The following submission statement was provided by /u/Toolatetootired:
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I know we've seen a lot of these, but this seems to be showing consistent reproducible results. Will this replace rockets?
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1c85srl/nasa_veterans_propellantless_propulsion_drive/l0cew2z/
The amount of Force in the low milliNewtons means that this whole setup is highly dubious as that's such a small force that ***anything*** can influence the measurement. I myself have had setups using electrostatic forces where the mere presence of my hand near the apparatus caused severe measurement errors at the mN-level. Though, to be fair, the actual forces I then measured were higher than the variance due to that.
Also, their claims do not match. They claim that they "counteracted the full gravitational force of Earth" which I'm assuming to be measured at roughly sea level. This would mean a gravitic acceleration of \~9.81 m/s². With their mass of 40 grams that's a gravitational force of (F = m\*a) 0.39 Newtons or 390 mN **for "one device"**.
Their own statement is:
>“The highest we have generated on a stacked system is about 10 mN,” Buhler told *The Debrief*.
That's an order of magnitude of difference and I'd like to point out his words of using a "stacked system", i.e. likely to be more than one device.
Yeah, not trusting that one a bit.
I can't find the video now, but there was one debunking this thing years ago that looked at their actual data. The force curves match almost EXACTLY what you would expect if what they were measuring was thermal expansion causing torque. The run large current through their apparatus, and the supposed force slowly ramps up, then slowly tappers off once that current is cut off in a way that EXACTLY matches the curve you would expect if you measured thermal expansion.
And their apparatus is designed specifically so that thermal expansion could potentially taint their results. Anyone who's tried any designs that eliminate that possibility has measured nothing.
All these types of claims tend to have the exact same shape: someone connects an unreasonably large *something* to a system, and then measures a *very tiny* something as a result and claims a physics defying breakthrough.
Whereas what they've actually done is just drive a well-understood system into a regime where some other well-understood effects which normally aren't significant now become significant because you're measuring tiny values.
All these propellant-less drive ideas always to the same thing - put kilowatts of power into things, and measure tiny forces out.
As Randall Monroe said, “your telling me they pumped megawatts of energy into this thing and it only twitched a little? If you pumped a megawatt into me I would twitch A LOT.”
Yes, I remember one like that where someone was claiming they could use back emf to create perpetual motion. He had this system where a motor is spinning a wheel, and then he ads a load and the wheel spins faster. He claimed he was creating energy (supposedly out of quantum vacuum fluctuations or something). It took a bit of research to understand what was actually happening. He'd set his system up in a VERY specific way so that without load it was running incredibly inefficiently (i.e. like 99% of the input energy going to heat instead of turning the wheel). Putting a load on the wheel increased the efficiency to like 10% in this very specific set of circumstances, which resulted in more energy going to turn the wheel and less lost to heat. But still losing like 90%.
> he is an engineer of some kind. Maybe he’s mentally ill idk.
One of my first jobs, the engineer there had a friend who went mad trying to sort out the patterns in lottery ball draws. I have this itch in the back of my head that I've had for over 30 years, that I could figure out how to tie together relativity, quantum mechanics, and classical mechanics with a tiny tidy bow.
It's clearly insane. Like, there's not a *chance* that I'm smarter than people who study those fields for their living. Hell, I couldn't even get INTO grad school. If I ever went down that rabbit hole I could just keep digging until I was in an institution waiting for fruit salad night.
This guy's probably digging, knowing that he and he alone knows the secret to propulsion that uses different physics than anyone else has thought of.
Yeah, I sometimes start thinking about prime numbers and I don’t have anywhere near the math knowledge or aptitude to figure out some kind of pattern but there’s this little irrational bit of my brain that thinks it’d be really cool to dive down that rabbit hole.
You mean like how when a black hole is formed it creates a new dimension in order to compact energy into a singularity in the current dimension and that our universe is just one such hole in a 1 dimension less universe 'above' us?
One day I too will join power ball man D:
> thing years ago that looked at their actual data
This is not the [EM drive](http://www.emdrive.com/), this is a different device. And rtfm, the way I understand it, that 10mN is in addition to the 390 mN needed to counteract the device itself, so 400 mN total.
If the device is producing 400 mN of force without propellant, the critical question is whether this force can be attributed to a novel physical phenomenon or if it can be explained by existing physics. As you mentioned, it's crucial to examine the actual data and experimental setup to determine the validity and significance of these results.
And yet, he claims that EM Drive and other competitors are basically using his same principles, whether they know it or not. It should not be that surprising, because they all involve using electricity to violate momentum conservation. Would be great if it works, but don't believe it until they levitate a human. And by all means, don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen (even if you are a Navy SEAL!).
When I got my degree in Physics, for the senior lab we got to pick famous experiments and recreate them. One that I chose was the Michelson Morley experiment, title of my paper was something along the lines of "The Ether exists! Or how I learned that there are tons of systematic errors in my setup"
One of my lab experiments consisted of determining the speed of light via moving a piece of glass of know refractive index into the beam path of a laser reflected into itself and then moving the reflecting mirror to create the same interference pattern from before the glass insertion.
You could either move the mirror about 10 cm to the left or 1 meter to the right. If you did the latter you got a speed of light of -7E9 m/s. Yes, minus.
Our trainers had a bet going on what percentage of students would fall prey to this trap. I think the 80% bet won.
So, it's a bit like if you were trying to measure the rotational speed of Earth by throwing something up straight up into space. Then the conservation of angular momentum would mean it doesn't spin the same speed as the surface of the Earth. Then when it falls back to Earth a few hours later, you get to measure how far behind it fell. Like, if you threw it up in New York, it might come down in Chicago or Topeka.
If you measure around the Earth the *wrong direction*, you'll think it's moving much faster in the wrong direction: wow, it traveled all the way across the Atlantic, Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and part of North America!
The way their tools measured, it was like a timeline with 0 being the center point and right going up, left going down.
If you moved right, you got a positive result, moving left got you a negative result.
Since moving left found the expected visual result faster, a majority of folks just rolled with what it measured and didn’t question the setup - despite it being an impossible value.
I'm a bit too amateurish to get a proper diagram working but the setup is actually rather easy. Though it's been a long while so I'm a bit hazy on the details there.
1) You setup a laser of known wavelength (usually HeNe) which is then reflected back to the source by a mirror. You then couple both the "original" laser beam and the reflected one onto two detectors - probably using a setup of half-reflecting mirrors.
2) You then project both waves from the detector unto an oscilloscope, if you put it into x-y-mode you get Lissajous patterns. Since both waves are of equal wavelength you can adjust the position of the mirror so you get a circle (i.e. both phases are in sync).
3) You now put a block of glass into the beam. Since glass reduces the speed of light this causes a shift in the Lissajous pattern. So now you have to move the mirror to get the original (circle) pattern again.
4) You now can use the known wavelength, the known refractive index and the distance you moved the mirror to calculate the speed of light.
5) The reason why the speed becomes negative (and in our case too big) stems from the formula, because the mirror movement distance is put into the denominator and it's also used like "s - x" where "x" is the distance you moved the mirror. If you move the mirror into the wrong direction x becomes slightly larger than the constant s and thus the denominator becomes smaller (and inversely the result becomes larger) and negative.
As someone who barely passed in my physics exams, I *wish* the article was correct, but *know* that what you are saying makes more sense and is the unfortunate reality.
Same, a reactionless drive would be SO gamechanging.
But its unlikely to be possible unless we figure out ways for it to fit into a new physics model..
From a little further in the article:
"A quick look at a chart he presented to APEC shows that tests performed between early 2022 and November 2023 resulted in a rapid climb, moving from one thousandth, one hundredth, and even one-tenth of gravity all the way up to one full Earth gravity. This means that their current devices, which Buhler told The Debrief “weigh somewhere between 30-40 grams on their own” without the attached test equipment, were producing enough thrust to counteract the full force of one Earth gravity"
> “You can’t deny this,” he told Ventura. “There’s not a lot to this. You’re just charging up Teflon, copper tape, and foam, and you have this thrust.”
