Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is the impossible drive possible?

Episode Date: June 18, 2020

Daniel and Jorge dissect the "EMDrive", explain how it's supposed to work and whether it ever might. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Like on Fridays when I take your questions for the BAQA. Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Oh, yeah, on whether you get your podcast. Hey, Daniel, how do you feel about breaking the laws of physics? Ooh, boy, that needs some context. It really depends. Oh, yeah, on whether you have a good physics lawyer to back you up? It really depends on which law you're going to break. I mean, you might get a misdemeanor. In some cases, you might even end up with a felony. Really? There's a range here. All right. So then what's the equivalent of getting life in prison for physics, Joe?

I think they put you in a room with a cartoonist. Oh, no, they're the worst offenders, really. But really, but when you hear about an idea that breaks a law of physics, even if it's a big one, are you hoping it's true or are you hoping it's wrong? Well, you know, anytime somebody claims to disprove Einstein, I get pretty strong. skeptical because that's been tested a lot. But in my heart of hearts, I'm really hoping that someone disproves a big law of physics like relativity. I mean, that that's how we learn something new about the universe. That's a good spin. I think I'll hire you as my physics lawyer. In that case, you're going to go to physics jail because I am not a good physics lawyer.

Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. And I once thought I wanted to be a lawyer and then I got argued out of it. Oh, yeah? Wow. History almost went a different way for you. Yeah, I was big into debate in high school and I liked arguing or I thought I liked arguing. I did a lot of it. But then I discovered that, you know, in debate, there's sort of never really any truth. You can just persuade people of anything. Wow. And in the end, I liked physics because it had a hard nugget of objectivity at its core. You're like, I want certainty, just like in quantum physics where everything's for sure and there's no fuzziness. Well, I want objectivity, you know, the universe comes down on one side

or the other. You try the experiment and it either works or it fails. You can't persuade somebody something's right if the experiments say no. At least on a probabilistic kind of sense, right? There's certainty. Yeah. All right. Well, we are certainly starting our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeard Radio. In which we talk about all the amazing things certain and uncertain about the universe, the things that we

know and the things that we do not yet know, the things that work and the things that we are still working on. Our goal in this podcast is to educate you about everything that science understands, everything that science is still working on and everything that human beings wonder about. That's right, all the things that are possible

out there in this big, beautiful universe of ours, and also maybe all of the things that are impossible in this universe, things that cannot be or that we maybe wish they could be. And history is filled with examples of scientists saying something is impossible and then somebody coming along and proving them wrong. So one of the most fun experience in science is pushing that boundaries, developing something new, is understanding the universe at a deeper level and figuring out something that we thought

was impossible and maybe even giving us a tool to explore the universe. That's right, because, you know, sometimes some of the biggest ideas in physics have been, they thought that were impossible, you know, like when quantum physics first came out, people thought were like, that's crazy. Why would nature be like that? Even Einstein thought it was kind of impossible. That's right. Sometimes you have to change your perspective and open your mind to something totally new.

On the other hand, sometimes the universe is just hard and cold and it says no to your idea. It's impossible to deal with this universe. But yeah, so today on the podcast, we'll be talking about one such idea, which today sounds kind of impossible. In fact, it has Impossible In its brand name. Are we talking about Impossible Burgers? Ooh, that sounds delicious. Sounds impossible to resist. That's right, because one struggle plaguing humanity's desire to explore the universe is just physically getting out there into the universe.

The universe is frustratingly, amazingly, beautifully, beautifyingly vast and enormous, which makes it difficult to explore. And so to get out there, to get to a neighboring star, to find those aliens, to visit black holes and unravel the secrets of general relativity and quantum mechanics, we need a device, a drive that could actually get us there. Yeah, maybe we need an impossible idea to solve a seemingly impossible problem. And so today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question. What is the impossible drive? And is it possible, possibly, in a possible kind of way? This is a very certain podcast episode here today, Daniel. Is it possible, the impossible drive may possibly be possible?

While eating an impossible burger. And watching Mission Impossible with Tom Cruise. That does sound like an impossible combination of things to pull off all at once. But yeah, so this is kind of a crazy idea. I have to say I had not heard of this before getting your notes this morning. And so this is all sort of an idea to solve the problem of how to get across space. Like how to get to distant stars without having to bring a whole bunch of fuel with you. That's right.

Because there's just a basic problem in getting to those stars. Like you want to get to those stars, they're really far away. All right. So to get really far away, you have to get going really, really, really fast. And to get going really fast, you need an engine, something that's going to push you. And the current rockets that we have, you require a lot of fuel. So you can do like a pretty simple calculation and ask like, how much rocket fuel would it take to accelerate a very, very small object, you know, something like a toothpick up to, I don't know, 5% of the speed of light.

