I'm currently investigating a potential warp-drive design principle, for anyone interested in this sort of guff.
The concept is very simple to explain, but quickly arrives at some rather unintuitive results:
- suppose we apply a force of 9.81 Newtons between two 1 kg masses for 1 second; each is thus accelerated by 9.81 meters per second in opposite directions.
Net momentum's conserved, no net acceleration, right? But you can see where this is going - the '9.81 N' value's the giveaway..
So flip it round to a vertical orientation, and apply that same internal force the moment the masses are dropped into freefall.. What happens?
We get a kind of inverted 'slinky drop' effect - the upper mass simply hovers in mid-air, whilst the lower one plummets at 2 G.
Seems perfectly straightforward so far, huh? The upper mass is subject to an internally-applied 1 G force upwards, but also an equal 1 G downwards force from gravity itself. The lower mass is under an internally-applied 1 G downwards force, plus another 1 G downwards force from gravity.
So the upper mass just sits there, stationary. It has no momentum or KE to account for; all of which is instead embodied on the lower mass.
The lower mass has manifested
all the system's motion - half of the work done accelerating it was output by gravity, and the other half by the internally-applied 1 G force.
If we subtract the work done by gravity, our internal work has raised 9.81 kg-m/s of momentum against
another 1 kg inertia, yet whilst only accelerating one of them... in apparent defiance of Newton's 1st and 3rd laws.
We can eliminate the work done by gravity by replacing the lower mass with an angular inertia, such as a vertical flywheel; since angular inertia equals mass times radius squared, a half-kilogram mass at half-meter radius has a moment of inertia of 0.125 kg-m^2, precisely equal in magnitude to the linear inertia of a 1 kg mass.
So as before, a 1 G force is applied between the two inertias, preventing the 1 kg mass from descending, whilst applying a torque to the flywheel, spinning it up.
Now there is no output of work by gravity, all of the system's momentum has been raised by the internal expenditure of work, and it appears we have decisively beaten the first and third laws of motion!
A subsequent inelastic collision between the two inertias will share that momentum equally between them - so we end up with 9.81 kg-m/s divided into two equal '1 kg' inertias, and thus 4.905 m/s of velocity on each, albeit rotating about a common axis.
So a mass has been accelerated against a 'reaction mass', and yet both are now moving at the same speed, in the same location at the same time.
Thus we're always prepped to repeat that cycle - another 1 G impulse applied as the 1 kg mass is on the descending side of the flywheel will again prevent its acceleration under gravity, and instead apply another 'reactionless acceleration' to the flywheel.
And this is where things get really weird... the impulse period can be arbitrarily short, as a function of angle and rising RPM - the asymmetric accumulation of momentum continues unabated.
In short, it seems it is trivially simple to apply gravity - or indeed
any static uniform force field (such as EM, or just pseudo-forces / centrifugal force) - to cancel or invert the sign of counter-momentum, without it having performed any net work upon the system. GPE-out = GPE-in, a zero-sum deal... all of the rising momentum has been raised exclusively by the internal expenditure of work..
This seems to present incredible implications - for a start, it violates both the conservation of energy
and momentum.
The energy value of momentum - and equivalently, its usual cost - is given by the standard KE formula KE = 1/2 mass * velocity squared.
So this single-signed momentum we're generating has a definite, standard energy value. In angular terms it becomes 1/2 angular inertia * angular velocity squared, but same deal.
The reason kinetic energy squares with velocity is due to the practicalities of Newton's 3rd law, and the subsequent need to raise input force or displacement to compensate rising velocity, in order to keep adding a consistent increase in momentum.
So for example, per KE=1/2mV^2, accelerating 1 kg to 1 m/s costs half a Joule. A second, identical 1 kg-m/s of momentum however now costs 2 J. A third, rises to 4.5 J and so on. Each same kg-m/s of momentum costing progressively more energy, the more momentum and thus velocity we accumulate.
The energy cost of raising
unilateral momentum however is no longer confined by Newton's 3rd law, and is thus constant,
not rising with velocity. The formula instead becomes ((N^2 J / N P) / second), where the number N is equal to the acceleration value of the uniform static force field, J is Joules and P is momentum (P=mV). Whereas a system's net momentum is usually a scalar quantity, here it is now a vector!
