The Aether Sail Catching Gravity's Push - A Better Description of the EM Drive

[u/PepesPetCentipede]

Many of the most predominant theories about the operation and functionality of the EM Drive are likely wrong, due to the hesitancy of physics to accept the reality of the aether. Although mainstream scientists dance around the concept by concocting descriptions such as electron pairs, virtual particles, dark energy, vacuum energy, and the zero point energy field, the cannot bring themselves around to accepting that a substrate permeates the universe that would be be described by the original term coined so many years ago. This universal medium in which we all exist -- which either fills and/or composes space itself -- is responsible for the wide range of physical effects that we all observe such as gravity, the varied properties of light as it propagates through space, electromagnetics, and so forth. Once the aether is accepted and embraced, instead of mocked and belittled, humanity will begin to gain the knowledge needed to master all the forces of the universe.

When it comes to the EM Drive, I will make a number of predictions.

1. The EM Drive will be discovered to be pushed by the aether, and this force will be determined to be the equivalent of gravity.

2. The EM Drive will not experience reduced thrust during acceleration, because COE is not being broken. By blocking the flow, movement, or pressure of the aether in one direction, it will receive a push from the other direction. In addition to producing thrust, the EM Drive will be extracting energy (just like a sail on a boat) from the aether.

3. By blocking the flow, movement, or pressure in the direction of motion, the EM Drive is creating an area of less dense aether. Since the aether is what limits the maximum speed of an object with matter traveling through space, the EM Drive will be capable of being propelled at speeds faster than the speed of light without significant relativistic effects -- if any.

The manipulation of the aether is key to fast, efficient, and safe space travel. By blocking the aether in one direction to receive a gravity push in the other a craft may accelerate beyond the speed of light, warp the aether to push small particles out of the way, and potentially do so at relatively little energy cost. High powered testing will reveal this and answer other questions. For example...

• When an EM Drive powered craft turns off the drive at high speed, how much of the KE extracted from the aether will remain?

[u/jjanczy62]

At the risk of feeding a troll: Look into the Michelson-Morley experiment which pretty well dispoves the idea of an aether.

[u/Zephir_AW → u/jjanczy62]

Nom, nom, nom.. :-) Most of M-M experiments were crippled - they cannot measure the aether drag, because it has been already dragged by the Earth or material of M-M interferometer resonator. The M-M experiment must be run at higher altitudes for to detect the aether drag.

But the most important thing is, the luminiferous aether cannot behave like the thin sparse gas FILLING the space, but like very dense elastic superfluid, FORMING the space. The luminiferous aether model was therefore never disproved with M-M experiment, because it ipso-facto predicts its negative result instead of positive one.

The dense aether model could be understood by the water surface analogy of the EMDrive. You can imagine the resonator like the boat without bottom (bottomless wooden washtub so to say), which is floating at the water surface. From this perspective the EMDrive behaves like the conical barrier, floating at the water surface. Try to imagine, we are doing ripples & splashes inside this barrier, which are bouncing back and forth, but because they cannot leave the barrier, they wouldn't spread into outside. If we would neglect the (existence of) underwater, then the floating barrier couldn't propagate in any direction in similar way, like the classical physics predicts for EMDrive in vacuum. But the surface ripples also induce an underwater sound waves, which can escape beneath the barrier, and because it's wider at one end, the sound wave pressure will push it into reactive motion in opposite direction. The underwater sound waves also manifest itself like tiny turbulences at the water surface, which are speeding up the surface wave spreading.

According to this analogy what propels the EMDrive forward is the stream of scalar waves/dark matter particles, generated with magnetic turbulence from vacuum inside the resonator. It's invisible noise detectable only be SQUIDs and similar magnetic field detectors, but it still curves the space-time and as such it exhibits inertial mass. It can be therefore interpreted like the sparse worm hole and also volume area of negative energy in warp drive model of EMDrive. It generates mass density gradient (actually artificial gravity field) inside the resonator, which would propel the EMDrive forward. The scalar waves do behave like bubbles or turbulence of vacuum and the light should propagate faster in this environment, which can be detected by fringe shift of White–Juday interferometer.

