My review of James Woodward's Making Starships and Star Gates V1 under construction

Jack Sarfatti

August 11 near San Francisco

My review of Jim Woodward's Making Starships book - V1 under construction

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Jack Sarfatti Sarfatti’s Commentaries on James F. Woodward’s book
Making Starships and Star Gates
The Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes

The book has many good insights except for some ambiguous statements regarding:

1) The equivalence principle that is the foundation of Einstein’s theory of the gravitational field. This seems to be due to the author’s not clearly distinguishing between local frame invariant proper acceleration and frame dependent coordinate acceleration. Thus, the author says that Newton’s gravity force is eliminated in an “accelerating frame.” In fact, it is eliminated in a Local Inertial Frame (LIF) that has zero proper acceleration, though it has coordinate acceleration relative to the surface of Earth for example. All points of the rigid spherical surface of Earth have non-zero proper accelerations pointing radially outward. This violates common sense and confuses even some physicists as well as engineers not to mention laymen. It is a fact of the Alice in Wonderland topsy-turvy surreal world of the post-modern physics of Einstein’s relativity especially when combined with the faster-than-light and back from the future entanglement of particles and fields in quantum theory and beyond.
2) I find the author’s discussion of fictitious inertial pseudo forces puzzling. I include the centripetal force as a fictitious force in the limit of Newton’s particle mechanics sans Einstein’s local inertial frame dragging from rotating sources. That is, every local frame artifact that is inside the Levi-Civita connection is a fictitious inertial pseudo force. This includes, Coriolis, centrifugal, Euler, and most importantly Newton’s gravity force that is not a real force. The terms inside the Levi-Civita connection are not felt by the test particle under observation. Instead, they describe real forces acting on the observer’s local rest frame. A real force acts locally on a test particle’s accelerometer. It causes an accelerometer’s pointer to move showing a g-force. In contrast, Baron Munchausen sitting on a cannonball in free fall is weightless. This was essentially Einstein’s “happiest thought” leading him to the equivalence principle the cornerstone of his 1916 General Relativity of the Gravitational Field.
3) A really serious flaw in the book is the author’s dependence on Dennis Sciama’s electromagnetic equations for gravity. In fact, these equations only apply approximately in the weak field limit of Einstein’s field equations in the background-dependent case using the absolute non-dynamical globally-flat Minkowski space-time with gravity as a tiny perturbation. The author uses these equations way out of their limited domain of validity. In particular, the Sciama equations cannot describe the two cosmological horizons past and future of our dark energy accelerating expanding observable universe. What we can see with our telescopes is only a small patch (aka “causal diamond”) of a much larger “inflation bubble” corresponding to Max Tegmark’s “Level 1” in his four level classification of the use of “multiverse” and “parallel universes.” Our two cosmological horizons, past and future, that are thin spherical shells of light with us inside them at their exact centers may in fact be hologram computer screens projecting us as 3D images in a virtual reality quantum computer simulation. This is really a crazy idea emerging from Gerardus ‘t Hooft, Leonard Susskind, Seth Lloyd and others. Is it crazy enough to be true?

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Jack Sarfatti 4) John Cramer’s Foreword: I agree with Cramer that it’s too risky in the long run for us to be confined to the Earth and even to this solar system. British Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees in his book “Our Final Hour” gives detailed reasons. Of course if a vacuum strangelet develops like Kurt Vonnegut’s “Ice-9”, then our entire observable universe can be wiped out, our causal diamond and beyond shattered, and there is no hope. That is essentially the apocalyptic worst-case scenario of the Bible’s “Revelations” and we will not dwell on it any further. Let’s hope it’s not a precognitive remote viewing like what the CIA observed in the Stanford Research Institute studies in the 1970’s. Cramer cites the NASA-DARPA 100 Year Star Ship Project that I was involved with in the first two meetings. Cramer’s text is in quotes and italics. There is “little hope of reaching the nearby stars in a human lifetime using any conventional propulsion techniques … the universe is simply too big, and the stars are too far away. … What is needed is either trans-spatial shortcuts such as wormholes to avoid the need to traverse the enormous distances or a propulsion technique that somehow circumvents Newton’s third law and does not require the storage, transport and expulsion of large volumes of reaction mass.”
Yes, indeed. I conjecture as a working hypothesis based on the UFO evidence that traversable wormhole stargate time travel machines are the only way to go with warp drive used only as a secondary mechanism at low speeds mainly for silent hovering near the surfaces of planets and for dogfights with conventional aerospace craft. The stargates do not have the blue shift problem that the Alcubierre warp drive has although the Natario warp drive does not have the blue shift problem (high-energy collisions with particles and radiation in the path of the starship). Newton’s third law that every force acting on a material object has an equal and opposite inertial reaction force on the source of that force is a conservation law that follows from symmetry Lie groups of transformations in parameters of the dynamical action of the entire closed system of source and material object. This is a very general organizing principle of theoretical physics known as Noether’s theorem for global symmetries in which the transformations are the same everywhere for all times in the universe. For example:
Space Translation Symmetry Linear Momentum Conservation
Time Translation Symmetry Energy Conservation
Space-Space Rotation Symmetry Angular Momentum Conservation
Space-Time Rotation Symmetry
Internal U1 EM Force Symmetry Conserve 1 Electric Charge
Internal SU2 Weak Force Symmetry Conserve 3 Weak Flavor Charges
Internal SU3 Strong Force Symmetry Conserve 8 Strong Color Charges

