Standby for adventure! With conventional fuel rockets, it would take 15, 16,000 years
to get to the nearest star. Conventional kind of rockets are just out of the question
for interstellar travel. You're gonna have to do something a little bit more out there. Slow to half impulse. Going one half impulse. What we're trying to do
is build an impulse engine like you hear on "Star Trek." We'd like it to go at about a 0.4 the velocity of light, just so that we can get
to the nearest stars within a human lifetime. There's no burnt up fuel. There's nothing being
shot out of a tailpipe. And it's the gravitational field that actually will propel
this thing forward. This is the Mach Effect
Gravity Assist Drive, a device that could make
interstellar space travel possible. But the MEGA drive, as it's known, is also a design that hinges on some pretty
controversial physics. For many years, you work on a project
that people think is nuts and you're likely to be
regarded as nuts too. Now, after 30 years of fine-tuning, this pair of scientists
might finally be close to getting the results
they've been hoping for. And NASA are taking the idea seriously. If something like that were
true, it'd be earth-shaking. It'd be groundbreaking,
revolutionary new physics, but those sorts of advancements
don't come along very often. That would be a pretty extraordinary claim to say that we've put this new spin on the way the universe works that we didn't know before. It's a well-known Newtonian law: an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays
in motion at a constant speed unless an external force acts on it. All objects resist a push to some extent, and what makes them do that? Inertia. In the 19th century Austrian physicist Ernst
Mach made a conjecture that these forces of inertia result from the gravity of
objects in the distant universe. It became known as Mach's principle. And while most experts
have now dismissed it, scientists at this lab in California think the idea is just misunderstood. Mach's principle itself has
sort of gone out of vogue and people don't seriously even discuss Mach's principal anymore. It just depends on the
way you think about it. If you're looking at a textbook, you might find five or
six different definitions of Mach's principle. But the one I'm thinking of is that distant matter way out there can influence things up close. To get your head around it, take this old analogy used to illustrate how matter bends space-time. If you put a heavy object on a trampoline, it falls in and curves the rubber sheet. Now, if you roll a ball on the trampoline, it will keep orbiting the
heavy mass in the center. That's how a planet behaves when it's attracted by
the gravity of a star. The thing is for the rubber
sheet to act that way, it has to be under tension. It has to be stretched. And we're saying that basically, the distant matter of the universe is what's pulling the
space-time and making it taut. And that's what's
causing it to act like a, basically like a rubber sheet. The stretched rubber sheet is loaded with potential energy. And according to the team's understanding of the Mach principle, so is space-time. So we're thinking that there's a big gravitational
potential out there and this device can
actually tap into that. Imagine the space-time of the universe as being like a very, very flat lake. And you're sitting in a rowboat, the kind that has the seat that moves backwards and forwards, but you don't have any oars. Instead, you have two great big buckets, like big trash cans. While you slide forward in the seat, the mass shifts around and
the boat moves slightly. That's conservation of
momentum, another Newtonian law. If there are no external
forces acting on a system while it's moving, its center of mass has
to stay in the same spot. And so the boat is moving to compensate for the
different distribution of mass. Now, what you're gonna do is you're gonna dump the
buckets into the water, which is the universal space-time. And now, you're a lot
heavier than you were. Now, you're gonna slide back in the seat. And as you slide back, the boat is gonna move under you so that your center of mass
remains in the same spot. The boat actually moves forward as you slide back in the seat. Then you can dump out the water, 'cause you don't need it anymore, and then you repeat that process. The MEGA drive works in a similar way. The part which is doing all the work is a stack of piezoelectric crystals, the same kind of material that's in your electric toothbrush. When you apply a certain
frequency of electric current, the crystals expand and contract, which causes the whole device to vibrate. But the MEGA drive is set up to vibrate mainly in one direction, which causes it to accelerate slightly. The team says this
acceleration enables the device to tap into the gravitational
potential of the universe. By borrowing some of its energy, the crystals change mass and the device starts
behaving like our rowboat. That mass change is what's
causing the propulsion because each crystal kind of
moves in this sort of fashion. So the whole stack is
in this breathing mode, which moves backwards and forwards. As it gains energy, it increases mass. And then it shrinks again and loses mass. If you time it just right, you can actually make
that thing move forward. All of this has been the life's work of Jim Woodward, who set off on this path
over three decades ago. Since then, he's been working alone on the MEGA drive
project in his spare time until his desk at the
university was relocated to the office of Hal Fearn. I was away on sabbatical. And I came back and there he was. There I was. And Hal was not happy. And at first, I thought
it was absolutely insane. I thought, what on earth
is this guy trying to do? I took a closer look at what he was doing. That's when I really
became more interested. The shift is very small though. The shift is not that small. I grew up on "Star Trek" and I would love to be able to say that I worked on something that would help people to get
across space-time quickly. If the theory turns out to be correct and we are really tapping
into the gravitational field, it would be a serious breakthrough. It's just, I've got to prove it. Hi, Shell, are you there?