Really? The kind of speed that would make it take like only 100 years to get to Alpha Centauri. Wow. So if my spacecraft was just a toothpick, 0.1 grams, how much fuel would it take to get it to Alpha Centauri within like 100 years? Yeah. And the problem is that your spaceship is not just a toothpick. It's a toothpick plus all the fuel, right? Your fuel has to push the fuel you're going to need in the future. And so if the payload is just a toothpick, then most of your rocket ship is actually fuel. And that means you need more fuel. And the more fuel you have, the more fuel you need. And so it grows very, very quickly.

You got to, like, fill up the tank and take it with you. Yeah, exactly. You have to bring an oil tanker, not just like a little Prius. Exactly. And then you've got to accelerate that oil tanker. That oil tanker also needs a tank of gas, right? And so it very quickly grows to a huge number. And the number is actually ridiculous.

Like, in order to have enough fuel to get your toothpick up to 5% of the speed of light, takes more mass than exists in the observable universe by a huge, by a huge, by a huge number. How much? 10 to the 2,200. That's not a number, Daniel. You made that up. It's impossible.

I didn't make that up. There's an impossible mathematics behind this. It's just frustratingly difficult. A one with 2,000 zeros in front. Yeah. And it's not hard to imagine how the number gets so big. I mean, say your spaceship is the size of Jupiter, how much fuel you're going to need.

You're going to need as much fuel as like the sun. All right. Well, now your spaceship is Jupiter and the sun. And how much fuel are you going to need to push that? Well, you're going to need, like, more suns. So it just grows very, very rapidly. All just to push this toothpick. So the lesson is chemical rockets that require this kind of fuel

are not going to get us across the stars. We need a better way, right? One where you don't have to bring your fuel with you. That's right. One where you don't have to bring fuel with you. That's the idea. Even if you use, like, you know, is this with current fuel technology, you know, like, you know, the current rocket fuel?

Or is this like imagining, like, what if we inventing, fusion drives or you know we managed to invent vision drives yeah the basic limitation is that you need something to push off of and so it's not so much limited by the technology of that push as to just having to carry the fuel along with you oh i see like how much mass you have to expel in order to be pushed to the speed of light yeah precisely so there's this cool crazy new idea out there this em drive sometimes called a impossible drive that some people think may have the possibility to overcome this problem. And that's why they call it an impossible drive

because it seems to violate some laws of physics. But some experimenters out there claim to have built one and made it work. Wow. And this came to us from a question from one of our listeners, right? Russell Allard. Yeah, he wrote to us about a year ago and said, hey, can you guys explain this drive to me? Is it impossible? Does it work? Could it actually get us to the stars?

And it's taken us a year to answer, just to... Well, I've been. built one of these things. I went to Alpha Centauri and I came back. I mean, I do some real field research for these questions. Did you think I was just Googling? You know, we don't want to just give you an idea and say it's impossible or not possible. We have to see for ourselves. That's right. I'm an experimentalist. I back my answers up with real research, man. This is not just Googling around, okay? Right. So we're actually recording this from a toothpick as we're making our way to Alpha Centauri. Toothick podcast studios, Inc.

Well, as usual, we were wondering, how many people out there had heard of this? impossible drive or EM drive. And so as usual, Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet to ask people, what is an EM drive and could it ever work? So think about it for a second. If you had ever heard of it or not, and a physicist asked you, what would you say? Here's what people had to say. An EM drive, I haven't heard of.

I'm going to presume that EM stands for electromagnetic and drive is some sort of propulsion system. So there be some sort of rocket booster or engine that doesn't require fuel, but relies on electromagnetic waves to propel itself. I think theoretically it could work, but it's on the realm of theoretical relativity, but nothing has been done about it. Supposed, you need a lot of energy to make it work. An EM drive, I think, well, first of all, it sounds really familiar. Like, I like a lot of sci-fi, so it's a term that, like, has come up a lot.

And I think it doesn't exist yet. And I think it also has to do with time travel, but I'm not sure. I'm so excited to look it up later. An EM drive is an electromagnetic drive that functions by putting a lot of microwaves together. Currently, Toshiba and General Electric have the best ratings by consumer reports. Anyways, you put a bunch of these together and shoot microwaves out one end to get the ship to go in the opposite direction. It definitely doesn't work and will kill the grass in your backyard if you attempt to a I have no idea what an EM drive is. I'm assuming that means electromagnetic, but I'm not sure,

so I have no idea of the work. I don't know exactly what this is, some kind of propulsion, but I don't have any idea. I have never heard of an EM drive. So I'm going to guess that EM stands for electromagnetic. And of course, drive means it's some sort of an engine. They can use electromagnetic pulses to create thrust, I guess. I don't know what an EM drive is, but I do know one other type of drive. It's called the Infinite Probability Drive. It was installed on the Starship part of gold, and it is still in use today. I can't explain it properly, but I know it's more possible than a warp drive.

