http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/space/improbable-thruster-seems-work-violating-known-laws-physics/ I just thought this was really neat. Some dude with nothing more than a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering claims he's invented an engine which breaks the law of conservation of momentum. NASA decided to test it. They designed one they thought would work and one they thought would never work. Both achieved thrust.
What's interesting about this is that while everyone's all up on the idea of how this thruster could be used to make deep space travel more feasible, I'm sitting here thinking holy hell if this concept works then it could have very dramatic terrestrial applications. The thing is practically a perpetual motion machine. Except real.
I am not sure if a engine large enough for significant thrust could be built inside the atmosphere for terrestrial use but its implications for space use are incredible! Thanks for sharing this.
Great story. You read these and the information on hyperloop and I feel genuinely excited about the future. Richard Branson and virgin galactic, elon musk and tesla, hyperloop, spacex. It's genuinely positive and thrilling. I wish I'd lived through the 40s, 50s and 60s. Watching the development of vehicles and transport, the space race, jet engines, commercial air travel. It must have been incredible to be part of.
Yeah as I read a little bit more about it, it would seem that the engine does consume energy in the form of electricity in order to create this thrust, but that the electricity could be fueled 100% by solar panels. So the reason this has such a profound implication on space travel is because in a zero-gravity environment the engine could provide perpetual thrust with no added weight from fuel, and also without the limitation of that fuel eventually burning up. So the real issue is that up until now we couldn't figure out a way to convert electricity from solar panels into directional thrust in a zero gravity environment? That's my understanding but I could be wrong. I guess the only way we knew to create directional thrust in a zero gravity environment was through the combustion of fuel? If that's the case I can see both why this is a huge discovery for space travel and why it's not necessarily that big a deal for life on earth. Even so, the mechanisms through which this works seem like such a strange discovery that I imagine there being terrestrial implications down the road. We just have to be creative enough to find them.
I'm no physics guy but the idea would seem to me to be pretty sound and perhaps even more compelling the more you scale it up.
In space where weight and drag are not significant factors and where electrical power from solar panels is both cheap and plentiful, this discovery has implications they will spend years developing. Exciting news.