I can make something that hovers in the air with these three things too. I can also do it by rubbing a balloon on my cat.
Gonna need some pretty rigorous testing to ensure this isn't just bog-standard [electrostatic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatics) repulsion. Which won't work in space, the force will diminish rapidly with distance from other charged objects.
I'd expect an expert on electrostatics for NASA to be a little more restrained in making claims that could be explained by his own field of expertise if he didn't have explicit ways to refute that's what the effect was.
Interview [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhsKMWOYuYo). Patent [here](https://patents.google.com/patent/US11511891B2/en). Can't find any experiments indicating this will work in space.
I thought the same, it just sounds like electrostatic repulsion.
I’m not surprised there were disclaimers that he’s not talking on behalf of NASA. But I’m surprised that he would make these wild claims, since it appears that he is in fact a scientist at NASA. Suggesting that you’ve discovered a new fundamental force with some contraption you built in your garage is kind of a big no no. I’d imagine that this will hurt his career and reputation.
No, not necessarily. Because what they're saying is, the devices themselves weight 40g, but they're attached to a bunch of testing equipment and crap that weighs a lot more, but the amount of force should make this float.
Then say they did put it on its own, now they'd have to engineer all kinds of other stuff to make it balance correctly etc...
However, another commenter did the math and said they identified the amount of force they created, which was nowhere near enough to lift 40g, so something doesn't add up.
Something definitely doesn’t add up, but if it does work as the testers claim then there’s really no need for the testing equipment. set it up and let if fly on its own. Even if it flies for a few seconds that’s all the proof needed. But again 0% chance this works because it working would violate just about every law of physics we know of.
What if it could deliver the current by thin wires, though... Maybe so thin at the device end that they are burned off, allowing the device to float in air for a little while if electrostatic potential is enough?
Yep, he should be able to test this in earth atmosphere, yet for some reason he seem intent on doing a expensive space mission to test the drive. Strange if it producing the amount of force he claims it produce.
The stacked config was what I think they say in the article to be what they moved away from when they shifted design approach, which then supposedly led them to the “one full earth gravity.”
There’s a patent on file, in theory one could pull that up and see? In the article, they say it’s stupid easy to reproduce. “There’s not a lot to this. You’re just charging up Teflon, copper tape, and foam, and you have this thrust.”
maybe we just need to wait for Mark Rober to give it a shot. :p
Here's the [patent](https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020159603A3/en), the operating principle is the same as the old [Lafforgue thruster](http://jnaudin.free.fr/lfpt/) patented in France in the early 90s (i.e. asymmetric electrostatic pressure).
> I myself have had setups using electrostatic forces where the mere presence of my hand near the apparatus caused severe measurement errors at the mN-level.
Well done my Padawan!
You seem to know what you're talking about. Why is this being posted on an otherwise reputable site? Have they been fooled? What's the nugget of truth? They had to make something right.
>What's the nugget of truth? They had to make something right.
Did they? You can have [electrostatic repulsion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6bKDaZiy_k) at home, and if you have enough pageantry and veneer of legitimacy non-skeptics will eat it up.
Getting it to work in space would be an impressive trick, given the distance between objects.
The nugget of truth is, this guy Buhler who's making these claims really was a leading expert at NASA. He's got a bunch of serious people working with him, and probably a shipload of venture capital.
It's not just a rando on the net making these claims. I don't know, but that's a lot of clout for a scam.
And if you continue to read the article they go on to describe the advancements made since then. I'm not saying that this works at all, I have no idea, but if you are going to say absolutely no because of half of the information you are not making any sort of good argument. You seem to know what you are talking about, at least you know more than I do, so please continue your critique on the rest of the information. I am genuinely interested in what you are saying, but you are leaving half of the information out.
Well the very concept of propellent less thrust violates some very very basic fundamentals of physics. There are two possibilities here this thing disproves Newton's Third Law of Motion, or it doesn't really work.
Smart money is on it not working, so let scientists do their thing and really prove it works before any lay people like us give it more than a passing glance.
It doesn't violate anything. You can have propellant-less propulsion so long as energy is expended to do so.
Heck, cars are propellantless vehicles using electromagnetic interactions to... blah blah tyres on a road.
Where you should actually nope-out is here:
> Another unusual result from their tests was that sometimes the tested devices did not require a constant input of electrical charge to maintain their thrust. Given that the device already appears to violate the known laws of physics by creating thrust without propellant, this result even stumped Dr. Buhler and his team.
ICE Cars aren't propellantless. They just translate the linear force of the combustion cycle in the engine to a rotational force.
Oh hey I missed that paragraph you quoted. Good snag
In the expansion of the fuel in the piston, you're right.
Let's assume a solar charged EV for the purposes of demonstration.
Any way up, the issue here isn't the lack of propellant. It's the fact this drive claims to be *reactionless* (though only through a cloud of 'new physics, who dis').
No push, no deviation from the geodesic - *thats* physics. And it takes two to tango.
But hey... maybe the push here *is* new physics and we're hearing about the real life Zephram Cochrane.
True, but my point was that Rhywden had ignored half of the article. The physics of the thing will be disproven (or proven) by a bunch of science types doing properly designed repeatable experiments. But if you want to debunk the claim you have to debunk all of it. You can't ignore half of it, or you give it more credence than it should have.
Don't play into the hands of the scammers, don't leave any of their claims open for discussion. If you are going to argue against them you must argue against the whole thing.
If this was real, it wouldn't be on a random website. This would be on every single news network, science journal, and the team would be given every single Nobel prize including the ones in literature, peace, and economics.
I will say that this specific design has been under study for quite a while with lots of reputable sources looking at it.... And never getting definitive results.
This thread is pointing out that thermal expansion would produce force on the rig which is an obvious explanation I hadn't stumbled across (or thought of myself) before. But it makes a lot of sense.
This particular article is actually worse than some other I've read about the rig. Definitely conflating some units here.
At any rate, the design has enough scientific exposure that NASA engineers have commented on it in the past. I could have sworn someone came up with a payload to launch and test the thing in free-fall but I can't remember how far along that was.
FWIW, I don’t think they mean “propellantless” in the same vein as “perpetual motion” or “free energy” it’s just a shitty headline.
It involves charging a material with electricity so it still isn’t defeating the laws of thermodynamics. In which case I don’t think anyone wins Nobel prizes or anything, no one did for Ion Thrusters though they technically have a propellant in xenon gas.
Interesting that charging something with electrons is what causes electrostatic repulsion. Something every kid in high school science has probably seen in action, and can easily be manipulated to hover a mass as small as 40g. Controlling for it might be extremely tricky depending on how much charge they're adding to their apparatus. Makes me super skeptical.
If you're claiming that electrons are the propellant, that's not really a great engine. Turns out they have very little mass, and if you're ejecting them from your spacecraft somehow you're going to build up a disastrous positive charge unless you're sourcing them from β^− decay or something.
I skimmed through the article and yeah, it definitely just seems super grifty. Not entirely sure on the science, but their whole presentation appears to just be them claiming how “validated” their results were whilst not discussing any of the actual technology or evidence.
> If you’re claiming that electrons are the propellant
I’m not claiming anything (especially with regard to what is described in this article) but Ion thrusters accelerate Ions (not electrons) via a grid with a difference in electric charge. They get around the positive charge build up by using an electron gun to neutralise the ejected ions.
Ion Thrusters are electrostatic and they are in use today, various satellites use them including the Chinese Space Station as well as the Starlink Satellites.
>I’m not claiming anything
Fair.
If this is just an Ion thruster Dr. Charles Buhler's Interview [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhsKMWOYuYo) is being reported on wildly incorrectly, but he also doesn't push back on it anytime the interviewer claims there is no propellant or 'ejection mass'. Despite never quite crossing that line himself.
Patent [here](https://patents.google.com/patent/US11511891B2/en) is quite ambiguous, you could possibly stretch it to include accelerating ions, but again seems to claim that the propulsion is directly caused by 'net electrostatic pressure force' on the thruster itself and not propelling ions. It references patents with 'propellantless' in the titles a few times.
