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Folks,
The promised answers to Jack's questions. They will be brief, but more can be found in the stuff that I've been writing and circulating. First, however, a comment that is motivated by this conversation, brought home to me with particular force because of the conversation.
There's been a lot of talk about the "problems" of current physics: the lack of a quantum theory of gravity, instantaneous propagation of effects, for example, entanglement and so on, what is the correct theory of cosmology, and on and on. It has also been suggested that all of these problems need to be fixed before we can have any real hope of making progress on the starship/stargates (S/S) problem. I disagree.
So far I agree with your disagreement on the above. Remember I will be on a multi-day DARPA/NASA panel on precisely this topic early October, so I would like to have at least a qualitative understanding of your conceptual narrative, premises and how your particular approach connects with orthodox General Relativity.
Indeed, I am sure that if we wait around for all of the "problems of physics" to be solved before we get serious about the S/S problem, hell will have long since frozen over. What we need to do is identify those physical principles that must be correct if the S/S problem is to be solved, and then go do experiments to see if the requisite principles actually work as needed.
OK
Mach's principle is a good example of what I am talking about. It has been defined and discussed ad nauseam for decades.
Right
Many simply dismiss it as an ill defined idea that does not merit serious consideration. It is, however, the only "principle" that addresses the origin of inertia.
OK you just lost me. First of all I don't know what you mean by "inertia." Let me tell you first what I mean by that term.
1) Given a massive test particle on a timelike geodesic in orthodox Einstein General Relativity (GR) a non-gravity force must be applied to push it off the time like geodesic. This is given by Newton's covariant second law of motion in curved spacetime
D^2x^u/ds^2 = F^u/m
where
m = invariant rest mass of the test particle
ds = invariant proper time differential (c = 1) along the test particle's (center of mass if extended) world line.
D/ds is the covariant derivative with respect to the Levi-Civita-Christoffel connection field for parallel transport of tensors relative to the invariant proper time differential along the world line.
F^u is the 4-vector non-gravity force
e.g. the electromagnetic force on the charged test particle is the covariant
F^u(EM) = qF^uvdx^v/ds
where F^uv = g^u^wFwv
Fwv is the EM field tensor
g^u^v is the metric tensor (that reduces to the Minkowski metric in a small region around a small geodesic detector in free float).
m = rest mass of test particle = inertia
you agree or disagree?
2) The origin of inertia is given by the Yukawa couplings in the standard particle quantum field theory model using the Higgs vacuum "superconductor" fields plus Frank Wilzcek's quantum chromodynamic super-computer computations of the hadronic rest masses of the confined quarks and their cloud of virtual off-mass-shell gluons and virtual quark-antiquark pairs to dominant approximation.
Therefore, I say there is no mystery at all about the origin of inertial. It is a pseudo-problem based on Mach's obsolete 19th century ideas of "matter" prior to quantum theory and prior to General Relativity.
And it should be obvious that you have to understand inertia if you are to solve the S/S problem.
Agreed, but please comment where we disagree on the meaning of "inertia."
Much of the confusion/contention arises from the way Einstein chose to first articulate the principle: asserting that the geometry of reality should be uniquely determined by the "material" sources contained it it.
What is meant by "material sources" has dramatically changed since Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and quantum field theory giving us virtual particles inside the vacuum as well as real particle elementary excitations of the vacuum, i.e. the "mass shell" idea based on poles of the Feynman propagators in the complex energy plane. Real particles are the poles and virtual particles are everything else in the complex energy plane that contributes to the propagator vacuum correlation functions.
Furthermore, ordinary near EM fields of power lines, electric motors, transformers et-al are macro-quantum coherent Glauber states of off-mass-shell virtual photons off the classical light cone as is seen by a Fourier transform of the electrostatic Coulomb field of a point charge in its rest frame as the most elementary example. This is distinct from the random zero point virtual photons of hf/2 per mode in the Casimir force effect, for example.
Every time one has a response susceptibility in soft condensed matter many-body problem the wave vector k-frequency f plane domain of support of the response functions are from virtual quasi particles and virtual collective modes that are real only on the "mass shell" e.g.
f = csk
cs = speed of sound in a crystal lattice
etc.
similarly for the vacuum response functions!
The important point here is that Einstein's strong equivalence principle (SEP) demands that virtual particles directly bend space time as well as real particles. This is proved by the dark energy acceleration of the expansion rate of our observable universe. Most physicists have failed to fully understand this since the discovery of the anomalous z redshifts in Type 1a supernovae are only about 12 years old. The diffusion time of new physics is obviously too long here.