Yeah, I'm here. But proving this idea has been a problem. The movements of the device
have been extremely small, not large enough to
register with the naked eye. But after receiving two grants from the NASA Institute
for Advanced Concepts, or NIAC for short, the team has managed to greatly improve their existing prototype. Jim was basically paying all
this out of his own money. He must have put 30 to
$50,000 into this project. He didn't want to buy off
the shelf kind of equipment 'cause some of it wasn't available when he started doing
this 30 odd years ago. You couldn't buy some of the equipment. You just had to make it and
build the circuits yourself. We did have some people
come over at one point and they saw Jim's homemade boxes. They didn't really take
him that seriously. I had to convince Jim to buy
some equipment off the shelf that we could get fully calibrated. Trying to get things set up so that we could actually do some runs that would make
interesting video material. Many new collaborators have joined along the way, and the team has designed
a new setup for the device, hanging it from a pendulum
to increase thrust and eliminate any vibrations, which might be mistaken for it. Okay, here it goes. Three, two, one. And they finally started seeing it move with their own eyes. You can physically see this thing shudder around, vibrating, and you can physically see
it move off to one side. So that's actually quite exciting. If we can actually show that by video, then I think that actually should convince quite a few people. It’s on a reflector on the frame. Okay? I still think we should
give Jim that air horn that looks like a wormhole. No. 'Cause I think it looks cool. Yeah. The devices we build now
produce those type of forces between 100 and 1,000 times larger than the forces that we were producing even a year or two ago. It's very, very small. If you think maybe a little pulley with a little mass held
on the end of a string, the force that that would produce if you dropped, say, two or
three grams of weight down. You'd almost barely feel it in your hand. It's almost like the weight of a feather. Maybe a little bit more than a feather. Maybe two feathers. I'll be be generous, I'll give you a couple of feathers. The team calculates that the smaller the device, the larger the force it can generate. So instead of scaling up, they hope that arrays of
thousands of tiny MEGA drives powered by a nuclear battery
could one day be deployed to accelerate large probes
into interstellar space. They are sufficient actually
in and of themselves to make it possible to take a starship, a human-crewed starship, to nearby stars and back in some reasonable
fraction of the human lifetime. So the question is,
have we all screwed up? Are we collectively smoking something? Do we not know what we're doing? I suppose you might argue
that that's the case. But the way to find out is to find out whether or
not the gizmos that we make are really doing what
we say they are doing. A few other teams have already tried to replicate
the MEGA drive's results, but the findings were negative. People don't expect this thing to work. It sounds so bizarre. There are several things that could happen that could cause these false positives. And that's what people
think is gonna happen. If they're saying this strange
effect is actually real, then... and then somebody else comes
along and proves it wrong, then they look like they have
egg on their face, basically. So it's much harder to say
that something is a real effect when it's controversial. Because of this controversy, NASA is now funding an independent
study of the MEGA drive at the Naval Research Laboratory. The neat thing about the
claim here is, they say there's some revolutionary new physics that lets you vary your inertial mass, which means you can actually be heavier and lighter at different times. And if you can wiggle at the same time as
you're changing your mass, now you've maybe got a way
to move yourself around and do some sort of wiggly,
wiggly, wiggly thing all through space. Now, is that possible in this universe? Maybe? Maybe not. Mike McDonald is part of the team testing the device, but even he admits that
conclusively proving or disproving this theory won't be easy. Is the test going to be conclusive? Let me answer that
question with a question. What if I ask you to prove to me that there are no pink elephants? Now, you might say every