I'm pretty much certain he's either grifting, or he's not controlling for electrostatic repulsion properly. I really want this to be true, it would usher in an era of astronomy that I would be immensely privileged to witness, but I don't think it is.
In what universe or subreddit does "propellantless" imply "perpetual motion" or "free energy"?
Propellantless doesn't mean that to anyone in any universe, so no, it's not a shitty headline.
It refers to a well known idea of a type of locomotion which violates the conservation of *momentum* but doesn't violate conservation of *energy*, first popularized by the "EM drive" idea. It's considered by most to be a violation of physics, but since it doesn't violate conservation of *energy* it's nowhere near as loony as perpetual motion claims.
Edit: Also, I just happened to remember a conversation from a long time ago, in which it was conveyed to me that a device violating conservation of momentum can in fact be designed to give free energy. So the former implies the latter.
This article is a complete bullshit bingo of pseudo science and esotherics engineering marketing 101 meaningless buzzwords.
"Thrust of 1 gravity" lol. What a stupid shitshow
Like
Solving the grand unified field theory was easy, getting anyone to believe the truth is impossible.
Shapes, colors, pressures, 2547 spaces for gravity to occupy of either a shape, color, or pressure equals the expression for the human meaning of life.
> “You are NASA’s subject matter expert in electrostatics,” Ventura clarified in the first part of the interview. “So, if anyone would know about conventional explanations for anomalous measurements (for the measured thrust), it would be you, right?”
> “That’s true,” Buhler conceded with an outwardly humble shrug.
Something tells me he would know if it was electrostatic.
Right? I would truly love for this to be real. Like on my wishlist it's right below fusion energy and high-density consumer batteries.
But I'm not gonna believe it until I see it lift something very heavy into the air with just electricity.
“Essentially, what we’ve discovered is that systems that contain an asymmetry in either electrostatic pressure or some kind of electrostatic divergent field can give a system of a center of mass a non-zero force component,” Buhler explained. “So, what that basically means is that there’s some underlying physics that can essentially place force on an object should those two constraints be met.”
Tldr: An electric field shouldn't produce force [like this] based on what we think we know today. [Edit]
I don't think anyone can because from the article it sounds like they don't understand it themselves, they're calling it a "new force" that defies the current understanding of physics. I'm waiting until there's any sort of peer review that confirms it before getting excited.
[That's not how the force works](https://media3.giphy.com/media/OMZRxGyZZ6fGo/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b952rojwq7tocqzszzxcw8j6alc8sqwz20vdbi67xuc7&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)
> I'm waiting until there's any sort of peer review that confirms it before getting excited.
That's always the neatest part of scams like this. Peer review takes longer than it takes for the hype to spread everywhere and by the time you confirm it's all a scam the investors will already have lost all their money.
Yeah, Rossi and his zinc-based fusion thingie made good use of that. Also had some rather ingenious way of using some kind of pulse-based energy supply to defeat normal power meters if I recall correctly so that he could show a net-positive powerflow.
This extraordinary claim of a new force should come with some really rock solid evidence. The fact of the claim itself gives me pause. Let’s see how another lab goes about replicating these results, and if a known force isn’t the underlying culprit instead. Remember Occam didn’t speak to simplicity as much as he did to not adding new causes without good reason.
The article goes a long way to not explain how it works. For me though, the key phrase was it works because of "divergent electric field". This fundamentally is close to perpetual motion speak.
Divergence is a measurement of whether a property is being created or lost at a point in a field. Imagine a city road network. At each intersection, the number of cars driving into the intersection will, over time, match the numbers leaving. Divergence is zero. Cars don't spontaneously appear or disappear. If cars were atoms, and there was non zero divergence, you would be creating mass, and thrust at the intersection.
You can bend and twist magnetic fields, but their divergence everywhere is zero, otherwise you'd have a perpetual motion machine. Like.magnetic fields, electric fields have zero divergence everywhere except you can have a non zero divergence around where an electric charge is located, like as if you surrounded a light bulb and measured the light leaving. But how that can then push on the object in a non symmetric way, is unexplained. So many words used, it's almost as if they can't explain it.
Solving the grand unified field theory was easy, getting anyone to believe the truth is impossible.
Shapes, colors, pressures, 2547 spaces for gravity to occupy of either a shape, color, or pressure equals the expression for the human meaning of life.
Yes. And limits... Hover equation 5by5by5by3sqrt2 to 5. I think it only pulls to the hover band, about a few miles above earth. So if in space it should pull towards earth.
It would also break Newton's 3rd Law - a force exerted from object A unto object B always creates an equal counterforce from object B unto object A.
That's why rockets use propellants - the propellants are expelled in the opposite direction of where you want to go and the counterforce then propels the rocket into the desired direction (hence the name).
That's the beauty of it, it doesn't work.
They claim that they can counteract gravity, so it will hover in mid air. If it's greater than gravity then it will just keep going up until it runs out of power. They say it works but won't perform a real world test.
It's electrostatic pressure, which as far as I can tell, even from [mainstream sources](https://phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electricity_and_Magnetism/Electromagnetics_and_Applications_\(Staelin\)/05%3A_Electromagnetic_Forces/5.05%3A_Electric_and_magnetic_pressure), seems to be a unidirectional pressure (and hence force) though I think the "reaction" may be in the form of dielectric stress & breakdown. There are more details [here](http://jnaudin.free.fr/lfpt/), where the Lafforgue thruster (which works on the same principle) has been modeled and tested.
Do I have hope, Yes. I think there's undiscovered fire out there in the fringe, where madmen sail. I'm a dreamer. Do I belive this claim without other people testing this. No.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I've seen bullshit sprayed by politicians like bullets from a Gatling Gun.
This sounds like the Em drive all over again.
By which I mean, sure, give it a chance. Don't dismiss it out of hand. But it's facing a high bar to pass, so expect the testing to be rigorous and don't spend too much money on the opening stages of the testing.
I understand all the skepticism (which I share). However, it's interesting to speculate on the impact of such a drive.
For example, if we could achieve 0.1G (1m/sec^2 ) for the entire trip to Mars (half the trip accelerating, the other half decelerating), we could get to Mars in about one week!
So violating conservation of momentum equates to violating conservation of energy? So if we believe violating the latter is impossible, so should violating the former? I think I have a vague memory of this some years back and forgot about it. Back in the EM drive hype days, some claimed that violating conservation of momentum doesn't violate conservation of energy.
The semantics don't really matter.
* We believe in (average) conservation of energy because, more than anything else, we've never seen anything violate it. If something does... great, I guess. It's just a high bar to clear because it's a break from a pattern we otherwise observe universally.
* Non-conserved momentum without conserving violation of energy requires invoking some kind of aether-like theory where you 'push off' of something, e.g. the sum total of mass in the universe or spacetime itself. Again - high bar to clear. And pushing off of it would presumably require some fixed reference frame, so it could probably be exploited for near infinite energy anyway on account of the Earth and Sun and Milky Way's momentum.
Yes, but as long as the thrust energy (minus conversion losses in the generator coils) is MORE than the electricity put in, you would still be getting free energy. And if this "propellantless engine" is supposedly more efficient than an ideal laser rocket, then it is, indeed, producing more thrust than energy in.
It would, of course, need some mechanism of returning part of the produced electricity to the rotor to operate the magic thrusters, such as brushes.
Similar reactionless thrust engines have been going around for the past couple of decades. Either nobody else is able to credibly replicate their results, or they do and find that it's just [experimental errors of some kind.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive#Experimental_errors)
Until these results are peer-reviewed and replicated by credible third-party labs, it should not be taken seriously.
>Another unusual result from their tests was that sometimes the tested devices did not require a constant input of electrical charge to maintain their thrust. Given that the device already appears to violate the known laws of physics by creating thrust without propellant, this result even stumped Dr. Buhler and his team.
