Tuesday, August 05, 2014

Why I haven't blogged about the reactionless drive

Don't Get Too Excited About NASA's New Miracle Engine

I had a hunch that the write ups of the NASA apparent confirmation of a reactionless drive were being a bit too enthusiastic.  This article indicates my skepticism may be well founded.

And one other point:  the thrust the test measured was absolutely tiny.  Even if a totally new effect is at play, I wouldn't get too excited unless it was clearly scale-able to something useful.   Weird (but tiny) force effects of the quantum world already exist - see the Casimir effect - but as far as I know there is no proposal to ever make use of that for colonising the universe.

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