An engine that does not violate anything: why EmDrive does not contradict the laws of physics. An engine that violates the laws of physics An engine that violates all the laws of physics

In the near future, researchers from China plan to test the EmDrive engine, which, according to them, runs on microwave energy. The device is a metal truncated cone and a magnetron, which creates microwaves, the energy of which is accumulated by a resonator. In this case, the system is not exposed to external influences and uses electromagnetic fields to create thrust.

The creators of EmDrive refuse to disclose the technology. However, Finnish physicists believe that the engine operates based on the inertia of photons arising from the Unruh effect. This method allows you to get rid of heavy fuel containers and the use of jet emissions.

Video

It is noted that the idea of ​​a device that contradicts the laws of physics was initially proposed by British engineer Roger Scheuer. He presented his project to the public in 2003, reports Gazeta.ru.

The creators of EmDrive hope to test the engine in space. They believe that using the device will reduce the flight to Mars to 10 weeks. And if the project is successful, it will allow reaching the edge of the solar system in a few months.

Full member of the Tsiolkovsky Russian Academy of Cosmonautics Alexander Zheleznyakov I don’t believe that such an engine is capable of working.

“I don’t comment on science fiction. You understand, it’s not at all clear what kind of engine this is. I am still a supporter of the fact that in nature nothing disappears without a trace and nothing appears without a trace. And then some fantastic ideas are expressed. Without knowing all the details, it is absurd to comment,” he said in an interview with NSN.

In turn, the head of the department of the Institute of Applied Mathematics named after M. V. Keldysh RAS, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Georgy Malinetsky noted that the EmDrive engine does not violate the laws of physics.

“When people imagine an engine, they imagine that something is moving, burning, but a lot has changed since the 19th century, when everything was exactly like that. Since then, people have created both quantum mechanics and quantum bullet theory. They found that a photon (a particle that has no rest mass) has both momentum and energy. Accordingly, attempts by scientists to use such things by converting electromagnetic field energy into motion energy are activities associated with the EmDrive engine. There are no violations of the laws of physics here, and then it depends on the engineers whether, based on the concepts of quantum field theory and quantum mechanics, they will be able to translate this into real structures,” he assured in a conversation with NSN.

The expert also noted that one can only be happy for the creators of such an engine and clarified, that previously the project of creating an “impossible” engine was seriously pursued at NASA. At the same time, the expert has not heard of anyone in Russia working on similar devices.

Malinetsky noted that this engine is of particular value for astronautics.

“For what we have on Earth, this engine is not needed. It is quite possible to drive on gasoline, gas, and electricity. But when it comes to space, in order for the satellite not to leave orbit, thrust is needed, albeit very small. What is most important is that this engine does not consume working fluid, it deals with the field, so it does not require rocket fuel to be carried into orbit. In this sense, this is an extremely tempting idea,” the expert noted.

MOSCOW, September 12 - RIA Novosti. All the latest statements by Chinese scientists about the successful creation and testing of the EmDrive microwave rocket engine are most likely based on erroneous data, but the device itself in any case does not violate the laws of physics, says physicist Brice Cassenti from the University of Connecticut (USA) .

"The operation of EmDrive violates Newton's third law, which states that force cannot arise on its own without the interaction of physical bodies. Both action and reaction are a direct result of the law of conservation of momentum. If this law is violated, then all modern physics, built on its basis will be incorrect. Therefore, many of us believe that all statements about the operation of EmDrive are the product of erroneous measurements,” Cassenti said, commenting on statements by Chinese scientists about the creation of a “working” version of EmDrive.

In 2001, American aircraft engineer Roger Scheuer announced the creation of an engine that, as it was stated then and as its opponents continue to believe today, violates all known laws of physics.

This device, operating on the basis of microwave radiation, is a special conical resonator chamber to which a powerful magnetron is connected - a source of microwave radiation. Given a certain geometry of this cone, this device will mysteriously move towards its narrow part with an extremely small force, if microwaves “walk” inside the cone.

Such behavior of EmDrive, as physicists immediately declared then, is impossible from the point of view of the laws of physics - such a manner of movement, in which neither fuel is wasted nor a directed beam of radiation is generated, contradicts the law of conservation of momentum. This problem can simply be imagined this way - if a person sits in a box and starts pushing its opposite walls, then he will not move forward, but will stagger in place.

