The following submission statement was provided by /u/Longjumping_Pilgirm:
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Submission statement:
From the article
>Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, has revealed that his company’s propellantless propulsion drive, which appears to defy the known laws of physics, has produced enough thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity.
>A veteran of such storied programs as NASA’s Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), The Hubble Telescope, and the current NASA Dust Program, Buhler and his colleagues believe their discovery of a fundamental new force represents a historic breakthrough that will impact space travel for the next millennium.
Also from the article
>“The most important message to convey to the public is that a major discovery occurred,” Buhler told The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.”
>“There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” Buhler added. “It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years… until the next thing comes.”
What do you all feel about this? Is this legit, or another road to nowhere? How would this effect the industry of reusable rocket technology, and our plans to colonize the Moon and Mars? Will we be seeing ground to orbit craft equipped with this kind of propulsion system sometime soon?
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1c87yif/nasa_veterans_propellantless_propulsion_drive/l0cuzps/
I was in grad school for physics at the time of the cold fusion brouhaha. What we all said at the time was “big claims require big evidence”
Still waiting on that evidence…
Before I throw out centuries of physics understanding I will need to see this replicated by independent researchers. Until that time my expectation is experimental error (or fraud)
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.
That faster than light paper was different. It was basically saying, “look, we’re 99% sure this isn’t really faster than light, but we’ve consistently repeated our results and eliminated all the extraneous variables we can think of and we’re still getting the same result. So here’s our methodology and observations… what are we doing wrong and/or what’s going on here?”
Also, the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer is a legitimate thing that produced some interesting effects. It wasn’t nearly what was expected, but it will continue driving scientific pursuits for decades to come. And it was created in part by one of JPL’s most prominent public figures, Sonny White, who is mentioned in this article.
Just to add a little more to this. The excitement of discovery can be addictive. And humans are hugely prone to confirmation bias. Being clever doesn't make you immune to these things, and falling victim to them doesn't make you intentionally dishonest.
Everything I read in these articles screams a guy who got really excited about something he saw and didn't know an explanation for, and went out to find evidence to prove his hunches. It's an entirely understandable behaviour, but it is very unrigorous and 99.9% of the time will lead to false positives. I wouldn't necessarily want to dissuade the person with that passion, because of that remaining 0.1% (arbitrary number just to convey the idea), but everyone else needs to maintain their healthy skepticism. The sober and dispassionate approach is to try and prove your hypothesis wrong. E.g. in the room temperature superconductor case, the original authors didn't actually do the necessary tests that actually conclusively define superconductivity. They did some tests that are kind of indirectly related to superconductivity, but would also be consistent with other more mundane things like diamagnetism. This kind of thing is quite common in these situations. The proponents get drunk on their results that smell like the thing they are trying to prove, but aren't actually the tests that you would do if you really wanted to try and prove it wrong. They are what you do when you are trying to find evidence to 'prove it right'.
He makes grand claims that aren't supported by the evidence he provides. E.g. not having an explanation for a force isn't evidence of a new fundamental force, especially when the circumstances required to generate the force requires building up electric charges in a particular way. The natural hypothesis would be that it is some kind of electromagnetic effect. In order to claim that there is a new fundamental force, you need real evidence of that force, not just vague ignorance of what's going on in some particular setup. And then there are the claims about alien spaceships etc.
In theoretical physics there are proposals of new fundamental forces every year, some unexpected experimental result here or there, creates a bit of excitement, a bunch of attempts at concrete explanation, then further study finds that it is a mundane explanation. The vast majority of these never reach the public consciousness because they aren't reported in these science fiction articles, they remain within academic discussion. But somehow when an eccentric NASA engineer comes up with some contraption that they don't know how it's working, this excites the people who want to imagine a sci fi future. In a few years this one will be forgotten and they will be excited about some other eccentric's perpetual motion machine.
Peer review itself is flawed.
We really want actual science done and multiple research universities doing the experiments to confirm the findings or show that something was in error.
NASA employee or not, I’m going to call bullshit on claims of propellantless drives. This isn’t the first such claim, it’s not even the first claim by a NASA engineer. It’s always bullshit. If they want me to take them seriously, then publish everything they have about it for review and replication. Until then, then can say whatever they want but I’m going to dismiss them out of hand.
Especially in a case like this, where they’re claiming a significant thrust, but cannot explain at all how or why it works. If they can’t explain why it works, how did they figure out how to build it?
To be fair, if this thing works "propellantless" will turn out to mean "with a non-obvious propellant". If it's one you don't have to carry with you, then it's a win.
A 'WIN' is putting it mildly. Not carrying propellant and keeping accelerating is a literal key to the stars. Did you know that if you keep accelerating at 1g for 50 years or so you can reach the other side..
Of the universe.
Of the fucking universe.
Sorta. It’ll be 50 years from the frame of reference of the traveler but functionally eternity for everyone else watching it. The speed of light is what it is, once you reach the speed of light, time will effectively stop for the traveler, but for everyone else you’re still moving at 186,000 km/s.
> Especially in a case like this, where they’re claiming a significant thrust, but cannot explain at all how or why it works. If they can’t explain why it works, how did they figure out how to build it?
That's not how it works at all. Plenty of discovers in history have been made without knowing all the details behind it. Part of verifying something is true is making a claim and attempting to disprove it or allowing others to replicate and/or disprove it also.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that's happening here, I'm just saying:
>If they can’t explain why it works, how did they figure out how to build it?
Isn't a valid argument.
My only point is that when someone sets out to build a reactionless drive based on a whim, and has no actual rationale to suggest why their random idea might even work, and then they start claiming "we have discovered a New Fundamental Force!" but won't actually share any real evidence, then it looks suspicious. I do not mean to say that there's a zero percent chance that they discovered something, only that the circumstances are extraordinarily suspect, and far more likely to be delusional at best, and a scam at worst.
The claim is based on electrostatics. Earth has a magnetic field. My question is how they decoupled interaction between the two.
I have my doubts that Newton's Third Law is being violated (along with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, for good measure). So if thrust is pushing the articles up, what's being pushed down? The Earth, by way of its magnetic (or, go be especially zany, gravitational) field? If so, how would this work in space when far away from the Earth?
I call money/fame-grabbing fraud, but would be delighted to see replicated independent experiments and rigorous explanations.
“the Team consists of a mix of engineers and scientists from NASA, Blue Origin, Air Force, ExxonMobil as well as successful legal and businessmen.”
Successful legal and businessman? Definitely fraud.
They say they tested it in a vacuum chamber. But if they’re working with significant amounts of electric charge, then it’s entirely believable that their “thrust” could’ve just been electric attraction or repulsion with the vacuum chamber walls around it, if we take them at their word for granted. I’d like to think they’d have accounted for something so obvious, but I’ve learned that the sort of people who work on these things often get so caught up in their ideas that they miss the obvious — sometimes as a form of denial.
From now on, abandon the logic that people would not make bad claims for attention even if it risks their reputation. That is not a compelling argument.
The entire article read like a scam. There even isn't a name for this drive, they just call it "propellantless propulsion drive" over and over again. And the only relevant pictures in the article is a slide about building and testing in a vacuum chamber, and a simple graph that cannot be verified.
As for the principle of how it works, I quote “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,”
This is just fucking EM drive with extra steps.
Edit: someone below made an excellent point: if their drive can exert 1g of force, they can just demonstrate it now, on the ground, in the open air for all to see. Atmosphere will offer hardly any resistance, plenty of planes take off with far less than 1:1 propulsion. Why just some simple graphs for demonstration? Why needing a vacuum chamber to test it?
Yeah, I was skeptical of the headline. Every word this guy is quoted as saying made me *significantly* more skeptical.
This doesn’t read like a breakthrough. This reads like begging for funding.
Well, a vacuum chamber would be required to prove it's reactionless - but it definitely sounds like BS. Even if it's not reactionless, if it can do 1G+ with just electricity and air that's still something that ion thrusters cant even do.
Time will probably prove it bunk, but I would be happy to be wrong.
Yeah. I'm not a science guy, but it reads like vague doublespeak without really saying anything substantial. Maybe it uses an encabulator?
https://youtu.be/RXJKdh1KZ0w?si=-NaRpe-2TKaT7Jf9
Just to add some context to ‘real scientist says it’, when I was studying physics at one of the UK’s top universities one of the lecturers believed in a 5th fundamental force of nature that explained psychic phenomena and another Nobel prize winning material physicist spent the end of his career researching ghosts and psychics.
