Mustafa's Space Drive: An Egyptian Student's Quantum Physics Invention

http://www.fastcompany.com/1837966/mustafas-space-drive-an-egyptian-students-quantum-physics-invention

by mikeleeorg • 14 years ago

49 23 14 years ago

Rhapso• 14 years ago

Still waiting for the very excited paper on zero point energy that explains it in non-leagalise. If she figured this out, why not use it to run a generator? They again, who wants to get power off the heat death of the universe -tanstaafl -3rd law of thermodynamics

raverbashing• 14 years ago

Well, this is awkward

It's apparently relying on the 'dynamic Casmir effect' but what exactly is doing is not clear

I assume photons created by accelerating a plate have zero angular momentum (the sum of all them) unless maybe if you have a plate near it then it isn't? (and by 'near' I mean 'Casmir near')

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

TLDR: It's like a solar sail, but instead of being pushed by energy from a star, it manipulates local quantum particles to create a small force that propels the vessel.

Eg, not warp or hyperdrive, but still very clever.

stcredzero2• 14 years ago

No, more like "Thrusters" in Larry Niven's "Known Space" universe. It's still fantastical because it doesn't need to expend reaction mass, hence it's not subject to the rocket equation.

http://www.larryniven.net/kzin/worlds.shtml

KaoruAoiShiho• 14 years ago

It's not like a solar sail. You don't need energy to use the sail, you need energy here. This idea is not going to change space propulsion.

stcredzero2• 14 years ago

Huh? It's "only" a >reaction-less< drive. That's only a science-fiction conceit to allow compact little spacecraft to zip all over a solar system with mass fractions that are actually sane.

If the guy has invented a science fiction conceit in real life, I think he deserves some praise.

surrealize• 14 years ago

"Lisa, in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"

--Homer Simpson

Plus, "space drives" violate the conservation of momentum.

nohat• 14 years ago

I predict with very high confidence that this does not work.

ww5202• 14 years ago

It is a patent. Who say a patent has to work? It just describes some methods dreamed up by someone. The hardwork of finding out and getting it to work is left to the engineers. And payment is due to the idea guy if it ever works.

psykotic• 14 years ago

Conservation of momentum has been one of the most unshakeable laws of physics. Reactionless drives violate conservation of momentum. The likelihood that this is flawed is infinitely greater than the likelihood that conservation of momentum has been overturned. End of story, as far as I'm concerned.

Anyone remember the EmDrive debacle? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive

nilaykumar• 14 years ago

I don't think conservation of momentum is under fire here - the vacuum fluctuations (due to second quantization, quantization of electron, quark, etc. fields) might pick up the difference... although I don't really know enough QFT to be definite. Not that I believe any of this though, haha, seems like complete bullshit. The original article, especially. None of the physics seems to make any sense.

ww5202• 14 years ago

Does anyone find the reporting horrible? It's like reading a press release with all the buzz words and jargon thrown in. "Dynamic Casimir effect" that produces a net force? Yeah, the net force is the opposing forces squeezing the two plates together from outside. It produces zero directional net force. I don't see how it can move an object in space.

ktizo2• 14 years ago

As far as I am aware, dynamic casmir is achieved by moving a virtual mirror at relativistic speeds to create photons, so I am assuming that if the photons are preferentially directed, there would be a small net force in the opposite direction.

starwed• 14 years ago

And what is a virtual mirror, I ask?

sigmaxipi• 14 years ago

This appears to be another reactionless drive [1] that sci-fi authors and crackpots come up with every few years. There are many variants of these designs [2] and a drive based on the Casimir effect is just one of them. However, they all tend to violate a critical law of physics or depend on a custom theory of physics [3]

BTW, the original article at http://www.onislam.net/english/health-and-science/science/45... goes into slightly more detail about her invention and mentions that it's related to a differential sail.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReactionlessDrive [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Propulsion_Physics... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertialess_drive

jerf• 14 years ago

There's also some variants that do work, or at least could work in theory, which turn out to simply be highly inefficient photon drives. For instance, one recurring one that seems to get reinvented every few years is one where you put two electromagnets some distance from each other, and use the speed of light delay and some moderately clever polarity flipping to make it so the magnets always attract or repel each other in one direction, providing thrust. There's no reason why this won't work... except that also shoots huge amounts of defocused radio waves out the back, which is where the equal & opposite momentum is "coming from", and it's wildly less efficient in every conceivable way than simply shooting a conventional laser in the opposite of the direction you want to thrust. (And there's some other caveats too when you really get down to the engineering task of trying to flip the polarity of really powerful magnets at the necessary rate of speed. But it is conceivable that using real physics, you might be able to build something with this principle that could generate vanishing fractions of a Newton without necessarily blowing up....)

Based on the link you provide, and guessing what the QM equivalent of the differential sail (this thing, I think: [1]) would be, it seems to me this could fall into either class, something that simply won't work or something that will turn out to be another variant of inefficient electromagnetic radiation drive, once the full set of interactions is taken into account. (It's pretty easy to miss some of the more subtle ways of creating electromagnetic waves.)

[1] http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/D/differential_sai...

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

Sounds a lot like some of the ideas in this NASA-produced survey of possible drives- http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/bpp/1997-J_AIAA_SpaceDr.pdf

NASA does have some research folks working on pretty esoteric space drive concepts. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/ideachev.h...

troystribling• 14 years ago

This is the Quantum Ram Jet in Artur C. Clarks "Songs of a Distant Earth" from 1985 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth. It is based on the Dynamical Casimir Effect which is thought to have been observed, http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26813/

WalterBright• 14 years ago

The only space drive that actually can work is the transmission of information, not of mass. But you'll need a receiver that is capable of acting on that information. Hopefully, such receivers can be made very small and then "seeded" through the galaxy.

prawn• 14 years ago

One thing I like about Fast Company's article is that it's not revealed (name aside, for those familiar with it) that the student in question is female until the last paragraph or so.

You can just imagine a TV reporter, breathlessly:

"It's a new space invention, from a student. And a female as well!"

Mustafa's Space Drive: An Egyptian Student's Quantum Physics Invention

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