Sorry, Daniel. No idea. Maybe a device for... traveling around the universe? I have no idea what is any EM drive. So the M drive, I've heard, it's not the KNAID drive where it's a slotted resonance space, but the idea is that momentum is quantized, and so if you have a smaller space on one side and a larger space on the other side, it can bounce back some kind of microwave frequency,

I think, and create propulsionless thrust. I don't think it's anything that actually works. I don't know what an EM drive is exactly. I think it'd be electromagnetic, where you're using some kind of electromagnetic reaction to throw particles out of the back of a spaceship to accelerate it. I suppose that would work, but it's probably not what you mean. All right.

Not a lot of recognition, but some people seem to know what it was. Or maybe they just lashed on to the electromagnetic part of it. You asked them good guesses there. And some people had definitely heard about this. And this really made some waves, pun intended, about 10 years ago. So there was a lot of splash in the media about this drive. And then recently there's been some more news. And so I'm not surprised that a few of our listeners have heard about this discussion.

Oh, nice. Nice. I guess my first question is, is it vegetarian? Does it come from plant-based products like the Impossible Burger? No meat was harmed in the creation of this impossible drug. Only laws of physics were totally destroyed. And all life depends on the laws of physics, though. I don't really know.

Is it vegan to break the laws of physics or not? I need a ruling on that. We need a better physics lawyer or a physics judge, I guess. We need to go to the International Court of Physics. Cosmological Court of impossibility. All right. First of all, what is it? And where did this idea come from?

So the idea for the EM drive is to try to build a drive where you don't need to bring along with you something to push against. You don't need something to have a propellant. And remember that all rockets that we've ever invented so far have two basic elements. One is some source of energy, you know, like fuel or laser or something. And the other is something to push against. And this comes from the conservation of momentum. If you're going to move left, the only way to do that is to push something else right. That's the only way, really, in the universe.

That's the only way, yeah. Right? There's no magic in the universe. Not that we're aware of. And the law of conservation of momentum is very, very deeply ingrained in physics and has been tested a zillion times at, you know, the scales of galaxies and particles. So we're pretty confident it's true. And it just basically says that momentum is conserved.

So momentum doesn't change. you can take a brick and split it in half and send one half to the left but then you have to send the other half to the right so that there are momentum balances. Like if your brick initially has zero momentum and the final state it also has to have zero momentum. There can be motion.

There can be kinetic energy but there has to be zero net momentum. So it's almost like if you want to go to Alpha Centauri you have to push yourself there almost. It's like you have to if you want to get your toothpick to Alpha Centauri, you have to push the equivalent. of a toothpake in the opposite direction. Yeah, you have to sit in your ship

and throw stuff out the back. Right. You know, some people out there wonder, like, do rockets work in empty space because they imagine that rockets work by pushing on the air? They're not pushing on the air. They're just throwing stuff out the back.

Right. Because if they want to move forward, something else has to move backwards. So the whole system, the combination of all the original stuff, has the same momentum as when it started. And this is pretty familiar. Like, if you fire a gun, right, you're pushing a bullet and there's a recoil.

So imagine, you know, the rocket example is the bullet is the stuff you're pushing out the back and the gun is your rocket. One way to power a rocket ship is to stand in the back of it and shoot bullets out the back. Oh, hey, that's an idea. Have you guys thought about that one? That is basically the idea. I mean, that's what a chemical rocket is, right? It start a big explosion and focus all the stuff and shoot it out the back. And that's why it goes.

You take the energy and that energy is used to push stuff out the back. So that's what a rocket is. But it needs those two elements. One, energy and two, something to throw out the back. Right. Because you can't just stand there and throw things off the bag. You would get tired. You need some energy to do it, right?

Yeah. Well, it's like you can't push yourself up by your bootstraps, right? You can't stand in your spaceship and get it going by pushing on the inside of it. Okay. That's the basic idea of every rocket we've ever had. You need energy and you need some. something to recoil against. You need propellant to throw at the back.

Right, right. And then the problem is that you need to bring that mass with you, the stuff you're going to explode with you, in order to keep going. Yes. And then you need to push that stuff, right? So you need to today push all the stuff you're going to need tomorrow and the stuff you're going to need in a week and in a year. And that stuff adds up, which means today you need even more stuff to push.

And that's how you end up with a spaceship the size of Jupiter just to go to Alpha Centauri. The payload the size of the sun. Yeah, exactly. And so the idea for the impossible drive is like, well, can we skip that step? Can we somehow have a drive that doesn't need any recoil, that doesn't throw anything out the back? Wow. Like something that somehow violates the laws of conservation momentum. Yes, exactly.

