Lifeboat Foundation

For those in Colorado who are interested in attending a talk by John Troeltzsch, Sentinel Ball Program Manager, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. please R.S.V.P Chris Zeller ([email protected]) by Tuesday, 26 February 2013 for badge access. US citizenship required.

6:00 pm Thursday, February 28th 2013
6:00 pm Social, 6:30 pm Program
Ball Aerospace Boulder Campus RA7 Conference Room
1600 Commerce St
Boulder, CO 80301

It will be good to see you there.

About the Talk:
The inner solar system is populated with a half million asteroids larger than the one that struck Tunguska and yet we’ve identified and mapped only about one percent of these asteroids to date.

Continue reading “AIAA Rocky Mountain — Sentinel Program” »

A Revolution in Physics and Cosmology

by Otto E. Rossler, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Tubingen, Germany

A deterministic 2-particle system interacting with a fixed third particle (the wall of a confining T-tube) shows two kinds of behavior never seen in a deterministic system before: Dissipative and antididissipative behavior in both directions of time (dependent on the sign of the force law). Dissipative behavior occurs in both directions of time when the system is started from non-selected far-from-equipartition initial conditions while the potential (giving rise to the force law) is Newtonian–repulsive. Antidissipative behavior occurs (in both directions of time) when the system is started from non-selected far-from-equipartition initial conditions while the potential is Newtonian–attractive.

“Entropic” behavior had not been demonstrated before in a deterministic system. Now, both “entropic” and “ectropic” behavior are described under deterministic-chaos conditions. The numerical simulations are due to Klaus Sonnleitner (2010) and, independently, Ramis Movassagh (2011) who also provided an analytical derivation.

Continue reading “A Revolution in Physics?” »

If, we as a community, are intending to accelerate the development of interstellar travel we have to glower at the record and ask ourselves some tough questions. First, what is the current record of the primary players? Second, why is everyone afraid to try something outside the status quo theories?

At the present time the primary players are associated with the DARPA funded 100-Year Starship Study, as Icarus Interstellar who is cross linked with The Tau Zero Foundation and Centauri Dreams is a team member of the 100YSS. I was surprised to find Jean-Luc Cambier on Tau Zero.

Gary Church recently put the final nail in the Icarus Interstellar‘s dreams to build a rocket ship for interstellar travel. In his post on Lifeboat, Cosmic Ray Gorilla Gary Church says “it is likely such a shield will massive over a thousand tons”. Was he suggesting that the new cost of an interstellar rocket ship is not 3.4x World GDP but 34x or 340x World GDP? Oops!

Let us look at the record. Richard Obousy of Icarus Interstellar and Eric Davis of Institute for Advanced Studies claimed that it was possible, using string theories to travel at not just c, the velocity of light but at 1E32c, or c multiplied by a 1 followed by 32 zeros. However, Lorentz-FitzGerald transformations show that anything with mass cannot travel faster than the velocity of light. Note that Lorentz-FitzGerald is an empirical observation which was incorporated into Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.

Continue reading “Gravity Modification – What Is The Record?” »

Einstein Mining

Otto E. Rossler, Faculty of Science, University of Tubingen, Germany

The young Einstein was the most fertile scientific mind of history. He first saw the observer-private nature of simultaneity, a consequence of the global constancy of the speed of light c valid in Maxwell’s equation. He then spotted the twin miracle (“paradox”): that a returned twin clock is younger than its stay-put sibling. The transversal Doppler effect described in the same 1905 paper was equally new. At the end of this miraculous year stood the improved Weber law (E exactly equal m times c-square) destined to become tragically consequential when Lise Meitner would recall its strength 34 years into the future. Two years after the miraculous year, there followed Einstein’s biggest discovery in the present author’s mind: the gravitational clock slowdown near the bottom of a constantly accelerating rocketship compared to a twin clock in its tip. It implies a second twin paradox (spending time downstairs lets you stay younger in Alan Lightman’s phrase).

This bundle of subsequently observationally confirmed predicted effects is an eternal heritage. Maxwell’s advice: go back to the origin of an already discovered gold vein since it is there that others inevitably originate is still valid. This is the excuse for the new notion of “Einstein mining.”

Continue reading “Einstein Mining” »

Recently, I met Josh Hopkins of Lockheed’s Advanced Programs, AIAA Rocky Mountain Region’s First Annual Technical Symposium (RMATS), October 26, 2012. Josh was the keynote speaker at this RMATS. Here is his presentation. After his presentation we talked outside the conference hall. I told him about my book, and was surprised when he said that two groups had failed to reproduce Podkletnov’s work. I knew one group had but a second? As we parted we said we’d keep in touch. But you know how life is, it has the habit of getting in the way of exciting research, and we lost touch.

About two weeks ago, I remembered, that Josh had said that he would provide some information on the second group that had failed to reproduce Podkletnov’s work. I sent him an email, and was very pleased to hear back from him and that the group’s finding had been published under the title “Gravity Modification by High-Temperature Semiconductors”. The authors were C. Woods, S. Cooke, J. Helme & C. Caldwell. Their paper was published in the 37^th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference and Exhibit, 8–11 July 2001, Salt Lake City, Utah. I bought a copy for the AIAA archives, and read it, reread it, and reread it.

