EmDrive and two more developments now.

I could be tootling off into space some time in the future in my own little module.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/31/nasa-validates-impossible-space-drive

 

Interesting

 

I was reading about this the other day. Stuff like this always interests me.

What I find most amazing is that several times over the last few decades, different scientists have announced all sorts of "impossible" observations involving EM radiation, often (but not always) in the microwave band. There was one a few years ago that reckoned he observed indications that he'd made a wave go faster than the speed of light, by exploiting some theory of quantum physics whereby time and space have different meaning at a subatomic level. Impossible of course, as nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

Yet despite how "impossible" these things are, scientists keep on observing them, yet the science community as a whole, despite openly admitting that there's a lot they don't know yet, still continue to tell us its all impossible.

 

Nothing that we've observed yet, although we might be getting glimpses.

Lets face it, light travels so fast that it took us the best part of human history to realise it moves at all.

Just because Einstein said it was a maximum speed, doesn't mean to say it is, his calcs were based on the thing travelling having a mass, i.e. the faster it goes then the more the mass increases, thereby slowing it down before it can obtain light speed.

Fair enough, but what if you had something that didn't have mass, only energy?

 

Some bloke a few years back (can't remember his name), was testing some theory about how microwaves interact with some metal. He expected most of it to reflect, and any that passed through to be delayed, but in fact the bit that passed through did so at, according to his calculations, almost 3 times the speed of light. There have been other experiments and observations too. Someone reckons they had a neutrino pass through hundreds of miles of rock faster than light.

Granted nobody has yet proven it consistently, but there's been enough observations surely to make the boffins wonder if their idea of what is 'impossible' is actually correct.

That's the thing about quantum magic stuff. I think I heard that EM energy has mass, or at least it is affected by gravity, but then again, when I went to school nothing could escape a black hole, yet now according to Stephen Hawkins (and who am I to doubt him), some types of energy do escape and are actually expelled out. Its a funny thing physics. The rules seem to keep changing, yet every time they do, the boffins declare that 'ok, we were wrong about that, but what we know now is definitely correct'.

 

When I was at school, black holes hadn't yet been invented!

 

When a mega star explodes and colapses back in on it's self, the black hole formed at the centre can't cope with the mass going into it (think its a hundred million earth masses a second) so it vomits it out in the form of gamma radiation, irradiating planets for light years all around.

They think it might have been one of them that killed off the Trilobites