So if we're using gravity to cancel / reverse the sign of an applied counter-momentum, and consolidating / accumulating the resulting net momentum rise over successive cycles, then the energy cost of that momentum remains a constant 96.23 J per 9.81 P per second.
Plotting input and output energies as a function of rising velocity, we get this result:
graph plot
...in summary, the system begins under-unity, 'destroying' 75% of input energy over the first cycle. So if we input 10 J, we'd only have 2.5 J of KE left in the system. But a second identical impulse cuts that loss down to 50%. A third only loses 25% of input energy.
A fourth hits unity - we end up with the same final KE on the masses, as input energy spent. So (4 * ((N^2 J / N P) / s)) = 1/2mV^2.
A fifth takes us into over-unity territory... we now have 125% more KE than we've spent in input energy.
And that efficiency keeps increasing by another 25% for each successive cycle, indefinitely... 200% unity after 8 cycles, 300% by 12, 400% by 16 and so on, limited only by mechanical constraints..
So.. damn!? Where's the energy difference coming from / going to? What's the source and sink?
Earth of course - during the stalled downwards acceleration of the descending mass, the entire planet is still gravitating (ie. accelerating) upwards towards a 1 kg mass that
isn't accelerating back downwards in reciprocation of net GPE
or momentum!
Instead of trying to leverage some kind of 'horizontal' asymmetry between input and output force/displacement integrals of a GPE interaction (intrinsically impossible because mass and gravity are constant, ie. temporally invariant and mediated at lightspeed) - as misconceived by so many failed perpetual-motionists - we have a 'vertical' asymmetry, between the 'negative and positive' components of a GPE interaction - ie. the usually-disregarded counter-lift-and-drop of the earth itself in response to any lift or drop performed upon it.
So our system is essentially gaining KE by dragging the whole planet upwards by its bootstraps! Causing the entire Earth to fall upwards, gravitationally accelerating towards something that isn't accelerating back...
Hence, buy a perpetual motion machine, get a free warp drive... and all merely by applying two principal moving parts, rotating in one direction.
And yet, you'd be right to wonder, if such a seemingly-miraculous cycle were so simple, especially with such potentially-devastating consequences,
surely someone would've noticed this already?
I mean, if such a machine ever actually ran, demonstrating any significant power over any convincing period of time, there ought to have been some noticeable effects upon the Earth:
- if the entire planet was accelerating in a particular direction, however gradually, for any length of time, then the respective inertias, densities and viscosities etc. of Earth's precious bodily fluids - its air, water and liquid outer core - would cause some degree of sloshing, towards the opposite hemisphere...
- when that acceleration was later terminated, all that fluid would slosh back up, coalescing at the epicenter of the source of the applied force. A rebound effect, as everything settled back towards equilibrium.
So we'd expect to see significant weather formations, as atmospheric pressures and mean sea levels adjusted to the net acceleration (and its later cessation) of the whole planet. If any active fault lines intersected earth's surface along that acceleration vector, significant geological activity could be precipitated..
All of the above is simply deduced from first principles. What follows, however, is from recorded history.
These events actually happened...!
Throughout the autumn of 1717, in a specially-constructed room in castle Weissenstein under the stewardship of his benefactor Prince Karl of Hesse-Kassel, Johann Bessler demonstrated his largest and most powerful wheel yet - 12 ells in diameter, and by all accounts weighing the best part of a tonne, it maintained a steady 26 RPM for over 50 days whilst sealed behind a locked, guarded door.
At various times before, during and after the demonstration, the wheel was disassembled and moved to separate support posts, all details of the room and adjoining rooms and floors were inspected by multiple reliable witnesses whose testimonies survive. No evidence of fraud could be found.
Bessler's friend Leibniz made his own observations known to Newton, correspondence which also still survives. Johann Bernouli, Christian Wolffe, Willem 'S Gravesande, Desaguliers and many other eminent phyicists, engineers and mathemeticians all witnessed and testified to the wheels' authenticity - many of these men the principal actors in the resolution of the
vis viva dispute of the mid-18th century, whose work defined our modern understanding of the conservation of momentum and energy in the first place... So really, these are literally the most trustworthy and reliable witness accounts we could hope for, from anyone alive at the time.
One such witness, Johann Andreas Weisse, concluded in his testimony that the only possible explanation seemed to be that energy was flowing into the machine by some means beyond the senses... a similar thought echoed by Leibniz himself, who naturally couldn't resolve the implication of energy or momentum creation
ex nihilo with his own pioneering philosophy. "Perpetual motion" is an oxymoron - it's simply the first law, the natural state of an unperturbed system. But as a misconceived notion of free energy from nowhere, a paradox, and there can be no paradoxes..