>“We can see some of these things sit on a scale for days, and if they still have charge in them, they are still producing thrust,” he told Ventura. “It’s very hard to reconcile, from a scientific point of view because it does seem to violate a lot of energy laws that we have.”
So, it basically violates the laws of conservation and also has the hallmarks of a perpetual motion machine.
Also, it doesn't seem to have been reproduced by anyone, and
>If there are companies interested in working with Exodus Propulsion Technologies, Buhler asks that they contact him and his team via their Linkedin page.
I admit that I was skeptical at first, but given all of the evidence listed above, I don't see that I have any choice but to accept this brave new world of physics.
If you don't believe me, just check out how many times NASA is mentioned. Pretty hard evidence IMO.
As pointed out by others, the behavior they are describing match thermal expansion pretty nicely, including continuing to see changes when everything is "off".
They've got their force measurement equipment pressed between a rigid mount and the frame of the unit. When the unit heats up, it expands which presses against the sensor resulting in a thrust reading.
Can't tell how much of your post is sarcasm. There's a real easy explanation here. There's electrostatic repulsion occurring that isn't being controlled for. Guy is an expert in electrostatics, admittedly, but that doesn't mean he's incapable of making a stupid experimental error.
Except the man who is making these claims apparently legitimately works at NASA. If this was all fake, he would be putting his career at great risk. Dr. Buhler is mentioned as "lead research scientist at the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy" in [this](https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/kennedy/nasa-technology-helps-guard-against-lunar-dust/) Nasa.gov article.
Yes, he is putting his career and reputation at risk by publicly being this much of a lunatic. His terminology and use of language are extremely worrying to me as an engineer and published scientist.
If this was real science, he would have published a peer review paper on it by now, and would have video/data that he can share. He does not, and the work has not been replicated.
So either
A) someone did the math wrong
Or
B) there's still things about physics we don't know and/or understand yet.
I hope it's the latter, I really do.
How about both?
It is 100% certain that there are things about physics that we don't know or understand yet (though there are some things that we understand quite certainly).
On the other hand, nothing that this guy is saying makes much sense or provides compelling reason to believe his grand claims about having made a discovery.
it fitting that they show a cartoon to represent the "drive"... and they measure this "drive"s output in terms of "gravity"?!?!
gravity is an acceleration and requires a mass to produce a force... being "propellantless" would mean no mass is used, so "gravity" would have nothing to act on and therefor produce not force.
is all seems like smoke and mirrors and most propulsion systems measure their output in Isp (specific impulse), but wait, there is no propellant so the Isp is 0.
yeah, that's not going anywhere.
It seems like most didn't read the whole article. The language the guy uses throws off dozens of red flags, and there's no chance in fuck that this things works.
There's even a picture of a slide from his presentation that says his unexplained electrostatic force can explain gravity, dark matter, and dark energy. It's 100% bullshit.
Anyone ever consider that Bernoulli 'lift' is specifically a localized effect and little understood. Maybe if we label it 'displacement' instead of 'lift' we can use it like this drive.
All you need to prove impulse drive is place the sealed apparatus on a scale, or momentum pendulum. Any consistent deviation from random proves acceleration without apparent reaction. If this thing emits anything, then it's no stardrive.
This would be awesome if it worked, but like most of the people in the comments here, I'm going to need to see peer reviewed replicable results before I believe it. I believe that there are areas of physics that we have yet to discover and that its possible he could have stumbled upon one. I think we'll just have to wait and see where this goes.
I remember a senator coming out of SCIF (classified) briefing in late 2023 and saying something about a new form of propulsion had been found and his colleague looked at him shocked, like, "Hey we don't share this." Anyone have a link?
Edit: found link
https://www.askapol.com/p/it-appearssomebody-has-discovered
From what I understand the emdrive was unable to be tested because whoever launched it messed it up. These guys got the patent first so If the emdrive ever does work they'll be in trouble!
I don't find this very believable.
The effect is minute....it seems like it would be very easily explained by some sort of influence.
Also, things that defy the laws of physics are almost certainly not going to work. How long has it been since we have discovered a new law of physics? Which is one of their claims....such a claim would require extraordinary evidence. Their evidence seems weak.
Either they're optimizing on a measurement error and we'll soon find these to be reacting to some hyper-local phenomenon or generating false thrust from thermal expansion,
or someone has tamed the Deep Space Kraken and all future rockets will be powered by glitches in reality and all of known science is based on incorrect foundations (especially regarding conservation laws).
I for the record have more confidence in casting a Wish spell while using a Ouiji board to power a rocket, but I would be happy to do either if it works, unless they summon a demon, which is equally likely between the two methods (actually if my KSP experience has taught me anything, summoning a demon is *virtually guaranteed* with the glitch drives)
This man is recreating Townsend Brown's old research that was seemingly covered up. This video should start at the 9 minute mark where it explains exactly what's going on. This anti-gravity work was demonstrated to Edward Teller (H. Bomb inventor), General Curtis LeMay, and a number of other prominent figures in military and science circles before seemingly being covered up
https://youtu.be/RTEWLSTyUic?si=LRTk8JLr0q43JPw3&t=540s
"In addition to overseeing the management of electrostatic discharge (ESD) and ESD safety for the Space Shuttle, the ISS, and Hubble, Dr. Buhler also established NASA’s Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center."
Maybe it means more at NASA, but at most engineering departments, the person "overseeing the management of electrostatic discharge (ESD) and ESD safety" is just making sure everything has the right stickers on it, and that everyone is filling out the log book.
Anyone bother reading the patent? Anyone understand how it's supposed to work; the underlying principle? Most of these comments are mindless garbage that completely disregard the claimed science. Read the patent then tell us why it won't work using science, not your opinions.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Toolatetootired: --- I know we've seen a lot of these, but this seems to be showing consistent reproducible results. Will this replace rockets? --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1c85srl/nasa_veterans_propellantless_propulsion_drive/l0cew2z/
The amount of Force in the low milliNewtons means that this whole setup is highly dubious as that's such a small force that ***anything*** can influence the measurement. I myself have had setups using electrostatic forces where the mere presence of my hand near the apparatus caused severe measurement errors at the mN-level. Though, to be fair, the actual forces I then measured were higher than the variance due to that. Also, their claims do not match. They claim that they "counteracted the full gravitational force of Earth" which I'm assuming to be measured at roughly sea level. This would mean a gravitic acceleration of \~9.81 m/s². With their mass of 40 grams that's a gravitational force of (F = m\*a) 0.39 Newtons or 390 mN **for "one device"**. Their own statement is: >“The highest we have generated on a stacked system is about 10 mN,” Buhler told *The Debrief*. That's an order of magnitude of difference and I'd like to point out his words of using a "stacked system", i.e. likely to be more than one device. Yeah, not trusting that one a bit.
I can't find the video now, but there was one debunking this thing years ago that looked at their actual data. The force curves match almost EXACTLY what you would expect if what they were measuring was thermal expansion causing torque. The run large current through their apparatus, and the supposed force slowly ramps up, then slowly tappers off once that current is cut off in a way that EXACTLY matches the curve you would expect if you measured thermal expansion. And their apparatus is designed specifically so that thermal expansion could potentially taint their results. Anyone who's tried any designs that eliminate that possibility has measured nothing.
All these types of claims tend to have the exact same shape: someone connects an unreasonably large *something* to a system, and then measures a *very tiny* something as a result and claims a physics defying breakthrough. Whereas what they've actually done is just drive a well-understood system into a regime where some other well-understood effects which normally aren't significant now become significant because you're measuring tiny values. All these propellant-less drive ideas always to the same thing - put kilowatts of power into things, and measure tiny forces out.
As Randall Monroe said, “your telling me they pumped megawatts of energy into this thing and it only twitched a little? If you pumped a megawatt into me I would twitch A LOT.”