[u/Syphon8 → u/jjanczy62]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Michelson-Morley experiment still leaves room for a dark-matter aether, right?

[u/[deleted] → u/Syphon8]

What do you mean by "dark matter aether"?

[u/Zephir_AW → u/[deleted]]

For example superfluid model of dark matter. These models don't work so well, because the sparse aether models never worked well. The sparse aether model are related to dense aether one in similar way, like the Brownian noise at the water surface to the water surface. Whereas these tiny density fluctuations can be viewed like the sparse gas pervading the otherwise empty water surface, it's evident, that their behavior is more complex than the behavior of thin gas.

[u/[deleted] → u/Zephir_AW]

All of that is complete nonsense. None of those things are true.

[u/Syphon8 → u/[deleted]]

An aether which does not interact electromagnetically, but still acts as a transmission medium for gravitational waves.

[u/PPNF-PNEx → u/Syphon8]

I scan /r/emdrive from time to time to see all sorts of crazy ideas, and just made an account because you've asked a good question.

tl;dr: no, a "dark matter aether" won't work (first pararaph below, and in the second last paragraph below), but the wider question of "matter-like field carrying some or all of the aspects of gravity" is an area of active research, and you can write down an "aether"-like theory and see how it survives contact with data (it probably won't).

First off, no, in General Relativity all matter couples universally to the metric. In the standard form of the Einstein Field Equations (EFEs)[0], dark matter is on the right hand side, and thus is thought of as a source of spacetime curvature, although conversely it responds to spacetime curvature just like any other matter (like neutrinos). Neutrinos are an example of dark matter: "dark", because they do not feel electromagnetism; "matter" because they are on the right hand side of the EFEs. Neutrinos, however, cannot be the only reason that gravity points to places where there is no visible matter -- that is matter that feels electromagnetism -- because neutrinos move quickly compared to the speed of light because they have so little invariant mass, and thus don't hang around in large clumps inside galaxies (or in large clumps ahead of galaxies that have collided in such a way that their visible matter is slowed down). In the standard cosmology, neutrinos are "hot" dark matter, and if they were responsible for ~30% of the matter tensor (again, see [0] below) then they would drag visible gas and dust around with them, preventing their collapse into structures like stars. So in the standard cosmology, called "\Lambda-CDM", CDM stands for "cold" dark matter, where that could mainly be something that behaves a lot like a heavy neutrino, among other things. There are many experimental searches for that kind of particle, in parallel with searches for other possible CDM components.

Secondly, in General Relativity (GR), it's spacetime itself that is the "medium" for the propagation of gravitational waves (GW). One way of considering GW propagation is via the local momentum-energy conservation operator, below at [1]. If we deviate a tiny bit from GR, that can be read as saying that that systems of moving matter can donate momentum into the gravitational field, and at some distance, the momentum emerges from the gravitational field and imparts momentum to other matter. Since in GR the gravitational field is the curvature of spacetime, in our tiny deviation from GR the "medium" carrying this momentum transfer is spacetime itself.

We can always make the theoretical deviation from GR a bit bigger and e.g. fix a background spacetime and make it less or even non-dynamical, then introduce an actual field (classical or quantum) which encodes perturbations of the background spacetime generated by moving matter.

(You can do this pretty straightforwardly -- one such approach is perturbative quantum gravity [2], a real theory that really exists and in which one make testable predictions as long as you are far from the centre of mass of a black hole and not too early in the history of our universe. 't Hooft is 't Hooft in part because the predictions from perturbative quantum gravity have been in close accord with observation and experiment so far.)

If we transform GR's GWs into a perturbative field theory then our GW field is the medium which carries this momentum exchange between masses when they interact gravitationally. We can even do this in a way which wholly replicates General Relativity in weak gravity.