That's why it's called the impossible drive, because it would totally violate the laws of conservation of momentum. Or, you know, maybe there's something else going on. And like, if you build a device that seems to violate the laws of conservation momentum, that means that either, one, you screwed something up in your experiments, two, momentum isn't actually conserved, you know, which would be like a huge deal. Or this momentum is conserved, but there's something else in your system you weren't aware. You've, like, discovered some new force field or some thing in the quantum foam or something, right? So you've learned something about the universe.

And at that point, like, why would you want to go to Alpha Centaur? Do you stay here and monetize your amazing physics break? idea. That's right. Your impossible foam or whatever it is you discovered. Yeah. And, you know, so this is a different class of ideas. This EM drive is a different class of ideas than ideas like a solar sail. Right. Solar sail is another really cool way to get to high speeds. But the idea there is you sort of leave the engine at home and you push the photons and they get captured by your spaceship, which just gets pushed by those photons. Right. And so the whole engine you can think of like as the laser that stays home and the sail is the part of the ship.

Right. It's like you're, that's the different idea where you can kind of catch things that are out there and use them to kind of hitch a ride. Yeah, exactly. That's a different idea. But that requires some like huge laser focused on your ship from really, really, really far away. This would be a drive that you could take anywhere. You could use it to lift off the surface of the earth and zoom around the whole galaxy and get up to really high speeds. I mean, it sounds awesome. I want the impossible drive to be impossible. I want a car with the impossible drive. I do. Yeah. I'm going to take it to the burger joint and buy an impossible burger. All right. Well, it sounds too good to be true, almost. It's kind of like a Tom Cruise movie, almost.

But let's get into how it actually works and whether or not it's impossible or possible and what people have done about it. But first, let's take a quick break. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having. an emergency, and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control.

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We get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise And then as we try the whole thing out for real Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right.

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but which could potentially get us to other star systems and other galaxies, because it's a tough problem. It's a tough problem, and we should keep an open mind. We should think, hey, some fresh ideas out there. there could crack an age old problem or reveal something new about physics and the universe. So we should definitely not just scoff and dismiss. We should analyze it. But then we also have to be skeptical.

We can't just take every crazy idea as true. That's right. You got to eat that Impossible Burger just to see for yourself. Because maybe it can't taste just like real meat. Or maybe the Beyond Burger is beyond the impossible burger. Who knows, right? Data is the only answer. Oh, is there a Beyond Engine also?

Not yet. I'm working on it. Oh, I see. Oh, sorry. sorry. That's beyond the scope of today's podcast. It's beyond my NDA agreement I have with you. We'll have to edit that out.

All right, well, maybe I'd step us through. How does this impossible drive work? Like, what's the basic physics idea or not physics idea behind it? It's kind of a crazy idea. And frankly, I don't really understand how it's even supposed to work. But if you look around online, you discover some basic fact about it. So it's a copper cylinder, right? So it's made out of metal.

It's a cylinder. It's got two flat. ends like a cylinder. But one side is bigger than the other. And the idea is that this kind of copper cylinder is a resonant chamber for microwaves. So microwaves are just a kind of light. They're kind of photon. You put them in there and this chamber is the right size for them to bounce around and sort of add up and build on each other. So they can hang out inside, reflect back, and reinforce themselves. So you put microwaves in there. They should just sort of bounce around forever. It's like a bottle that can capture microwave. Really? They don't get absorbed into the

metal or anything? That's the idea. I mean, they do a little bit, but if it's the right shape and the right material, then they mostly just reflect. It's like fiber optics, you know, you have this reflection of light in the interior. If you have the right angle and the right materials and the right interface between the materials in the resonant cavity and the thing that makes up the cavity, you can get almost total internal reflection. All right, so it's kind of like a resonant cavity, right, where microwaves bounce inside. And somehow that gives you superpowers. Yeah. Well, if you're bitten by that cavity, right, then you get that cavity's proportionate.

That's right. You become the impossible man or woman. No, the idea is that you have a bottle with microwaves bouncing around inside of it. But then if you make your bottle bigger on one side, so it's a cylinder, if one side is bigger on the other and then it sort of tapers, and the idea is that the radiation pressure on one side is bigger than on the other side, just because you get more microwaves hitting one wall of the cavity than the other. And so then they think, well, if you're pushing on the left side more than the right side,

shouldn't that generate some thrust? Shouldn't that push this thing because there's more force on the left than there is on the right. That's the idea behind the EM drive. And by radiation pressure, you mean like the force that the photons are making on the cavity wall.

That's right, because what happens when a photon reflects off a wall is it pushes against it. Just like if you bounce a ball off of a wall, it's pushing on the wall. It applies a force on the wall and the wall applies a force on the photon. And so the radiation pressure is just that. When a photon gets bounced, it gets pushed.