However, Scheuer did not give up his idea, and a few years later it was tested by a number of professional physicists, including one of NASA laboratories. These tests, as one of the original skeptics wrote, led to unexpected results for scientists - it turned out that Schuer's invention really works. Last December, the successful completion of such tests was announced by scientists from China, who created a copy of EmDrive and are preparing to launch it into space for a final performance test.

As Cassenti, whose words are reported by the press service of the University of Connecticut, emphasizes, both the experiments of Chinese scientists and the results of measurements by physicists from the Eagleworks Laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center are not a fake or an elementary lie. They did see real changes in the position of the EmDrive, but these shifts may have occurred not due to the appearance of the “impossible” traction force generated by the Scheuer engine, but due to various side effects not taken into account in the measurements.

For example, the scientist continues, some parts of the EmDrive could expand under the influence of electrical currents arising inside the device, and this expansion could be perceived by instruments and experimenters as evidence that the engine is actually producing thrust. On the other hand, he admits that NASA physicists and perhaps their Chinese colleagues tried to eliminate all side effects and took their existence into account.

In general, as he notes, all experiments with EmDrive indicate the existence of some interesting physical effects that are unlikely to go beyond the Standard Model of physics, but which would be interesting to study and explain. For this reason, according to Cassenti, both China and NASA are conducting experiments with EmDrive, and the results of these experiments are being published in peer-reviewed journals.

Even if EmDrive works, as Cassenti believes, it is unlikely to violate the existing laws of physics - most likely, its work will be explained by some effects that fit both Newton’s calculations and the general theory of relativity, which we do not yet know about.

The final test of its performance, as the scientist emphasizes, will be possible only in space, where other forces will not influence the operation of the engine. In this case, engineers will be able to accurately measure the actual thrust force and test whether EmDrive can truly pave the way for deep space travel.

The Russian segment of the Internet once again reacted violently to a low-grade fake news story. A year later, a “sensation” about a miracle engine that does not require fuel, which all decent publications in the world disowned,

again hit the headlines of the domestic electronic media, and overshadowed the news about Putin’s election campaign in popularity:

"Yandex.Ru"

The headlines are not very diverse: “In China they created an engine that violates the laws of physics”, “The Chinese have encroached on other worlds”, “In China they created an engine that breaks the laws of physics”, “Chinese scientists have created a unique engine that violates the laws of physics”, etc.

The source of the commotion, as has happened before, turned out to be the British tabloid, famous for its “yellowness”.

By the way, in February of this year, Wikipedia recognized the tabloid as an unreliable source of information and refused to use it as a source. Just a day ago, the publication published an article with a screaming headline: “Have the Chinese hacked an impossible engine? Propaganda video claims

that scientists have created a working version of the EmDrive engine that will take a person to Mars in 10 weeks.”

The authors of the tabloid refer to a video that appeared, allegedly shown on Chinese television, which states that the EmDrive rocket engine, which violates Newton’s laws, has now been recreated by Chinese engineers and is ready for testing in space. The video does not provide any technical details; however, the engine itself is also absent from the video.

A simple search indicates that absolutely no one in the world responded to the “sensation” from the Daily Mail: there are simply no reprints of this fake news.

Another thing is RuNet. “Sensation” fell on the fertile soil of the domestic media, which are so greedy for meaningless sensations that no one bothers to check. As of Tuesday afternoon

The number of news stories about the miracle engine EmDrive has exceeded a hundred - a rare political event receives such wide coverage.

The engine, which looks more like a bucket, made headlines a year ago when an article with the results of its tests was published in a peer-reviewed journal. The history of EmDrive began back in 2003, when British engineer Roger Scheuer presented to the public an electromagnetic motor of an unusual design. It consisted of a magnetron, a device that generates microwave radiation, a copper conical resonator resembling a bucket, sealed at both ends.

According to the inventor, the engine is capable of generating thrust without the use of jet emissions.

However, this statement directly contradicts the law of conservation of momentum. After all, if EmDrive is a closed system, it cannot increase its momentum without external influence. This circumstance is responsible for the excitement in the world media around an incomprehensible development that has been going on for several years.

Over the next few years, the inventor worked to improve the craft, and in 2008, its “independent” verification began.
First, a working prototype was created at China's Northwestern Polytechnic University under the leadership of Professor Yang Juan, developing a thrust of 72 grams (about 360 mN per kilowatt). Then NASA became interested in the unusual engine.

Since 2013, testing of EmDrive began in the Eagleworks laboratory at the Johnson Space Center under the leadership of Harold White. The engine was tested in a sealed chamber on special torsion balances capable of detecting tens of micronewtons of thrust. The resulting thrust was much less than in the Chinese experiment, but nevertheless it was argued that it was present.