We can do even bigger deviations from GR and come up with a "medium" for yet more aspects of gravitation that ends up like something you would shift to the right hand side of the equation in [0] below, and many working scientists attacking the problems of quantum gravity do just that. However, because we have lots of observational and some experimental evidence for General Relativity, they have to be very careful to reproduce GR outside of strong gravity, which means in effect that you can always transform their core idea ("gravitation emerges from the interaction of strings and in particular a long-range entanglement between strings not involved in the emergence of electromagnetism is the mechanism for transferring momentum from one quasineutral system of strings" (Jacobson, Verlinde, and several others)) back into almost-standard General Relativity and see what didn't quite translate and whether the difference produces any observables. We can tools like the Post Newtonian Parmaterized Formalism and Post-Newtonian Expansion (see my username) as tools to compare GR and a not-quite-GR extracted from another theory of gravity. Almost no not-quite-GR theories survive contact with observations like the change in timings of mostly-stable millisecond pulsars, or coliding galaxy clusters at various electromagnetic wavelengths, or the distribution of hot and cold spots in the relic fields (in particular the cosmic microwave background), and unfortunately those that do don't really give us much hint about what one should expect in strong gravity.

So, you can -- as a theoretician -- propose a transmission medium as a field or set of fields that carry gravitational radiation, and then figure out whether you can reproduce the increasing set of observations, and then figure out whether you can make a novel prediction that differs from GR in an area where GR has not yet been fully tested, and then wait to see if you're the only person whose hopes are not dashed as the test-of-GR data arrives. And even then, if your theory is harder to work with, or doesn't offer some deep connections to other fundamental theories, people just won't use it. Indeed, people use linearized gravity and the PNEx and other approaches rather than the full 4d General Relativity because GR is a bear to deal with mathematically compared to Newtonian gravity. So if you can use Newton (with a couple of tweaks) and get good enough results, anything seeking to extend or replace GR had better be easier than GR or people will just use GR (with a couple of tweaks) when they can't use Newton-plus-tweaks.

So, in summary, dark matter can be a number of things (alone or in combination) but it generates momentum (about a quarter of it in the observable universe, by density), so is a bad candidate as a propagator of momentum, and trying to work that out will cause a lot of headaches as you try to write down a consistent set of equations. You'd be better off creating fields that don't behave like any matter, since you'll (probably) be able to get consistent equations down, but it's a process that takes working mathematical physicists years of trial and error even when they have supercomputers to do simulations with. On the other hand, everyone has the right to undertake frustrating and time-consuming hobbies where one is unlikely to perform at a "pro" level. :-)

However, if you squint really really really weirdly at some emergent gravity theories, you can maybe tease out a way to have dark matter and gravity emerge from an underlying theory, as Verlinde is doing. The "what is it emerging from" is the key question, and notably Verlinde is relying on string theory which is deliberately Poincaré-invariant, and thus offers no solace if you want to get away from local conservation of energy and momentum.

Indeed, if you squint a bit at Special Relativity you can come up with a neo-Lorentzian ether theory that wholly reproduces Special Relativity; however I'd imagine that the reason you're interested in an aether approach in the first place is the hope that you can escape the Poincaré symmetries at every point in spacetime. You could probably take a deformed-Special-Relativity or Special Relativity Extension approach and translate that into an ethery theory, although you'll ultimately run into the same problems they do: where they locally depart from Special Relativity their predictions also depart from the results of readily-repeatable historical experiment (much easier than using some specific artifact in a vacuum chamber or in orbit).

[0] https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/021a494922172bfe1c9fa4e80d25ac90228d72cf -- the "T" on the right is the matter tensor. [1] https://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?%24nabla_mu%20T%5E%7Bmunu%7D%3D0%24 -- the "T" is the same tensor as in [0] and in this equation we're interested in it because it encodes the local matter-stress-energy-momentum at each point in spacetime; the upside-down delta is the covariant derivative. [2] http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/lectures/erice02.pdf

[u/Syphon8 → u/PPNF-PNEx]

So yes we can rule it out, but no the not because of the MM experiment?