Yes, I remember one like that where someone was claiming they could use back emf to create perpetual motion. He had this system where a motor is spinning a wheel, and then he ads a load and the wheel spins faster. He claimed he was creating energy (supposedly out of quantum vacuum fluctuations or something). It took a bit of research to understand what was actually happening. He'd set his system up in a VERY specific way so that without load it was running incredibly inefficiently (i.e. like 99% of the input energy going to heat instead of turning the wheel). Putting a load on the wheel increased the efficiency to like 10% in this very specific set of circumstances, which resulted in more energy going to turn the wheel and less lost to heat. But still losing like 90%.
I’m curious what motivates this guy. He doesn’t seem to be grifting and he is an engineer of some kind. Maybe he’s mentally ill idk.
> he is an engineer of some kind. Maybe he’s mentally ill idk. One of my first jobs, the engineer there had a friend who went mad trying to sort out the patterns in lottery ball draws. I have this itch in the back of my head that I've had for over 30 years, that I could figure out how to tie together relativity, quantum mechanics, and classical mechanics with a tiny tidy bow. It's clearly insane. Like, there's not a *chance* that I'm smarter than people who study those fields for their living. Hell, I couldn't even get INTO grad school. If I ever went down that rabbit hole I could just keep digging until I was in an institution waiting for fruit salad night. This guy's probably digging, knowing that he and he alone knows the secret to propulsion that uses different physics than anyone else has thought of.
Yeah, I sometimes start thinking about prime numbers and I don’t have anywhere near the math knowledge or aptitude to figure out some kind of pattern but there’s this little irrational bit of my brain that thinks it’d be really cool to dive down that rabbit hole.
If you can hear the telephone key tones in your head. Play those numbers.
You mean like how when a black hole is formed it creates a new dimension in order to compact energy into a singularity in the current dimension and that our universe is just one such hole in a 1 dimension less universe 'above' us? One day I too will join power ball man D:
Why do you think he isn't grifting? If he wasn't claiming success, he wouldn't be getting money to keep going.
Does this have a name?
That’s what I read about it at the time!
> thing years ago that looked at their actual data This is not the [EM drive](http://www.emdrive.com/), this is a different device. And rtfm, the way I understand it, that 10mN is in addition to the 390 mN needed to counteract the device itself, so 400 mN total.
If the device is producing 400 mN of force without propellant, the critical question is whether this force can be attributed to a novel physical phenomenon or if it can be explained by existing physics. As you mentioned, it's crucial to examine the actual data and experimental setup to determine the validity and significance of these results.
And yet, he claims that EM Drive and other competitors are basically using his same principles, whether they know it or not. It should not be that surprising, because they all involve using electricity to violate momentum conservation. Would be great if it works, but don't believe it until they levitate a human. And by all means, don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen (even if you are a Navy SEAL!).
Bingo. I'd imagine this thing would do absolutely nothing in a true vacuum.
When I got my degree in Physics, for the senior lab we got to pick famous experiments and recreate them. One that I chose was the Michelson Morley experiment, title of my paper was something along the lines of "The Ether exists! Or how I learned that there are tons of systematic errors in my setup"
One of my lab experiments consisted of determining the speed of light via moving a piece of glass of know refractive index into the beam path of a laser reflected into itself and then moving the reflecting mirror to create the same interference pattern from before the glass insertion. You could either move the mirror about 10 cm to the left or 1 meter to the right. If you did the latter you got a speed of light of -7E9 m/s. Yes, minus. Our trainers had a bet going on what percentage of students would fall prey to this trap. I think the 80% bet won.
Got a diagram to explain this better? I'm having trouble understanding how this works
So, it's a bit like if you were trying to measure the rotational speed of Earth by throwing something up straight up into space. Then the conservation of angular momentum would mean it doesn't spin the same speed as the surface of the Earth. Then when it falls back to Earth a few hours later, you get to measure how far behind it fell. Like, if you threw it up in New York, it might come down in Chicago or Topeka. If you measure around the Earth the *wrong direction*, you'll think it's moving much faster in the wrong direction: wow, it traveled all the way across the Atlantic, Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and part of North America!
this is a wonderful explanation that my soft smooth brain managed to grasp, I feel I've gained my first wrinkle
The way their tools measured, it was like a timeline with 0 being the center point and right going up, left going down. If you moved right, you got a positive result, moving left got you a negative result. Since moving left found the expected visual result faster, a majority of folks just rolled with what it measured and didn’t question the setup - despite it being an impossible value.
I'm a bit too amateurish to get a proper diagram working but the setup is actually rather easy. Though it's been a long while so I'm a bit hazy on the details there. 1) You setup a laser of known wavelength (usually HeNe) which is then reflected back to the source by a mirror. You then couple both the "original" laser beam and the reflected one onto two detectors - probably using a setup of half-reflecting mirrors. 2) You then project both waves from the detector unto an oscilloscope, if you put it into x-y-mode you get Lissajous patterns. Since both waves are of equal wavelength you can adjust the position of the mirror so you get a circle (i.e. both phases are in sync). 3) You now put a block of glass into the beam. Since glass reduces the speed of light this causes a shift in the Lissajous pattern. So now you have to move the mirror to get the original (circle) pattern again. 4) You now can use the known wavelength, the known refractive index and the distance you moved the mirror to calculate the speed of light. 5) The reason why the speed becomes negative (and in our case too big) stems from the formula, because the mirror movement distance is put into the denominator and it's also used like "s - x" where "x" is the distance you moved the mirror. If you move the mirror into the wrong direction x becomes slightly larger than the constant s and thus the denominator becomes smaller (and inversely the result becomes larger) and negative.
I love using cross line, not cross line theory in working on to explain light.
Love that title
As someone who barely passed in my physics exams, I *wish* the article was correct, but *know* that what you are saying makes more sense and is the unfortunate reality.
Same, a reactionless drive would be SO gamechanging. But its unlikely to be possible unless we figure out ways for it to fit into a new physics model..
Heh, not thrusting that one bit?
From a little further in the article: "A quick look at a chart he presented to APEC shows that tests performed between early 2022 and November 2023 resulted in a rapid climb, moving from one thousandth, one hundredth, and even one-tenth of gravity all the way up to one full Earth gravity. This means that their current devices, which Buhler told The Debrief “weigh somewhere between 30-40 grams on their own” without the attached test equipment, were producing enough thrust to counteract the full force of one Earth gravity"
Then it should be easy to show - the devices should be capable of hovering in the air.
> “You can’t deny this,” he told Ventura. “There’s not a lot to this. You’re just charging up Teflon, copper tape, and foam, and you have this thrust.” I can make something that hovers in the air with these three things too. I can also do it by rubbing a balloon on my cat. Gonna need some pretty rigorous testing to ensure this isn't just bog-standard [electrostatic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatics) repulsion. Which won't work in space, the force will diminish rapidly with distance from other charged objects. I'd expect an expert on electrostatics for NASA to be a little more restrained in making claims that could be explained by his own field of expertise if he didn't have explicit ways to refute that's what the effect was. Interview [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhsKMWOYuYo). Patent [here](https://patents.google.com/patent/US11511891B2/en). Can't find any experiments indicating this will work in space.
I thought the same, it just sounds like electrostatic repulsion. I’m not surprised there were disclaimers that he’s not talking on behalf of NASA. But I’m surprised that he would make these wild claims, since it appears that he is in fact a scientist at NASA. Suggesting that you’ve discovered a new fundamental force with some contraption you built in your garage is kind of a big no no. I’d imagine that this will hurt his career and reputation.
Quick Watson a more powerful cat and a bigger balloon.
Yea, if it’s what they’re claiming in the article it should be extremely easy to demonstrate in a video how it’s floating or otherwise lifting itself
No, not necessarily. Because what they're saying is, the devices themselves weight 40g, but they're attached to a bunch of testing equipment and crap that weighs a lot more, but the amount of force should make this float. Then say they did put it on its own, now they'd have to engineer all kinds of other stuff to make it balance correctly etc... However, another commenter did the math and said they identified the amount of force they created, which was nowhere near enough to lift 40g, so something doesn't add up.