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Jack Sarfatti In a propellantless propulsion system without the rocket ejection of real particles and/or radiation one must include the gravity curvature field (dynamical space-time itself) as a source and sink of linear momentum. Furthermore, if we include quantum corrections to the classical fields there is the remote possibility of using virtual particle zero point fluctuations inside the vacuum as a source and sink of linear momentum. However, the conventional wisdom is that this kind of controllable small-scale metastable vacuum phase transition is impossible in principle and to do so would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics (extracting work from an absolute zero temperature heat reservoir). Even if we could do the seemingly impossible, propellantless propulsion while necessary is not sufficient for a true warp drive. A true warp drive must be weightless (zero g-force) timelike geodesic and without time dilation for the crew relative to the external observer outside the warp bubble that they were initially clock synchronized with. Localizing global symmetries requires the addition of compensating gauge connections in a fiber bundle picture of the universe. Indeed, the original global symmetry group is a smaller subgroup of the local symmetry group. The gauge connections define parallel transport of tensor/spinor fields. They correspond to the interactions between the several kinds of charges of the above symmetries. I shall go into more details of this elsewhere. Indeed localizing the above spacetime symmetries corresponds to generalizations of Einstein’s General Relativity as a local gauge theory. For example, localizing the space and time global translational symmetries means that the Lie group transformations at different events (places and times) in the universe are independent of each other. If one believes in the classical special relativity postulate of locality that there are no faster-than-light actions at a distance, then the transformations must certainly be independent of each other between pairs of spacelike separated events that cannot be connected by a light signal. However, the local gauge principle is much stronger, because it applies to pairs of events that can be connected not only by a light signal, but also by slower-than-light timelike signals. This poses a paradox when we add quantum entanglement. Aspect’s experiment and others since then, show that faster-than-light influences do in fact exist in the conditional probabilities (aka correlations) connecting observed eigenvalues of quantum observable operators independently chosen by Alice and Bob when spacelike separated. I shall return to this in more detail elsewhere. Finally, we have the P.W. Anderson’s anti-reductionist “More is different” emergence of complex systems of real particles in their quantum ground states with quasi-particles and collective mode excitations in soft condensed matter in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This corresponds to spontaneous symmetry breaking of the quantum vacuum’s virtual particles, in its high energy standard model analog, to the Higgs-Goldstone “God Particle” now found at ~ 125 Gev in CERN’s LHC that gives rest masses to leptons and quarks as well as to the three weak radioactivity force spin 1 gauge W-bosons though not to the single spin 1 photon gauge boson and the eight spin strong force gluon gauge bosons. In this quantum field theory picture, the near field non-radiating interactions among the leptons and quarks are caused by the exchange of virtual spacelike (tachyonic faster-than-light off-mass-shell) gauge bosons continuously randomly emitted and absorbed by the leptons and quarks. To make matters more complicated unlike the single rest massless U1 photon, the three weak rest massive SU2 W bosons and the eight strong rest massless SU3 gluons carry their respective Lie algebra charges, therefore, they self-interact. A single virtual gluon can split into two gluons for example. The SU3 quark-quark-gluon interaction gets stronger at low energy longer separations. This is called quantum chromodynamic confinement and it explains why we do not see free quarks in the present epoch of our causal diamond observable universe patch of the multiverse. Free quarks were there in a different quantum vacuum thermodynamic phase shortly after the Alpha Point chaotic inflation creation of our observable universe that we see with telescopes etc. Indeed, most of the rest mass of protons and neutrons comes from the confined Heisenberg uncertainty principle kinetic energy of the three real confined up and down quarks and their plasma cloud of virtual zero point gluons and virtual quark-antiquark pairs. The Higgs Yukawa interaction rest masses of three bound real quarks is about 1/20 or less than the total hadronic rest masses.