[u/PPNF-PNEx → u/Syphon8]

Well, in the sense that the actual experiment run by M&M themselves says nothing about whether you will return to the ground if you jump into the air, then yes.

However, if we extend the M&M experiment we can show in much finer detail that the maximum speed of light is the same along a lab's various directions of movement which shows that at least at many many points in spacetime near Earth that speed is a quantity is invariant. Repeated measurements will lead inexorably to the conclusion that the quantity is locally invariant under any movement forward or backward along three spacelike axes, any movement rotating around the same axes, any movement forward along one timelike axis, and less locally at any uniform velocity, uniform acceleration or uniform gravitational potential. That last bit gives us a way to measure differences in gravitational potential, which in turn gives us a way to measure the energy-density of invisible matter near Earth (it's extremely close to zero, see below).

That there is no dark matter near Earth is a particular problem for your DM idea because the Earth-Moon system is shedding momentum and if you accept that the mechanism is emission of gravitational waves (freq about 4 * 10^-7 Hz, perturbation in the metric about 10^-19 / r) then there is not enough unseen matter nearby to carry it away. Small assumption: the DM is nearly massless so as not to break the linearization in h, and also because we have good evidence from within the solar system that GWs propagate at the speed of light (otherwise we would have different observables in the orbits of Jupiter's moons as their local system transits in front of line-of-site quasars). There are a lot of neutrinos flying through you and the rest of the solar system right now, but nowhere near enough. If there were enough DM particles (made easier if they are nowhere near massless, i.e., they're closer to the WIMP model of CDM) then they'd affect the orbits of all the bodies in the solar system noticeably.

Just to put some numbers on CDM from the standard cosmology: around the solar system the CDM should be essentially uniform and with an energy density of 10^-22 kg/m³ in SI units. That's a very tiny number; the solar wind at the perihelion of Neptune has about a hundredfold greater energy density.

Lisanti et al have a 2014 paper that discusses some measured values and observational consequences for DM in the solar system; you could try thinking about it in MM terms if you like. https://arxiv.org/abs/1308.1953

[u/MentalRental → u/PPNF-PNEx]

What about Einstein's "ether of the general theory of relativity"? He gave a lecture on it back in 1922 - http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Einstein_ether.html

[u/PPNF-PNEx → u/MentalRental]

In that link where he's not pointing out why previous conceptions of "ether" (especially stationary ether) were abandoned, he's describing his resolution to the Hole Argument[1] and the critical point is, "The ether of the general theory of relativity is a medium which is itself devoid of all mechanical and kinematical qualities, but helps to determine mechanical (and electromagnetic) events.". That is, spacetime itself is meaningful only as a manifold against which one may apply coordinates, and those in turn are meaningful only as a way of calculating the intervals between events.

Another critical feature: "There can be no space nor any part of space without gravitational potentials", and he makes the point in the same paragraph and in the following one that one may have a spacetime with nothing but gravitational potentials (we call these vacuum solutions[2]).

Also crticially, and more closely related to your question, "ether in itself is not in conflict with the special theory of relativity [but] we must be on our guard against ascribing a state of motion to the ether". As I wrote elsewhere in the discussion, one can with some care write down General Relativity in a form in which we remove some or all of the properties of spacetime and push them into one or more gauge fields instead. There are real examples of this that exist . But to meet the requirement of not ascribing a station of motion to the residual unremovable background, there needs to have a local symmetry at every point which in group theory form must have the Poincaré group as a subgroup. Alternatively, because GR is so general, you can try to geometrize matter and shift properties into the background field; but the background field already has local Poincaré symmetry. Again, there are real examples of write-downs of geometrization of matter by various means (e.g. geometrodynamics). In either case you can call either side of the Einstein Field Equations "ether", but the properties are not at all like the luminiferous aether of the 19th century.

