David Burns' Helical Engine Won't Work

There was a little bit of a kerfuffle a week or so ago about an engineer from NASA (David Burns, reportedly the Manager of the Science and Technology Office of the Marshall Space Flight Center but I’ve not been able to independently verify that).  He put up a document on a NASA page talking about an engine that could reach large fractions of the speed of light (more than 90%) with pretty much no fuel.  That document has since been removed but it can still be viewed at the Wayback Machine.

I’m astounded that it got put up at NASA in the first place.  It simply won’t work, he’s got the physics wrong.  Looking at the “Thought Experiment” which has a weight on a spring in a box, one can see that the fundamental principle is incorrect.  Within the frame of the box (or the spaceship, or whatever), the mass inside would be slightly heavier at both ends of the cycle, within the frame of the container, so there won’t be an overall forward propulsion imparted to the container.  The best you could hope for is that the container (box, spaceship, whatever) would quiver (and even then that would contribute to the mass inside losing momentum).

It all comes down to the total energy.  I’m going to explain in terms that I introduced at On Time.

A spaceship with (stationary) mass M_o, when it's stationary, has energy M_oc² – we can think of this as the rest mass times it’s “speed through time”, or v_T = c.  When at a velocity through space, v_S, spaceship has energy M(v_T² + v_S²) where, v_T ≠ c but instead (due to time dilation) v_T = c.√(1 - v_S²/c²) = √( c² - v_S²), so energy is E(v_T)=Mc².

But M ≠ M_o, instead M = M_o/√(1 - v_S²/c²), which when you work it all through, observing that 1/√(1 - v_S²/c²) ≈  1 + v_S²/c² (accurate to within 10% to about 0.68c and within 2% to about 0.47c), gives you E(v_T)=M_oc² + ½M_ov_T ² (see On Time).

This means that you need to pump ½M_ov_T² into the system – which is the extra mass he’s talking about – or you aren’t going anywhere.

To get to from zero to 297 million metres per second (0.99c, one of the numbers being bounced around), assuming no losses, that’s 88 petajoules per kilo or 88000 million megajoules and noting that liquid hydrogen has an energy density of about 120 MJ/kg (according to a guy at Stanford) you are going to need a lot of fuel to get your spaceship up to that speed, even if you ignore the fuel burden and losses and assume some magical method by which the energy in liquid hydrogen is converted directly into kinetic energy.

To be fair to David Burns, his “paper” (it’s not a paper, it’s a few PowerPoint slides!) ends with these words:

• Basic concept is unproven
• Has not been reviewed by subject matter experts
• Maths errors may exist!

It's entirely possible that the document ended up where it was by mistake (as it clearly wasn't ready for publishing to the world).  The fact that so many organisations ran with this, so uncritically, as if it were something real is simply very sad.

Mea Culpa Rursus ... and Exorcisms vs Epilepsy

Rarely do I find myself banned from places where the banning has not been part of my plan.  Nevertheless, I have found myself banned from Craig-Land (temporarily so I was told, but at time of writing I am now heading towards the 40th day of a one-month suspension, so who knows).

I have to admit that it was my fault.  The moderator who suspended me was nice enough to list my infractions:

needlessly insinuating that another community member is an idiot (not guilty, your honour, I implied that the guy doesn't think things through – but I will plead guilty to a lesser charge, "insinuating that another community member is intellectually lazy" … and "needlessly" is a bit of a stretch, it was quite necessary for my argument that I point out that the other community member doesn't think things through)

calling a community member crazy, christians a little bit crazy, and implying that you don’t have to be nice to someone if their views seem insane to you (you do) (oh, that extraneous comma is an offence to human-kind, more on the meat of this later)

saying “bullocks” a lot (um, no, I specifically wrote "bollocks", but yeah, I wrote it four times in that post, for effect)

either being unintentionally obnoxious or trolling (they don't know me well enough if they think I was being unintentionally obnoxious – and trolling seems to be a term bandied around far too easily on this forum, I wasn't trolling, I was just having a light-hearted exchange with a fellow non-theist in enemy territory.  These theists get far too hot under the collar when we point out that their priests have been abusing children for centuries.  Or maybe it was the reference to the inquisition that they object to?)

So, yes, I did err.  I should have been more careful in my wording.  But worst of all, I fell into a little trap regarding the use of the term "crazy".  It was a sort of honey-trap, I was lured in and then smashed.

I was discussing how theists use certain types of arguments in support of their god hypothesis because they lack proper evidence (which I call "the argument from lack of evidence").  As an example of a hypothesis that has actual evidence, I used the Theory of Relativity.  This attracted the attention of a person called Trinity who made a comment that there is no such thing as "time dilation", that time cannot expand and contract.  I commented that the term "time dilation" might be a little vexed, but the phenomenon it describes certainly exists.  Trinity then replied he does not believe in "spacetime".