And it's also doing some pushing. Right. We talked about it in a previous podcast. Like if I take a flashlight and flash it at you, I'm actually kind of pushing you a little bit and I'm being pushed back, even though it's just the flashlight. And so imagine, you know, you have a gymnasium filled with students and each one has a bouncy ball and they're throwing the balls against the wall.

If one wall is bigger and it's getting hit by more balls, the idea is there's more force on it. And so is the whole gymnasium then kind of like lift up off the ground and travel to Alpha Centauri? That's my idea for... Wow. Okay, this is sounding impossible already. But what's the history of this thing? Like, who came up with it and why it's so hard to find information about it on the internet? It has a pretty sketchy history.

It comes from a guy named Roger Sawyer in 2001. He designed this thing. He had this idea and he designed it and he built it and he claimed that it worked. He said, I built it and it worked. But he didn't really share any evidence of it just sort of claimed this was true. Didn't publish or anything? Didn't let anyone see the device? No, he'd never published a paper.

It was sort of a, you know, always promising something else. He's like, he's promising the next version. He's promising the new results. He's promising the next round, but never actually delivered. And this guy was just an inventor, a physicist or a lawyer? What, Tom Cruise's brother? Yeah, you know, he's an inventor. And so he has some technical background.

And, you know, he was shooting big. He was thinking, hey, could I solve a really big problem? And he had this idea. And he claimed that it worked. But, you know, in science, you can't just tell people that your idea worked. You have to prove it. You have to describe the details. People want to understand it.

Other people will want to build it and test it for themselves. If this is something which is true and physical, it should be true in other people's labs also. And if we want to build EM Gives, we can't just rely on one guy in his basement. We need to actually understand the physical principles. It can actually be impossible. It has to be possible. it can't be some magical fairy dust that he sprinkled on it in his garage right and some scientists looked at it i think right in 2006

yeah well in 2006 there was a lot of coverage because robert choyer is also you know he's good at the PR and so he managed to convince the new scientist magazine which is a magazine with very high readership in 2006 to write an article suggesting that this thing might really be true and that article received a lot of criticism by science writers because it sort of glossed over the fact that there's a basic problem with this drive. Like it violates the law of conservation momentum. It shouldn't work.

So the fact that he claims to have built it and made it work need to be reported with a big, big piece of salt. Oh, I see. They didn't show enough skepticism. Yeah, exactly. And so this is roundly ridiculed, but other people were interested. And so then there was another guy, a guy named Guido Feta.

He's just a marketing executive, but he got really interested in this. And he built another version. He calls it the Knai drive. Knai. Like a can't, like Kna. Like impossible was taken, so I'm going to go with can't, because that sounds like impossible. Yeah, it sounds to me like an Irish expression. Like, you can a do that.

And they cannae, no. I'm not sure the linguistic origins of it. But he had some contacts. at NASA, and he found some folks at the NASA Eagleworks labs to try to test this thing. What? Oh, no. Yes. And he's like, all right, I built this. Please test this. Tell me if this thing can work. Wow. So they like actually NASA got involved now. Yeah, there's a question about whether it's actually NASA or some people at NASA, right? You know, like if I do an experiment in my lab and I say, oh my gosh, I've overthrown the laws of physics. Can you say the University of California has

overthrowing the laws of physics, right? I can't speak for the whole university. And these folks at NASA don't necessarily get to speak for NASA. Maybe it was the custodian or the cafeteria worker at NASA who like press the button and then it's like NASA did it. Well, it got a lot of attention because these folks at NASA Eagle Works Labs, they tested it and they saw a little bit of thrust. Like, they claim that it generates a very small amount of thrust. Now, the amounts we're talking about are really, really, really tiny. Like, we measure thrust, it's a force. We measure units of Newton's.

So, like, a one kilogram object on the surface of the earth feels 10 newtons, right? So a Newton is not a small unit. But these guys, when they measured this thing, they measured like millinutons, like 1,000th of a Newton. Right. Or even smaller, like, micronutons. I see. So what they measured were really, really small effects. Like, they built this thing.

They put it on the table, and they felt a very, small force when they turned it on. Interesting. But it's not nothing. It's not nothing. I mean, a new turn is like the weight of an apple almost. So it's like,

you know, it's like taking a bite out of an apple. It's like taking a very small bite out of an apple. And a new bowl. Yeah, exactly. And they put out a paper in 2016 saying, well,

you know, we tested this thing and it doesn't seem to be impossible because we're getting a small amount of thrust. What? Yeah. So that made a lot of explosions in minds and physics all across the world. Yeah, then it got a wider press coverage.