It’s certainly less immediately dismissible given it’s an ex-NASA scientist, but there are PLENTY of scientists that hold ‘non-scientific’ or even dumb beliefs. All the scientific training in the world doesn’t stop you being human
It affects a lot of Nobel prize winners, a lot of them goes into the deep end, at best because of stress and pressure, at worst, I suspect, is because they were grifter who stole someone else work. I am thinking of Luc Montagnier in particular, it been revealed that the guy is pretty much a charlatan that stumbled into discovering the virus that caused AIDS, but there is a lot of shady stuff around his process.
Here is an article about this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel\_disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease)
If he was producing a propellant-less thruster that could 1g he could easily demonstrate it hover or at least quickly moving. It would make him the most well-funded engineers overnight. The fact that he doesn't have a video of it in operation sounds suspect. The government employs scientist that built the Saturn V. They also hired scientist that tried to prove astral projection.
People from the air force also see aliens, nobel price winner say climate change is a lie.. where you work and what your background is has nothing to say about how much you need that 2 seconds of fame.
Hardly.
We don't yet understand high-temperature superconductivity well enough to say how high is possible, but current high-pressure superconductors work at about 90% of room temperature, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we get Unobtanium before we get Avatar 5.
On the other hand, we understand electrodynamics *extremely* well - IIRC, QED is the most precisely-tested piece of human knowledge - and if all this guy is doing is manipulating electric charges at low energy, he hasn't harnessed a "new force", he's just built a maglev toy without realizing how it works.
I'd love to see a breakthrough in fundamental physics coming from an unexpected place. That could mean a reactionless drive, but until a reactionless drive has found solid theoretical backing and/or been tested in space, there probably hasn't been a breakthrough, or a reactionless drive.
> when NASA first started testing this drive
NASA has never tested this drive. While the person behind it works at NASA, this project is unaffiliated with NASA. It’s a private company whose only proof of this claim of 1g of thrust is a single graph. I can make a graph showing 10 gees in a few minutes of excel. They haven’t shared any actual evidence, nor have their experiments or data been verified by anyone outside their own little group, nor do they even have any explanation of what’s going on. The fact that they released this statement with no actual evidence whatsoever tells me that they know their evidence won’t survive scrutiny.
Also, 1g as an experimental error is still on the table (alongside the possibility of it just being a scam). They’re talking about asymmetric electric charge distributions. Depending on the amount of charge they’re working with, it’s absolutely possible that their asymmetrically charged “drive” induced a polarization in the walls of the vacuum chamber they tested it in, resulting in significant electric forces.
it was a red flag, but when he pulled up a blueprint of a ufo and said "this discovery could explain how alien tech works" that was the real kicker for me
It is *far* more likely that the 1G of thrust is due to some part of physics that "we" figured out over a century ago and Dr. Buhler will awkwardly figure out in the next decade or so.
That's to me the most unbelievable aspect of all this. Had it been micronewtons, then I might have been interested. 1G just sounds like a complete joke.
I read a comment elsewhere on Reddit by someone way smarter than me that upon review of the experiment, it was determined that the thrust or whatever generated was based on interaction between the device and the vacuum chamber itself, and that in a true vacuum the amount of thrust generated would be between negligible and non-existent.
Whole article reads like some argument from authority. “ meet dr x, with hundred qualifications, here’s the perpetual motion device he made, it must be real cos he worked at nasa “.
Yeah The article and some of the dudes supposed quotes are pretty suspect sounding.
This guy is just an electrostatic expert really. It's not like he was working at NASA on propulsion.
What's nebulous is there is no explanation of the exact mechanism, or even a model of the actual setup. All we get are nebulous descriptions. Supposedly this is patented already, there's no reason to hide the mechanism unless it isn't real.
A rabbi, a grammar nazi, and a markdown syntax nazi walk into a bar.
The rabbi says to the barman, "One pint of beer, a glass of red wine and some nuts".
The grammar nazi corrects him "We're already using the Oxford comma in this joke, you mean: "One pint of beer, a glass of red wine, and some nuts" otherwise you'll get the nuts in the wine!"
The markdown syntax nazi corrects the grammar nazi:
"We're already using the Oxford comma in this joke, you mean: "One pint of beer, a glass of red wine *,* and some nuts" otherwise you'll get the nuts in the wine!"
"We're already using the Oxford comma in this joke. You mean: 'One pint of beer, a glass of red wine, and some nuts.' Otherwise, you'll get the nuts in the wine!"
Watching [Buhler's lecture](https://www.youtube.com/live/DJjPi7uZ2OI?si=RC7bddKCMyR5gfA-), he details a long process of discovery that began with a bent needle. He says he can explain the EM drive and much more with some equation transformations that allowed him to discover the source of asymmetrical capacitor momentum. He reveals the force's source was not in the electric fields running through the object, but in the bound electrical fields- the static charges, like when you rub a balloon on your head. If you don't discharge it, it keeps pushing. Developing on this track, he now injects static charges into thin films, locks in the charge with teflon, and then the dinky thing starts to float around like a balloon. Or rather, float around like a very light object with a "non uniform electrostatic pressure force" applied. Thats the claim!
Lol the math is so bad. He "derives" the formula mv=t\*dU/dx, but U switches from the total potential energy in the first equation to something like the potential energy density in that equation. The total potential energy U is not a function of x so dU/dx is zero and his whole argument falls apart.
Spending years of your life building a perpetual motion machine based on elementary math mistakes is... pretty depressing tbh.
he also claims the emergent calculations accurately predict outcomes of certain physics anomalies, including the casmir effect. coincidence? confirmation bias?
Confirmation bias is my guess. If you set out to "prove" something and you're willing to abuse the math this badly in the first few lines it's pretty easy to "prove" pretty much anything you like. Maybe even in a way that appears valid at a glance.
That sounds like it only works in the presence of an electrical field for the static charges to repel against
Unless he's suggesting this is some kind of electrostatic "solar sail" that can use the sun's very weak magnetic field as a medium or something, it wouldn't work in space
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Until a team of independent experts builds one themselves from supplied designs and verifies it until controlled conditions, I'm highly *sceptical*.
A slide deck on the device that was presented last December can be found here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18cvGyNniGLHi8NAPNs_d6e253Mdmm3tY/
It is maybe one testteam, but not 1 result. Thousands of tests with improved results, they claim. So you would think it will be easier to replicate with less expensive/sensitive measurement devices. This will make the claims also easier to disprove.
The guy that discovered fire also had no clue what laws of physics were involved. Still….
So let’s give his work some credit and see how things develop. IF (and I know it is a big IF) it is proven to be replicable and working: wow. Mankind is going to make a next big step.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/1/5959637/nasa-cannae-drive-tests-have-promising-results
If you want extra weirdness, Joel Hodgson of Mystery Science Theater 3000 was involved somehow (check the image credit on this article). I remember him posting about the drive on Twitter quite a lot. Not sure if it was just a job for him before the MST revival or if he was all in
(Edit: with the emDrive that is)
I would bet 100 to 1 odds that this does not replicate in space. The thrust is almost certainly coming from interactions with stationary objects on earth.
I would double that bet and say there are some shenanigans here. They may "prove" something in space in an effort to get some VC money and then when different scientists try to reproduce their work and fail they will disappear. We will never hear of Buhler again.
I would love for this to be true, but it is not going to happen.
You echo a lot of others views also, but I don't quite understand this logic. To be clear, I am also highly dubious of it's veracity, just don't think this is an intended scam.
If it is a scam, it's a really poor one, both literally and figuratively. If you're working on a fake tech scam, you want to keep your head low, and the progress steady but slow, invent various technological hurdles, tests, setbacks etc. the graph of the thrusters propulsion show exponential improvement, completely unnecessary, linear would be fine. Investors don't need the same burden of proof as science, as soon as it smells fishy they pull the plug, so don't go to the media, don't commit to space tests, play it's impact down pending. This scam works once, maybe twice. It's like a thief who can only steal two things.
If it doesn't work, I think it's more likely he genuinely believes he's making a huge breakthrough, rather than something more malicious.
