This is one area which never fails to keep me thinking - how is mankind supposed to traverse the vast interstellar distances when it takes pathbreaking satellites like Voyager 2 many months to reach the outer planets of our own Solar System?
Well, the answer is here, albeit in a highly theoretical, neglected branch of physics, something most people take for granted (this is by no means new stuff - work on developing this began way back in the '60's)
The concept of an 'inertialess drive' - i.e. a propulsion system that acts on every atom of a body so that no strains are produced when it accelerates - was probably invented by the master of the 'Space Opera', E.E. Smith, in the 1930s. It is not as improbable as it sounds - because a gravitational field acts in precisely this manner.
If you fall freely near the Earth (neglecting the effects of air resistance) you will increase speed by just under ten metres per second, every second. Yet you will feel weightless - there will be no sense of acceleration, even though your velocity is increasing by one kilometre a second, every minute and a half!
And this would still be true if you were falling in Jupiter's gravity (just over two-and-a-half times Earth's) or even the enormously more powerful field of a white dwarf or neutron star (millions or billions of times greater). You would feel nothing, even if you had approached the velocity of light from a standing start in a matter of minutes. However, if you were foolish enough to get within a few radii of the attracting object, its field would no longer be uniform over
the whole length of your body, and tidal forces would soon tear you to pieces.
An 'inertialess drive', which would act exactly like a controllable gravity field, had never been discussed seriously outside the pages of science fiction until very recently. But in 1994 three American physicists did exactly this, developing some ideas of the great Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov.
'Inertia as a Zero-Point Field Lorentz Force' by B. Haisch, A. Rueda & H. F. Puthoff (Physics Review A, February 1994) may one day be regarded as a landmarkpaper. It addresses a problem so fundamental that it is normally taken for granted, with a that's-just-the way-the-universe-is-made shrug of the shoulders.
Their provisional answer depends on the astonishing - and outside the physicists' ivory towers - little-known fact that so-called 'empty' space is actually a cauldron of seething energies - the Zero-Point Field. HR&P suggest that both inertia and gravitation are electromagnetic phenomena, resulting from interaction with this field. There have been countless attempts, going all the way back to Faraday, to link gravity and magnetism, and although many experimenters have claimed success, none of their results has ever been verified. However, if HR&P's theory can be proved, it opens up the prospect - however remote - of anti-gravity, 'space drives' and the even more fantastic possibility of controlling inertia.
This could lead to some interesting situations: if you gave someone the gentlest touch, they would promptly disappear at thousands of kilometres an hour, until they bounced off the other side of the room a fraction of a millisecond later.
The good news is that traffic accidents would be virtually impossible; automobiles - and passengers - could collide harmlessly at any speed. The 'weightlessness' which we now take for granted in space missions - and which millions of tourists will be enjoying in the next century - would have seemed like magic to our grandparents. But the abolition - or merely the reduction - of inertia is quite another matter, and may be completely impossible.* But it's a nice thought, for it could provide the equivalent of 'teleportation': you could travel anywhere (at least on Earth) almost instantaneously. Frankly, I don't know how Interstellar Space travel could manage without it...
Also, soon to be written - a science fiction story (by me, of course) featuring this landmark new theory...keep checking this blog for it.
Cheers
Sid
Well, the answer is here, albeit in a highly theoretical, neglected branch of physics, something most people take for granted (this is by no means new stuff - work on developing this began way back in the '60's)
The concept of an 'inertialess drive' - i.e. a propulsion system that acts on every atom of a body so that no strains are produced when it accelerates - was probably invented by the master of the 'Space Opera', E.E. Smith, in the 1930s. It is not as improbable as it sounds - because a gravitational field acts in precisely this manner.
If you fall freely near the Earth (neglecting the effects of air resistance) you will increase speed by just under ten metres per second, every second. Yet you will feel weightless - there will be no sense of acceleration, even though your velocity is increasing by one kilometre a second, every minute and a half!
And this would still be true if you were falling in Jupiter's gravity (just over two-and-a-half times Earth's) or even the enormously more powerful field of a white dwarf or neutron star (millions or billions of times greater). You would feel nothing, even if you had approached the velocity of light from a standing start in a matter of minutes. However, if you were foolish enough to get within a few radii of the attracting object, its field would no longer be uniform over
the whole length of your body, and tidal forces would soon tear you to pieces.
An 'inertialess drive', which would act exactly like a controllable gravity field, had never been discussed seriously outside the pages of science fiction until very recently. But in 1994 three American physicists did exactly this, developing some ideas of the great Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov.
'Inertia as a Zero-Point Field Lorentz Force' by B. Haisch, A. Rueda & H. F. Puthoff (Physics Review A, February 1994) may one day be regarded as a landmarkpaper. It addresses a problem so fundamental that it is normally taken for granted, with a that's-just-the way-the-universe-is-made shrug of the shoulders.
Their provisional answer depends on the astonishing - and outside the physicists' ivory towers - little-known fact that so-called 'empty' space is actually a cauldron of seething energies - the Zero-Point Field. HR&P suggest that both inertia and gravitation are electromagnetic phenomena, resulting from interaction with this field. There have been countless attempts, going all the way back to Faraday, to link gravity and magnetism, and although many experimenters have claimed success, none of their results has ever been verified. However, if HR&P's theory can be proved, it opens up the prospect - however remote - of anti-gravity, 'space drives' and the even more fantastic possibility of controlling inertia.
This could lead to some interesting situations: if you gave someone the gentlest touch, they would promptly disappear at thousands of kilometres an hour, until they bounced off the other side of the room a fraction of a millisecond later.
The good news is that traffic accidents would be virtually impossible; automobiles - and passengers - could collide harmlessly at any speed. The 'weightlessness' which we now take for granted in space missions - and which millions of tourists will be enjoying in the next century - would have seemed like magic to our grandparents. But the abolition - or merely the reduction - of inertia is quite another matter, and may be completely impossible.* But it's a nice thought, for it could provide the equivalent of 'teleportation': you could travel anywhere (at least on Earth) almost instantaneously. Frankly, I don't know how Interstellar Space travel could manage without it...
Also, soon to be written - a science fiction story (by me, of course) featuring this landmark new theory...keep checking this blog for it.
Cheers
Sid