..but wherever its energy and momentum was coming from, after 50-odd days in motion, the demonstration was considered definitive, and the machine stopped.
And with it, any net force that was being applied to the Earth. So if the Earth
had been subjected to a constant upwards acceleration centered upon castle Weissenstein, that force abruptly disappeared again the moment the wheel was halted.
If such a force had been present, then as noted above, all the Earth's fluids will have been slightly displaced downwards, causing a low-pressure system to accumulate over central western Europe. Over Saxony, to be precise.
Similarly, any geological stress formation on the opposite side of the globe - centering on New Zealand - would be subject to an increased force "upwards" towards ground level.
Of course, back in 1717 Cooke hadn't yet discovered the Antipodes, so we don't have any human records of geological activity from the period.
Just geological evidence. The jury's still out on precisely
when in
1717 the mega-quake struck New Zealand's Alpine fault, but here it seems we have good reason to hope it definitely
wasn't some time around mid-November to mid-December that year, because that's precisely when we'd expect it to have occurred if any of these events were indeed connected..
What we
do have excellent written records for is the epic and unprecedented
cataclysm of a storm system that descended upon lowland Western Europe a fortnight
after Bessler's demonstration ended...
There was significant loss of life. Huge swathes of farmland, crops and livestock destroyed. Coincidence, or an inevitable consequence of Bessler's apparent 'free-energy gravity wheel'?
This much is certain - Bessler definitely had a mechanically 'over-unity' system, and yet we know that energy, and moreso, momentum, are conserved. If what appears to be a thermodynamically-closed system nonetheless has a non-constant energy and/or momentum, then by definition it is not a 'closed system', but open to other fields.
The first law says only that the net momentum of a mass or system of masses remains constant unless 'acted upon' by an externally-applied force field. It seems that here we have an edge-case scenario, with an almost-semantic differentiation - we might assume that to 'act upon' the system implies that work has been done upon it, in which case its change in net momentum is a function of that work performed by the externally-applied force field.
And yet here, gravity (or whatever uniform force field applied) performs
no net work in merely rendering the asymmetric distribution of internally-applied momentum; all of which is being generated purely by the internal expenditure of work/energy between the two masses.
So whether this is an effective 1st law violation depends on that definition of what it means for an external force to 'act upon' an otherwise-closed system... here, it has an
influence, yet no net force * displacement is caused by it..
As for the 3rd law, as already noted, whilst we're accelerating the flywheel against the stalled downwards acceleration of the descending mass, the whole earth is still accelerating upwards towards it...
..hence we've merely sunk that 'missing' counter-momentum of the non-accelerated reaction mass, straight into
Earth's momentum, via the unreciprocated gravitational acceleration!
For every kg-m/s of momentum we 'harvest' at discount energy price from its gravitationally-skewed distribution, we're applying an equal opposite kg-m/s of momentum to the Earth, aligned in the other (ie. 'upwards') direction..
So, umm, yeah.. buy a gravity wheel, get a free warp drive. Here, the warp bubble's simply that of the earth's gravity well, and the net acceleration is caused by an effective violation of Newton's 3rd law, essentially dissipating the 'gained' half of the applied net momentum as low-grade heat via the extracted work, heating our coffee or powering our jet-packs or whatever.
So we maybe dodged a serious bullet when Bessler ironically fell to his death while constructing a vertical windmill, having been unable to sell his invention successfully despite all the validation efforts. On the one hand, it would arguably have changed the course of history, but on the other, probably not in a good way. No free-energy panacea here. Unless..
..per Galileo's principle, as noted, any force or pseudo-force could take the place of gravity - for instance we could apply 'artificial gravity' by setting two Bessler wheels 180° opposite one another on opposite sides of a horizontally-rotating drum; again, no net work would be done by centrifugal force, but it would nonetheless be causing the same asymmetric distribution of internally-applied momentum. The drum could itself be driven by the gain in rotational kinetic energy, supercharging the per-cycle momentum yield whilst cancelling any net radial forces and so insulating the system from Earth's gravity.