elephant I've ever seen is gray, but how do I know you just
haven't looked hard enough? The answer is that you can't
really prove a negative. Tests give us enough information to decide if the way we
think the world works is valid enough for us to
keep going in that direction. And that's what this
sort of test can tell us. If you asked me to put on my betting hat and say, are we really going to see exactly the effect that is claimed, and is it going to be so strong that we think, ah, yes, it's definitely the
mechanism that's claimed too? You know, I'd say that's a number probably somewhere between one and 10 and one in 10 million, and I would lean toward the higher end. The odds, the odds are on no to be honest, but the odds are on no for
every new idea that comes up. And remember that science isn't a tool that gets dirtied by use. You know, the scientific method
comes out of any encounter looking as shiny as where it started. And if we use it well, even if we don't find that
there's some new effect here, we'll learn something about how to do these kinds
of tests better in the future for whatever is coming along next. There's a small but real chance that there's nothing to it. For me, it's exceedingly unlikely, but there's been more than one occasion where things haven't gone
right on a particular day and I've started drafting
an apology to the people who are interested in this, saying "Gee guys, I'm really sorry. You know, it wasn't real after all." I haven't had one of those
episodes in a number of months. Assuming the device passes its replication trials and nothing else can explain the forces the team is claiming, one day, the ultimate test would be for an array of MEGA drives to maneuver a CubeSat in space. I'm 79 years old, so I don't know how
long I'm going to live. A few years, maybe I'll see something
in space, maybe I won't. If I live longer than that, I'm pretty sure I will
see something in space. Science fiction will be vindicated as transformed into scientific
fact in that regard.
This reminds me a LOT of the EM-Drive resonance cavity microwave engine. The massless drive. The reactionless drive. The cone of metal full of bouncing microwaves that can produce propulsion without a reaction mass.
One of the theorised explanations for the EM Drive breaking Newton's third law was that it was pushing against the background mass of the universe. Maybe it's pushing against the higgs field directly or perhaps the quantum foam or virtual particles.
Until it was tested a bit more closely and found to be a measurement error. The EM Drive prototypes produced a tiny tiny amount of thrust even in a vacuum when powered by fairly substantial amounts of electric current. On closer inspection that massive burst of electric current was causing the power cables to flex slightly from their own magnetic field. The tiny measured thrust was an experimental error.
It's a safe bet that the same is true here. Any tiny bits of thrust measured from these prototypes are probably from a similar experimental error. Maybe the piezoelectric crystals are offgassing a few atoms every time they flex or its the power cable again. Produce a thrust that is large enough to not be an experimental error then it's worth exploring.
I think they lost me at how they were changing the mass of the crystal. The piezoelectricity effect hasn't been observed to affect the mass.
No they're not, stop falling for cranks. "Impulse engines" violate conservation of momentum and if you give me one I can find you a frame of reference where they violate energy conservation as well and you can get limitless energy out of the whole thing. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
If you believe this then I've got Gandalf's staff to sell you.
If they really crave believability, they need to change the font on that report from Comic Sans. Just saying.
It doesn't help they dubbed crickets into the video towards the end.
Frankly, under very specific circumstances I think a magnetic/RF drive of some type may work. Space isn't completely empty. Once a craft leaves our solar system, the density of free hydrogen increases dramatically. I think it would be possible to construct an engine using microwave/ RF/ magnetism that pushes against that interstellar medium to travel. Just, it wouldn't really work within the bowshock of our own sun.