Is the impossible drive possible?

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Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, how do you feel about breaking the laws of physics? Boy? That needs some context. It really depends on whether you have a good physics lawyer to back you up. It really depends on which law you're gonna break. I mean, you might get a misdemeanor. In some cases, you might even end up with a felon. Really there's a range here, all right, So then what's the equivalent of getting life in prison for physics too? I think they put you in a room with a cartoonist and they're the worst defenders. 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 you hoping it's wrong? Well, you know, anytime somebody claims to disprove Einstein, I get pretty skeptical because that's been tested a lot. But in my heart of hearts, I'm really hoping that someone disproves a big law physics, like relativity. I mean that that's how we learned 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 am r handa cartoonists 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. And in the end I liked physics because it had a hard negative objectivity at its core. Like I want certainty, just like in quantum physics where everything's for sure and there's no funny names. 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 some things, right if the experiments say no, at least on a probabilistic kind of sense, Right, there's certainty. Yeah, alright, well, we are certainly starting our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart 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. 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 right, because you know, sometimes some of the biggest ideas in physics have been that they thought they were they were impossible, you know, like when quantum physics first came out, people thought it were like, that's a crazy why would nature be like that? Right? 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 dude, 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 burghers? Oh, that sounds delicious, That sounds as possible 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 beautifying, le 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 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 con Cruise. That does sound like an impossible combination of things to pull off all that one. 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 base, like how to get two 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 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 raw good fuel would it take to accelerate a very very small object, you know, something like a toothpick up two, I don't know five of the speed of light really the kind of the kind of speed that would make it take like only a hundred years to get to alpha centar. So my spacecraft was just a toothpick zero point one, Grahams, how much fuel would it take to get it to alpha centri within like a hundred 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, exactly. You have to do. You have to bring an oil tanker, not just like a little prious 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 five of the speed of light takes more mass than exists in the observable universe by a huge by huge number. How much hen to the 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 it's frustratingly difficult one with two thousand zeros in front of 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 gonna need. You're gonna need as much fuel as like the Sun. All right, Well, now your spaceship is Jupiter and the Sun. How much fuel a you're gonna need to push that? Well, you're gonna need like more suns. So it just grows 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. You need a better way, right, one where you don't have to bring your fuel with you. That's right, when where you don't have to bring the fuel with you, that's the idea, even if you use like, you know, is this the current fuel technology, you know, like you know, the current rocket fuel or is this like imagining like what if we invent fusion drives or you know, we managed to invent fission 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. I see, like how much mass you have to expel in order to be pushed to the speed of light? Yeah, precisely. So this this cool, crazy new idea out there, This e M 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 claimed to have built one and made it work. Wow. And this came to us from a question from one of our listeners, right Russell Alert. Yeah, he wrote to us about a year ago and said, hey, you could you guys explain this drive to me. Is it impossible? Doesn't work? Could it actually get us to the stars? And it's taken us a year to answer just to well, I built one of these things. I welcome to a centauri and I came back. I mean, I do some real field research. 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 backed 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 as we're making our way to to pick podcast studios, inc well as usually what we were wondering how many people out there had heard of this impossible drive or e M drive? And so, as usual, Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet to ask people what is an e M drive and could it ever work? So think about it for a second, if you had ever heard of it or not, and if physicist ask you, what would you say. Here's what people had to say, Honey, I'm trying if I haven't heard of. I'm going to presume that e M stands for electromagnetic and drive as some sort of propulsion systems. So maybe some sort of rocket buster or engine that doesn't require few but relies on electromagnetic waves to propel itself. I think theoretically it could work, but it's on the realm of theoretical really tbt. But nothing has been done, but it there. Supposedly you need a lot of energy to make it work. And E M drived I think, well, first of all, it sounds really familiar, like I like a lot of sci fi, so I it's a term that 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 at up later. And E M drive is an electromagnetic drive that functions by putting a lot of microwaves together. Currently Toshiba in general Electric have the best ratings by consumer reports. Anyways, 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 achieve launch. I have no idea what an E M drive is. I'm assuming that means electromagnetic, but I'm not sure, so I have no idea to 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 e M drive, so I'm going to get then E M stands for