EM Drive BUSTED!

hi I'm Roger Shire I'm an engineer and in 1999 I invented a controversial space propulsion system to be used in satellites and rockets well it's finally here the revolutionary electromagnetic drive so M Drive is going to change the world because first of all it will give us flying cars the one that's going to give us hotter cars it will give us unrestricted access to any where we want to go to in space I touch it any hover cars hover cars that will take you from London to Sydney in about two and a half hours it's going to solve global warming and eventually it will help provide energy for the world and solve the global warming problem it could take you to Mars in just 70 days or to the moon in just four hours it's amazing and yes it's just past peer-review so for starters I'm going to ignore all the stuff about this violating the law of conservation of momentum which is kind of the scientific equivalent of saying then a miracle happens and I'm just going to take their results at face value just to see how revolutionary this drive actually is now firstly I shall make it clear that the inventor of the drive that's the guy making the a remarkable claims weren't the same people who actually did this recently published study they seem to be independent so according to their peer review paper it produces a whopping 40 to 80 micro Newton's of force for 80 watts of power that's about the energy of one of these energy guzzling incandescent lightbulbs so that thing there is about a hundred watt light bulb power going light bulb now those of you impressed with 80 Micronesians that's 80 millions of a newton let me just put that into perspective I mean let me say I'm a big guy I weigh about 100 kilos so this is your sort of tip humans about 100 kilos give or take it's about 200 pounds you know learn too much about the details here and I experience gravity an acceleration of 10 meters per second squared towards the ground that means that I exert a force on the ground of about 1,000 Newtons that's effectively my weight now this eeehm thruster produces 80 Micronesians of thrust so let's be generous and call it the 100 micro Newton's 100 millionths of a Newton so only to provide enough thrust to lift me off the ground would require about 10 million of these engines so M Drive is going to change the world because first of all it will give us flying cars but it gets better if we look at the power to thrust ratio so they say they got about 100 Micronesians for a hundred or so what so it's about a million Newton of force per kilowatt of power kill or power is 1,000 watts so cool so in order to lift just me would require I kid you not a gigawatt of power it's not to send one back to the future that's just to lift one person off the ground so perspective time the entire electrical generating capacity of America is 1,000 gigawatts so the entire grid of America using the emdrive could lift about 1,000 people off the ground and those people about 100 kilos apiece so the entire electrical generating capacity of America could put about 100 tons in the air for 1,000 gigawatts now a Chinook helicopter can put about 20 tons in the air for about two megawatts of power so five of them could lift again about 100 tons for about 10 megawatts that means the regular motors are about a hundred thousand times more effective than the emdrive the emdrive now for those of you trying to picture what a factor of 100,000 looks like they're consider a regular guy who can lift say 10 kilograms and there's about 10 kilos which is not light it's about one-tenth of my body weight now let's make him 100,000 times stronger so rather than lifting 10 kilograms he can now lift a million kilograms or 1000 tonnes that's the equivalent of lifting 10 super heavy tanks all these super super stupid tanks that Germany never quite around making in World War 2 by side with a modern tank the rat would have colossal weight 1,000 tonnes length 35 metres so let's see their device produces this are amazing 100 micro Newton's about the same force is 10 millionths of a kilogram so it's about the same force as the weight of a single drop of water okay so the emdrive produces about 10 milligrams of thrust this is a milligram balance so let's do one drop of water to call in to this is about 40 milligrams so that's 4 times the thrust of the emdrive and it's gonna get around about ten milligrams if we can add 15 milligrams it's close enough right so that's about the actual thrashed the DM Drive juices and it could do that for about 100 watts of power so if you just take the energy that a typical human consumes per day and express that in terms of power rating your typical human actually consumes about as much power as a hundred watt light or one of these energy doubling light bulbs which is curiously about the same amount of energy that the emdrive needed to produce 10 milligrams of thrust ok so let's see what I can produce in the way of thrust just by using my breath so I can produce about a hundred times as much thrust just using my breath as the emdrive so you got that both me and the emdrive wondered about the same power a hundred watts the emdrive produces a massive ten milligrams of thrust now I don't know how much of my 100 watt running power went into blowing on those scales but it probably wasn't that much and even at that I produced about a hundred times as much thrust as the emdrive but there's more I mean let's just see if the convection currents of a hundred watt light bulb can produce more thrust than the emdrive okay I put that on the top now we see what that will do oh oh the levitating a piece of plastic yep okay my little by Bob just about produces enough thrust to keep me up on how much does that weigh I is about 15 milligrams it's about five times the thrust of the emdrive or maybe