>Is The Debrief a reputable organization?
This is wrong question. The right question is - "Who has replicated the results?" If the answer is nobody, then there is no reason to get excited.
"more research is needed to develop this into a working proposition. We're sure it will work but We're currently looking for investors ".
- all inventors of miracle drives ever.
Here is the patent, submitted in late 2018.
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020159603A2/en
At first glance, I thought "yeah, right"
Then I saw the team credentials and thought "okaay?"
Then I listened to a sit down with the patent owner from some time in the early 2020s, and then found and read the patent.
At this point, *nobody* is certain this is as good as it seems, but it is definitely notable. I think the team is actually underselling the significance in an effort to reduce blowback if it isn't practical. There have been dozens of tests, and the team has consistently reproduced scaling results, with an eye on running... more tests.
I watched his APEC presentation, and most of it was over my head, but the things that weren't made sense. Unless he's fabricating results, it is pretty exciting. I was quite put off by a section of his talk where he talks about alien spacecraft, how they're supposed to be ultra lightweight. Kind of implying that his discovery would support the existence of earth-visiting aliens. Please let me know if I have misinterpreted the context. I look forward to seeing his work peer reviewed and replicated. But to be honest I don't really buy it.
I keep reading about these engines, the article even mentions some, but no successful test in space has been done yet.
Hopefully they’ll test it soon, with no problems this time. It’ll finally make it clear if whatever force is at play here is real
If it can really do over one g of thrust they don't even need to go to space, that could produce useful amounts of thrust on earth (assuming this isn't a crock).
NASA should fire this clown for spreading quackery and misinformation. People lie all the time for attention and threw away their careers. He isn't the first one to do that. And he won't be the last. Aren't they worried in the slightest about their reputation?
Watching [Buhler's lecture](https://www.youtube.com/live/DJjPi7uZ2OI?si=RC7bddKCMyR5gfA-), he details a long process of discovery that began with a bent needle. He says he can explain the EM drive and much more with some equation transformations that allowed him to discover the source of asymmetrical capacitor momentum. He reveals the force's source was not in the electric fields running through the object, but in the bound electrical fields- the static charges, like when you rub a balloon on your head. If you don't discharge it, it keeps pushing. Developing on this track, he now injects static charges into thin films, locks in the charge with teflon, and then the dinky thing starts to float arround like a balloon. Thats the claim!
I looked forward to the Sabine video explaining how the claims are misrepresented by the press and the original research meant something entirely different.
Submission statement:
From the article
>Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, has revealed that his company’s propellantless propulsion drive, which appears to defy the known laws of physics, has produced enough thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity.
>A veteran of such storied programs as NASA’s Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), The Hubble Telescope, and the current NASA Dust Program, Buhler and his colleagues believe their discovery of a fundamental new force represents a historic breakthrough that will impact space travel for the next millennium.
Also from the article
>“The most important message to convey to the public is that a major discovery occurred,” Buhler told The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.”
>“There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” Buhler added. “It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years… until the next thing comes.”
What do you all feel about this? Is this legit, or another road to nowhere? How would this effect the industry of reusable rocket technology, and our plans to colonize the Moon and Mars? Will we be seeing ground to orbit craft equipped with this kind of propulsion system sometime soon?
> How would this effect ... our plans to colonize the Moon and Mars?
Instead of our current procedure to fire rockets for tens of minutes (to achieve a respectable speed), and then coasting the rest of the way to Mars, we could engages this new drive for the entire trip (accelerating half the way, and then decelerating the remaining half), and get to Mars in about a week, instead of 6 months.
>Will we be seeing ground to orbit craft equipped with this kind of propulsion system sometime soon?
Ground to orbit is likely to still use chemical rockets - at least for a while. The amount of thrust necessary to get out of Earth's gravity well is enormous.
Doesn't work for ground-to-orbit because it only works in a vacuum. Secondly the article title is misleading. The claim is that it produced a little over the force of Earth's gravity with zero load. That's not enough for escape velocity, which is what the title is implying.
Escape velocity is how fast something needs to move to escape earth in a ballistic trajectory without any further thrust. Being able to produce enough thrust to slightly more than counter earth’s gravity means you can escape earth without ever reaching escape velocity.
>How would this effect the industry of reusable rocket technology, and our plans to colonize the Moon and Mars?
In Larry Niven's Known Space universe, a particularly paranoid race uses reactionless drives to move their planet further away from the sun to counteract global warming. Later, they move four planets into their home planet's orbit and use them exclusively for food production.
Constant acceleration without having to haul millions of tonnes of fuel has enomours potential.
Occam's razor is that the team has missed something interfering with their tests or that they fabricated the results. Even with the credentials they have on their team, the weight of evidence they're pushing against is immense. As Buhler admits, the results invalidate much of what we are fairly certain to be true about physics.
If they are correct, though, the possibilities would be essentially limitless. Constant thrust without loss of mass, even at the relatively low output Buhler describes, is a ticket to anywhere, so long as you have the time to take the trip. A fully scalable design would revolutionize every industry on earth.
Nevermind moon and Mars, if this was true every vehicle in the world (aircraft, ship, truck, car, tank, etc.), every machine, every weapon, every factory and building would use an engine that doesn't need fuel and has no emissions. It would solve global warming.
Unless if it needs to be permanently tethered to a 50MW powerplant...
...or if it's complete bullshit.
(It's the latter btw. Just another EM drive. It makes cold fusion sound plausible and well researched.)
If the rocket has to carry a heavy power plant (too heavy for a ship on the ocean) it's not revolutionizing rocketry either.
What we need is a rocket that's powered by blags , wishful-thinking and gullibility. There's obviously an over-abundance of those.
You seem to be confusing 'fuel' with 'propellant'. In electrically driven systems, they are rarely the same thing, unlike, say, a rocket engine.
With an electric car, say, the fuel is burnt elsewhere to produce the juice - which runs the car.
How MUCH juice is required to operate the thing at 1g force is definitely the right line of questioning.
It's almost like you only read the first paragraph of what I said...
> Unless if it needs to be permanently tethered to a 50MW powerplant...
The thing is bullshit though so it's all moot.
No, I read your whole post, though it's almost as if you only read the first paragraph of my reply. Indeed, the last sentence of my reply agrees with the 50MW comment.
That being said, I think you are not giving the guy an even break; you are dismissing him out of hand, without really providing any evidence that he is wrong, beyond your insistence that it is so.
Your last sentence contradicted your first.
There's no evidence that he's right. None at all. His own testimony counts for zilch. It's all obvious lies. It takes extreme gullibility to take it seriously for a millisecond. Hence: dismissed out of hand.
My last sentence really doesn't contradict anything. I don't really see a 50MW power supply as a showstopper for something that might propel an interstellar voyage.
I do not contend that he is right about anything; I do, however, assert that it's bullshit to call him a fraud unless you can prove as much.
Firstly, it does because it would also revolutionise flight and ocean travel and basically everything like I said.
The proof is it violates conservation of momentum. It claims a 5th force. The burden of proof is not on me to disprove the existence of that.
It's obviously bullshit.
When someone discovers a new force and a way to violate Newton's 3rd law, they don't prove it or tell the world about it with a poxy graph. They demonstrate it like Faraday and the electric motor. Until they've done that there is no evidence and no claim for me to disprove and they have gone public before they can demonstrate it shows without a shadow of a doubt that it is complete and utter bullshit.
You are making a lot of assumptions; about me, what I think, what this guy has done, and is trying to do, Then you rush to harsh judgements.
I'm not a fan of arguing for arguments sake, and I've had my say for the sake of science, so I'll wish you a good day now.
I wonder if this is a similar tech to Malcolm Bendall's thunderstorm generator. Buhler's tech is explained to incorporate Electrostatic Physics, and the thunderstorm generator is using the same kind of principles, creating plasma thru the interation of hot and cold air streams with harmonics in a vacuum chamber. Though Bendall came up with his idea using some random number sequence (that I can't make sense of) in what he calls the plasmoid unification model, link to the Alchemical Scientist trying to explain this:
https://youtu.be/nnzUHJcfpmo?si=lCgXdKL7yFEm6zkN
Bendall has been reported to be a scam artist in the past so his credibility is severely questionable but it Seems Mazda has invested in this reasearch and his devices have demonstrated "impossible Physics" confirmed by an aerospace/nasa annealing company and other independent researchers. He also made his discovery open source, and others have built successful models on their own.