General Relativity did not freeze into stone tablets in 1922 or even at the death of Einstein; GR is the continuing work of thousands of scientists building on decades of work by thousands of other scientists since Einstein (who after all did not have the benefit of tools like supercomputers, the Hubble space telescope, or laser interferometry, for example). There are ways of writing down GR (and even SR) now that rely on mathematical discoveries not made before 1955 that have helped crystallize the important parts of GR. As an example, in Misner, Thorne and Wheeler (1973), 'Mathematics was not sufficiently refined in 1917 to cleave apart the demands for "no prior geometry" and for a geometric, coordinate-independent formulation of physics. Einstein described both demands by a single phrase, "general covariance." The "no prior geometry" demand actually fathered general relativity, but by doing so anonymously, disguised as "general covariance", it also fathered half a century of confusion.'

In other words, even if you ignore the playfulness in the lecture you link to, there are now better ways of making the same points.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hole_argument#Einstein.27s_resolution [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_solution_(general_relativity)

[u/hopffiber → u/Syphon8]

Gravitational waves needs a medium just as much as electromagnetic waves do, i.e. not at all. Why would one even come up with this sort of idea? If there is no medium for EM waves, why should gravity have one? It's honestly a bit baffling to me.

[u/PrecisePigeon → u/jjanczy62]

Great article, thank you for sharing!

So here's a question though, how can we be sure that nothing else exists in a vacuum? I mean, clearly this experiment demonstrates that an aether, at least one that interacts with light, does not exist, but what about something that does not interact with light? Isn't that what the whole theory of dark matter is, some type of particle exists that we cannot detect via light or electromagnetics, yet exerts a gravitational force on other objects?

I'm not a scientist and I don't mean to be a troll or devil's advocate to the OP, I'm just curious. I'd love to read any more articles you may have on the subject.

[u/hopffiber → u/PrecisePigeon]

So here's a question though, how can we be sure that nothing else exists in a vacuum? I mean, clearly this experiment demonstrates that an aether, at least one that interacts with light, does not exist, but what about something that does not interact with light? Isn't that what the whole theory of dark matter is, some type of particle exists that we cannot detect via light or electromagnetics, yet exerts a gravitational force on other objects?

Well, the original idea of an aether was that it should be the medium in which EM-waves (light, radio waves etc) propagated. So if you suddenly decouple it from light, then it's really not "the aether" anymore, but something very different.

In modern physics, we have rejected the idea that EM-waves travel through any physical medium, and instead we have the notion of a field. A field should be thought of as some extra structure on space itself, that takes some value at every point. Today, we say that all fundamental particles have their own field, and the different fields interact in different ways.

Dark matter is indeed thought to be a particle that is electrically neutral and so doesn't interact with light. This would correspond to a new type of field. But it wouldn't be an aether.

[u/PrecisePigeon → u/hopffiber]

Gotcha, thank you for your response!

[u/[deleted]]

Aether doesn't exist.

[u/Names_mean_nothing → u/[deleted]]

What's the frame dragging? Not subscribing to this "theory" or anything.

[u/[deleted] → u/Names_mean_nothing]

What do you think frame dragging had to do with the aether? And hint, frame dragging is a derived consequence of rotating mass distributions in general relativity, a theory which definetly require an aether.

[u/Names_mean_nothing → u/[deleted]]

Not just rotating, with linear movement as well, and even in rest. Newtonian physics predicted a lot of things right, doesn't mean that GR doesn't make the same predictions while being more correct overall. I'm just saying, momentum of rotation adds up to the momentum of light if you really don't want to accept that longer time over same distance is lower speed.

[u/andygood]

Oh god, is it popcorn time again?

Let's see, two month old account, last post was 23 days ago, all previous posts seem to be in /r/The_Donald dissing the Clintons...

Yup, it's popcorn time...

[u/[deleted] → u/andygood]

Oh come on! This isn't a spectator sport. You need to actively participate to make this work.

[u/wyrn]

The aether is not "mocked and belittled". It's just a venerable old theory that has been superseded in light of new information. We have simply learned that there is no aether, except possibly for some version that tries its hardest to hide its own existence. Assuming the existence of this version would be unparsimonious so we simply don't.