electromagnetic, and of course drive means it's some sort of a of an engine um with they can use electromagnetic pulses to create thrust. I guess I don't know what an e M drive is, but I do know another type of drive. It's called the infinite probability drive. It was installed on the starship part of Gold, and it was and it is still in use today. I can explained it properly, but I know it's more possible than a warp drive. Sorry, Daniel, no idea. Maybe a device for driving around the universe. I have not ideal EM drive. So the M drive I've heard, Uh it's not the Canay drive where it's uh slotted resonance space um. But the idea is that momentum is quantized, and so if you have a smaller space on one side and the larger space on the other side. It can bounce back some kind of microwave frequency, I think, and create propulsion lists thrust, but I don't think it's anything that actually works. I don't know what an e M drive is exactly. I think it would 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 not a lot of recognition, but some people seem to know what it was, or maybe they just lashed onto the electromagnetic cart it. He asked some good guesses there, and some people had definitely heard about this, and this really made some waves. Pun intended about ten years ago. So there's 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 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 only laws of physics were totally destroyed, and all life depends on the laws of physics. So I don't really know is it vegan to break the laws of physics or not. I need of 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. I was let's step thraight here. Uh. First of all, well what is it and where did this idea come from? So the idea for the e M 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 gonna move left, the only way to do that is to push something else right. That's the only way really in the universe, the only way. 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 that you know, the scales of galaxies and particles, so we're pretty confident it's true. And it just basically is 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 their momentum balances. Like if your brick and initially has zero momentum, in 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 centari, you have to push yourself there. Almost it's like you have to if you want to get your toothpick to alpha centor you have to push the equivalent of a toothpick and 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 is when it's starting. 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 at the back, and the gun is your rocket. A 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 that you guys thought about, that one. That is basically the idea. I mean, that's what a chemical rocket is, right, You 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 to something to throw out the back. Because you can just stand there and throw things off the bag, you would get tired. You need you need some energy to do it right. Well, it's like you can't push yourself up by your bootstraps, right, You can't stand in your spaceship and like 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 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 mess with you, the stuff you're gonna 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 gonna need tomorrow, and the stuff you 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, you know, spaceship Jupiter, just to go to Alpha Centauri, the paler of 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 um, something that somehow violates the laws of conservation of momentum. Yes, exactly, And 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, like if you would build a device that seems to the laws of conservation momentum, that means that either one you screwed something up in your experiments to 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 to wear it. You've 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 a centaur. Just stay here and monetize your amazing physics breaking idea. That's right, your impossible foam or whatever it is you've discovered. Yeah, and and you know, so this is a different class of ideas. This e M drive is a different class of ideas than ideas like a solar sales. Solar sales of 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, and so the whole engine. You can think of it like as the laser that stays home, and the sale is the part of the ship. Right. It's like you you're that's that's different idea where you kind of catch things that are out there and use them to kind of hit your 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 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's sounds awesome. I want the impossible drive to be impossible. I want a car with the impossible drive. I do. Yeah, I want to take it to you know, the Burger Joint and by an impossible burger. All right, Well, it sounds too good to be true, almost kind of like a Tom Cruise movie almost. But let's get into how it actually works and whether or not it's possible or possible and what people have done about it. But first let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel, we're talking about the impossible drive, which is maybe a crazy easy idea that violates the laws of physics, but which could potentially get us to other star systems in other galaxies. Because it's a 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 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, right, But then we also have to be skeptical. We can't just take every crazy ideas, right. You gotta eat that impossible burger just to see for yourself, because it maybe it can't take it's just like real or maybe the beyond burger is beyond the impossible burger. Who knows, right, data is the only is there beyond engine? Also not yet I'm working on I see. Oh sorry, sorry, that's beyond the scope of today's podcast, 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'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, It's made out of metal, and the cylinders have 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 microware. 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 resident cavity and the thing that makes up the cavity, you can get almost told internal reflection all right. So it's kind of like a resonant cavity right where microwaves bound in side and somehow that gives you superpowers. Well, if you're bitten by that cavity right, then you get that cavity is proportionate starting that's right, you become the impossible man. Know the idea, So you have a bottle with Marco waves 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. 