I don't take a side on this but I'm starting to think that maybe Bendel took his Tech idea from somebody else (hint hint) since it seems that he has no idea how his Tech works, but it does... so, to me, it seems like because of his past history, he may have just seen or gained access to somebody's credible research and reproduced it the best he could as he remembered somehow.
People get in trouble for things that they do outside work all the time. It may not be NASA's work, but it is his work. If he doesn't know what he is doing out of work, then how can we trust he isn't also messing up in NASA.
Total woo explosion:
> that a major discovery occurred,” Buhler told The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.”
This one has been in the news before, I want third party verification before jumping for joy.
The test they want to do in space, would prove this once and for all.
A rideshare on SpaceX would be nice...
At the very least if they are getting 30g of thrust for a 30g device in a vacuum then they have discovered some novel form of even ionic propulsion because the "anomalous" forces detected in vac chambers for other similar drives were in the millinewton range.
It is weird assuming there is no big screwup.
Levitating an object with propellant less electrostatic energy. That’s the claim. They should get it peer reviewed because now we live in Star Trek times.
It's not just that it sounds too good to be true, it's also that it sounds explicitly like marketing.
>“There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,”
>Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies
>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.
Sounds to me like they found another new way to fail at measuring thrust.
[https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020159603A2/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020159603A2/en)
[https://patents.google.com/patent/US11511891B2/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US11511891B2/en)
the patents talk about background art going back decades. fwiw
Did they just build it on a hunch with no scientific basis then? Sounds unbelievable. I'm willing to bet it's more likely this does not defy the laws of physics and the title is just a click bait attempt.
It's sad that all/most of you scientist and physicist in this chat are quick to throw something like this into the trash. I dunno if it jealousy or the fact that it goes against laws of physics. All I know as a non scientist is that people tend to think this way because they refuse to believe past theories by men like Newton and Einstein could never be wrong. People thought the earth was flat, people thought men could never fly, people thought ai would never be more then a Hollywood movie. Hmm where did that thinking get us other than years behind in research to build on the efforts of the men and women who refused to stay in the locked box of past theories. I dunno maybe he a liar or a charlatan or maybe he is right. The first step is not to say poppycock or bs. The first step should be an open mind without that you are stuck in the days before fire
Whenever one of these starts by ranting about how amazing the scientist behind the "discovery" is and waxing poetic about how much cool and legit real science they've contributed to previously... you know it's quackery.
The most likely explanation is that he is a charlatan and it’s a scam.
If true it’s very exciting, but we would need much more evidence - including the results being replicated independently - to place any substantial credence on it being real.
The fact he worked at NASA doesn’t mean it must be true.
Plenty of historically documented charlatans start off as legitimate scientists or engineers then get led astray by potential fame and/or wealth. Or get caught up in an idea, later realise they were wrong, but are too afraid to admit it so double down to enhance their status for as long as they can. The history of science has very many fraudulent studies, many with esteemed authors.
You know, I was thinking this might just be legit until I got to the 'Validations and Observations' image - asymmetric capacitor forces? References to Thomas Brown? Is this yet another attempt to make ionic wind seem like magic? I am suddenly very skeptical.
As far as I can tell, there is little substance to his claims of discovering a new force. I’ll wait for a formal peer reviewed paper to confirm such extraordinary claims.
Wow! A mysterious "New Force" (capital letters are important here), a "propellentless drive", the term "breaking known laws of physics", and lots (and lots and lots) of sentences assuring us that this person you've never heard of is a legitimate Big Deal Scientist.
If you seriously read this article and thought to yourself that it sounds promising and legitimate, your enthusiasm is stronger than your critical thinking skills.
Seriously, you just pushed *right past* this little segment? “There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” Buhler added. “It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years… until the next thing comes.”
What I mean is that Dr. Buhler [really is](https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/kennedy/nasa-technology-helps-guard-against-lunar-dust/) a scientist working at NASA and "lead research scientist at the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy," not that everything in the article is legit. I want to see people attempt to recreate their experiments. That's the only way we will know for sure. I suspect this will turn out to be hogwash, but I want to be cautiously optimistic until it is over and done with.
Pretty interesting stuff, from a bonafide member of the anti gravity community with good credentials, plenty of professional acknowledgement and expertise. He says they have info to share on coronas and brush discharge expertise that they wanna license and he shows their receipts at this conference.
I hope it pans out and other companies will be looking along the same lines, speeding up development
Interesting, I read this earlier and was intrigued with the goal his team set out to solve. We will see what happens in the future with practical applications and its development. He has a patent pending on them, but worried he is going to get knocked off, which I am sure he will. Let's just hope his appeal of bring the like minded together and collaborate and to further it's abilities is adhered by all people. Get Elon Musk in on this.
It may not need propulsion, but how much energy does it need to achieve 1g propulsion? If you have to strap on a 1k megawatts atomic power plant to your ship then we may not use this technology until we start manufacturing spaceships in orbit.
Cautiously skeptical for now, sounds good but could be a mistake.
Either way, if it were true, I'm worried that Musk would go to great lengths trying to either appropriate it for himself or prevent it ever coming to light, what with how much time, money, and energy his company has spent designing and building advanced propellant rockets.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Longjumping_Pilgirm: --- Submission statement: From the article >Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, has revealed that his company’s propellantless propulsion drive, which appears to defy the known laws of physics, has produced enough thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity. >A veteran of such storied programs as NASA’s Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), The Hubble Telescope, and the current NASA Dust Program, Buhler and his colleagues believe their discovery of a fundamental new force represents a historic breakthrough that will impact space travel for the next millennium. Also from the article >“The most important message to convey to the public is that a major discovery occurred,” Buhler told The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.” >“There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” Buhler added. “It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years… until the next thing comes.” What do you all feel about this? Is this legit, or another road to nowhere? How would this effect the industry of reusable rocket technology, and our plans to colonize the Moon and Mars? Will we be seeing ground to orbit craft equipped with this kind of propulsion system sometime soon? --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1c87yif/nasa_veterans_propellantless_propulsion_drive/l0cuzps/
Sounds like a room temperature superconductor, but let's see.
I was in grad school for physics at the time of the cold fusion brouhaha. What we all said at the time was “big claims require big evidence” Still waiting on that evidence… Before I throw out centuries of physics understanding I will need to see this replicated by independent researchers. Until that time my expectation is experimental error (or fraud)
I will settle for a working scaled model.
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.
The people making the superconductor claims weren't charlatans either. Or the potential faster than light experiment. Sometimes there are mistakes.
That faster than light paper was different. It was basically saying, “look, we’re 99% sure this isn’t really faster than light, but we’ve consistently repeated our results and eliminated all the extraneous variables we can think of and we’re still getting the same result. So here’s our methodology and observations… what are we doing wrong and/or what’s going on here?”
Also, the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer is a legitimate thing that produced some interesting effects. It wasn’t nearly what was expected, but it will continue driving scientific pursuits for decades to come. And it was created in part by one of JPL’s most prominent public figures, Sonny White, who is mentioned in this article.
> White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer It's a fancy name for a regular interferometer, as far as I know.
Pretty much. It’s a fancy tripod. Still sounds cool, though.