“They traditionally publish some kind of bullshit, but recently they published a story about warp drive.

They receive funding from some internal reserves and constantly get some fabulous results, here it’s called “internal money for spontaneous ideas,” a knowledgeable NASA employee then explained to Gazeta.Ru the situation with American “inventors.”

However, official comments from NASA said approximately the same thing. “Although the Houston team's research into a new propulsion principle made a lot of noise, this feeble attempt failed to produce any tangible results. NASA is not working on warp drive technology,” the agency said in its response to Space.com.

Drafts of a NASA article, which has caused a stir, have leaked online, confirming the functionality of the controversial EmDrive engine, which supposedly does not require fuel. According to the conclusions of specialists from the Eagleworks laboratory, the engine develops a thrust of 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt. And it probably works on vacuum energy. Should we believe this?

An enthusiast of the amazing engine, Phil Wilson, under the nickname The Traveler, published a post about this on the NASA Spaceflight website forum, but moderators deleted it, explaining that the article should be officially published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in December 2016. However, the Next Big Future website provided free access to the documents and the diagrams they contained, finally making the article public.

NASA experts report a successful repeat of an experiment conducted by British engineer Roger Scheuer in 2006. He was able to create a rotating engine that produces no emissions and showed that the device obeys Newton's laws of mechanics. According to the developer, the device converts electricity into microwaves, their energy is accumulated in a resonator, and as a result, a small draft occurs. Since then, scientists have been grappling with the EmDrive mystery: does it work, and if so, why? Indeed, according to the law of conservation of momentum, thrust occurs due to the jet stream. In other words, for an object to move forward, something needs to bounce off it in the opposite direction.

When New Scientist magazine first published an article about EmDrive, angry letters poured in to the editor. “Momentum, according to one of the four basic principles, is conserved and cannot be created or destroyed again. The engine violates this rule. In traditional rockets, thrust is achieved in accordance with the rule, since the impulses of the ship and the exhaust jet, moving in opposite directions, cancel each other out,” one reader pointed out to the publication.

However, those who are trying to understand the principles of operation of the engine believe that the law of conservation of momentum is preserved in it; it is quite difficult to simply explain how this happens. Thus, Michael McCullosh from the University of Plymouth (UK) admits the existence of photons with mass, as well as a change in the speed of light inside the device. Another hypothesis speaks of the quenching of microwaves, as a result of which pairs of photons are born that carry momentum. This can only happen in cone-shaped cavities. However, these assumptions go beyond modern ideas about physics and are unlikely to convince other specialists.

Experiments with EmDrive, carried out in June 2015 by Martin Taimar from Germany, did not confirm or deny the functionality of the power plant. However, the NASA article claims that the engineers achieved a positive result.

The study used a torsion pendulum, an aluminum structure mounted on a slippery table in a vacuum chamber. Such a device is capable of measuring even very weak thrust. There was an EmDrive on one arm of the pendulum, and in a series of tests at 40, 60 and 80 watts it showed a force of 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt in a vacuum. Checks did not reveal any unaccounted sources of movement, but experts recognized the need for additional research to exclude distortions from factors such as thermal expansion.

Engine testing at NASA laboratory

To explain the results, the authors of the article turned to the almost forgotten theory of the pilot wave. This theory attempts to explain concepts such as wave function collapse and Schrödinger's cat paradox from the point of view of classical physics. In other words, all the uncertainty arises due to the fact that the position and momenta of the particles are unknown to the observer. Planck's constant, the Casimir effect, as well as the ground state of hydrogen and much more have received classical explanations.

Modern physics has adopted the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which states that uncertainty does not depend on the observer. However, physicists Couder and Fort showed back in 2006 that water droplets can behave like quantum objects. Thus, a drop continuously bouncing off a thin layer of liquid at a certain frequency and moving in a random direction creates a pattern of concentric waves that follows the drop along its entire path. Using such a system, it was possible to reproduce the double-slit experiment, tunneling and other quantum phenomena.

Roger Scheuer's 2006 experiment

Perhaps quantum fluctuations (virtual particles) are waves that "follow" real particles. From this, for example, it follows that the seven energy levels of the hydrogen atom can be considered as waves in the quantum vacuum. Scientists in the article come to the conclusion that the quantum vacuum is a medium that supports acoustic oscillations, and the components of any such medium are capable of exchanging momentum. This means that work can be done on the vacuum and extracted from it, which is what the engine does.