a slightly different way of looking at things this light bulb takes 100 watts of power to run that's 100 joules per second so the power to run this light for just one second is 100 joules so if I would give that energy in terms of kinetic energy to a kilogram of weight ballpark figures again one kilogram is about one liter of water or ice which is about one hundredth of my body weight how fast would that water bottle be going well kinetic energy is 1/2 MV squared so it's going to be about 14 meters per second now let's compare this to the remarkable M Drive well 100 watts gives you about 100 and micronewtons of force a force that would give one kilogram an acceleration of 100 micro newtons per second squared so it's velocity after one second is going to be about 100 micro meters per second or to put it another way of all the energy that you put into this drive only about one part in 10,000 goes in to velocity or one hundredth of a percent of the energy goes in to velocity now let's compare that to the efficiency of say a rocket engine which it turns out in terms of changing energy into velocity is pretty much the best thing in the market turning about half of the energy into thrust that's a pretty amazing seeing is most internal combustion engines max out at about 30% so rocket engines convert about 50% of the energy of the fuel into velocity so the M drive convert about a hundredth of a percent of the energy into velocity are you finished mr. slain now I'm just getting warmed up all engines require a power source rockets pack that energy in in the form of fuel which bar nuclear fuels is basically the most energy dense stuff you can get it gives you the most kilojoules per kilogram and then that fuel and you put it through one of the most efficient motors on the market which converts about half of that energy into velocity and even at that you really have to pack the energy in to these rocket you know typically to get a rocket to orbit at something like ninety percent fuel by weight when they take off so let's the sake of argument say that you could produce that thrust through electricity while you still got to pack that energy on board your rocket problem is if you compare the energy in one kilogram of rocket fuel to one kilogram of batteries the batteries optimistically contain about one-tenth of the energy of the rocket fuel so even if you had electric engines as powerful and efficient as rocket engines the weight of the battery fuel alone would mean this rocket would never get off the ground oh yeah and the emdrive is nowhere near as efficient as a rocket motor it's got about the efficiency of trying to move a truck by shouting at it but there will be a much more serious application and that will be when we can use em drive for low-cost access to space and we can start launching solar power satellites I mean it's a no-brainer once you can get low-cost access to space then you can solve the world's energy problems well I actually have no trouble with healthy skepticism however I was very shocked by the level of personal abuse that came back so some ballpark figures you'll recall that just to lift me off the ground with an M drive would require about a gigawatt of power what a look at another way as a watt is one Joule per second to lift me off the ground just one person off the ground for one second would require one Giga Joule of energy there aren't really batteries that can hold one mega Joule of energy per kilogram yet but let's just save the sake of argument that they did that means to lift just one single man off the ground for one second could require one that wasn't kilograms one tonne of batteries and indeed I still get some insults on some of these internet forums but I guess I've got it's pretty immune to it now and just put it down to very strange people being out there on the Internet oh and just so you know that's enough energy to vaporize you about five times over I mean it's a no-brainer once you can get low-cost access to space then you can solve the world's energy problems call me skeptical but I don't think with the emdrive really quite into the League of Hava Kashia in the next decade M Drive technology will start to be being used all over the world I think most people will only really notice M Drive when they can call up a personal air vehicle land vertically outside their house it will take them wherever they want to go quietly comfortably safely that's the sort of consumer application that we're looking towards or free space trouble and this such like but there will be a much more serious application and that will be when we can use M drive for low-cost access to space the UK Ministry of Defense and the American Department of Defense are interested in emdrive and that's assuming that what they've got in the paper is correct wait it isn't so how do I clean this drive actually work cuz weeds just microwaves bouncing around inside a copper comb put electrical energy into this connector here and it produces a force in this direction which propels the thruster and anything it's connected to in this direction well they claim that due to the microwaves bouncing up and down inside this cone that somehow generates thrust yeah that violates the conservation of momentum and that just not going to happen I mean your suspicions may first being raised by the massive press release that NASA did how they have results that showed that the law of conservation of momentum was wrong I'll wait they didn't and even if they had NASA's not beyond putting out there you know a stick based life and the incredible response it got from the earth scientifically literate press it may be a game-changer in the search for alien life NASA scientists unveiled a discovery Thursday that it says redefines life as we know it these microbes are composed of