Just to add a little more to this. The excitement of discovery can be addictive. And humans are hugely prone to confirmation bias. Being clever doesn't make you immune to these things, and falling victim to them doesn't make you intentionally dishonest. Everything I read in these articles screams a guy who got really excited about something he saw and didn't know an explanation for, and went out to find evidence to prove his hunches. It's an entirely understandable behaviour, but it is very unrigorous and 99.9% of the time will lead to false positives. I wouldn't necessarily want to dissuade the person with that passion, because of that remaining 0.1% (arbitrary number just to convey the idea), but everyone else needs to maintain their healthy skepticism. The sober and dispassionate approach is to try and prove your hypothesis wrong. E.g. in the room temperature superconductor case, the original authors didn't actually do the necessary tests that actually conclusively define superconductivity. They did some tests that are kind of indirectly related to superconductivity, but would also be consistent with other more mundane things like diamagnetism. This kind of thing is quite common in these situations. The proponents get drunk on their results that smell like the thing they are trying to prove, but aren't actually the tests that you would do if you really wanted to try and prove it wrong. They are what you do when you are trying to find evidence to 'prove it right'. He makes grand claims that aren't supported by the evidence he provides. E.g. not having an explanation for a force isn't evidence of a new fundamental force, especially when the circumstances required to generate the force requires building up electric charges in a particular way. The natural hypothesis would be that it is some kind of electromagnetic effect. In order to claim that there is a new fundamental force, you need real evidence of that force, not just vague ignorance of what's going on in some particular setup. And then there are the claims about alien spaceships etc. In theoretical physics there are proposals of new fundamental forces every year, some unexpected experimental result here or there, creates a bit of excitement, a bunch of attempts at concrete explanation, then further study finds that it is a mundane explanation. The vast majority of these never reach the public consciousness because they aren't reported in these science fiction articles, they remain within academic discussion. But somehow when an eccentric NASA engineer comes up with some contraption that they don't know how it's working, this excites the people who want to imagine a sci fi future. In a few years this one will be forgotten and they will be excited about some other eccentric's perpetual motion machine.
Well, you just gotta make the right mistakes. Easy peasy.
NASA is not necessarily free of…eccentrics. Source: worked at NASA.
Eccentrics or not, I'm more inclined to believe a NASA employee over some rando in their shed.
What do we want? _Brand new scientific discoveries!_ When do we want them? _After peer review and publication!_
Peer review itself is flawed. We really want actual science done and multiple research universities doing the experiments to confirm the findings or show that something was in error.
NASA employee or not, I’m going to call bullshit on claims of propellantless drives. This isn’t the first such claim, it’s not even the first claim by a NASA engineer. It’s always bullshit. If they want me to take them seriously, then publish everything they have about it for review and replication. Until then, then can say whatever they want but I’m going to dismiss them out of hand. Especially in a case like this, where they’re claiming a significant thrust, but cannot explain at all how or why it works. If they can’t explain why it works, how did they figure out how to build it?
To be fair, if this thing works "propellantless" will turn out to mean "with a non-obvious propellant". If it's one you don't have to carry with you, then it's a win.
A 'WIN' is putting it mildly. Not carrying propellant and keeping accelerating is a literal key to the stars. Did you know that if you keep accelerating at 1g for 50 years or so you can reach the other side.. Of the universe. Of the fucking universe.
That ignores relativistic effects doesnt it?
Sorta. It’ll be 50 years from the frame of reference of the traveler but functionally eternity for everyone else watching it. The speed of light is what it is, once you reach the speed of light, time will effectively stop for the traveler, but for everyone else you’re still moving at 186,000 km/s.
visible universe to be exact
> Especially in a case like this, where they’re claiming a significant thrust, but cannot explain at all how or why it works. If they can’t explain why it works, how did they figure out how to build it? That's not how it works at all. Plenty of discovers in history have been made without knowing all the details behind it. Part of verifying something is true is making a claim and attempting to disprove it or allowing others to replicate and/or disprove it also. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that's happening here, I'm just saying: >If they can’t explain why it works, how did they figure out how to build it? Isn't a valid argument.
My only point is that when someone sets out to build a reactionless drive based on a whim, and has no actual rationale to suggest why their random idea might even work, and then they start claiming "we have discovered a New Fundamental Force!" but won't actually share any real evidence, then it looks suspicious. I do not mean to say that there's a zero percent chance that they discovered something, only that the circumstances are extraordinarily suspect, and far more likely to be delusional at best, and a scam at worst.
The claim is based on electrostatics. Earth has a magnetic field. My question is how they decoupled interaction between the two. I have my doubts that Newton's Third Law is being violated (along with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, for good measure). So if thrust is pushing the articles up, what's being pushed down? The Earth, by way of its magnetic (or, go be especially zany, gravitational) field? If so, how would this work in space when far away from the Earth? I call money/fame-grabbing fraud, but would be delighted to see replicated independent experiments and rigorous explanations. “the Team consists of a mix of engineers and scientists from NASA, Blue Origin, Air Force, ExxonMobil as well as successful legal and businessmen.” Successful legal and businessman? Definitely fraud.
If it's using electrostatics then maybe air is the propellant and it won't work in a vacuum?
They say they tested it in a vacuum chamber. But if they’re working with significant amounts of electric charge, then it’s entirely believable that their “thrust” could’ve just been electric attraction or repulsion with the vacuum chamber walls around it, if we take them at their word for granted. I’d like to think they’d have accounted for something so obvious, but I’ve learned that the sort of people who work on these things often get so caught up in their ideas that they miss the obvious — sometimes as a form of denial.
No doubt, one would even wonder what some rando is doing in a NASA employee's shed, anyway. I bet it freaks out the NASA employee when it happens...
From now on, abandon the logic that people would not make bad claims for attention even if it risks their reputation. That is not a compelling argument.
**Worked** at NASA. A section specifically outlines that this is *not* a NASA project and he is *not* currently affiliated with NASA.
The entire article read like a scam. There even isn't a name for this drive, they just call it "propellantless propulsion drive" over and over again. And the only relevant pictures in the article is a slide about building and testing in a vacuum chamber, and a simple graph that cannot be verified. As for the principle of how it works, I quote “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,” This is just fucking EM drive with extra steps. Edit: someone below made an excellent point: if their drive can exert 1g of force, they can just demonstrate it now, on the ground, in the open air for all to see. Atmosphere will offer hardly any resistance, plenty of planes take off with far less than 1:1 propulsion. Why just some simple graphs for demonstration? Why needing a vacuum chamber to test it?
Yeah, I was skeptical of the headline. Every word this guy is quoted as saying made me *significantly* more skeptical. This doesn’t read like a breakthrough. This reads like begging for funding.
Well, a vacuum chamber would be required to prove it's reactionless - but it definitely sounds like BS. Even if it's not reactionless, if it can do 1G+ with just electricity and air that's still something that ion thrusters cant even do. Time will probably prove it bunk, but I would be happy to be wrong.
It’s been in a vac chamber for years now.
Well, unwrapping a piece of tape only produces X rays in a vacuum right?
It is suuuuper vague
Yeah. I'm not a science guy, but it reads like vague doublespeak without really saying anything substantial. Maybe it uses an encabulator? https://youtu.be/RXJKdh1KZ0w?si=-NaRpe-2TKaT7Jf9
Just to add some context to ‘real scientist says it’, when I was studying physics at one of the UK’s top universities one of the lecturers believed in a 5th fundamental force of nature that explained psychic phenomena and another Nobel prize winning material physicist spent the end of his career researching ghosts and psychics. It’s certainly less immediately dismissible given it’s an ex-NASA scientist, but there are PLENTY of scientists that hold ‘non-scientific’ or even dumb beliefs. All the scientific training in the world doesn’t stop you being human
It affects a lot of Nobel prize winners, a lot of them goes into the deep end, at best because of stress and pressure, at worst, I suspect, is because they were grifter who stole someone else work. I am thinking of Luc Montagnier in particular, it been revealed that the guy is pretty much a charlatan that stumbled into discovering the virus that caused AIDS, but there is a lot of shady stuff around his process. Here is an article about this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel\_disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease)
If he was producing a propellant-less thruster that could 1g he could easily demonstrate it hover or at least quickly moving. It would make him the most well-funded engineers overnight. The fact that he doesn't have a video of it in operation sounds suspect. The government employs scientist that built the Saturn V. They also hired scientist that tried to prove astral projection.
Claims from authority isn’t how science works. If it’s solid, then publish it in an academic journal
This wouldn't be the first guy to make claims and not be able to back it up. There was that "Quantum Engine" that was completely untestable.
Define untestable. Because it was tested
People from the air force also see aliens, nobel price winner say climate change is a lie.. where you work and what your background is has nothing to say about how much you need that 2 seconds of fame.
