[AR] Re: The Laws of Motion have just changed!

  • From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: arocket <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2019 15:43:22 -0400 (EDT)

On Wed, 13 Mar 2019, James Bowery wrote:

Keith may recall my "Weird Fun With Propulsion" saga involving an apocryphal
reactionless drive, and the connection with Harry Stine's fascination with
"The Fourth Law of Motion" dependent on asymmetric "Jerk" (a=m/s^3).  
I pretty much forgot about this guy until I ran across a relatively recent
paper on high frequency gravity waves mentioning "third time derivative of
mass motion"...

As I understand it -- not a field I'm really up on -- this isn't new: such things show up with some regularity in General Relativity.

However, this has *zero* connection to any device you can build in (today's) machine shops or demonstrate in (today's) laboratories. Gravity is such a feeble force that making such GR effects detectable generally would require enormous masses moved around at tremendous accelerations (somehow). This doesn't keep theorists from writing papers about such devices, but building them is another story.

The apparent similarity to some of the ideas of the reactionless-drive enthusiasts is pure coincidence. In the (unlikely) event that one of their gadgets actually performs as claimed, the theory required to explain this would have to be something completely different.

Henry

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