It should be noted that Eagleworks itself (also known as the Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory), where the research was carried out, is a small scientific group studying various dubious theories in order to find ways to develop new engines for spacecraft. It is quite possible that the article that has passed the reviewers will be significantly different from the version that is available now, and the conclusions will be formulated more accurately. In any case, we must wait for further research and experiments by other scientific groups, since the NASA article itself does not yet provide any answers.

0 👁 546

This week, the global scientific community was rocked by unexpected news. Chinese scientists have officially published experimental evidence that the EmDrive electromagnetic motor actually works. A unique installation is capable, for example, of moving a spaceship in a vacuum... without using fuel. So why did many scientists believe (and some still believe) that this invention was pure quackery?

How EmDrive works

Tiangong-2 orbital station, where the EM engine will be tested

The concept of an electromagnetic propulsion system was first published back in 2002 by the British research company Satellite Propulsion Research, founded by aerospace engineer Roger Scheuer. At the same time, the first working prototype of the device was presented to the public. Yes, yes, it was the famous “British scientists” who invented the fantastic engine, which caused a wave of skepticism from the scientific community.

The fact is that EmDrive defies all existing laws of physics. Its design is a magnetron that generates microwaves, as well as a high-Q resonator - a metal “bucket”, a microwave trap in the shape of a sealed cone. The magnetron (in everyday life it is this that ensures the operation of microwave ovens) is connected to the resonator by a high-frequency transmission line, that is, an ordinary coaxial cable. Entering the resonator, the EM wave is emitted towards both ends with the same phase velocity, but with different group velocities - this, according to the creator, is what causes the effect.

What is the difference between these two speeds? Once in a closed space, electrons begin to spread in it, reflecting from the inner walls of the resonator. Phase velocity is the speed relative to the reflecting surface, which, in fact, determines the speed of electron movement. Since the electrons enter the chamber from the same source, this value is indeed the same for all. The group velocity, in turn, is the speed of the electrons relative to the end wall and increases as they move from the narrow to the wide part of the cone. Thus, according to Scheuer, the pressure of the EM wave on the wide wall of the resonator is greater than on the narrow wall, which creates thrust.

Engine versus Newtonian physics

So why don't scientists agree with this? The main complaint of physicists is that the principle of operation of the described structure directly contradicts Newton’s third law, which states that “an action always has an equal and opposite reaction, otherwise, the interactions of two bodies on each other are equal and directed in opposite directions.” To put it simply, in the space we are familiar with, for every action there is a reaction, equal in strength but opposite in direction. This principle explains why all modern engines work, from jet engines (gas is pumped backwards, which propels the car forward) to ion engines (a beam of charged atoms moves in one direction and the ship in another). EmDrive simply has... no emissions.

Some hobbyists have assembled a miniature copy of EmDrive right at home

In addition, several other not so important parameters remain unaccounted for. For example, the author of the concept did not take into account the fact that the EM wave exerts pressure not only on the end walls, but also on the side walls of the resonator. After criticism, Scheuer published a non-peer-reviewed paper explaining his point of view, but experts say the radiation pressure theory is more complex than the theory he presented.

Technologies on the verge of fantasy

In 2013, NASA became interested in the engine. It's not surprising: if EmDrive really works as advertised, it will be a real revolution in the field of space travel. The device was tested at the Eagleworks laboratory at the Johnson Space Center. The work was carried out under the leadership of Harold White, and during their course an anomalous result was obtained - a thrust of about 0.0001 N. White believes that such a resonator can work by creating a virtual plasma toroid that realizes thrust using magnetohydrodynamics during quantum oscillations of the vacuum. The testing conditions were chosen to be gentle, 50 times less powerful than Scheuer’s own experiments. They were performed on a low-force torsion pendulum, which can detect forces of tens of micronewtons, in a sealed stainless steel vacuum chamber at room temperature and normal atmospheric pressure.

Today, CCTV-2 reported that Chinese engineers not only successfully tested the new engine in December last year, but also presented materials demonstrating the circuit and operation of EmDrive. In the near future, the installation will go into space and be tested in real conditions. Li Feng, chief designer, explained that the technology will have to undergo upgrades before launch. For example, in order to keep the device at , a thrust power of 100 mH to 1H is required, and the current design does not allow squeezing such power out of the engine. In addition, the placement of the engine in one or another part of the theoretical satellite will also affect its heating and thrust.