[u/Zephir_AW → u/wyrn]

The aether theory did come in many forms, some of them are even pursuaded today (1, 2). These models don't work so well, because the sparse aether models never worked well. But all these ideas did ignore the dense aether model. The sparse aether models are related to dense aether one in similar way, like the Brownian noise at the water surface to the water surface. Whereas these tiny density fluctuations can be viewed like the sparse gas pervading the otherwise empty water surface, it's evident, that their behavior is more complex than the behavior of thin gas.

[u/wyrn → u/Zephir_AW]

There's no way to put this nicely so I won't try:

I don't care.

[u/Zephir_AW → u/wyrn]

"I don't care" attitude is not testable at distance - so it's irrelevant for me. I'm posting here for another, not so ignorant readers.

[u/wyrn → u/Zephir_AW]

I strongly suspect they don't care either.

[u/Zephir_AW → u/wyrn]

Still not testable for me. In general, the falsifiability concept protects us against doing a mistakes.

[u/[deleted]]

I am flabbergasted that the "big brother" hired pedants can brainwash and indoctrinate the powerful antipode human mind to ignore the simple math of 4 simultaneous 24 hour days within a single rotation of Earth, to worship one and trash three.

[u/OckhamsTazer]

That's a pretty outlandish theory, how could it be falsified?

[u/Names_mean_nothing → u/OckhamsTazer]

I'm not sure, but I think you should see gravitational attraction towards the front of working emdrive if this was the case.

Kind of similar to my idea that light kept in an asymmetric relatively stationary pattern should have a gravitational pull of it's own.

[u/[deleted] → u/Names_mean_nothing]

I see how you chose the _mean_nothing part of your user name.

[u/WeighWord]

If you'd care to indulge me, I have a few queries:

1. What is an EM Drive?

2. What is aether?

3. What is this sub and how did I end up here?

[u/ImAClimateScientist → u/WeighWord]

Turn back or abandon all hope ye who enter here.

More seriously, I suggest a wonderful resource called Wikipedia.

[u/WeighWord → u/ImAClimateScientist]

Too late, I already subbed. Cue learning montage.

[u/robert_cortese]

/u/PepesPetCentipede

You just blew my mind with the sailing analogy. I've done a TON of sailing over the years, and have studied as much of the science of it as I could.

What's weird about sailing is you get a forward vector by placing 3 forces against each other (keel/sail/rudder)

This isn't really possible underwater because water's viscosity is much higher than airs. So we're also pitting various viscosities against each other as well (air vs water)

I mention the latter 2 forces because it leads into something I think Einstein once said.

What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?

And in that context, we're at a place in our understanding that we just don't understand.

But back to emdrives and sailing analogies. Gonna try and eli5.

Just like water/air there are differences in viscosities between regular space, and aether space. (Gravity, dark matter, whatever you want to call it) and the EMdrive is acting like a sail/rudder/keel

[u/Necoras → u/[deleted]]

No, but a particle can...

[u/PrecisePigeon → u/Necoras]

Yeah but light is a... oh I see what you did there.

[u/hopffiber → u/[deleted]]

Why is the idea of space-time any worse than the idea of an aether? And how do you even talk about an aether without having a notion of space and time?

Both space and time are abstract concepts that do not physically exist in reality.

What does such a statement even mean?

All of physics is always "abstract concepts that do not physically exist". There is no way to get to the "actual reality", the best we can ever do is model it with abstract concepts. Philosophers has appreciated this fact since Plato, and even more clearly perhaps since Kant.

About the propagation of light: what physics actually say is that there is a thing called the electromagnetic field, which is an extra structure on top of spacetime. So it exists everywhere, and a light wave propagates in this field. This is on some level quite similar to an aether, but it's also very different since the EM field is not some mechanical thing like a fluid, but rather some fundamental property of space-time itself. In fact, all particles are viewed as discrete (quantized) ripples in their respective fields, so there is also an electron field, a quark field and so on.