The problem with this is that the field equations of GRT are really those of a local field theory (that can be applied to cosmological situations), so it really shouldn't be surprising that they have "non-Machian" solutions. The historical record then follows. . . .
OK, In fact, orthodox GR of 1916 is simply the local gauge theory of the Abelian 4-parameter globally rigid translation group T4 whose infinitesimal generators are the global total energy and linear momentum operators of the non-gravity matter fields in globally flat Minkowski spacetime where they are well defined.
The four Cartan 1-form tetrad fields e^I describe the motion of local inertial frames not rotating along the geodesics of the curved spacetime. There are even Penrose-Newman complex null tetrads for the null geodesic light cones as well as the more familiar ones for timelike geodesics corresponding to massive detectors with "inertia."
The non-Minkowski part of the tetrad fields in 1916 GR are the compensating gauge potentials that keep the total global dynamical actions of the non-gravity matter fields (leptons, quarks, gauge bosons of EM-weak-strong interactions) invariant under the local T4(x) that contains T4 as a subgroup.
The spin-connection for lepton and quark spinors (Weyl, Dirac, Majorana) comes from the tetrads as shown in detail by Rovelli in Ch 2 of his online lectures "Quantum Gravity," All of this is for the plain vanilla minimal curvature only 1916 GR.
To include a torsion field, one must locally gauge the 10-parameter Poincare group including the six space-time rotations in addition to the above four translations.
To go even further include the even larger conformal de Sitter group and spontaneously break it down to the de Sitter group with the cosmological constant /\ that connects us to the 't Hooft-Susskind world hologram picture via Tamara Davis's 2003 Ph.D (online).
The vacuum superconductor Glauber coherent states (order parameters) of course have physics in them that is yet to be properly explored. There are some papers on this in the literature.
From the S/S point of view, another approach is possible. You can ask: what is the essential physical content of Mach's principle that's relevant to the S/S problem?
Exactly my question.
Can it be restated in such a way that you can ignore all of the cosmological complications and leave them to be debated by cosmologists?
I hope so. The scales are so different that it's plausible they are decoupled sufficiently for practical applications.
I argue that the answer to these questions is yes.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
As far as local physics is concerned (and the S/S problem is one of local physics), the physical content of Mach's principle is the assertion that inertial reaction forces are due to the gravitational action of chiefly distant matter.
You have lost me completely with this remark. It has no meaning for me. How do you falsify it? Also what do you even mean by "distant matter"? This premise is too vague for my mind and that's why my instinct is that your approach rests on shaky ground at least 9.0 on the Richter scale! ;-)
Look at Tamara Davis's conformal time diagram of the entire history of our universe.
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Where and when is the "distant matter" on this diagram? Do you mean the entire space-time bounded by our past light cone and our past particle horizon? If so, you do not allow Wheeler-Feynman (Hoyle-Narlikar-Cramer) advanced signal "transactions."
This is already implied by the Equivalence Principle which says, in effect, gravitational forces are the same as "fictitious" forces [inertial forces], so you can geometrize them away. My version of Mach's principle simply says, not only are fictitious and gravitational forces the same in that they are geometrizable, they are the same because they are all gravitational forces.
Again these English words are too vague for me. I don't understand how you can relate that to propulsion.
Sure, in the simplest metric field Newton's gravity force is actually the non-gravity reaction force needed to keep the static LNIF detector still in curved spacetime, that's the meaning of the metric component
g00 = 1 + 2Newton's potential per unit test mass/c^2
where
Newton's potential = -GM/r
r > 2GM/c^2
If that were all one could do to "localize" Mach's principle, you probably couldn't make much progress on the S/S problem. But there is more that can be done. It is possible, indeed, easy to show that phi must be equal to c^2 if inertial reaction forces are gravitational. (See Sciama's and Nordtvedt's calculations appended to Mach's principle and Mach effects.) And since m = E/c^2, m phi = E; and now you have more than a statement about the nature of inertial reaction forces. You have a statement of the origin of inertia. And you can use this stuff to go looking for transient effects that you might be able to use to solve the S/S problem. That's what the "Mach effects" part of the recent piece circulated is all about.
You lost me completely in the above paragraph. I need to see equations/diagrams etc. I think all you are saying is what I just said above? In any case I can't connect your dots to propellantless propulsion for the Star Ship Study Panel. Not yet. You need to show more.
