starship-design: FTL and such

[Timothy van der Linden <Shealiak@XS4ALL.nl>]

Adam,

>Can you dig up the reference? John Cramer, in his Alternate View column in
>"Analog" talked about tachyon neutrinos as a possible drive system - not for
>FTL, but as a reactionless drive.

Recent research has indicated that neutrinos are NOT massless. (Best guess
upto now is 0.07 eV/c^2)
I added an article from AIP (June) at the end of this letter.

Regarding plugging in values for v>c in Einstein's equations:
For some odd reason people use known formulas to extend predictions without
having ANY reason that the known formula is even slightly more valid than
any other odd equation.
So, I see no reason for Einstein's equations to be valid for values of v>c,
since there is no data available to make ANY extension more valid than an
other. Hence suggesting that we need to find imaginary mass or energy
before thinking about FTL makes little sense.
It could be just as well that no energy at all is needed for apparant
velocities larger than c. After all translation doesn't need any energy.

>Coupled to a suitable power source a
>coherent beam of tachyons could act as a "space drive" that'd travel the
>Universe.

Any reason for a *coherent* beam? Do incoherent tachyons not transfer
momentum?

>They all think that some sort of ZPE power system isn't too far off.

They don't think that, they hope or feel that.

Timothy



PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE                         
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News
Number 375 June 5, 1998   by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein

NEUTRINO OSCILLATION HAS BEEN DEMONSTRATED at
the Super-Kamiokande lab in Japan to a higher degree of certainty
than in previous experiments. Neutrinos, weakly interacting
elementary particles only detected for the first time in 1956, are
thought by some theorists to reside in a kind of schizoid existence;
that is, a neutrino would regularly transform (or oscillate) among
several alternative neutrino states, each having a slightly different
mass.  Such a theory would help to explain the apparent shortfall of
neutrinos coming from the Sun.  The oscillation proposition has
been tested using four neutrino sources: the Sun, Earth's
atmosphere, reactors, and particle accelerators. Some tests find
tentative but ambiguous evidence for oscillation. Today, at the
Neutrino  98 conference in Takayama Japan, the Super-Kamiokande
collaboration (comprising 100 scientists from 23 institutions in
Japan and the US) is announcing the most exacting evidence yet for
neutrino oscillation. They study neutrinos made when cosmic rays
from outer space strike the upper atmosphere.  Some neutrinos,
those made overhead above Japan, travel about 20 km or so before
entering the underground detector. Other neutrinos, those made in
the atmosphere on the far side of the globe, have a travel path of
20,000 km into the detector.  In either case, they create, among
other things, a high energy electron or muon, which in turn emits
a telltale cone of light (Cerenkov radiation) observed by an array of
thousands of photodetectors mounted in a tank filled with pure
water.  Sorting events by electron neutrino or muon neutrino, by
high energy or lower energy, and by zenith angle (overhead
approach or through the Earth), statistical evidence for oscillation
becomes evident. A 1-GeV muon neutrino seems to oscillate every
few hundred miles.  Four years ago, the same group, using a
smaller detector, reported preliminary evidence on the basis of 200
events (Physics Today, Oct 1994).  The new report is based on
several thousands of events, and provides an approximate mass
difference (the test cannot render any neutrino species' mass
directly) of about 0.07 eV. Because they are so numerous in the
universe, neutrinos, with even a small mass, might play an
important role in the formation of galaxies. (See
http://www.phys.hawaii.edu:80/~jgl/nuosc_story.html)