James Woodward's latest paper will be published in Foundations of Physics later this year. It's about how the Mach Effect can be applied to the Warp Drive and Stargate problem.
It covers some new and interesting ground on how to make warp drives and stargtates using the M-E's wormhole and higher terms to generate the required amount of exotic or negative G/I mass needed to create same. And no, Jupiter sized exotic G/I masses will not be required for that estimate is a worst case. It turns out it could be much, much less...
Jack Sarfatti's response to my email question is quoted below:
On Feb 17, 2011, at 1:49 PM, Kim Burrafato wrote:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/02/making-stargates-science-of-absurdly.html
Does this make any sense to you?
Sent from my iPad
That's James Woodward.
I have my doubts that his particular mechanism would be useful even if it worked as described.
My main reasons are:
1) that any attempt to change rest mass of the ship is a complete disaster even if he could do it - if I understand what he wants to do?
To see why read Martin Rees's "Just Six Numbers".
2) warp drive and worm hole super-technology would basically engineer the null and timelike geodesic structure. For example, we have the purely zero g-force Alcubierre toy model. Any attempt to change the rest mass m of the atoms in the ship besides disrupting the delicate balance of quantum ZPE pressures and gauge forces, would basically be a conventional rocket impulse g-force effect (dm/dt)v contribution to dp/dt and we don't want that even though it would be propellant-less, i.e. no ejection of matter.
Also the appeal to Mach's Principle is resting on very shaky ambiguous ground - see remarks by Rovelli below
However, definitely post it on stardrive.org at least - with these comments.
It's definitely worth thinking about and I need to look into it more deeply.
As I recall he only uses Newton's G and unless that can be effectively amplified by at least 40 powers of ten, we are stuck here - my opinion at the moment.
That's why I am pushing (index of refraction)^4GNewton/c^4 as an effective coupling of stress-energy current densities of EM fields to induced curvature - something like Ray Chiao's amplified EM-Gravity Wave transducer using superconducting films.
There are no global inertial frames in Einstein's GR. Einstein may have been inconsistent on this in his early thinking creating GR.