arsenic instead of phosphorus instead of phosphorus so it's a huge deal because all of a sudden they're like as so it turns out that some living things could be genetically different well a major announcement today by NASA that a new form of life has been discovered right here on earth in California in fact where we have a new life-form the finding in a salty lake near Yosemite National Park in California shows just how little scientists know about the variety of life-forms on earth we do it's a new life-form everybody's going crazy over it thankfully early some people out there who actually read the scientific paper and call on look no serious scientific discovery is ever prefaced by the facepalm words this is an artist's rendition of what we think is going on in the cell and yet this is what is said in the press conference so it was associated it was inside the cell it was somehow associated with the DNA and it had this chemical environment or it had an analogous sort of sort of it's like sitting at a dinner table and you and your neighbors and how we might see that you were all around well what should be in the place of phosphorus looks like it was arsenic we measured it as arsenic and so let's look at an artist rendition of what we think is going on in a cell let's let's roll that animation please so here we're saying the beautiful elegant structure of the double helix of DNA and what I want to highlight is the phosphate backbone we say and that's the light orange balls and it stitches together as we see the edges of DNA it holds together the DNA the backbone and so what we think is happening what are all the evidence we've collected suggests is that instead of these we'll see these these orange light orange balls disappear and represented by green balls we see that arsenic would be substituting for phosphorus in the backbone of DNA and you can see how critical this component of the DNA might be now let's compare this to what is actually said in the conclusions of their science paper how astok insinuates itself into the structure of the biomolecules is unclear and the mechanism by which such molecules operate are unknown now that has said that in the press conference I wouldn't be making this video but then again they wouldn't have anything to have announced at the press conference that I've isolated a microbe that's doing something very different it can survive with exceed only high levels of arsenic it seems to be growing in a unique way and hopefully very shortly we'll be making a very interesting announcement and that announcement could have a huge impact on the search for extraterrestrials or he could not Oh oh my well researched BBC documentary it could just be that this great announcement was he was a effectively evicted from her job and her groundbreaking paper was put on retraction watch as subsequent studies showed her results were yeah oh look at her seen it coming but in this case yeah NASA despite the fact that if this was true it would throw away the whole war book on physics yeah curiously they didn't want anything to do with publicizing this you see it's as simple as this remarkable claims require remarkable evidence and honestly having to measure your thruster on one of the world's most sensitive bounces ain't it with most space type engines it's a matter of can you build a rig strong enough to actually hold the agent well then can you make an instrument sensitive enough to determine whether it's actually producing thrust or me noise passing peer-review for some gamma-ray dumping ground exactly a stamp of approval from the academic community and it's not helped by the fact that other people have also got thrust out of these things and then once they've managed to get rid of the errors curiously that thrust vanished well they claim it's all the microwaves bouncing up and down inside this cone which is just a complete non-starter you gotta understand that photons will I have no mass do actually have momentum it's a quantum mechanical thing so the photon drive is perfectly possible but because photons have a lot of energy and almost no momentum it's just one of the most power hungry methods of propulsion ever I mean you don't know that photons produce almost no thrust otherwise every time we turn up on all understand or something it would blow itself over with the momentum from the photons so yeah you can actually have a photon thruster it's just a gargantuan ly inefficient the end drive claims to be more efficient than just a photon thrust problem is that's not how physics works bottom line is when you get a photon absorbed or reflected it conveys momentum the thing is that just a photon bouncing back and forth in a cavity is not transferring any net momentum anywhere so basically all of this energy that they pump into this metal cone thing is being turned into heat which is especially funny things the guy claims the M Drive is inherently stealthy because it has no thermal signature in the depths of the Pentagon fairly high-level presentation ended by the US Air Force DARPA NASA and it was actually chaired by the director of the National Security spacewalking essentially it provides good maneuverability continuous maneuverability with stealth characteristics and a clearly M Drive has no exhaust signature and therefore is inherently very stealthy inherently stealthy what the hell are you talking about this drivers you Colette turned about 99.99% of the energy into heat it's basically a big heater as you can see from the actual infrared images presented in their paper yeah very stealthy continuous maneuverability with stealth characteristics what's that what are they actually looking at it well if I had to guess it's a phenomena very similar to a Radiometer you know one of these guys okay so that's a Radiometer it's got black