alright everyone, Cody here
so there has been a lot of buzz lately about the Em-drive, and so I have decided to take another look at it.
After more NASA testing, it appears that the device does seem to somehow work.
So in this video I will try to make some sense of this.
Disclaimer: I failed multivariate calculus, and I do not have access to the actual research that NASA has done,
so most of my data has come from what I can find on Google and I'm going to stay away from advanced math as much as I can.
I have made a little stand in model as the Em-Drive, composed as a capacitor for power and a headlight representing the actual drive.
The capacitor is charged with 6000 Jules of electrical energy, my Em-Drive consumes 8 amps at 12 Volts, so that is about 100 Watts.
The drive-Capacitor combination weighs approximately 1 Kilogram.
It takes 2 minutes to discharge the Capacitor to less than 1 Volt.
as the capacitor voltage drops the power available to the drive also drops, and I'm approximating this curve as a straight line.
if we amuse the Em-Drive puts out 50 Newtons of thrust per Kilowatt, the Value I have been given by some sources,
We should see 5 Newtons into this device, which will go to 0 over a 2 minute period, giving a total of 300 newton seconds of impulse.
This should move the Craft from 0 to 300 Meters per second as It gains 300 Jules of energy.
Dividing 300 by 6000 that gives us a 5% efficiency in converting electrical energy into kinetic energy.
this seems totally fine, and it would not violate conservation of energy since we are putting in way more than we are getting out, at lest as far as we can tell.
so to check ourselves lets try the math with the craft starting at say 100 Meters per second instead of 0,
from the crafts perspective its the same as if it were not moving, you know speed is relative.
however this time the 5 Newton force would now be applied over a
much greater distance therefore more work is done and the device would gain
345,000 Jules we are getting out nearly 60 times the energy that we put in,
a conventional rocket motor producing five Newton's of thrust would also produce
the vastly increased amount of work and any kerbal space program player would
know this as the Oberth effect Rockets become more efficient if you fire them when you're
already moving very quickly, however with a rocket the extra energy comes from the
fuel which has a lot of mass and that mass had to be accelerated up to your
starting velocity, the extra energy needed to accelerate that fuel is then
added to the spacecraft when the fuel is burned and thrown overboard
however in this case since there is no reaction mass being thrown off, it does
violate physics, if this was true that the device could produce that much
thrust for the amount of input you could put it on the end of a long arm attached
to a pivot with a generator which would supply the energy to run the end drive
and it would create infinite energy obviously then Em-drive must not work
because you cannot according to well-tested laws of physics create
energy from nothing
in fact this is almost as absurd as expecting to get infinite energy by
plugging a power strip into itself but NASA seems to approve that is producing
thrust so after a little bit more digging I found a few sources for the
number that NASA got being closer to 1.2 micronewton per kilowatt, way way smaller
but still usable amount of thrust, so let's see if it makes more sense,
given our power consumption we should get .12 micronewtons of thrust and with our setup
that would come out to 7.2 micronewton seconds of impulse for full capacitor charge,
this would accelerate the craft from rest to .007 millimeters per second
giving it a total of 2.6*10^-11 joules of kinetic energy
for an efficiency of you know a trillionth of a percent a
tiny tiny amount but it's still there and so far it doesn't seem to break
physics sense more energy is going in then coming out way more in fact now
let's ramp up the starting speed to 200 million meters per second this is
insanely fast but relativistic effects should be still sort of small since it's
only sixty percent speed of light to get going this fast maybe we drop it into a
tight orbit around a black hole or a neutron star doesn't matter laws of
physics should be the same everywhere. the craft now accelerates from 200
million meters per second to 200 million meters per second plus .0072 millimeters per second
using the kinetic energy equation and plug in these numbers in my
calculator we find that the calculator can't handle it, but once I crunch the
numbers by hand we find that this gives us increase of 1400 joules, for an energy
efficiency of 23% way more and it is not above a hundred so it still does make sense.
so so far we haven't proven that it violates physics, even when put in an
extreme situation but we still don't have a mechanism for how it would be
producing a thrust, but what about what has been staring us in the face all along,
my little device here that I've made to recreate the Em-drive does actually
produce some thrust because it's putting out light, in fact my "does light push?" video
confirmed that photons which have no rest mass but have relativistic mass
and therefore momentum when they're traveling can transfer energy to a
object when they bounce off of it so plugging the numbers into the equation
Force equals watts devided by the speed of light we get .3 micro Newtons of thrust
wait that's more than the Em-drive got remember our model using NASA numbers
got .12 micronewtons that means our light could get 2.5 times more thrust than the
Em-drive of the same wattage, considering that the energy they put into the device
must go somewhere and probably ends up as heat i'm very suspicious that the
effect we're seeing is really just radiation pressure, I do however find it
hard to believe that NASA researchers would overlook such an obvious
explanation so perhaps that will be included in the paper that is coming out
or they've already taken account of that which some sources say they did in which
case this would be an entirely new effect perhaps pushing on the quantum foam or
photon coupling or whatever but it would still be an exciting discovery,
however i do not believe it is one that will allow us to send probes to
other stars, in fact I would argue that any device converting electrical energy
into kinetic energy
no matter the mechanism wouldn't actually be reactionless because as the
capacitors batteries or whatever were drained of energy in order to run the drive
they would also be losing mass because energy equals mass times the
speed of light squared, this brings us back to how rockets work and we know
that rockets do indeed work as someone who believes in the scientific method i will stay
open to the possibility that the laws of physics could be wrong
however i am so confident that the laws of physics will hold that if any device
is capable of producing more than a Newton thrust for less than 300 million
watts of power without throwing something else overboard or is capable
of maneuvering itself in space better than a solar cell spacecraft could
then I will actually eat this hat
I'm not kidding if such a discovery is made I will be so excited that
I will be perfectly happy munching down on a little bit of cotton
so i hope you guys enjoyed the little
bit different video style for today it didn't turn out quite as well as I'd
hoped but it is something I've been wanting to try out for a while if you
guys would like to see a little bit better video my friend Isaac Arthur put
out a video on a similar topic on his channel earlier today so if you like
really long in-depth science videos I would definitely recommend going to check him out
links are in the description. hope you all enjoyed, i'll see you next time!