Yes, it got a lot of press, and a lot of that press, you know, skimmed over some of the important details, you know. You know, there were headlines in Wired, for example, saying NASA validates impossible space drive, which I'm sure people at NASA woke up in a sweat over when they read that in the headlines. Unless it's true, then it's like, oh, we'll take the credit. Yeah, exactly. And popular mechanics wrote an article with the title was Space Engine Breaks the Laws of Physics. Wow. Juicy clickbait. Juicy clickbait.

And so it was very exciting, right? People are like, maybe this is true. And maybe it doesn't matter that this drive only gives you a tiny little force because you can scale it up or we can improve it. Or we can, you know, pass it on to the engineers and said, we proved it's possible, make it work. Right. Make it better, more. Make it more efficient. Yeah.

Also, I mean, if you're on a toothpake on your way to Alpha Centauri, you know, you got time. So even a little push with help Yeah, even a little push A little constant push Without the need for propellant Could get you to very high speeds That's the whole idea of a solar sail Solar sails do not provide a lot of acceleration

It's just a long constant acceleration Without the need for a really heavy rocket Can get you up to significant fractions Of the speed of light Right, yeah All right, well this sounds maybe like It's not impossible, Daniel Now I'm really intrigued here

I mean are we going to be on our way Alpha Centauri pretty soon? Or is that impossible? So let's get into whether it actually can work and what's going on with these impossible physics. But first, let's take a quick break. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control.

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Daniel, it seems, as we left at NASA, or at least some people who work at NASA, validated this impossible space drive, this crazy idea that somehow seems to violate the loss of physics, but that could maybe get us to another galaxy or another star. So what's going on here, Daniel? Is this really possible or is there something here we're not seeing? Well, you have to sort of hold your enthusiasm in check and apply your skeptical mind. Like, we'd love for this to work, and we want it to work. In that sense, we have a bit of a conflict of interest. It's just like when you listen to a story about aliens. If you want it to be true, then you're going to be less skeptical and you're going to

gloss over problems in the story. So you've got to put aside your plans for Alpha Centauri and just ask yourself, like, does this make sense? And the first thing to think about is whether the experimental results are done carefully enough. Right. Because this is a very small effect. Like, what they measure is, you know, the equivalent of like a fly landing on this thing.

So you have to remove all of. other possible sources of experimental error. And when you dig into these experiments, they're not done with the kind of care that you need in order to really establish that this small thrust comes from radiation pressure inside the drive and not something else. Like the air conditioner maybe was hitting on your device and pushing it a little bit.

You know, that you're not far from the truth. Like when you turn this thing on, it heats up because you're pounding microwaves inside of it. And if it heats up, then it's going to cause air currents around it. And so those thermal currents, if it's not in a really, really good vacuum, those thermal currents might be what's providing this microthrust. Well, I'm trying to get a picture here.

So somebody actually built this, this marketing executive, built this device, this machine, and it got tested by some people who work at NASA. So like, you know, like this actually happened. This actually happened. There was a room with people from NASA there with clipboards. and I'm sure they were wearing white lab coats and safety goggles

and protective helmets and like this thing is humming it's like it's running and they measure the force but you're saying maybe it could have been something else yeah it doesn't have to be a force from the drive you have to remove all other sources of experimental error

to convince yourself the force came from the drive so the first test they did weren't even in a vacuum so who even knows if those results are just due to the air getting warm around it and differentially pushing on it because one side of it is bigger. Wow. All right.

Well, I mean, it sounds like you just kind of need to replicate the experiment. Has anybody tried or nobody wants to touch this? Yeah, so other labs have tried. Like, so there's a lab in Germany and a lab in China. And some of these labs can't reproduce the results. Like, they just don't see any thrust. Other labs have seen thrust. But then they showed that this thrust was actually just an interaction between the wires

that lead up to the EM drive and the Earth's magnetic field. What? Yeah. Oh, I see. The wires that create the microwave, not the wires leading up to the device. No, the wires leading up to the device, the ones that, like, you know, power this thing. And so we're talking about really small effects here, you know, it's like that you breathe on this thing, and that's a bigger effect than the thrust that they're measuring. Oh, wow.

And so it's very easy to make a mistake. And, you know, you read these papers, they don't seem very carefully done. And they don't give you confidence in the experimental setup. It's sort of like, remember the cold fusion thing, like these guys measure. some heat production, but there were all sorts of uncertainties and errors and other ways that could confuse the results that were potentially bigger than the signal they measured. I see. So the signal these people are measuring is smaller than the noise in their system.

Right. You have to be super extra careful, right? Like when you guys built the LIGO gravitational wave telescope, you know, you had to bury it underground, you had to put it in the middle of nowhere, you had to track any truck passing by just to make sure that that wasn't causing the signal. Exactly. They can't just build a device and then it shakes and they say, hey, gravitational waves, right? They need to show that they're not sensitive to all the sources of noise that are nearby.