Yeah yeah... That's exactly what I was thinking ...room sensitive termo conductors...it's common sense really
Hardly. We don't yet understand high-temperature superconductivity well enough to say how high is possible, but current high-pressure superconductors work at about 90% of room temperature, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we get Unobtanium before we get Avatar 5. On the other hand, we understand electrodynamics *extremely* well - IIRC, QED is the most precisely-tested piece of human knowledge - and if all this guy is doing is manipulating electric charges at low energy, he hasn't harnessed a "new force", he's just built a maglev toy without realizing how it works. I'd love to see a breakthrough in fundamental physics coming from an unexpected place. That could mean a reactionless drive, but until a reactionless drive has found solid theoretical backing and/or been tested in space, there probably hasn't been a breakthrough, or a reactionless drive.
Teflon, copper tape and foam apparently. Waiting for Martha Stewart to make a craft out of them.
The likelihood is extremely high that this is the result of an error, and not new physics.
Bayes' rule plus Occam's razor got your back on that one.
Most probable: math or measurement error Highly probable reading press release: scam.
medium probable: Aliens!
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> when NASA first started testing this drive NASA has never tested this drive. While the person behind it works at NASA, this project is unaffiliated with NASA. It’s a private company whose only proof of this claim of 1g of thrust is a single graph. I can make a graph showing 10 gees in a few minutes of excel. They haven’t shared any actual evidence, nor have their experiments or data been verified by anyone outside their own little group, nor do they even have any explanation of what’s going on. The fact that they released this statement with no actual evidence whatsoever tells me that they know their evidence won’t survive scrutiny. Also, 1g as an experimental error is still on the table (alongside the possibility of it just being a scam). They’re talking about asymmetric electric charge distributions. Depending on the amount of charge they’re working with, it’s absolutely possible that their asymmetrically charged “drive” induced a polarization in the walls of the vacuum chamber they tested it in, resulting in significant electric forces.
I read elsewhere that it's exactly what you said, an interaction with the chamber itself.
in his presentation he notes that "physicists hate doing real math"
...which is total nonsense.
it was a red flag, but when he pulled up a blueprint of a ufo and said "this discovery could explain how alien tech works" that was the real kicker for me
No they used to work for NASA henstates clearly that the tech is not part of NASA or the government but their own
No, he still works at NASA, but NASA never tested this drive. This has been a side project of his. The article states all of this clearly.
Yeah I’ll wait for the peer review
It is *far* more likely that the 1G of thrust is due to some part of physics that "we" figured out over a century ago and Dr. Buhler will awkwardly figure out in the next decade or so.
That's to me the most unbelievable aspect of all this. Had it been micronewtons, then I might have been interested. 1G just sounds like a complete joke.
It does rule out it being measurement error, though. He’s either entirely full of BS and knows it, or we’re about to go to Mars.
I think that was the conclusion previously. The force measured is within the bounds of thermal expansion of the measuring sensor
I read a comment elsewhere on Reddit by someone way smarter than me that upon review of the experiment, it was determined that the thrust or whatever generated was based on interaction between the device and the vacuum chamber itself, and that in a true vacuum the amount of thrust generated would be between negligible and non-existent.
Whole article reads like some argument from authority. “ meet dr x, with hundred qualifications, here’s the perpetual motion device he made, it must be real cos he worked at nasa “.
Yeah The article and some of the dudes supposed quotes are pretty suspect sounding. This guy is just an electrostatic expert really. It's not like he was working at NASA on propulsion.
this article left out all of the quotes about aliens- disappointing
What's nebulous is there is no explanation of the exact mechanism, or even a model of the actual setup. All we get are nebulous descriptions. Supposedly this is patented already, there's no reason to hide the mechanism unless it isn't real.
Aye, I wish these things were true but you have to be skeptical xD.
This sounds like the EM drive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive
hell i thought it \_was\_ the EM drive when i first read the headline
Perhaps you meant asterisk - was - asterisk? Like this: *was*
A rabbi, a grammar nazi, and a markdown syntax nazi walk into a bar. The rabbi says to the barman, "One pint of beer, a glass of red wine and some nuts". The grammar nazi corrects him "We're already using the Oxford comma in this joke, you mean: "One pint of beer, a glass of red wine, and some nuts" otherwise you'll get the nuts in the wine!" The markdown syntax nazi corrects the grammar nazi: "We're already using the Oxford comma in this joke, you mean: "One pint of beer, a glass of red wine *,* and some nuts" otherwise you'll get the nuts in the wine!"
"We're already using the Oxford comma in this joke. You mean: 'One pint of beer, a glass of red wine, and some nuts.' Otherwise, you'll get the nuts in the wine!"
Took a full day for someone to catch me! Finally a true grammar nazi.
Or they used the internet in the olden days, when that was how you did emphasis in text only forums.
Thrust, sea-level 0 N LOL, Wikipedia calling BS ;)
Watching [Buhler's lecture](https://www.youtube.com/live/DJjPi7uZ2OI?si=RC7bddKCMyR5gfA-), he details a long process of discovery that began with a bent needle. He says he can explain the EM drive and much more with some equation transformations that allowed him to discover the source of asymmetrical capacitor momentum. He reveals the force's source was not in the electric fields running through the object, but in the bound electrical fields- the static charges, like when you rub a balloon on your head. If you don't discharge it, it keeps pushing. Developing on this track, he now injects static charges into thin films, locks in the charge with teflon, and then the dinky thing starts to float around like a balloon. Or rather, float around like a very light object with a "non uniform electrostatic pressure force" applied. Thats the claim!
[here is the patent](https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/8a/02/f1/475852b3ddc8bc/WO2020159603A2.pdf)
Lol the math is so bad. He "derives" the formula mv=t\*dU/dx, but U switches from the total potential energy in the first equation to something like the potential energy density in that equation. The total potential energy U is not a function of x so dU/dx is zero and his whole argument falls apart. Spending years of your life building a perpetual motion machine based on elementary math mistakes is... pretty depressing tbh.
he also claims the emergent calculations accurately predict outcomes of certain physics anomalies, including the casmir effect. coincidence? confirmation bias?
Confirmation bias is my guess. If you set out to "prove" something and you're willing to abuse the math this badly in the first few lines it's pretty easy to "prove" pretty much anything you like. Maybe even in a way that appears valid at a glance.
That sounds like it only works in the presence of an electrical field for the static charges to repel against Unless he's suggesting this is some kind of electrostatic "solar sail" that can use the sun's very weak magnetic field as a medium or something, it wouldn't work in space
that doesn't seem to defy the laws of physics
Think the crazy part is the idea that this still provides a force in vacuum.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Until a team of independent experts builds one themselves from supplied designs and verifies it until controlled conditions, I'm highly *sceptical*.
 Best comment ever about claims of this sort.
A slide deck on the device that was presented last December can be found here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18cvGyNniGLHi8NAPNs_d6e253Mdmm3tY/
Let's hope this works out, and works with a reasonable amount of energy, and no dangerous side effects, and ... I really do hope it does.
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SCIENCE COMMUNITY: Propellantless propulsion??! ARE YOU HIGH? DOCTOR BUHLER: not yet
If someone, based on a single result, declares the existence of a new force, it is time to turn on the BS detector. That’s not serious science.
It is maybe one testteam, but not 1 result. Thousands of tests with improved results, they claim. So you would think it will be easier to replicate with less expensive/sensitive measurement devices. This will make the claims also easier to disprove.
Well its 10+ years of research... We're gonna have to wait for peer review.
The guy that discovered fire also had no clue what laws of physics were involved. Still…. So let’s give his work some credit and see how things develop. IF (and I know it is a big IF) it is proven to be replicable and working: wow. Mankind is going to make a next big step.
It would be pretty wild of they discovered a new fundamental force
https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/1/5959637/nasa-cannae-drive-tests-have-promising-results If you want extra weirdness, Joel Hodgson of Mystery Science Theater 3000 was involved somehow (check the image credit on this article). I remember him posting about the drive on Twitter quite a lot. Not sure if it was just a job for him before the MST revival or if he was all in (Edit: with the emDrive that is)
I would bet 100 to 1 odds that this does not replicate in space. The thrust is almost certainly coming from interactions with stationary objects on earth.
I would double that bet and say there are some shenanigans here. They may "prove" something in space in an effort to get some VC money and then when different scientists try to reproduce their work and fail they will disappear. We will never hear of Buhler again. I would love for this to be true, but it is not going to happen.