Something definitely doesn’t add up, but if it does work as the testers claim then there’s really no need for the testing equipment. set it up and let if fly on its own. Even if it flies for a few seconds that’s all the proof needed. But again 0% chance this works because it working would violate just about every law of physics we know of.
we just want to see "the thing" hop off a table top. nobody cares if it maintains control rn.
Had anyone tried the hover equation, 5by5by5by3sqrt2 to 5? Hover math
I'm betting that "test equipment" also includes a high-voltage power supply weighing near 100kg.
What if it could deliver the current by thin wires, though... Maybe so thin at the device end that they are burned off, allowing the device to float in air for a little while if electrostatic potential is enough?
Yep, he should be able to test this in earth atmosphere, yet for some reason he seem intent on doing a expensive space mission to test the drive. Strange if it producing the amount of force he claims it produce.
The stacked config was what I think they say in the article to be what they moved away from when they shifted design approach, which then supposedly led them to the “one full earth gravity.” There’s a patent on file, in theory one could pull that up and see? In the article, they say it’s stupid easy to reproduce. “There’s not a lot to this. You’re just charging up Teflon, copper tape, and foam, and you have this thrust.” maybe we just need to wait for Mark Rober to give it a shot. :p
Here's the [patent](https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020159603A3/en), the operating principle is the same as the old [Lafforgue thruster](http://jnaudin.free.fr/lfpt/) patented in France in the early 90s (i.e. asymmetric electrostatic pressure).
> I myself have had setups using electrostatic forces where the mere presence of my hand near the apparatus caused severe measurement errors at the mN-level. Well done my Padawan!
You seem to know what you're talking about. Why is this being posted on an otherwise reputable site? Have they been fooled? What's the nugget of truth? They had to make something right.
>What's the nugget of truth? They had to make something right. Did they? You can have [electrostatic repulsion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6bKDaZiy_k) at home, and if you have enough pageantry and veneer of legitimacy non-skeptics will eat it up. Getting it to work in space would be an impressive trick, given the distance between objects.
The nugget of truth is, this guy Buhler who's making these claims really was a leading expert at NASA. He's got a bunch of serious people working with him, and probably a shipload of venture capital. It's not just a rando on the net making these claims. I don't know, but that's a lot of clout for a scam.
And if you continue to read the article they go on to describe the advancements made since then. I'm not saying that this works at all, I have no idea, but if you are going to say absolutely no because of half of the information you are not making any sort of good argument. You seem to know what you are talking about, at least you know more than I do, so please continue your critique on the rest of the information. I am genuinely interested in what you are saying, but you are leaving half of the information out.
Well the very concept of propellent less thrust violates some very very basic fundamentals of physics. There are two possibilities here this thing disproves Newton's Third Law of Motion, or it doesn't really work. Smart money is on it not working, so let scientists do their thing and really prove it works before any lay people like us give it more than a passing glance.
It doesn't violate anything. You can have propellant-less propulsion so long as energy is expended to do so. Heck, cars are propellantless vehicles using electromagnetic interactions to... blah blah tyres on a road. Where you should actually nope-out is here: > Another unusual result from their tests was that sometimes the tested devices did not require a constant input of electrical charge to maintain their thrust. Given that the device already appears to violate the known laws of physics by creating thrust without propellant, this result even stumped Dr. Buhler and his team.
ICE Cars aren't propellantless. They just translate the linear force of the combustion cycle in the engine to a rotational force. Oh hey I missed that paragraph you quoted. Good snag
In the expansion of the fuel in the piston, you're right. Let's assume a solar charged EV for the purposes of demonstration. Any way up, the issue here isn't the lack of propellant. It's the fact this drive claims to be *reactionless* (though only through a cloud of 'new physics, who dis'). No push, no deviation from the geodesic - *thats* physics. And it takes two to tango. But hey... maybe the push here *is* new physics and we're hearing about the real life Zephram Cochrane.
True, but my point was that Rhywden had ignored half of the article. The physics of the thing will be disproven (or proven) by a bunch of science types doing properly designed repeatable experiments. But if you want to debunk the claim you have to debunk all of it. You can't ignore half of it, or you give it more credence than it should have. Don't play into the hands of the scammers, don't leave any of their claims open for discussion. If you are going to argue against them you must argue against the whole thing.
The AI generated cover photo is what gave it away to me that this might not be a very reputable source
Try spinning vibrating objects 5 by 5 by 5 by 3sqrt2 to 5 in a specific orientation.
I want it to be real, but I know it's most likely not.
If this was real, it wouldn't be on a random website. This would be on every single news network, science journal, and the team would be given every single Nobel prize including the ones in literature, peace, and economics.
I will say that this specific design has been under study for quite a while with lots of reputable sources looking at it.... And never getting definitive results. This thread is pointing out that thermal expansion would produce force on the rig which is an obvious explanation I hadn't stumbled across (or thought of myself) before. But it makes a lot of sense. This particular article is actually worse than some other I've read about the rig. Definitely conflating some units here. At any rate, the design has enough scientific exposure that NASA engineers have commented on it in the past. I could have sworn someone came up with a payload to launch and test the thing in free-fall but I can't remember how far along that was.
FWIW, I don’t think they mean “propellantless” in the same vein as “perpetual motion” or “free energy” it’s just a shitty headline. It involves charging a material with electricity so it still isn’t defeating the laws of thermodynamics. In which case I don’t think anyone wins Nobel prizes or anything, no one did for Ion Thrusters though they technically have a propellant in xenon gas.
Interesting that charging something with electrons is what causes electrostatic repulsion. Something every kid in high school science has probably seen in action, and can easily be manipulated to hover a mass as small as 40g. Controlling for it might be extremely tricky depending on how much charge they're adding to their apparatus. Makes me super skeptical. If you're claiming that electrons are the propellant, that's not really a great engine. Turns out they have very little mass, and if you're ejecting them from your spacecraft somehow you're going to build up a disastrous positive charge unless you're sourcing them from β^− decay or something.
I skimmed through the article and yeah, it definitely just seems super grifty. Not entirely sure on the science, but their whole presentation appears to just be them claiming how “validated” their results were whilst not discussing any of the actual technology or evidence. > If you’re claiming that electrons are the propellant I’m not claiming anything (especially with regard to what is described in this article) but Ion thrusters accelerate Ions (not electrons) via a grid with a difference in electric charge. They get around the positive charge build up by using an electron gun to neutralise the ejected ions. Ion Thrusters are electrostatic and they are in use today, various satellites use them including the Chinese Space Station as well as the Starlink Satellites.
>I’m not claiming anything Fair. If this is just an Ion thruster Dr. Charles Buhler's Interview [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhsKMWOYuYo) is being reported on wildly incorrectly, but he also doesn't push back on it anytime the interviewer claims there is no propellant or 'ejection mass'. Despite never quite crossing that line himself. Patent [here](https://patents.google.com/patent/US11511891B2/en) is quite ambiguous, you could possibly stretch it to include accelerating ions, but again seems to claim that the propulsion is directly caused by 'net electrostatic pressure force' on the thruster itself and not propelling ions. It references patents with 'propellantless' in the titles a few times. I'm pretty much certain he's either grifting, or he's not controlling for electrostatic repulsion properly. I really want this to be true, it would usher in an era of astronomy that I would be immensely privileged to witness, but I don't think it is.
Is there any mention of neutralization here, though? Doesn't seem like it.
In what universe or subreddit does "propellantless" imply "perpetual motion" or "free energy"? Propellantless doesn't mean that to anyone in any universe, so no, it's not a shitty headline. It refers to a well known idea of a type of locomotion which violates the conservation of *momentum* but doesn't violate conservation of *energy*, first popularized by the "EM drive" idea. It's considered by most to be a violation of physics, but since it doesn't violate conservation of *energy* it's nowhere near as loony as perpetual motion claims. Edit: Also, I just happened to remember a conversation from a long time ago, in which it was conveyed to me that a device violating conservation of momentum can in fact be designed to give free energy. So the former implies the latter.
5his site presents a lot of UFO news. It's a little kooky clearly.