And that's what these folks have not done. Okay. And there's some really concerning things about the results. Like, sometimes they get thrust even if the drive is backwards. And they get thrust the same direction. What? Yeah. That's the level of sort of experimental rigor that we're talking about here.

Maybe it's mind control, Daniel. It operates on wishes and unicorns. Like, if you want it to work, it works. Yeah. And so I would not say that the results are conclusive. You know, I would not say that this thing generates the rest. Well, I'm impressed. You actually flipped it around, you know?

Like, that shows a little bit of experimental worker. Yeah, I wonder if that was on purpose. Or they just sort of like, you know, put it in backwards. I see. Oh, man. We're throwing all kinds of shade at these NASA scientists. And these are not NASA scientists. These are people at NASA, right?

NASA did not stand behind this result. It's done in their spare time, in their garage. Right. Exactly. Not with official white lap coats from NASA. They bought it off the internet. And, you know, it's hard to imagine how this thing could actually work, right? Just because you have photons bouncing around inside a bottle doesn't mean that it's going to get pushed, right?

It violates the law of conservation momentum. You can't. Right. You can't pull yourself up from your bootstraps, right? If you stand inside a box in empty space and you throw a ball against one wall of the box, yeah, that ball applies a force to the wall, but to throw the ball, you apply to force the other direction to the floor, right? So you can't push a box from the inside.

Right. As far as we know. As far as we know. That's what we, that's how we think the universe works. But as you say, we kind of have to keep an open eye, which unfortunately kind of leaves you open to these crazy ideas. Yeah, and so the guys who wrote this paper, they know this, and they understand that this thing shouldn't work.

But they are seeing a result. And so in the paper, they put this really sort of amazing claim, and I just have to read it to you verbatim because it's, I don't want to paraphrase. They said that their drive, quote, is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomena and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma. Well, that makes sense.

Oh, now I totally get it. I was totally waiting for somebody to bring up the quantum vacuum virtual plasma. Obviously, everyone. Well, I mean, I guess the typical person like me wouldn't be able to tell the difference if that's something that's real or not. Well, you know, there is a thing which is the quantum vacuum, right? We know that empty space is not empty, that it's filled with energy. Right.

And we talked about virtual particles in a recent episode, right? Like virtual quantum particles exist. Yeah, because this energy that's in empty space can turn into particles. And those particles live for a very short amount of time and then they turn back into energy or another kind of particle or whatever. So there is this sort of energy available. This is like frothing foam. But this is not a question of having a source of energy, right? There's already energy in this drive.

This is a question of having something to push off of. Right. This is a question of momentum. But energy, I mean, energy is mass. Could I say that? Energy is mass. Like solar cells work on photons, which have no mass. Yes, but this quantum vacuum doesn't have like a rest frame.

You can't push against it. You can't like change the net momentum of a quantum vacuum. That doesn't make any sense. What? Could I maybe capture those energy of empty? I'm just rooting for these NASA garage scientists. So I'm playing devil's advocate. Could you like somehow capture the energy of empty space and like use it, you know, convert it to mass and push it one way? Is that possible?

Well, you know, Jorge, I think you've thought about this more deeply than the guy who wrote that paper. But think about what you're suggesting. You say capture the energy of empty space and then convert it into mass and throw it in one direction, right? That would mean it has now some sort of net momentum, whereas it didn't have that before. And that's the problem is that this quantum vacuum has no rest frame. It has no like net momentum, which you would. can capture. Unless you're going to break the law of conservation of momentum, then there's no way to gain momentum for this device. Right. But I guess, you know, is the law of conservation of momentum related to the law of conservation of energy? They're sort of related, right? They are sort of related. In particle physics, we think of energy momentum together. We put it together actually into

like a four-dimensional vector, the way that you have like a four-dimensional space time vector, three dimensions of space and one of time. We think of four momentum, three dimensions of momentum. and one of energy. And so these things are related, certainly. So the whole vector has to be conserved, but they're conserved independently. Like momentum in X is conserved separately from momentum in Y. It's conserved separately from momentum in Z.

And then energy conservation is also separate. So they're related, but they're independent, which makes for a very powerful constraint. Right. All right. Well, there are ideas that maybe it's tapping into this impossible drive, is maybe tapping into this quantum vacuum virtual plasmo, or energy, is that possible or is that total bunk?

I think it's total bunk. And, you know, I did some reading about this. And Sean Carroll says, quote, there is no such thing as a quantum vacuum virtual plasma. So that should be a tip off right there. There is a quantum vacuum, but is nothing like a plasma. You know, so he's pointing out the use of the word plasma means that they're maybe not even really understanding what they're talking about.