The author, James F. Woodward (JFW), introduces Mach’s Principle though in an ambiguous way to my mind. He says that the computation of the rest mass from local quantum field theory as has been in fact accomplished for hadrons by MIT Nobel Laureate, Frank Wilczek et-al using supercomputers is not sufficient to explain the inertia of Newton’s Second Law of Particle Mechanics. This does sound like Occult Astrology at first glance, but we do have the 1940 Wheeler-Feynman classical electrodynamics in which radiation reaction is explained as a back-from-the-future retro causal advanced influence from the future absorber on the past emitter in a globally self-consistent loop in time. Indeed, Feynman’s path integral quantum theory grew out of this attempt. Hoyle and Narlikar, and John Cramer have extended the original classical Wheeler-Feynman theory to quantum theory. Indeed, the zero point virtual photons causing spontaneous emission decay of excited atomic electron states can be interpreted as a back from the future effect. The electromagnetic field in the classical Wheeler-Feynman model did not have independent dynamical degrees of freedom, but in the Feynman diagram quantum theory they do. However, the retro causal feature survives. Therefore the only way I can make sense of JFWs fringe physics proposal is to make the following conjecture. Let m0 be the renormalized rest mass of a real particle computed in the standard model of local quantum field theory. Then, the observed rest mass m0’ equals a dimensionless nonlocal coefficient C multiplied by the local m0 renormalized rest mass. Mach’s Principle is then C = 0 in an empty universe of only real test particles without any sources causing spacetime to bend. Furthermore, C splits into past history retarded and future destiny advanced pieces. Now is there any Popper falsifiable test of this excess baggage?

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Jack Sarfatti 1) Springer-Praxis Books in Space Exploration (2013)
2) Einstein in Zurich over one hundred years ago read of a house painter falling off his ladder saying he felt weightless.
3) I have since disassociated myself from that project, as have other hard...See More

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Jack Sarfatti 4) Roughly speaking, for particle mechanics, the dynamical action is the time integral of the kinetic energy minus the potential energy. The classical physics action principle is that the actual path is an extremum in the sense of the calculus of variations relative to all nearby possible paths with the same initial and final conditions. Richard P. Feynman generalized this classical idea to quantum theory where the actual extremum path corresponds to constructive interference of complex number classical action phases one for each possible path. There are more complications for velocity-dependent non-central forces and there is also the issue of initial and final conditions. The action is generalized to classical fields where one must use local kinetic and potential analog densities and integrate the field Lagrangian density over the 4D spacetime region bounded by initial history and final teleological destiny 3D hypersurfaces boundary constraints. Indeed, Yakir Aharonov has generalized this to quantum theory in which there are back-from-the-future retro causal influences on present weak quantum measurements made between the past initial and future final boundary constraints. Indeed, in our observable expanding accelerating universe causal diamond, these boundary constraints, I conjecture, are our past cosmological particle horizon from the moment of chaotic inflation leading to the hot Big Bang, together with our future dark energy de Sitter event horizon. Both of them are BIT pixelated 2D hologram computer screens with us as IT voxelated “weak measurement” 3D hologram images projected from them. The horizon pixel BIT quanta of area are of magnitude (~10^-33 cm or 10^19 Gev)^2. The interior bulk voxel IT quanta of volume are of magnitude (~10^-13 cm or 1 Gev)^3. This ensures that the number N of BIT horizon pixels equals the number of IT interior voxels in a one-to-one correspondence. The actually measured dark energy density is proportional to the inverse fourth power of the geometric mean of the smallest quantum gravity Planck length with the largest Hubble-sized scale of our future de Sitter causal diamond ~ 10^28 cm. This, when combined with the Unruh effect, corresponds to the Stefan-Boltzmann law of black body radiation that started quantum physics back in 1900. However, this redshifted Hawking horizon blackbody radiation must be coming back from our future de Sitter cosmological horizon not from our past particle horizon.

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Jack Sarfatti 5) Localizing the four space and time translations corresponds to Einstein’s general coordinate transformations that are now gauge transformations defining an equivalence class of physically identical representations of the same curvature tensor field. However, the compensating gauge connection there corresponds to torsion fields not curvature fields. The curvature field corresponds to localizing the three space-space rotations and the three space-time Lorentz boost rotations together. Einstein’s General Relativity in final form (1916) has zero torsion with non-zero curvature. However, T.W.B. Kibble from Imperial College, London in 1961 showed how to get the Einstein-Cartan torsion + curvature extension of Einstein’s 1916 curvature-only model by localizing the full 10-parameter Poincare symmetry Lie group of Einstein’s 1905 Special Relativity. The natural geometric objects to use are the four Cartan tetrads that correspond to Local Inertial Frame (LIF) detector/observers that are not rotating about their Centers of Mass (COM) that are on weightless zero g-force timelike geodesics. Zero torsion is then imposed as an ad-hoc constraint to regain Einstein’s 1916 model as a limiting case. The ten parameter Poincare Lie group is subgroup of the fifteen parameter conformal group that adds four constant proper acceleration hyperbolic Wolfgang Rindler horizon boosts and one dilation scale transformation that corresponds to Herman Weyl’s original failed attempt to unify gravity with electromagnetism. The spinor Dirac square roots of the conformal group correspond to Roger Penrose’s “twistors.”

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