That got my interest.

We tic-tacked for a while and then something he wrote made me stop and think.  He was a geocentrist, the one who had started a thread recently calling for people to provide him with evidence that the Earth is moving, specifically some way of measuring the Earth's motion (see Gyroscopes on the Moon, Gyroscopes on Earth and Gyroscopes and Relativity? What's that all about?).

So I called him that "crazy person who thinks that geocentricity is actually correct".  Soon after, he set his honey-trap, asking:

I don't think this is irenic, neopolitan. What if I think that geocentricity is actually correct? Why does that make me crazy? More than two billion people on Earth think that Jesus walked on water. Are they crazy as well?

Well of course I think that people who believe that Jesus walked on water are at least a little bit crazy.  They believe something that is patently false and their belief is impervious to evidence, logic and reason.  They almost certainly think the same of me.  I tried to be diplomatic though and wrote:

Anyone who believes that Jesus (existed AND) literally walked on water is probably a little bit crazy, but not necessarily as crazy as someone who denies reality enough to believe that the Earth is the centre of the universe.

See, I wrote "a little bit crazy"!  That's a concession, isn't it?

But I'd already fallen into the honey-trap.  Once I'd overtly accused Trinity of being crazy for his geocentricity, I could not equivocate on my position that theists in general are (at least a little bit) crazy.  And making this position clear was already something that I was tempted to do – a temptation that I have to consciously and continually resist.

---

I didn't get banned, but I have since left Craig-Land of my own accord.  Maybe I'll visit again in the future, who knows?

---

I wrote this piece more than half a year ago and, like a few other articles that I've not yet posted, it has just been sitting in a directory collecting dust.  There's no real reason for me to not have published most of them, other than I got busy with other things … so I plan to trickle release from this treasure trove over the next month or so.

This article, however, is serendipitously relevant because of something I saw the other night.  I initially closed with the comment to the effect that I am consciously and continually resisting the urge to call theists "a little bit crazy".  Now, it would be inaccurate to say that all theists are as crazy as the ones interviewed in the short SBS documentary, however … these beliefs are there in the major three monotheistic religions (judaism [yep, written by that David Wolpe], christianity and islam).

I have no issue with adults choosing to rid themselves of the spirit of masturbation, although the level of fixation seems a little odd when we're talking about something (self-reverence) that is over and done with within a few minutes  and surely doesn’t happen more than half a dozen or so times a day …

However, I do have considerable issues with what is effectively child abuse when toddlers going through their "terrible twos" are deemed to be possessed by demons, especially when this abuse is thought to be protected as "freedom of religion".  Parents have the right to believe all sorts of crazy things, I suppose, but this does not justify putting their children through anything like an "exorcism", or denying their children proper medical care, or preventing them from getting proper education.  (Which are more likely to put their kids through an exorcism - publicly educated parents or parents who as children were home-schooled by an earlier generation of religious nut-jobs?)

It's this sort of thing that has me biting my lip and struggling to not call religious people "a little bit crazy", because standing not too far behind them are religious people with a whole ship-load of crazy.

---

I am aware that Linda Chaniotis has epilepsy, but her unapologetic father tells of how she was a placid child up until she was two.  Babies can have epilepsy-like convulsions, although these are usually related to fevers (febrile convulsions) which only become a risk factor for epilepsy if they are prolonged and recurrent, and even then this only increases the risk by about 10% above that of the general population (so from about 60 in 10,000 to 66 in 10,000).  The onset of epilepsy in children is usually from about age four, rather than age two, but even if she did have an earlier onset, the complaint expressed by her father was not in regard to convulsions but rather about her behaviour.

There are some inconsistencies in the reporting, for example:

"She was a very good baby, placid," her father Damien told The Feed. "At about the age of two she just changed overnight."

(The fact that her father has the name Damien would be endless amusing, if it weren't all so horrible.  You can hear Damien making this statement in the video which can be accessed from the Guardian link above and from the SBS link below.)

Linda herself reports having had screaming fits from three months to about three years, but then also writes that her "parents decided that when (she) was about two, (she) had been cursed by a witch, and that (she) was demon possessed".  This is a little awkward wording, making it unclear as to whether the parents came to the conclusion, at the time when she was two, that she had earlier been cursed by a witch, or whether the curse, according to her parents, had been laid upon her when she was two.  Elsewhere it seems more clear that her parents told her when she was two that she had (apparently earlier) been cursed by a witch.  However, this seems inconsistent with her being a lovely, placid child until two and then changing overnight into a demon-possessed nightmare.