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 it's more forced the left than there is on the right. That's the idea behind the e M draw by radiation pressure. You mean like the forest 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 the wall. It's pushing on the wall, right. 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. And so 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 a 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 gonna like lift up off the ground and travel to Alpha Centauri. That's my 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's it so hard to find information about it on the internet. It has a pretty sketchy history. Um, it comes from a guy named Roger Shoyer in two thousand one. He designed this thing. He had this idea and he designed did 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 never published a paper. He could just 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 meg. 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 the m jives, we can't just rely on one guy in basement. We need to actually understand the physical basic 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 two thousand six. Yeah, well, in two thousand six there was a lot of coverage because Robert Joyer's 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 two thousand six, 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's sort of glossed over the fact that there's a basic problem with this drive, like it violates the law of conservation momentum, that it shouldn't work. So the fact that he claimed to have built it and made it work, you know, need to be reported with a big, big piece of So 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 Feda. He's just a marketing executive, but he got really interested in this and he built another version. He calls it the Canady Drive, like I can't, like can't Kennet like, like impossible was taken. So I'm gonna go with can't because that sounds like impossible. Yeah, it sounds to me like an Irish expression like you can they do that? But I'm not sure the linguistic origins of it. But he had some contacts at NASA, and he found some folks at the NASA Eagle Work Labs to try to test this. What yes, And he's like, all right, I built this, Please test this. Tell me if this thing can work. Oh wow, So they like big like actually NASA gut involved. Now yeah, there's a question about whether it's actually NASA or some people at NASA. Right. You know, like if I 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 a we're throwing 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 NASA who like pressed the button. And then it's like NASA did it well. It got a lot of attention because these folks that 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 amount you're talking about are really really really tiny. Like we measure thrust, it's a force. We measured units of Newton's so like a one k object on the surface of the Earth feels ten Newton's right, So Newton is not a small unit. But these guys when they measured this thing, they measured like milan Newton's like one thousands of a Newton or even smaller like micro Newton's. 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. Interesting, but it's not nothing. It's not nothing. I mean exactly. A Newton is like the weight of an apple almost. So it's like, you know, it's like taina bite out of an apple. It's like taking a very small bite out of an apple. Yeah, exactly. And they put out a paper in two thousand and sixteen 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, it was. And 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, they were headlines and wired for example saying NASA validates impossible space drive, which I'm sure people at NASA woke up in his sweat over when they read that. Unless 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. You see clickbait? Do you see 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 whatever we can, you know, pass it onto the engineers and said, we've proved it possible. Make it work, right, make it better, more make it more efficient. Yeah. Also, I mean, if you're on a toothpick on your way to Alpha Centauri, you know you've got time. So even a little push with health, yeah, even a little push, a little constant push without the need for propellant to get you to very high speeds. That's the whole idea of a solar sale. Solar sales 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 to alphastri 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. All right, 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 laws 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 your enthusiasm in check and apply your skeptical mind, like we'd love for this to work, and we wanted 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 gonna be less skeptical and you're gonna like gloss over problems in the story. So you gotta 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 other possible sources of experimental area. And when you dig into these experiments, they're not done with a 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 providing this this micro thrust. Well, I'm trying to 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 in nest, so like you know, like this actually happened. It is actually happening. 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, I like, this thing is humming, it's like it's running, and they measured it a 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 all right, well, um, I mean it sounds like you just kind of need to replicate the experiment. Has anybody tried or nobody wants to touch this? Ye, Other labs have tried, Like 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 rust. But then they showed that this thrust was actually just an interaction between the wires that lead up to the e M drive and the Earth's magnetic few What yeah, oh, I see the wires that create the microwaves, not the wires like leading up to the device. So no, the wires leading up to the device, the ones that like, you know, power this stuff. And so we're talking about really small effects here. You know, it's like you breathe on this thing, and that's a bigger effect than the thrust that they're measuring. 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 I said, they don't give you confidence in the experimental setup. It's it's sort of like remember the cold fusion thing, Like these guys measured some heat production, but there are all sorts of uncertainties and errors and other ways that could confuse the results that were potentially bigger than the signal they measured. 