Now, you can wait around for all of the "critical problems of physics" to be solved, or at least the quantum theory of gravity to be invented, or, like Jack, you can speculate about coupling coefficients and metamaterials, or, like me, you can try to identify the real physical content of Mach's principle and look for transient effects, and then you can go do EXPERIMENTSto see if you're on the right track. I'm not interested in seeing hell freeze over. And in any event, I know that that's far beyond my realistic life expectancy. So I vote for trying to figure out the physics without worrying about grand problems, and then doing experiments. Perhaps, being an experimentalist, I am prejudiced. But I don't think much progress on a problem of this sort is possible without experiments.
I don't understand "transient effects". I don't see how that connects to warp drive in the sense of Einstein's GR where to use Puthoff's "metric engineering" we need to manipulate the ship's timelike geodesic from the ship itself with small amounts of power many powers of ten smaller than Jupiter's mass-energy. In short, we need to reverse engineer what we see flying saucers actually do above our nuclear weapons bases etc with impunity. We don't want to screw around with the mass of the ship because of the Anthropic Principle's "Just Six Numbers" (Martin Rees). Of course if we can make negative mass in a small sub-mass of the ship without blowing apart the universe in an Ice 9 vacuum "strangelet" (Martin Rees "Our Final Hour") good.
Off the soap box again, and on to Jack's questions:
On Aug 1, 2011, at 9:40 PM,
I've been off doing other things, so I've not caught up with all of the conversation. Let me say, though, that all of Jack's questions (and some of his comments) are addressed in the Stargates paper.
Maybe I missed it. Please resend it.
I'll resend the version that I'm working on for the book as soon as it's ready.
I guess what I am asking is for you to give here a synopsis of
1) what precisely you mean by Mach's principle?
Inertial reaction forces are not only "like" gravitational forces in that they display "fictitious" behavior (in the sense of Adler, Bazin, and Schiffer), they are gravitational forces. For this to be true, and for Newton's third law to be true everywhere and everywhen, then it must be that the total scalar gravitational potential (non-localizable under the EEP) is a locally measured invariant equal to the square of the speed of light.
I don't understand your last sentence here.
1a) do you have a mathematical formulation consistent with Einstein's mainstream equations of gravity?
Yes, see above and Stargates, or Making the Universe Safe for Historians, or the piece in progress; Mach's princple and Mach effects.
2) what are the equations for propulsion?
The equations are tedious to write out here, and can be found in any of a number of peer reveiwed publications. So I'll just verbally synopsize the effects.
No, not good enough. I need to see YOUR equations and understand their premises before I can endorse your approach to DARPA/NASA and several billionaires keen on interstellar space-travel. Please resend professional details ASAP as I seem to have lost them in the noise of email traffic.
There are two Mach effects. The normally larger effect occurs at twice the frequency of a signal that is producing a sinusoidal acceleration of a system in which internal energy is fluctuating at the same frequency. This fluctuation is "rectified" by adding another double frequency acceleration to the part where the mass fluctuation is occuring. The formal equations for all this can be found in any of a number of peer reviewed publications.
Again, show me. OK so you claim to be able to rectify. But what mass is actually fluctuating? How much is it? I gather you are not changing the rest masses of real electrons and real atomic nuclei? (Just Six Numbers) You are messing with their chemical binding energies? What about making an explosion with that Sorceror's Apprentice approach?
The second Mach effect, normally vanishingly small, is always negative.
Show me. Again, what is this mass-energy you are making negative with w > -1 so that you get anti-gravity?
In special circumstances, it can be made large using periodic signals to excite both effects. A crude example of how to do this is in "TWISTS of Fate: Can we make traversable wormholes in spacetime?" Alas, the published version is marred by serious post copy editing misprints in some of the key equations. But there you will find a very crude numerical integration that shows how extreme exoticity might be induced.
I can't understand your last paragraph here. I need to see the nitty-gritty ASAP.
3) is your drive a true warp drive?
Yes. That based on the second Mach effect is a true means to produce the Jupiter mass of exotic matter needed for a warp drive.
You are claiming to make a Jupiter mass of exotic matter in your laboratory with microwaves? With ELF? .... Without destroying the Earth? Pardon my skepticism - extraordinary claims ...
3a) are the objects inside the ship weightless?
With respect to, say, a nearby Earth or suchlike, yes. They are weightless in the sense you mean. [Strictly speaking, for external observers, the contents of a warp bubble are effectively inertia-less as they can be accelerated to arbitrarily large velocities (including FTL). But inertialess encompasses the sense of weightless that I think you intend.]