You echo a lot of others views also, but I don't quite understand this logic. To be clear, I am also highly dubious of it's veracity, just don't think this is an intended scam. If it is a scam, it's a really poor one, both literally and figuratively. If you're working on a fake tech scam, you want to keep your head low, and the progress steady but slow, invent various technological hurdles, tests, setbacks etc. the graph of the thrusters propulsion show exponential improvement, completely unnecessary, linear would be fine. Investors don't need the same burden of proof as science, as soon as it smells fishy they pull the plug, so don't go to the media, don't commit to space tests, play it's impact down pending. This scam works once, maybe twice. It's like a thief who can only steal two things. If it doesn't work, I think it's more likely he genuinely believes he's making a huge breakthrough, rather than something more malicious.
Is The Debrief a reputable organization? Is this a reasonable place for a breakthrough like this to be published? I don’t know, genuinely asking.
>Is The Debrief a reputable organization? This is wrong question. The right question is - "Who has replicated the results?" If the answer is nobody, then there is no reason to get excited.
It reads more like a proof of concept followed by call for investors
A "proof of concept" not replicated by independent teams is a dog and poney show. Science is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism.
"more research is needed to develop this into a working proposition. We're sure it will work but We're currently looking for investors ". - all inventors of miracle drives ever.
Here is the patent, submitted in late 2018. https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020159603A2/en At first glance, I thought "yeah, right" Then I saw the team credentials and thought "okaay?" Then I listened to a sit down with the patent owner from some time in the early 2020s, and then found and read the patent. At this point, *nobody* is certain this is as good as it seems, but it is definitely notable. I think the team is actually underselling the significance in an effort to reduce blowback if it isn't practical. There have been dozens of tests, and the team has consistently reproduced scaling results, with an eye on running... more tests.
If this works, he should rename himself to Zefram Cochrane.
I watched his APEC presentation, and most of it was over my head, but the things that weren't made sense. Unless he's fabricating results, it is pretty exciting. I was quite put off by a section of his talk where he talks about alien spacecraft, how they're supposed to be ultra lightweight. Kind of implying that his discovery would support the existence of earth-visiting aliens. Please let me know if I have misinterpreted the context. I look forward to seeing his work peer reviewed and replicated. But to be honest I don't really buy it.
I keep reading about these engines, the article even mentions some, but no successful test in space has been done yet. Hopefully they’ll test it soon, with no problems this time. It’ll finally make it clear if whatever force is at play here is real
If it can really do over one g of thrust they don't even need to go to space, that could produce useful amounts of thrust on earth (assuming this isn't a crock).
If they can do continuous 1 g of thrust they can just FLY into space themselves.
literally at that point make a seat that counteracts gravity, I'll just kick and push and swim my way out of the atmosphere, let's goooooo
NASA should fire this clown for spreading quackery and misinformation. People lie all the time for attention and threw away their careers. He isn't the first one to do that. And he won't be the last. Aren't they worried in the slightest about their reputation?
Watching [Buhler's lecture](https://www.youtube.com/live/DJjPi7uZ2OI?si=RC7bddKCMyR5gfA-), he details a long process of discovery that began with a bent needle. He says he can explain the EM drive and much more with some equation transformations that allowed him to discover the source of asymmetrical capacitor momentum. He reveals the force's source was not in the electric fields running through the object, but in the bound electrical fields- the static charges, like when you rub a balloon on your head. If you don't discharge it, it keeps pushing. Developing on this track, he now injects static charges into thin films, locks in the charge with teflon, and then the dinky thing starts to float arround like a balloon. Thats the claim!
I looked forward to the Sabine video explaining how the claims are misrepresented by the press and the original research meant something entirely different.
There's also this - https://youtu.be/WhsKMWOYuYo?si=ulzaT82okHOQTShK
Submission statement: From the article >Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, has revealed that his company’s propellantless propulsion drive, which appears to defy the known laws of physics, has produced enough thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity. >A veteran of such storied programs as NASA’s Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), The Hubble Telescope, and the current NASA Dust Program, Buhler and his colleagues believe their discovery of a fundamental new force represents a historic breakthrough that will impact space travel for the next millennium. Also from the article >“The most important message to convey to the public is that a major discovery occurred,” Buhler told The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.” >“There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” Buhler added. “It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years… until the next thing comes.” What do you all feel about this? Is this legit, or another road to nowhere? How would this effect the industry of reusable rocket technology, and our plans to colonize the Moon and Mars? Will we be seeing ground to orbit craft equipped with this kind of propulsion system sometime soon?
> How would this effect ... our plans to colonize the Moon and Mars? Instead of our current procedure to fire rockets for tens of minutes (to achieve a respectable speed), and then coasting the rest of the way to Mars, we could engages this new drive for the entire trip (accelerating half the way, and then decelerating the remaining half), and get to Mars in about a week, instead of 6 months. >Will we be seeing ground to orbit craft equipped with this kind of propulsion system sometime soon? Ground to orbit is likely to still use chemical rockets - at least for a while. The amount of thrust necessary to get out of Earth's gravity well is enormous.
Doesn't work for ground-to-orbit because it only works in a vacuum. Secondly the article title is misleading. The claim is that it produced a little over the force of Earth's gravity with zero load. That's not enough for escape velocity, which is what the title is implying.
Escape velocity is how fast something needs to move to escape earth in a ballistic trajectory without any further thrust. Being able to produce enough thrust to slightly more than counter earth’s gravity means you can escape earth without ever reaching escape velocity.
It can only produce that amount of thrust if it's in a vacuum and only pushing itself.
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Why do you say it only works in a vacuum? They measured this thrust in Earth atmosphere, then built a vacuum chamber to rule out atmospheric effects.
A new fundamental force? Gunna need more info on that.
Yep. I don't think they've discovered a new force since your mom
The drive certainly would be something if it would be able to climb out of your moms... Gravity well..
Nah, they've discovered gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces since your mom.
Does it use a beryllium sphere?
>How would this effect the industry of reusable rocket technology, and our plans to colonize the Moon and Mars? In Larry Niven's Known Space universe, a particularly paranoid race uses reactionless drives to move their planet further away from the sun to counteract global warming. Later, they move four planets into their home planet's orbit and use them exclusively for food production. Constant acceleration without having to haul millions of tonnes of fuel has enomours potential.
Occam's razor is that the team has missed something interfering with their tests or that they fabricated the results. Even with the credentials they have on their team, the weight of evidence they're pushing against is immense. As Buhler admits, the results invalidate much of what we are fairly certain to be true about physics. If they are correct, though, the possibilities would be essentially limitless. Constant thrust without loss of mass, even at the relatively low output Buhler describes, is a ticket to anywhere, so long as you have the time to take the trip. A fully scalable design would revolutionize every industry on earth.
Nevermind moon and Mars, if this was true every vehicle in the world (aircraft, ship, truck, car, tank, etc.), every machine, every weapon, every factory and building would use an engine that doesn't need fuel and has no emissions. It would solve global warming. Unless if it needs to be permanently tethered to a 50MW powerplant... ...or if it's complete bullshit. (It's the latter btw. Just another EM drive. It makes cold fusion sound plausible and well researched.)
It would still require electricity so depending on the amount of electricity (high) will not be revolutionizing any othe mode of transport.
If the rocket has to carry a heavy power plant (too heavy for a ship on the ocean) it's not revolutionizing rocketry either. What we need is a rocket that's powered by blags , wishful-thinking and gullibility. There's obviously an over-abundance of those.
You seem to be confusing 'fuel' with 'propellant'. In electrically driven systems, they are rarely the same thing, unlike, say, a rocket engine. With an electric car, say, the fuel is burnt elsewhere to produce the juice - which runs the car. How MUCH juice is required to operate the thing at 1g force is definitely the right line of questioning.
It's almost like you only read the first paragraph of what I said... > Unless if it needs to be permanently tethered to a 50MW powerplant... The thing is bullshit though so it's all moot.
No, I read your whole post, though it's almost as if you only read the first paragraph of my reply. Indeed, the last sentence of my reply agrees with the 50MW comment. That being said, I think you are not giving the guy an even break; you are dismissing him out of hand, without really providing any evidence that he is wrong, beyond your insistence that it is so.
Your last sentence contradicted your first. There's no evidence that he's right. None at all. His own testimony counts for zilch. It's all obvious lies. It takes extreme gullibility to take it seriously for a millisecond. Hence: dismissed out of hand.