In any event, no matter whether it is convulsions or behavioural issues (perhaps due to episodes of petit mal epilepsy, or absence seizures, which can be mistaken for "misbehaviour" - although Linda does describe auras which are associated with grand mal seizures, which lead to convulsions), a child should be given appropriate medical care in the first instance - religious parents should be encouraged to place exorcism as an activity of last resort, so far down the track from rational behaviour that it is never actually resorted to. 

The Ludicracy of Conscious Realism

It's sad to see that Quanta Magazine should take Donald Hoffman seriously when he waxes lyrical on the nature of reality, based on his "conscious realism".  This is a broadly respected repository of science journalism, but in this case, the editors appear to have let the article through because it mentions quantum stuff.

Naturally, I object to "conscious realism" in general, because it is total bollocks, but I also object some of the specific nonsense spouted by Donald Hoffman.  Now I would have provided a Wikipedia link to the page on "conscious realism" here, but there isn't one.  When you google the term, you end up at a document written by Donald Hoffman, which states:

Conscious realism is a proposed answer to the question of what the universe is made of. Conscious realism asserts that the objective world, i.e., the world whose existence does not depend on the perceptions of a particular observer, consists entirely of conscious agents.

Hoffman even gave a TED talk on the topic - Do we see reality as it is?

My major beef is with this specific claim (from the Quanta Magazine article, but also referred to in the TED talk):

Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.

I don't think I can state this strongly enough: This is total and complete bollocks.  It's lunacy.  I'd call it quantum nonsense, but this might lead some readers to think that it's nonsense on a minuscule rather than massive scale.

This idea could only work if, in order for trains to work, we were obliged to explain them to each other - to synch our individual subjective realities with respect to the trains in our shared experience.  Think about it for a moment.  Engineer E designs a train at the request of Customer C, who approves the drawings and passes them over to Manufacturer M.  At various stages during the process, Surveyor S visits the construction site and compares the train, in its current form, to the design detailed in the drawings.  Eventually, S signs off on the construction and M presents the train to C who then puts it onto a pre-existing rail network, with pre-existing tracks, pre-existing bridges and pre-existing tunnels and sets it off on its way.

There is certainly some discussion between E, M, S and C, but the process does not involve a word by word, squiggle by squiggle explanation as to what each of the pieces of paper have written and drawn on them.  For the information to flow accurately from person to person, and for a train to result which fits on the tracks and into tunnels (etc, etc), those pieces of paper (the drawings) must have an independent, objective and (at least temporarily) immutable reality.

Once the train exists, we don’t need to discuss with each other the location of doors and seats, and so on.  If my reality of the train could truly be different to your reality of the train, then we could enter via different doors and you could sit on a seat in a location that, in my reality, doesn't even exist on my train (for example, you might have the train as being four metres wide, whilst mine is only three metres wide).  Animals that cannot even converse with us (guide dogs for example) will reliably enter and exit via the doors in a train that must necessarily have an objective reality (and may not be perceptible at all by those being guided).  An objective reality is necessary because we could not synch any differences in subjective reality with them.  (Cross country horse events would be a nightmare if horse and rider could not independently observe an objective reality with respect to jumps and other obstacles - both need to be aware of what they are jumping over, and when, in order for them to move in concert and make the jump.)

I agree that there are certain aspects of reality that are fuzzy to us - colours vary due to lighting and there is evidence that the perception of some colours may be language dependent (Lenneberg and Roberts).  The idea is that given the lack of a specific word for "orange", speakers of Zuni find it more difficult to differentiate between two colours that an English speaker would have no difficulty distinguishing.  Females, who generally have a better handle on language, also have a greater range of colours that they can distinguish, despite not having any huge difference in their physiognomy.  (There are apps written for men to help them discuss curtain, cushion and dress colours with women - "What do you mean, the light green cushion?  It's not light green, it's chartreuse!")  There are a range of illusions that we may fall prey to: the illusion that an image on a page is 3D, if it is sufficiently well drawn, or the illusion that a spoked wheel is spinning in the opposite direction that it is actually spinning and so on.

However, these illusions and inaccuracies on our part as imperfect sensory creatures should never be taken to mean that reality is somehow "imperfect", let alone non-existent.  To pretend otherwise represents a monumental level of hubris.

To my mind, Donald Hoffman's "conscious realism" constitutes an equally monumental level of stupidity, complete with a massive begged question - where do these "conscious agents" of his come from, if there is no objective reality?  It's a form of quantum woo.

But then again, who knows, it might just be a misconception on my part.

---

And by the way, I couldn't decide on whether I should use "lunacy" or a reference to the ludicrous nature of the idea of conscious realism in the title, so I split the difference.  It also hints at some sort of governance by the ludicrous, a word for which the need of is becoming more and more critical each day.