Just my physics idea..
Getting to space is hard..
If humans are to travel to other stars, we need a completely new unimagined propulsion system. Although our industries are trying to transition to cleaner fuels, rocket fuel will likely continue to be used as the best means of leaving Earth’s gravity. But once in orbit, we no longer need very powerful engines, just efficient ones, which is why most rockets are made up of two stages; an upper stage usually carrying a single space vacuumed optimised engine, and the lower stage (1st stage) doing the bulk of the work in getting to space.
Once in orbit, only small pushes translates to big distances since there is no air to slow you down, but the distance to the next star is almost infinite away when compared to the distance to our moon. Thousands of years can pass before reaching the nearest star.
Every engine is based on the physics principle that you need to throw something out of the back as to get moving forward. With rockets, they use compressed gas, and ignited it as it travels through the engine so that burst out with maximum energy. The problem is that fuel is heavy and takes up a lot of space, if you want to go far, you need bigger rockets as to carry the extra fuel.
It would be nice if a potential craft could extract energy from space itself, and some do, using onboard solar panels paired with an ion drive engine, which is basically something that spits out electricity in the form of ions. Doesn’t produce a lot of power, but its efficient and does get used to guide a craft in the right direction.
Electromagnetism travels at the speed of light because they are fundamentally the same thing —nothing new here. However, we can potentially use the delay in travel time to our advantage. Magnets can only interact within the field they occupy. When two magnets interact, there is a short delay as the magnetic field must propagate between them before any force is experienced.
Imagine two electro-magnets (air core solenoids) about 10cm apart aimed at each other. We turn one of them on (calling EM-B), and are able to watch the magnetism propagate in slow motion. The moment the magnetism reaches the second electro-magnet, we turn this on (in manner in which it attracts, and turn the first one off). The second solenoid (EM-A) would start to experience the force and move towards the first one.
As the magnetism from the second electro-magnetic propagates back to the first one, we turn the first one back on, but in an opposite current, as to create a repulsion, (while the other electro-magnetic is turn off). As the field reaches it, it will interact with the field and this electro-magnetic will start being repelled.
We can repeat, ie. oscillate this as to a continuing force, first electro-magnetic being repelled while the second electro-magnetic being pulled, creating an overall net movement in one direction.
This setup could be put on a single platform, oscillating the power in this manner (at around 3ghz?), and watch the generation of one directional movement without any equal and opposite reaction.
Listen to the podcast
Why publish here:
I’m publishing these ideas because I cant find any material on the internet about this and no category to which to publish this to. So if/when its discovered in the future, I can at least say I thought of it first!
~~~~ Seb Gibbs 7 Feb 2023 (23:00+1000) ~~~~
Some background
The first idea came to me about 6 months ago when thinking generally too hard about electromagnetism, and have already tried to talking to people in forums without any success. My posts just deleted from physics forums for ridiculous reasons like well it hasn’t been tested and another was that apparently I proposing an engineering question!