plates to get hot and silver plates that eyes you stay relatively cool and so what there is is a low-pressure of gas in here and when the side of the plate heats up the molecules hitting it come away faster than when they hit it which basically conveys momentum to this thing which spins up so if I provide a nice infrared light source okay so one infrared light source on hey yeah it's pretty quick than that okay so you may have seen suggestions that these are actually driven by photons actually hitting the dark side and being absorbed and it's that momentum that's actually driving around so this is a little demo shirts not the case so what I've got here is some various light bulbs that there is a LED light now photons in the visible region are actually higher energy in therefore higher momentum than those in the infrared and what you'll see is it doesn't need accelerator it's exactly the greatest of accelerations and so now I can try that with an incandescent light bulb so it's mostly giving out visible light at beginning and what you'll see is again there's a pretty tepid acceleration even though if if this was actually being driven by photons being absorbed he would expect it to spin faster with visible photons than with infrared photons and so this is what happens when I give it a blast with the infrared it's pretty clear you may let me just print you a picture here a cavity is cold and air molecules hitting both sides they bounce off with the same energy they hit it that means that there is no net momentum conveyed to this box now imagine that one side of this is heated for some reason now when the molecule hits here it bounces off with more energy than the one hitting the other side and this produces a thrust for the object and that's basically how a Radiometer works yeah these radiometers require a partial atmosphere to work now let's just say the same thing is happening here they just were for sake of argument one side of this is getting hot for some reason which is not crazy you know you're putting in a hundred watts of power to this thing well what would you expect if this were true well you would expect that if you run it in an atmosphere it'll produce more thrust and if you take away that atmosphere then the effect will almost entirely vanish then guess what when you run the device without air the effect almost entirely vanishes so for instance they get about 10 grams of thrust when it's running in an atmosphere through two a demonstrator engine that could actually produce eight grams of thrust and then when you remove almost all of the air the thrust goes down by 99.9 percent and you're left with an amazing ten milligrams of thrust that could be chalked up to one of a thousand experimental variables that hasn't been accounted for actually this point are going to make a slight correction the paper does actually say they got the same results both with and without the atmosphere that result was the amazing 10 milligrams of thrust however both of those are a factor of a thousand other than the thrust of the inventor cleaned that he got however would thrust that low even if you might explode a nuclear reactor on a low thrust rocket for deep space trouble the incredibly low efficiency of the engine would basically offset the extra energy density from the nuclear fuel and even if this result was real which it isn't you would basically be at the break-even point with conventional chemical fuels and trust me when you're putting a hundred watts of power through a machine and trying to track down a stray force of ten milligrams that tricky because honestly is going to be practical about this you have one result right on the limit of what can experimentally be measured to the point where other groups who have looked at this retract their results when they actually found some minor error in their measurement and this thrust is right on the limit of what can actually be detected with the most sensitive instrument and the guy who originally thought of this physically non-central idea is a crank who thinks that such devices which can barely produce any detectable thrust will do all of this it will give us flying cars unrestricted access to anywhere we want to go to in space it will help provide energy for the world and solve the global warming problem in the words of the inventor check the maths for yourself well Einstein I did and you're talking crap but hey if I want to named you there's one ten thousandth of the efficiency of a regular rocket engine that runs of an energy source that's one-tenth as powerful as rocket fuel all to produce a thrust that is barely detectable on some of the world's most sensitive scientific instruments then I'll know just where to come you

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 989,648

Rating: 4.4173374 out of 5

Keywords: EM, Drive, nasa, space, warp, laws, of, physics, science, chemistry, passes, peer, review, impossible, hover, cars, car, free, travel, solar, rodger shawyer, rodger, shawyer, NASA

Id: jCAqDA8IfR4

Length: 28min 34sec (1714 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/TheCaconym]

Ah, yes, the golden standard of scientific rebuttal: a youtube video with a voice-over and memes.

[u/[deleted]]

Not one of his best. While the hype around the subject is easily debunked and the flying cars claim by the inventor are clearly an enormous over-exaggeration, this does not negate the fact that there now is a paper which during review has not shown any major experimental problems to explain the result, which SHOULD NOT BE THERE!!!

So either there is something to be learned about measuring methods or there is something strange, albeit minute, going on which is worth figuring out.

Being anecdotal about it now instead of scientific will result in nothing.

[u/Mazon_Del]

Summarize please.