything we know about how the world works (and the destruction potential would literally be apocalyptic). That’s about “relativity is wrong - here’s my FTL drive” problematic.
The problem with this particularly reactionless drive is that the experimental setup was shaky, the recorded thrust was at the limit of the instrument’s precision (hence why it was far weaker than the previous Chinese test) and the science behind it problematic - for what I understood, it was little more than a Dean Drive with microwave pushing in a cavity instead of mechanical parts pushing against a frame. This doesn’t work for the same reason you can’t push a ship (or a car) from the inside. You have to go out out to push it. But then again, that’s would make it a reaction drive.
So there is probably little chance it will get somewhere (which is a good news for anyone disliking apocalypses - though it would help explain the Fermi paradox I guess).
To his credit, Mr White seems to want to avoid such media attention and be left to do his things, with a tiny budget even for cash-strapped NASA, for what I read. So it is the many headlines-seeking, unchecking journalists that are to blame here.
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We had a discussion about a similar magic space drive here:
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I’ve been following it just to see how it develops because I’m interested to see what happens either way. What ThornEel said is correct. Theoretically this drive cannot work or else it violates the conservation laws(Ala free energy, as Thorn pointed out).
That being said, their first experiment wasn’t very convincing nor controlled. It happened in a non vacuum with shotty parts and test equipment. At the time, I felt it was complete BS.
Recently, the eagleworks team released a report that in a vacuum(down to microTorrs iirc) environment, they still detected thrust. Now, its still very sketchy but it’s still a step closer to it working. I’m still not convinced that it isn’t some experimental error, but the issue is they need to upgrade the device to produce more “thrust” before they can send it to other labs to test it further. This is due to other labs needing a higher base level of thrust.
Personally, I’d love this to work, but scientifically it’s hard to justify it actually working based on what we know about the universe thus far. From what I’ve read the theory about it working is the RF waves pushing off “virtual particles” that pop in and out of existence before we can detect them. The other theory is that it’s utilizing the Casimir effect. The VP theory feels pretty flimsy to me considering what little I know about particle physics.
I do enjoy that we don’t know why it works, and I’m curious to see what what flaws are causing the forces. I’ll be even more ecstatic if it manages to work simply because whoa. It would makes trips around our solar system trivial compared to now. Interstellar is still out of the question for the sane however.
How Can This Chemical Be a Solid, Liquid, and Gas at the Same Time? (title) It is neat but ice, open water and humidity.
EDIT I didn’t say what it is!!! It’s about Jupiter’s satellite ganymede’s makeup soeey. Not quit what I expected. This is however not empirical evidence.
Analysis leads to all but exclude thermal artifacts as cause of anomalous thrust
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=36313.0
They show their math, so it’s not more of the same armchair philosophical purse fight nor some journalist trying to repeat what he was told. A few people in the discussion are actually working on their own replications. A very good discussion overall.
Just another day in the office at Magic Leap
This game looks better then the others of it’s tips.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM
Wait… How’s That even science ? Pure after-effects with plenty of animations… This ain’t augmented reality yet !
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Yes, I already knew about “Magic Leap”, thank you for the video.
What I meant was: the “robot shooting” game is all about special effects. It is not a demo and most certainly farther from reality that their current prototype is (at least for all we know, since they’re not showing anything).
I’ll trust this company when they’ll throw out prototypes, not intentions. For now, “Occulus Rift” is more real and impressive IMO.
I was being lazy. sorry.
I got one better! Sorta… Just read it yesterday! First thing I thought of was possible applications for reducing reentry heat felt by spacecraft. Then I read that to have any effect one would need 7 Tesla magnetic fields! Yikes!!
If you put the two together then you’ve really got a nice little shield…
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Not only 7 Tesla, but the decrease of heat transfer rate was only of 12% for a material almost at 0K. I’m not sure (couldn’t find it in the article) if the percentage would remain the same for higher temperature …
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Now. Increasing heat transfer rate would be interesting too …
And yep … seven Tesla is a lot …
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Lazes are used to cool adams (spelling) to try to get to 0, K ( zero degrees kelvin that is) to lazy to look it up. 