OK, but again these are merely empty claims without any evidence I have seen.
3b) are you controlling the shape of the timelike geodesic of the center of mass of the ship?
Configured as a warp drive, yes. My preferred embodiment, however, is the absurdly benign wormhole where stabilizing the throat is the foremost issue of concern.
I fully agree a good trick if you can do it. How do you fix the distant mouth and cosmic global time of the other end of the wormhole?
In real warp drive the inertial mass of the ship over-all is irrelevant - it drops out of the geodesic equation for the center of mass of the ship. It is the intrinsic geometry at the ship that is being manipulated from the ship - that's what "metric engineering means".
Yes, I know. That's been obvious since the '90s. See the above remark on weightlessness.
4) How do you compute the energy needed for a real large star ship as big as a modern day super-carrier?
The basic equations are fairly straight-forward. Applying them to practical situations should not prove insuperable. So far, however, they have been applied to experimental configurations.
Again I need to see details for DARPA/NASA panel. More unsubstantiated extraordinary claims.
Note - in the retrocausal world hologram theory with our future event horizon as the hologram screen - that is arguably a Wheeler-Feynman version of historically vague Mach's Principle.
Remember "Killing Time"? Yes, I have known since the very early '90s (as others on this circulation can attest) that Mach's principle entails W-F action at a distance, and that requires a future absorber. I'm ambivalent about whether it gets called a hologram.
OK, so again this brings us back to the Tamara Davis's picture above. Where and when is your distant matter?
Also how does the distant matter connect with your local transient effect - is it the Dirac radiative reaction that Wheeler-Feynman started with. So you need the future light cone intersection with our future horizon or not?
Sorry about not trying to put equations into the above with this text editor. But the equations really are in essentially all of the formally published stuff. :-)
I don't have access to that published stuff please send it. Also you can screen capture the equations as I have been doing if you have digital copies.
Best,
Jim
I gather he has not read it with care yet. I am sure that if (and when?) he does, he will find answers to most of his concerns.
Perhaps the most fundamental is the issue of mass and the Higgs process. The Higgs process confers rest mass on rest massless particles in the standard model. It is NOT an explanation of the origin of mass.
Sure it is. The rest mass of the leptons and quarks comes from the coupling to the macro-quantum coherent c-number QUANTUM VACUUM Higgs field. That c-number field is a Glauber coherent state of VIRTUAL Higgs-Goldstone bosons from a spontaneous broken continuous symmetry (SU2weak) at the moment of inflation.
Whether or not we can excite REAL Higgs bosons is not relevant to the origin of the quark and lepton rest masses.
That, indeed, was Wilczek's point in both papers, talks, and his book. The bulk of the masses of the nucleons is attributable to the energies of the real gluons that bind the quarks. As W puts it, Einstein's "second" law: m = E/c^2.
I think you have this confused Jim. Where do you get real gluons binding the quarks? That is wrong. The gluons are all virtual just like the virtual photons that bind the electron and the proton in the hydrogen atom.
In fact it's the zero point vacuum plasma fluctuation energy of virtual gluons and also virtual quark-antiquark pairs that gives the hadron rest masses. If you look at the quantum numbers you cannot use real gluons. It's like saying there is a real antineutrino and a real electron inside a neutron BEFORE it decays into a proton and an electron and an anti-neutrino.
There is a tricky point here. When you try and fail to separate say a real quark - antiquark pair in a meson you have a kind of vortex string of chromodynamic fields. Just like the electromagnetic near field the vortex string is made out of coherent states of virtual gluons. The effective string potential ~ (separation of the real quark from the real antiquark).
So you have both random zero point vacuum fluctuations and coherent virtual gluon Glauber states "inside" the hadron. But I am pretty sure that thinking of real on-mass-shell gluons inside the hadron is not correct. Of course the gluons have zero rest mass.
The point is that real gluons are like real photons - they are far field radiating energy to infinity. The hadron needs NON-RADIATING spatially confined near fields of gluons (i.e. Glauber states of virtual gluons).
The standard model (as explained already in MUSH [1995] and Stargates) is not suitable for asking about the gravitational properties of elementary particles for the obvious reason that it doesn't include gravity. The ADM model, however, is an EXACT general relativistic model that does include gravity.
So what? How does that give propellantless propulsion?
There are two kinds of propellantless propulsion:
one with g-force (not warp drive) i.e. still impulse drive like a rocket even though no real particles are ejected
the other is the true zero g-force warp drive I am interested in.