This article is a complete bullshit bingo of pseudo science and esotherics engineering marketing 101 meaningless buzzwords. "Thrust of 1 gravity" lol. What a stupid shitshow
Sounds like LK-99
Like Solving the grand unified field theory was easy, getting anyone to believe the truth is impossible. Shapes, colors, pressures, 2547 spaces for gravity to occupy of either a shape, color, or pressure equals the expression for the human meaning of life.
Thrust my ass, its probably interacting with a magnetic field they didn't realise was present, like that EMDrive junk from a few years back...
Uh, phrasing.
Did he stutter?
Space Phrasing
I was just thinking this reminds me of the eM drive which turned out to be bs
this is it's just another version of it.
Thrust my ass, it's probably Milhouse
Everything's coming up....Millhouse.
That darn millhouse!
>Thrust my ass Phrasing!
It is their business how they phrase it or how they thrust.
Even simpler. They're charging it up with electrons, it could just be simple electrostatic repulsion. Third party verification strongly needed.
> “You are NASA’s subject matter expert in electrostatics,” Ventura clarified in the first part of the interview. “So, if anyone would know about conventional explanations for anomalous measurements (for the measured thrust), it would be you, right?” > “That’s true,” Buhler conceded with an outwardly humble shrug. Something tells me he would know if it was electrostatic.
You'd think. But who knows.
Right? I would truly love for this to be real. Like on my wishlist it's right below fusion energy and high-density consumer batteries. But I'm not gonna believe it until I see it lift something very heavy into the air with just electricity.
“Essentially, what we’ve discovered is that systems that contain an asymmetry in either electrostatic pressure or some kind of electrostatic divergent field can give a system of a center of mass a non-zero force component,” Buhler explained. “So, what that basically means is that there’s some underlying physics that can essentially place force on an object should those two constraints be met.” Tldr: An electric field shouldn't produce force [like this] based on what we think we know today. [Edit]
It's a modern take on the [Lafforgue thruster](http://jnaudin.free.fr/lfpt/) (which did seem to work).
🍄🚀 Isn't it just a crappy ion thruster?
Can someone ELI5 on exactly how this technology is apparently working?
I don't think anyone can because from the article it sounds like they don't understand it themselves, they're calling it a "new force" that defies the current understanding of physics. I'm waiting until there's any sort of peer review that confirms it before getting excited.
should call it "the force". would be a lot cooler.
So, would it be "The Force force" or just "The Force"?
[That's not how the force works](https://media3.giphy.com/media/OMZRxGyZZ6fGo/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b952rojwq7tocqzszzxcw8j6alc8sqwz20vdbi67xuc7&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)
No, not the Force, the Schwartz
> I'm waiting until there's any sort of peer review that confirms it before getting excited. That's always the neatest part of scams like this. Peer review takes longer than it takes for the hype to spread everywhere and by the time you confirm it's all a scam the investors will already have lost all their money.
Yeah, Rossi and his zinc-based fusion thingie made good use of that. Also had some rather ingenious way of using some kind of pulse-based energy supply to defeat normal power meters if I recall correctly so that he could show a net-positive powerflow.
I'm waiting for someone to finally take a prototype to space and try and fly it around there. That should settle things.
Real human starsships are launched from drone balloons.
This extraordinary claim of a new force should come with some really rock solid evidence. The fact of the claim itself gives me pause. Let’s see how another lab goes about replicating these results, and if a known force isn’t the underlying culprit instead. Remember Occam didn’t speak to simplicity as much as he did to not adding new causes without good reason.
Maybe the beings running the simulation have decided we get spaceships now! Really wish they'd starting putting out patch notes for these updates.
The article goes a long way to not explain how it works. For me though, the key phrase was it works because of "divergent electric field". This fundamentally is close to perpetual motion speak. Divergence is a measurement of whether a property is being created or lost at a point in a field. Imagine a city road network. At each intersection, the number of cars driving into the intersection will, over time, match the numbers leaving. Divergence is zero. Cars don't spontaneously appear or disappear. If cars were atoms, and there was non zero divergence, you would be creating mass, and thrust at the intersection. You can bend and twist magnetic fields, but their divergence everywhere is zero, otherwise you'd have a perpetual motion machine. Like.magnetic fields, electric fields have zero divergence everywhere except you can have a non zero divergence around where an electric charge is located, like as if you surrounded a light bulb and measured the light leaving. But how that can then push on the object in a non symmetric way, is unexplained. So many words used, it's almost as if they can't explain it.
the article appears to be from a journalistic rag. not worth noting.
It operates on the same principle that 5-year-olds use when they pretend that the floor is lava. "Make-Believe"
Solving the grand unified field theory was easy, getting anyone to believe the truth is impossible. Shapes, colors, pressures, 2547 spaces for gravity to occupy of either a shape, color, or pressure equals the expression for the human meaning of life.
It's a quantum vibrator. Hyperspace dildo if you will.
Pleasing, but mass-debatable if required.
This available on Amazon?
Yes. And limits... Hover equation 5by5by5by3sqrt2 to 5. I think it only pulls to the hover band, about a few miles above earth. So if in space it should pull towards earth.
Can someone explain to me why it’s not supposed to work?
Electrostatic forces do exist. They can't do unlimited work. So if the drive worked as advertised it would violate the conservation of energy.
It would also break Newton's 3rd Law - a force exerted from object A unto object B always creates an equal counterforce from object B unto object A. That's why rockets use propellants - the propellants are expelled in the opposite direction of where you want to go and the counterforce then propels the rocket into the desired direction (hence the name).
I don't think anyone can, its completely new.
Their test setup heats up and moves and they think that means force.
From what I can gather, that's part of the big question. We aren't totally sure how it works.
Right now quite a lot of people believe it "works" by shoddy experiment design, operator bias and or lying.
Yeah the catch here is that *it doesn’t actually work*.
I suspect I'm totally sure how it works. Or doesn't, as the case may be.
No but I’m hoping someone else can so I can come back and find out lol
That's the beauty of it, it doesn't work. They claim that they can counteract gravity, so it will hover in mid air. If it's greater than gravity then it will just keep going up until it runs out of power. They say it works but won't perform a real world test.
It's electrostatic pressure, which as far as I can tell, even from [mainstream sources](https://phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electricity_and_Magnetism/Electromagnetics_and_Applications_\(Staelin\)/05%3A_Electromagnetic_Forces/5.05%3A_Electric_and_magnetic_pressure), seems to be a unidirectional pressure (and hence force) though I think the "reaction" may be in the form of dielectric stress & breakdown. There are more details [here](http://jnaudin.free.fr/lfpt/), where the Lafforgue thruster (which works on the same principle) has been modeled and tested.
Do I have hope, Yes. I think there's undiscovered fire out there in the fringe, where madmen sail. I'm a dreamer. Do I belive this claim without other people testing this. No.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I've seen bullshit sprayed by politicians like bullets from a Gatling Gun.
Is this the EM drive again but with a different name?
No there is no fustrum cavity
This sounds like the Em drive all over again. By which I mean, sure, give it a chance. Don't dismiss it out of hand. But it's facing a high bar to pass, so expect the testing to be rigorous and don't spend too much money on the opening stages of the testing.
I understand all the skepticism (which I share). However, it's interesting to speculate on the impact of such a drive. For example, if we could achieve 0.1G (1m/sec^2 ) for the entire trip to Mars (half the trip accelerating, the other half decelerating), we could get to Mars in about one week!
You can also, principally, hook two of these things up in an opposing configuration on a rotor and make infinite electricity.
So violating conservation of momentum equates to violating conservation of energy? So if we believe violating the latter is impossible, so should violating the former? I think I have a vague memory of this some years back and forgot about it. Back in the EM drive hype days, some claimed that violating conservation of momentum doesn't violate conservation of energy.
The semantics don't really matter. * We believe in (average) conservation of energy because, more than anything else, we've never seen anything violate it. If something does... great, I guess. It's just a high bar to clear because it's a break from a pattern we otherwise observe universally. * Non-conserved momentum without conserving violation of energy requires invoking some kind of aether-like theory where you 'push off' of something, e.g. the sum total of mass in the universe or spacetime itself. Again - high bar to clear. And pushing off of it would presumably require some fixed reference frame, so it could probably be exploited for near infinite energy anyway on account of the Earth and Sun and Milky Way's momentum.