And I think that the way you're imagining it is like, can you push off against this plasma? and you like impart some momentum on it the way you can like with a rowboat right you're like rowing against the water and you're pushing against the water so the water gets momentum one way you get momentum the other way i guess maybe is a good analogy like if you're out in the middle of the ocean you can't just like with a bucket pick up some water well maybe you could yeah so you can't treat the quantum foam like you can the ocean you can't row your way through the quantum foam because all the energy there is virtual it's like borrowed momentarily and and it needs to return. It's not real energy in that way. It's quantum fluctuations. There's a difference between these virtual energy particles and the real particles. And so there's no like the way you're imagining it, like the ocean has a rest frame, right? It's like there is an ocean, it's a zero velocity in some frame.

That's not true for this quantum vacuum, right? It's an inherent property of space. It has no rest frame, the way that space itself has no absolute zero. For you to be able to row your way through space would mean that space had like some rest frame that we've never discovered before and would violate special relativity. All right.

Well, worth a shot, Daniel. Totally worth a shot. I mean, I only get to do physics two hours a week, so I'm shooting for the moon here with the impossible. Rowing through space, that'll be the name of my engine. That'll be the name of your memoirs, right? The space ore, space or. Or maybe it's just nonsense.

But it's totally worth a shot And it's worth these guys thinking about it And I love the ambition You know, they say All right, we built this drive We agree it shouldn't work But it kind of does So maybe we discovered something new and crazy

About the universe Like that's cool But it has to also actually kind of make sense Right Well, you know But like you say You have to be skeptical But also keep an open mind

Like maybe it is kind of You have to admit a little bit possible For you know Our ideas about conservation of momentum and the vacuum to maybe be a little off. And maybe there is a little bit of a room there to maybe do something that seems as possible. Certainly.

And we don't understand empty space and we don't understand this quantum vacuum and there may be a way to interact with it that allows you to capture momentum in a way that we can't imagine right now. That's true. I don't think this EM drive is doing that. I think this EM drive is just a fun device in a lab somewhere.

I see. It seems unlikely that a little copper cone will somehow pierce the reality of the laws of physics. Yeah, because they've made no connection between how they've built this thing and this quantum vactual virtual plasma. It's like saying, hey, who ate my chocolate chip cookies? I don't know. Maybe it was the quantum vacual virtual plasma, right?

Why not? That's what my kids say all the time. It's not just an escape clause for everything, right? It's not something your physics lawyer to do to get you out of jail no matter what. You need like an actual mechanism, a real explanation for how this plasma which people think doesn't even exist, how this virtual vacuum is somehow giving you momentum. Right.

Why was I late to this podcast recording? Because, you know, the quantum plasma was pushing against me and I lost my space ore and that's what. That's right. Also I had to finish the Mission Impossible Five. It was on TV. So, all right. So I'd say overall, this thing is most likely hype

and not going to lead to anything. But I encourage people out there, experiment in your garage, try to make up a new drive, because, you know, I want us to get to Alpha Centauri. I don't want to go myself, but I want humans to get to explore. You don't want to ride that toothpake. You want somebody else, probably smaller than you to ride it.

There's not a lot of leggy. Because, you know, until we figure something out, it's going to be, it is going to be impossible to make it to Alpha Centauri within a lifetime or a few lifetimes, right? I mean, we need an idea like this, like a crazy idea. Otherwise, we'll never get there. Well, I'm banking on solar sales. I think we build a big laser and a really big sail and you can take a really light craft

and accelerate it to a high speed. So if I was investing money in interstellar transport, I think solar sales are currently the best threat. Okay. How about a quantum plasma sale? That sounds impossible. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed this little trip down impossible lane.

And it's kind of amazing to think that maybe there could be devices out there that break the loss of physics. This one seems like a little bit impossible, but, you know, it is sort of still, out there that we don't understand the loss of physics enough to know whether these things are really conclusive or not, right? That's right. We don't know and we should always keep an open mind to what might be out there. Sometimes people discover crazy stuff when they're trying to do something else. There's lots of times in the history of physics when things have been

discovered by accident. And so, well, I don't think that this drive is cracked open the secrets of the quantum virtual plasma. Keep experimenting, folks. Keep thinking up ideas. You may stumble across something amazing. It could be one of our listeners who breaks the laws of it is. And we get one percent. That's right. And then you can represent them

in the cosmological court of impossibility. That sounds great. My fee is 1% of your Nobel Prize. Is that like a nibble of an apple? That's just the core, yeah. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that

and keep thinking of the impossible. See you next time. Thanks for listening. Remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition.

I haven't auditioned in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And, of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dacus Come Again on the IHeartRadio app,

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