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 I Go gravitational wave telescope, you know, you had to bury it on the ground, You had to put 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 advice 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 this these folks have not done. And there's some really concerning things about the results, like sometimes they get thrust even if the drive is backwards, and they get they get thrust the same direction. Yeah, at the level sort of experimental rigor that we're talking about, maybe it's mind control, Daniel. It operates on wishes and unicorns, like if you wanted 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 thrust. Well, I mean press the 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. 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 results done in their spare time in their garage now 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 put yourselves 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 that's that's what we how, that's how we think the univerous 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. Ye. And so the guys who wrote this paper, they know this, and they understand that this thing shouldn't work, but they are really Yeah, 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 verbabion because it's I don't want to paraphrase. They say 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 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 is 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 these 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, right, This is a question of momentum. Right, But energy, I mean energy is mass? Could I say that like energy is mass, like solar sales 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 the quantum vacuum. That doesn't make any sense. What could I maybe capture those energy of empty I'm rooting for these NASA scientists, so I'm playing devil's advocate. Could you like somehow capture the energy of empty space and like use it, you know, converted to mass and push it one way? Is that possible? Well? You know, Orry, 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 converted 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 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. But I guess you know, is a 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 three dimensions of space and one of time. We think of four momentum three dimensions of momentum from one of energy. And so these things are related certainly, so that the whole vector has to be conserved, but they're conserved independently, like momentum and x is conserved separately from momentum and wise conserved separately from momentum and z, and then energy conservation is also separate. So they can they're related, but they're independent. Makes are very powerful constraint, right all right, Well, their ideas and maybe it's tapping into this impossible drivers. Maybe tapping into this quantum vacuum, virtual plasma 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 there the use of the word plasma means that there may be not even really understanding what they're talking about. And I think of the way you're imagining it is like, can you push off against this plasma? Can 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 it is a good analogy. Like if you're on 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 it needs to return. It's not real energy in that way, it's a 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 growing through space. That they'll be the name of my engine. That would be the name of your memoirs. Right, the space or space or or maybe it's just nonsense, um, 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 units. Like that's cool, but it has to also actually kind of make sense right well, you know, but like you said, you have to be skeptical but also keep an open mind, like maybe that it is kind of you have to admit a little bit possible for you know, our ID is about conservation momentum and the vacuum to maybe be a little off of maybe there is a little bit of a room there to maybe do something that seems impossible 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 e M drive is doing that. I think this AM drive is just a fun device in a lab somewhere. I see. It seems unlikely that a little copper cone will somehow here's 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 vacuum virtual plasma, right, Like why not? You can't just That's what my kids say all the time. It's not just an escape clause for everything, right, It's not that some of your physics lawyer, can you get you at of jail? No matter what you need like an actual mechanism of real explanation for how this plasma uh, which you know 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 or and that's why. Also I had to finish the Mission Impossible five 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 trying 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 toothpick. You want somebody else, probably smaller than you, not a lot of lakes. You know, until we figure something out, it's gonna be it is gonna be impossible to make it to Alpha Centauri within a lifetime or a few lifetimes, right, I mean we need 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 sale and you can take a really light craft and accelerated to a high speed. So if I was investing money in interstellar transport, I think solar sales are currently the best end. Okay, how about a quantum plasma sale? That sounds impossible? All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed this little trip down impossible lane. And two, it's it's kind of amazing to think that maybe there could be devices out there that break the laws 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 laws 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 physics when things have been discovered by accident. And so while I don't think that this drive has 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 and we get one that's right, and then you can represent them in the cosmological court of impossibility. That sounds great. My fees one percent 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, and remember that. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. More podcast from my Heart Radio visit the I Heart Radio Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah,