On Dec 25, 2011, at 9:59 AM,
Ron,
As I've already said several times, I don't think Jack's scheme will work -- but it is certainly one that should be investigated experimentally.
JS: Of course it may not work, but if it doesn't nothing else will. I don't think the Machian idea will work either because the whole scheme using phi is very shaky ground - at best a primitive approximation to Einstein's GR. To me it makes no sense whatsoever to try to change the mass of material objects - indeed it would be dangerous if you could.
Experimental investigation is problematic for several reasons. First, making superconducting BECs is not a trivial matter and requires special resources.
JS: Agreed. However, my new idea from yesterday may leapfrog over that. A pure reactance in the metamaterial if it would allow no ohmic Joule heat loss in the very near field of the LC circuit may allow us to have a "superconductivity without superconductivity" - this new idea needs further investigation.
They are, however, already being investigated at Harvard. There are no reports from Harvard that suggest that the BECs they make produce the sort of spatiotemporal distortions that Jack's proposal suggests they should.
JS: That is not conclusive for several reasons.
1) the effects are very short lived.
2) no measurement detectors of the required type are deployed. If you do not seek you will not find.
3) no device using reactance near fields has yet been constructed to my knowledge.
4) remember I am talking about ELF LC circuits with capacitor fillings made of the right kind of meta-materials yet to be designed.
I think I can safely say that no experiments conceived of to date are relevant to what I am talking about. The atomic gas BECs do not have the quasi static EM near fields I am talking about in them.
But that may just be a result of no one looking for the sort of effects in question. The way to look would seem to be to watch light propagation in the vicinity of the BECs, not in the BECs themsleves.
NO! Again Jim does not get that I am not talking about real photons in propagating light beams. I am talking about maybe 60 Hz near induction fields in a specially made capacitor in an LC circuit. I don't expect light propagation would show any significant effect.
The basic source term I am talking about is
[(index of refraction)^4G/cvacuum^4] Stress-Energy Tensor of Quasi-Static Near EM Fields inside Meta-Material.
light propagation irrelevant - at best it might produce a very weak short gravity wave pulse analogous to what Ray Chiao has proposed.
This is just straight-forward interferometry. You can do this, believe it or not, using garden variety laser pointers, though you'd probably want something a little fancier, if only to suppress the giggle factor. In the BECS, if Jack is right, spacetime is radically different from outside. The transition can reasonably be expected to extend beyond the BECs themselves. So that's what you would look for.
JS: Yes, you might be able to detect a very weak TRANSIENT HFGW gravity distortion field that way at 10^15 Hz far field, that would never be strong enough for any propulsion - in my intuitive opinion.
Sarfatti's Conjecture - HFGWs induced by real photons can't compete with LFGW from virtual photons in macro-quantum coherent Glauber state inductive reactance near field configurations in terms of practical low power warp drive applications.
In the metamaterial area, likewise there are problems. Metamaterials were first successfully made for RF fields using small pieces of wire and metal. They have recently been extended into the optical regime using smaller and smaller structures. Jack's problem is the opposite as he wants ELF to DC metamaterials. By a simple scaling argument, the size of the engineered structures should be very large. VERY large.
JS: No, Jim is completely wrong here because he keeps thinking REAL PHOTONS where f = ck. He does not get that f =/= ck for inductive near fields e.g. the static Coulomb field has f = 0 with a whole spectrum of k',s i.e. spatial Fourier transform of 1/r. Therefore, we can have f ---> 0 with k ---> inifinity in the inductive near field. It is not true at all that low frequency near fields require large wavelengths - that is only true for the transverse polarized far radiation fields!
This suggests that another approach to ELF metamaterials needs to be found. Presumably, though, it should be possible to make such material, if they can be made at all, with fairly common and cheap materials. We're not talking element 115 here. Fabrication problems perhaps. But not prohibitively expensive materials.
Let's say Jack, or one of his friends, hits upon a way to make an ELF or DC metamaterial capacitor. It there a simple way to test it? Yes, but it isn't by weighing it, for while in the on state it will be repelled by the Earth, it will move in the opposite direction (in accordance with the EEP). The way to test it is on a thrust balance of the sort I've been working with for years. You simply make the capacitor part of a system with another mass a small distance from it. Turn it on, and the pair of masses should self-accelerate. Easily measured with a thrust balance. No elaborate, deeply expensive, hard to obtain equipment needed. It would be trivial for me to do with the system on hand.
So, the simplest test of Jack's ideas is for him to design an ELF to DC metamaterial capacitor that I can then put on the thrust balance. The other thing to do is see if the Harvard folks can be convinced to look for local spacetime distortions in the vicinity of the BECs in their system. That means rigging an interferometer so that one of the paths passes close the a BEC. Neither of these tests should be prohibitively expensive or difficult to do. The hard part is designing the metamaterial capacitor. This is Jack's proposal. That's his job.
Best,
Jim