Hopefully this would avoid designing an inadvertent warp drive that propels earth into the sun or breaks lunar tidal lock, basically destroying us. Unless the energy's effectively being drawn from the Higgs field, in which case we'd likely end up burrowing ourselves into a gravity well we could never climb out of anyway, and inadvertently causing a singularity or possibly even
collapsing the entire physical universe as we know it.
But relax, i've still some testing to do before unleashing an easy-build design on teh interwebz. An obvious implication of the theory is that since the unity threshold arises at four successive reactionless accelerations ((4 * ((N^2 J / N P) / s)) = 1/2mV^2), the first three being under-unity, we can circumvent them entirely and simply prime the system to the unity threshold via any conventional acceleration, and then apply a single reactionless acceleration to achieve an instant 125% gain on each and every interaction. Potentially with multiple interactions per full cycle.
This appears to be what Bessler is hinting at in some of the more arcane images he printed - in the main, his depictions essentially reduce to two angular inertias, one of which is also subject to gravitation. He drew this configuration in many different ways, something of elementary simplicity, hidden in plain sight.. But many other images, and aspects of them, are more perplexing. He claimed to have learned to read Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics as part of his classical education, yet this would have been in the mistaken school of Kirschner et al, pre-Roseta stone, and so some of his more 'esoteric' images are harder to decipher...
Consider the final image shown in his
Machinen Tractate, the so-called 'toys page':
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/68/c1/dd/68c1dd4873d736c8a14d30479aada2ac.jpg
..the handwritten text reads "5. Children's game in which there is something extraordinary for anyone who knows how to apply the game in a different way".
I believe the scissorjack is a metaphor for both inertia generally (the force you feel when operating the handles), but perhaps also in that the linear acceleration of each scissor section is a function of the summed linear accelerations of all preceding sections, so kind of in analogy to a 'factorial sequence' of reactionless accelerations.
Items A and B, the 'staff and chain', represent a sequence of asymmetric torques / accelerations between clockwise and counter-clockwise directions about an axis; specifically five of them.. and remember, over-unity arises at exactly 5 successive reactionless accelerations.. The obtuse angle of the fork atop 'B' represents this torque or angular momentum asymmetry.
The upper and lower hammer toys represent gravitational and inertial interactions respectively, offset by 90° of rotation relative to the rotation sequence to which it is aligned with A and B.
The upturned whistling top (apparently penned in afterthought, along with the handwritten text) denotes that the output of the above components' interaction is rotational kinetic energy, a gain which can in turn be applied back as input energy (such as via centrifugal workloads or raising a mass against gravity), the upside-down orientation (an inherently unstable feat for such a spinning top) implying that RKE is now 'turned on its head', applied as an input rather than just an output.
The lower hammer toy denoting the inertial interaction also has handles, as this is where that energy gained must be re-input. The upper toy lacks handles as it represents weights which are in turn raised to passively fall against gravity. So the net system is initially accelerated by an output of gravitational potential energy. Once in motion, an asymmetric inertial interaction is applied and a net rise in clockwise momentum generated. As noted, five such interactions return 125% of input energy - the "extraordinary something" the text alludes to.
So is any of this for real, then? Follow the maths and make up your own mind.. My belief is that there appears to be an overlooked classical symmetry break running straight through the middle of classical mechanics. CoM and CoE are perfectly enforced with respect to inertia and gravitational interactions in their own right; Gravity and mass are constant, and closed loop trajectories through static fields yield zero net energy. Yet here, there's a time variance built into the respective scaling dimensions of the input and output energy intergrals - output energy squares as a function of velocity, per 1/2mV^2, yet input energy remains a fixed function of inertia times displacement, and there's no such thing as terminal velocity in vacuum, so the gain principle is speed-invariant and constant with respect to ever-rising velocity (as shown in the previous graph plot).
CoE and CoM are immutable under their respective terms, yet combine inertial interactions with gravitational ones together,
at the same time, and that elementary-simple interaction causes an effective failure of both principles; we can gain and accumulate momentum about a fixed axis, using only gravity as a stator to torque against, and the more momentum so accumulated, the greater the divergence in its cost/value efficiency. Replace real gravity with magnetic force, or inertial force from a net acceleration (so a Bessler wheel atop an accelerating rocket, or riding around in a centrifuge), and we get all the same benefits,
without destroying the earth, at least from purely classical considerations. Again, if the system still remains open to the Higgs field then it
might also destroy the world, or entire universe, a bit, but until then we'd have completely-safe, clean free energy for everyone, and possibly warp drives too.
