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new propellantless drive company

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woofy:
Professor Eric Laithwaite came up with similar nonsense, suggesting that the behaviour of gyroscopes violated the law of conservation of energy. He said there was a device which could displace itself outside of its own center of mass. It ultimately destroyed his reputation and career.

coppercone2:
that is sad that you can get your reputation and career destroyed for challenging some assumption most people don't even understand. Because you know there is some zealot with no clue what center of gravity even is getting mad because "he challenged alot of smart people!!!' . bit of a religious thing IMO


they might lead the youth astray!!

Alex Eisenhut:
Buttered toast strapped to a cat?

Njk:
Some patents can be really funny. Example: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5782134A/en

Anyway it seems at NASA many people made their careers by managing a projects of that kind

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20050041926

Nominal Animal:
Propellantless drives violate conservation of linear momentum, but not necessarily conservation of energy.  Without going into the theoretical physics of it (because I ain't a theorist), it would require violation of spatial symmetry somehow, because the conservation corresponds to continuous smooth spatial symmetries per Emmy Noether's theorem.

Thing is, if such a violation can be produced using current human technology, we probably should have seen it already in stellar and cosmological phenomena.
Whether we have ("dark energy", et cetera), I do not know.

I can imagine one tiny possibility, though: a variable electric field that not only generates spontaneous electron–positron pairs (Schwinger effect), but also somehow (handwaving magic here) affecting the distribution of linear momentum of those pairs.  Think of Alcubierre drive, but instead of energy density, in the distribution of directions of the linear momentum of the spontaneously generated pairs.  Basically, within the "drive volume" the pairs would have a nonzero sum linear momentum; with the volume outside having the opposite vector sum.

It is extremely unlikely, though.  I do like the idea in the sci-fi sense, because it would be basically "pushing" on space itself; and might not actually violate conservation of energy, or even linear momentum in the strict sense.  https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.2.1191 (1970) would be my starting point.

(Feel free to laugh at me for entertaining such ideas.  I do; it is fun.  :-+)

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