British physicists are developing an analogue of the "impossible engine" EmDrive, working under a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The University of Plymouth reported.
“If our ideas are fully implemented, then we will no longer need fuel to launch satellites. In fact, any spacecraft can move in space if it has a current source. Interstellar flights will be open to humanity,”said Michael McCulloch of the University of Plymouth (UK).
In 2001, the American engineer-aircraft designer Roger Shoer announced the creation of the EmDrive engine, which, as his opponents said at that time, and as his opponents continue to believe today, violates all known laws of physics.
This device is a conical resonator chamber to which a powerful magnetron is connected - a source of microwave radiation. With a certain geometry of this cone, this device will mysteriously move towards its narrow part with extremely low, but thrust, if microwaves “walk” inside the cone.
Almost all scientists considered this behavior of EmDrive impossible from the point of view of the laws of physics. Several years ago, McCulloch and his colleagues offered a "realistic" explanation for this "miracle engine," linking his work to another controversial thing, the so-called Unruh effect.
This phenomenon was discovered by the American physicist William Unruh in the late 1970s. It is an explanation of why there is a force of inertia, and the assumption that it has a certain "discrete" nature associated with the quantum properties of vacuum.
Unruh showed that an object moving with acceleration begins to interact in a special way with a vacuum or other medium through which it moves - to put it simply, the surrounding space becomes "warmer" for it. This heat, or Unruh radiation, "presses" on a moving body and makes it slow down.
In a Schoer engine, McCulloch believes, this heat will interact in different ways with microwave photons reflected from the narrow and wide walls of the cone, if the photons have inertial mass and the speed of light can change inside the resonator. Both of these assumptions are extremely contradictory from the point of view of physics.
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Regardless, McCulloch's ideas have caught the attention of officials at DARPA, and the agency recently donated $ 1.4 million to rigorously test mathematically and practically the British researcher's theories.
The Plymouth physicist and his associates from Spain and Germany will create a complete computer model describing the operation of this engine, and then create prototypes to evaluate if it can actually generate thrust. They expect to receive the first results in the next 1.5 years.