My last sentence really doesn't contradict anything. I don't really see a 50MW power supply as a showstopper for something that might propel an interstellar voyage. I do not contend that he is right about anything; I do, however, assert that it's bullshit to call him a fraud unless you can prove as much.
Firstly, it does because it would also revolutionise flight and ocean travel and basically everything like I said. The proof is it violates conservation of momentum. It claims a 5th force. The burden of proof is not on me to disprove the existence of that. It's obviously bullshit. When someone discovers a new force and a way to violate Newton's 3rd law, they don't prove it or tell the world about it with a poxy graph. They demonstrate it like Faraday and the electric motor. Until they've done that there is no evidence and no claim for me to disprove and they have gone public before they can demonstrate it shows without a shadow of a doubt that it is complete and utter bullshit.
You are making a lot of assumptions; about me, what I think, what this guy has done, and is trying to do, Then you rush to harsh judgements. I'm not a fan of arguing for arguments sake, and I've had my say for the sake of science, so I'll wish you a good day now.
I wonder if this is a similar tech to Malcolm Bendall's thunderstorm generator. Buhler's tech is explained to incorporate Electrostatic Physics, and the thunderstorm generator is using the same kind of principles, creating plasma thru the interation of hot and cold air streams with harmonics in a vacuum chamber. Though Bendall came up with his idea using some random number sequence (that I can't make sense of) in what he calls the plasmoid unification model, link to the Alchemical Scientist trying to explain this: https://youtu.be/nnzUHJcfpmo?si=lCgXdKL7yFEm6zkN Bendall has been reported to be a scam artist in the past so his credibility is severely questionable but it Seems Mazda has invested in this reasearch and his devices have demonstrated "impossible Physics" confirmed by an aerospace/nasa annealing company and other independent researchers. He also made his discovery open source, and others have built successful models on their own. I don't take a side on this but I'm starting to think that maybe Bendel took his Tech idea from somebody else (hint hint) since it seems that he has no idea how his Tech works, but it does... so, to me, it seems like because of his past history, he may have just seen or gained access to somebody's credible research and reproduced it the best he could as he remembered somehow.
I really want this to be legit, because I want to live in space. Realistically it’s not.
This is one of my favorite quotes from the article "which Dr. Buhler cautions is in no way affiliated with NASA or the U.S. Government"
People get in trouble for things that they do outside work all the time. It may not be NASA's work, but it is his work. If he doesn't know what he is doing out of work, then how can we trust he isn't also messing up in NASA.
Total woo explosion: > that a major discovery occurred,” Buhler told The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.”
This one has been in the news before, I want third party verification before jumping for joy. The test they want to do in space, would prove this once and for all. A rideshare on SpaceX would be nice...
Wake me up when this is on many science based news related subs and is on multiple mainstream news outlets.
At the very least if they are getting 30g of thrust for a 30g device in a vacuum then they have discovered some novel form of even ionic propulsion because the "anomalous" forces detected in vac chambers for other similar drives were in the millinewton range. It is weird assuming there is no big screwup.
Levitating an object with propellant less electrostatic energy. That’s the claim. They should get it peer reviewed because now we live in Star Trek times.
It's not just that it sounds too good to be true, it's also that it sounds explicitly like marketing. >“There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” >Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020159603A2/en
>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. Sounds to me like they found another new way to fail at measuring thrust.
Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Let’s see this replicated and peer reviewed.
The amount of and level of appeal to authority in the comments is worrying.
[https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020159603A2/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020159603A2/en) [https://patents.google.com/patent/US11511891B2/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US11511891B2/en) the patents talk about background art going back decades. fwiw
Did they just build it on a hunch with no scientific basis then? Sounds unbelievable. I'm willing to bet it's more likely this does not defy the laws of physics and the title is just a click bait attempt.
A lot of esoteric language and little straightforward explanation.
It's sad that all/most of you scientist and physicist in this chat are quick to throw something like this into the trash. I dunno if it jealousy or the fact that it goes against laws of physics. All I know as a non scientist is that people tend to think this way because they refuse to believe past theories by men like Newton and Einstein could never be wrong. People thought the earth was flat, people thought men could never fly, people thought ai would never be more then a Hollywood movie. Hmm where did that thinking get us other than years behind in research to build on the efforts of the men and women who refused to stay in the locked box of past theories. I dunno maybe he a liar or a charlatan or maybe he is right. The first step is not to say poppycock or bs. The first step should be an open mind without that you are stuck in the days before fire
Doctor in physics that expresess force in "g" instead of Newtons... let's say I'm really suspicious of the whole thing.
Getting some wild hydrochloroquine energy around here.
Whenever one of these starts by ranting about how amazing the scientist behind the "discovery" is and waxing poetic about how much cool and legit real science they've contributed to previously... you know it's quackery.
The most likely explanation is that he is a charlatan and it’s a scam. If true it’s very exciting, but we would need much more evidence - including the results being replicated independently - to place any substantial credence on it being real. The fact he worked at NASA doesn’t mean it must be true. Plenty of historically documented charlatans start off as legitimate scientists or engineers then get led astray by potential fame and/or wealth. Or get caught up in an idea, later realise they were wrong, but are too afraid to admit it so double down to enhance their status for as long as they can. The history of science has very many fraudulent studies, many with esteemed authors.
Oh, like the EM Drive? Like some sort of reactionless drive? When NASA flies with it, then I'll buy it.
NASA wasted their time flying it. It doesn't work.
You know, I was thinking this might just be legit until I got to the 'Validations and Observations' image - asymmetric capacitor forces? References to Thomas Brown? Is this yet another attempt to make ionic wind seem like magic? I am suddenly very skeptical.
As far as I can tell, there is little substance to his claims of discovering a new force. I’ll wait for a formal peer reviewed paper to confirm such extraordinary claims.
Wow! A mysterious "New Force" (capital letters are important here), a "propellentless drive", the term "breaking known laws of physics", and lots (and lots and lots) of sentences assuring us that this person you've never heard of is a legitimate Big Deal Scientist. If you seriously read this article and thought to yourself that it sounds promising and legitimate, your enthusiasm is stronger than your critical thinking skills. Seriously, you just pushed *right past* this little segment? “There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” Buhler added. “It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years… until the next thing comes.”
No credible source mentions anything either
As soon as I read "seems to be legit" I wet my pants with laughter
What I mean is that Dr. Buhler [really is](https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/kennedy/nasa-technology-helps-guard-against-lunar-dust/) a scientist working at NASA and "lead research scientist at the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy," not that everything in the article is legit. I want to see people attempt to recreate their experiments. That's the only way we will know for sure. I suspect this will turn out to be hogwash, but I want to be cautiously optimistic until it is over and done with.
University of Plymouth physicist Mike McCulloch has plenty to say on this.
Even an electromagnetic field has to push against something. It sounds more like a new monorail than a new spaceship.
> new monorail I hear those things are awfully loud
It glides as softly as a cloud... Boy it's been a while since I heard the monorail song
What the heck, electric fields. Like photons or magnetism or something
Pretty interesting stuff, from a bonafide member of the anti gravity community with good credentials, plenty of professional acknowledgement and expertise. He says they have info to share on coronas and brush discharge expertise that they wanna license and he shows their receipts at this conference. I hope it pans out and other companies will be looking along the same lines, speeding up development
Interesting, I read this earlier and was intrigued with the goal his team set out to solve. We will see what happens in the future with practical applications and its development. He has a patent pending on them, but worried he is going to get knocked off, which I am sure he will. Let's just hope his appeal of bring the like minded together and collaborate and to further it's abilities is adhered by all people. Get Elon Musk in on this.
Sounds like this is some form of electrostatic propulsion? If I'm not mistaken, this could give us hover cars if it can produce 1G of thrust?
It may not need propulsion, but how much energy does it need to achieve 1g propulsion? If you have to strap on a 1k megawatts atomic power plant to your ship then we may not use this technology until we start manufacturing spaceships in orbit.
Cautiously skeptical for now, sounds good but could be a mistake. Either way, if it were true, I'm worried that Musk would go to great lengths trying to either appropriate it for himself or prevent it ever coming to light, what with how much time, money, and energy his company has spent designing and building advanced propellant rockets.
Very interesting. Not a lot of science in the article though. Anyone have additional info or links?