And if any other physics bods are following this and thinking to try beat me to the punch, have at it.. i'm basically just ripping off Bessler's original discovery... only, he never seemed to have taken the next step into generalising it to
any force field, only ever demonstrating vertical wheels, nor understood that his method of applying it was likely not very environmentally friendly. In his defence, however, is the implication that he must've resolved the
vis viva debate long before any of his contemporaries such as Newton, Leibniz and 'S Gravesande et al.
The potential power densities of these kinds of systems are almost arbitrary - limited only by how fast mechanical synchronisation of the interaction with respect to alignment with the static force field vector can be maintained. Suffice to say, it blows all other energy techs completely out of the water, at a stroke..
Likewise, the net unidirectional (ie. uncancelled) thrust produced can be an arbitrary function of centrifugal / centripetal forces and the magnitude of asymmetric momentum that can be raised against them. For instance a duo of clockwise and counter-clockwise Bessler wheels attached to the same base using CF as the uniform force field and synchronising their inertial interactions to the same angle (say top dead center or whatever) will exert both uncancelled momenta in the same, net linear, direction. Much like Roger Shawyer's putative super-conducting EM drive, we can practically envisage levitating a family-sized car, albeit much more simply, potentially using only mechanical means.. and without even needing to carry a fuel or energy source.
Rogue System already features an EM drive, but of course, dependent on fuel. The system we're looking at here however would need none, and pay just 1/2 a Joule per kg-m/s, for each and
every meter/sec all the way up to lightspeed... at which point the system would be as many times over-unity (ie. have a coefficient of performance) equal to the number of C / meters/sec. In principle you'd be able to travel to the red-shift horizon
and back within just a few years of flight time, arriving back at Sol billions of years after it's solidified into a cold back dwarf.
This assumes however that acceleration would still be viable beyond lightspeed. On the one hand, the final kg-m/s of momentum that clocks us up to C will only cost the same 1/2 J as every preceding one. That same final m/s up to lightspeed, for a 1 kg mass, per 1/2mV^2 would normally cost 299,792,500 J. So, quite a bit more than 0.5 J. So the usual practical difficulties of getting up to C would no longer apply. The question however - as others have noted in the thread above - is whether or not the Higgs field mediating mass and thus inertia still interacts normally with matter beyond C, because we tend to consider C as synonymous with instantaneity. So perhaps all matter by definition becomes massless at C. This question essentially is whether or not fermionic and thus baryonnic matter can meaningfully exist at C or beyond, any suggestion of which would pose challenging questions as to the distinction between fermions and bosons; ie. just notionaly crossing C, we'd be likewise breaching the boundaries of the Pauli exclusion principle, and no longer subject to super-position exclusion... time itself would seem to screech to a halt, and distance would no longer have properties of magnitude (ie. in its own reference frame, a photon striking your retina from a distant star has arrived the same 'moment' it left, regardless of how far it's traveled). The basic conceptual elements of motion itself, of time, location and distance, become ambiguous..
Still, even if we were limited to C-minus-1 m/s (299,792,457 m/s), suppose you were on-board such a vessel, and propelled a 1 kg mass in the forwards direction at 1 m/s,
whilst cancelling the corresponding counter-momentum (using our trick above, or an EM drive, or just handwavium).. from within your rest frame, you've only spent 0.5 J, yet a stationary observer would see an energy rise of 299,792,500 J. But what would actually happen - would the mass refuse to budge, or perhaps comply, only to vanish into a searing flash of light?
Neither the Higgs, 'graviton', W & Z, gluons or photons are tachyons. So all suggestions are that there's no massive matter or any functioning gauge bosons (and thus force fields) possible beyond C.
But either way, if the current indications are anything to go by, we might get to test this empirically at some point in the not-so distant future.. if not via Bessler wheels than with EM drives..
Nuts eh..
But could it be just nutty enough? I've tested all the key conditions - mathematically and in simulation, anyway. The output energy is simply the conventional 1/2mV^2 so needs no further justification; the exploit is the speed-invariance and thus constancy of the input energy, and neither gravity nor inertia are speed-dependent therefore this too seems a foregone conclusion - the same input energy buys the same rise in momentum, regardless of rising velocity.. so it's all but a fait accompli. Can't imagine it'll take much longer to realise an optimum implementation..
..if successful, you read about it here first!