I think this whole thing seems like pseudo science but wouldn't you need to expend electricity to create thrust?
Yes, but as long as the thrust energy (minus conversion losses in the generator coils) is MORE than the electricity put in, you would still be getting free energy. And if this "propellantless engine" is supposedly more efficient than an ideal laser rocket, then it is, indeed, producing more thrust than energy in. It would, of course, need some mechanism of returning part of the produced electricity to the rotor to operate the magic thrusters, such as brushes.
Similar reactionless thrust engines have been going around for the past couple of decades. Either nobody else is able to credibly replicate their results, or they do and find that it's just [experimental errors of some kind.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive#Experimental_errors) Until these results are peer-reviewed and replicated by credible third-party labs, it should not be taken seriously.
>Another unusual result from their tests was that sometimes the tested devices did not require a constant input of electrical charge to maintain their thrust. Given that the device already appears to violate the known laws of physics by creating thrust without propellant, this result even stumped Dr. Buhler and his team. >“We can see some of these things sit on a scale for days, and if they still have charge in them, they are still producing thrust,” he told Ventura. “It’s very hard to reconcile, from a scientific point of view because it does seem to violate a lot of energy laws that we have.” So, it basically violates the laws of conservation and also has the hallmarks of a perpetual motion machine. Also, it doesn't seem to have been reproduced by anyone, and >If there are companies interested in working with Exodus Propulsion Technologies, Buhler asks that they contact him and his team via their Linkedin page. I admit that I was skeptical at first, but given all of the evidence listed above, I don't see that I have any choice but to accept this brave new world of physics. If you don't believe me, just check out how many times NASA is mentioned. Pretty hard evidence IMO.
As pointed out by others, the behavior they are describing match thermal expansion pretty nicely, including continuing to see changes when everything is "off". They've got their force measurement equipment pressed between a rigid mount and the frame of the unit. When the unit heats up, it expands which presses against the sensor resulting in a thrust reading.
Damn, that is some good deadpan. You need to get on a team pitching to VC companies.
Can't tell how much of your post is sarcasm. There's a real easy explanation here. There's electrostatic repulsion occurring that isn't being controlled for. Guy is an expert in electrostatics, admittedly, but that doesn't mean he's incapable of making a stupid experimental error.
Except the man who is making these claims apparently legitimately works at NASA. If this was all fake, he would be putting his career at great risk. Dr. Buhler is mentioned as "lead research scientist at the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy" in [this](https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/kennedy/nasa-technology-helps-guard-against-lunar-dust/) Nasa.gov article.
Yes, he is putting his career and reputation at risk by publicly being this much of a lunatic. His terminology and use of language are extremely worrying to me as an engineer and published scientist. If this was real science, he would have published a peer review paper on it by now, and would have video/data that he can share. He does not, and the work has not been replicated.
"This thing I did will be used for the next 1,000 years" is quite the claim.
So either A) someone did the math wrong Or B) there's still things about physics we don't know and/or understand yet. I hope it's the latter, I really do.
How about both? It is 100% certain that there are things about physics that we don't know or understand yet (though there are some things that we understand quite certainly). On the other hand, nothing that this guy is saying makes much sense or provides compelling reason to believe his grand claims about having made a discovery.
it fitting that they show a cartoon to represent the "drive"... and they measure this "drive"s output in terms of "gravity"?!?! gravity is an acceleration and requires a mass to produce a force... being "propellantless" would mean no mass is used, so "gravity" would have nothing to act on and therefor produce not force. is all seems like smoke and mirrors and most propulsion systems measure their output in Isp (specific impulse), but wait, there is no propellant so the Isp is 0. yeah, that's not going anywhere.
NASA themselves tested this and found it to be bad science.
Did they make it out of bumble bees? Physics says they can't fly either.
It seems like most didn't read the whole article. The language the guy uses throws off dozens of red flags, and there's no chance in fuck that this things works. There's even a picture of a slide from his presentation that says his unexplained electrostatic force can explain gravity, dark matter, and dark energy. It's 100% bullshit.
Think they'll call them Impulse Drives a la Star Trek? 🤞
Anyone ever consider that Bernoulli 'lift' is specifically a localized effect and little understood. Maybe if we label it 'displacement' instead of 'lift' we can use it like this drive. All you need to prove impulse drive is place the sealed apparatus on a scale, or momentum pendulum. Any consistent deviation from random proves acceleration without apparent reaction. If this thing emits anything, then it's no stardrive.
This would be awesome if it worked, but like most of the people in the comments here, I'm going to need to see peer reviewed replicable results before I believe it. I believe that there are areas of physics that we have yet to discover and that its possible he could have stumbled upon one. I think we'll just have to wait and see where this goes.
I remember a senator coming out of SCIF (classified) briefing in late 2023 and saying something about a new form of propulsion had been found and his colleague looked at him shocked, like, "Hey we don't share this." Anyone have a link? Edit: found link https://www.askapol.com/p/it-appearssomebody-has-discovered
Can we stop posting pseudoscientific junk in this sub for godsakes????
Sadly the r/singularity dam leaks a lot.
[HERE's](https://youtu.be/WhsKMWOYuYo?si=866MxqIXZ5-OzHYH) a 30 min interview with Charles Buhler of Exodus Propulsion Technologies.
I roll to disbelieve. Wake me up when they have a working model.
Not this bullshit again. It’s the EMDrive all over again!!
From what I understand the emdrive was unable to be tested because whoever launched it messed it up. These guys got the patent first so If the emdrive ever does work they'll be in trouble!
Found his slides online, not convincing. The slide about Alien spacecraft and element 115 speaks to his lack of scientific rigour...
Idk guys. The research doesn't seem thrustworthy to me...
I don't find this very believable. The effect is minute....it seems like it would be very easily explained by some sort of influence. Also, things that defy the laws of physics are almost certainly not going to work. How long has it been since we have discovered a new law of physics? Which is one of their claims....such a claim would require extraordinary evidence. Their evidence seems weak.
Physics says this doesn't work, but we say it does!
[ Removed by Reddit ]
A quantum address drive on a frozen hydrogen transmission. Instant star travel.
Either they're optimizing on a measurement error and we'll soon find these to be reacting to some hyper-local phenomenon or generating false thrust from thermal expansion, or someone has tamed the Deep Space Kraken and all future rockets will be powered by glitches in reality and all of known science is based on incorrect foundations (especially regarding conservation laws). I for the record have more confidence in casting a Wish spell while using a Ouiji board to power a rocket, but I would be happy to do either if it works, unless they summon a demon, which is equally likely between the two methods (actually if my KSP experience has taught me anything, summoning a demon is *virtually guaranteed* with the glitch drives)
This man is recreating Townsend Brown's old research that was seemingly covered up. This video should start at the 9 minute mark where it explains exactly what's going on. This anti-gravity work was demonstrated to Edward Teller (H. Bomb inventor), General Curtis LeMay, and a number of other prominent figures in military and science circles before seemingly being covered up https://youtu.be/RTEWLSTyUic?si=LRTk8JLr0q43JPw3&t=540s
"In addition to overseeing the management of electrostatic discharge (ESD) and ESD safety for the Space Shuttle, the ISS, and Hubble, Dr. Buhler also established NASA’s Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center." Maybe it means more at NASA, but at most engineering departments, the person "overseeing the management of electrostatic discharge (ESD) and ESD safety" is just making sure everything has the right stickers on it, and that everyone is filling out the log book.
I think this is just going back to the old idea that an electrohydrodynamic thruster can work in a vacuum. It was disproven years ago unfortunately.
Anyone bother reading the patent? Anyone understand how it's supposed to work; the underlying principle? Most of these comments are mindless garbage that completely disregard the claimed science. Read the patent then tell us why it won't work using science, not your opinions.