Then I found a third team they published their lack of findings “Gravity Modification Experiments Using a Rotating Superconducting Disk and Radio Frequency Fields”. The authors were G. Hathaway, B. Cleveland and Y. Bao. Published in Physica C, 2003.

Both papers focused on attempting to build a correct superconducting disc. At least Wood et al said “the tests have not fulfilled the specified conditions for a gravity effect”. The single most difficult thing to do was to build a bilayered superconducting disc. Woods et al tried very hard to do so. Reading through Hathaway et all paper suggest that they too had similar difficulties. Photo shows a sample disc from Woods’ team. Observe the crack in the middle.

Continue reading “Gravity Modification – What Went Wrong?” »

To understand why gravity modification is not yet a reality, let’s analyze other fundamental discoveries/inventions that changed our civilization or at least the substantially changed the process of discovery. There are several that come to mind, the atomic bomb, heavier than air manned flight, the light bulb, personal computers, and protein folding. There are many other examples but these are sufficient to illustrate what it takes. Before we start, we have to understand four important and related concepts.

(1) Clusters or business clusters, first proposed by Harvard prof. Michael Porter, “a business cluster is a geographic concentration of interconnected businesses, suppliers, and associated institutions in a particular field. Clusters are considered to increase the productivity with which companies can compete, nationally and globally”. Toyota City which predates Porter’s proposal, comes to mind. China’s 12 new cities come to mind, and yes there are pro and cons.

Continue reading “Gravity Modification – New Tools” »

OK, why do we need a different technology to achieve commercial viability (as in mass space tourism) for either interplanetary or interstellar travel?

In many of my previous posts I had shown that all the currently proposed technologies or technologies to be, are either phenomenally expensive (on the order of several multiples of World GDP), bordering on the impossible or just plain conjecture. This is very unfortunate, as I was hoping that some of the proposals would at least appear realistic, but no joy. I feel very sorry for those who are funding these projects. For a refresher I have posted an updated version of the Interstellar Challenge Matrix (ICM) here which documents 5 of the 11 inconsistencies in modern physics. I give permission to my readers to use this material for non-commercial or academic uses.

I recently completed the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravity modification published under the title An Introduction to Gravity Modification, 2^nd Edition. For the very first time we now have a scientific definition for gravity modification:

Gravity modification is defined as the modification of the strength and/or direction of the gravitational acceleration without the use of mass as the primary source of this modification, in local space time. It consists of field modulation and field vectoring. Field modulation is the ability to attenuate or amplify a force field. Field vectoring is the ability to change the direction of this force field.

Continue reading “Gravity Modification – What is it?” »

“Metaballon anapaúetai” was the original 2-word phrase. Since the physical science of thermodynamics knows only one time’s arrow, Heraclitus appeared outdated for 1 ½ centuries.

Recently though, a second fundamental time’s arrow was found in nature. It defines cyodynamics, a full-fledged sister discipline to thermodynamics (cryós = cold, thermós = hot). Both jointly form the subject matter of statistical mechanics. The new subfield of cryodynamics applies whenever the forces acting between the particles in question are attractive. Thermodynamics applies when they are predominantly repulsive. Hot plasmas, for example, are governed by both disciplines – which fact puts fusion technology on a new promising basis.

The new combined discipline re-enables an eternally recycling perpetual-motion cosmos. The implied chaos-theoretic combined mixing and unmixing process, found by Anaxagoras to be implicit in Heraclitus‘ work, is thereby confirmed.

A third name needs to be added though, Einstein’s. The giant perpetual-motion machine would not work in the absence of general relativity forming the third element.

Continue reading “OPEN DIALOG WITH STEPHEN HAWKING --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ‘Metabolizing it is at Rest’: Heraclitus’ Eternally Recycling Cosmos Recovered” »

To achieve interstellar travel, the Kline Directive instructs us to be bold, to explore what others have not, to seek what others will not, to change what others dare not. To extend the boundaries of our knowledge, to advocate new methods, techniques and research, to sponsor change not status quo, on 5 fronts, Legal Standing, Safety Awareness, Economic Viability, Theoretical-Empirical Relationships, and Technological Feasibility.

In a previous post on Technological Feasibility I had stated that a quick and dirty model shows that we could achieve velocity of light c by 2151 or the late 2150s. See table below.

That is, at the current rate of technological innovation we could as a civilization reach light speed in about 140 years. More importantly we could not even reach anywhere near that within the next 100 years. Our capability would be 6.3% of c.

The Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformation informs us light speed would require an infinite amount of energy (i.e. more than there is in the Universe!), thereby highlighting the weaknesses in these types of technological forecasting methods. But these models still serve a purpose. They provide some guidance as to what is possible and when. The operative word is guidance.

Continue reading “The Kline Directive: Technological Feasibility (3b)” »