Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering
Harold E. Puthoff
Abstract and summary · read the original at the source
In one page
This is the paper that named the field, in the version Hal Puthoff published for the space-flight community. The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society ran it in 2010, and Puthoff posted it to arXiv two years later; the same text had already gone to the Defense Intelligence Agency as one of its reference documents, and that sheet carries the whole of it. The argument is short and unusually practical. General relativity stores space and time in a set of numbers, the metric tensor, and every quantity you could measure — clock rate, ruler length, colour, energy, effective mass, the local speed of light — is tied to those numbers by fixed relations. So you can work out what an engineered region would do before anyone knows how to build one. Puthoff tabulates it: clocks inside run fast, emissions blueshift, materials behave as though hardened, effective mass falls, light bends around the craft. He calls the method general relativity for engineers.
Why it matters hereChapter 4 takes its name and its checklist from this paper, and this is the version a reader can cite in a journal reference — the peer-reviewed twin of the reference document, published in the aerospace literature rather than released under a records request.
What it claims
01The metric tensor approach is model-independent: it does not depend on knowing the specific mechanisms or dynamics that produce a spacetime alteration, only that a technology exists which can control and manipulate the metric, so the physical consequences can be catalogued ahead of the mechanism — a general-relativity-for-engineers approach.Section 2, Spacetime Modification — Metric Tensor Approach
Settled physics02Fixed relations tie every measurable quantity to the metric coefficients — time intervals, frequency and energy, spatial intervals, the remotely observed velocity of light, and effective mass — and Table 1 sets the natural case beside the engineered one, so that where a dense mass slows clocks and reddens light, the engineered column reads the other way through.Section 3, Physical effects as a function of the metric tensor coefficients, Table 1
Settled physics03A spacetime alteration can be written as an effective refractive index of the vacuum; because the velocity of light is set by the vacuum’s permeability and permittivity, generating such an index by technological means is the same thing as engineering those two vacuum parameters — the polarizable-vacuum representation of general relativity.Section 3.4, Refractive Index Modeling
Published and peer-reviewed04The right-hand column of Table 1 amounts to a specification for an interstellar craft: superluminal motion relative to the background frame while nothing locally outruns light, material bonds strengthened relative to the environment, effective mass decreased, an accelerated internal time frame that permits abrupt trajectory changes without undue internal stress, gravity-like forces of arbitrary geometry, and lensing effects in which light bends around the craft or appears to terminate in mid-space.Section 4, Significance of physical effects for advanced aerospace craft, Sections 4.1 to 4.4
Designed, not yet built05Arbitrary metrics with the desired gravity, antigravity and propulsion characteristics can in principle be postulated — the Alcubierre solution being the exemplar — but what implementation requires is determining appropriate sources for their generation, and Puthoff states that until that is met it is premature to guess at an optimum strategy or to form a critical path for engineering development.Section 5, Discussion
What to watch
Read it · abstract
The complete text of this paper is on the site already, in its Defense Intelligence Reference Document form, at /library/stm-3b53deb697 — the same argument, the same Table 1, the same references. This sheet records the published journal version and what changed on the way to press; the differences are listed in the rights note above. Below is the author’s abstract as it appears on the paper.
Abstract
A theme that has come to the fore in advanced planning for long-range space exploration is the concept that empty space itself (the quantum vacuum, or spacetime metric) might be engineered so as to provide energy/thrust for future space vehicles. Although far-reaching, such a proposal is solidly grounded in modern physical theory, and therefore the possibility that matter/vacuum interactions might be engineered for space-flight applications is not a priori ruled out. As examples, the current development of theoretical physics addresses such topics as warp drives, traversable wormholes and time machines that provide for such vacuum engineering possibilities. We provide here from a broad perspective the physics and correlates/consequences of the engineering of the spacetime metric.
The way in
https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.2184This is the published version of the paper whose Defense Intelligence Reference Document form — DIA-08-1003-015, 29 March 2010, with the author’s name withheld — is reproduced in full at /library/stm-3b53deb697. Published as Harold E. Puthoff, ‘Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering’, JBIS, the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 63, pp. 82–89 (2010), received 21 October 2010 and revised 21 November 2010, from the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin; submitted to arXiv on 3 February 2012 as arXiv:1204.2184. The arXiv posting carries the arXiv.org perpetual non-exclusive licence rather than a Creative Commons licence, so this page carries the summary, the claims and the author’s own abstract, and sends the reader to the DIRD sheet for the text. What differs: the published paper adds an abstract and a keyword line, numbers its sections one to five where the DIRD runs a preface and introduction followed by sections I to IV, and its abstract lists warp drives, traversable wormholes and time machines where the DIRD’s opening lists warp drives and traversable wormholes. The word ‘mainstream’ before ‘physics literature’ and ‘theoretical physics’ is dropped. The discussion is softened from the DIRD’s ‘the possibility — even likelihood — that future developments ... will trend’ to ‘the possibility has been considered that future developments ... could trend’. The reference list grows from 22 items to 24, adding Leonhardt and Philbin, ‘General Relativity in Electrical Engineering’, New Journal of Physics 8, 247 (2006), and Deardorff, Haisch, Maccabee and Puthoff, ‘Inflation Theory Implications for Extraterrestrial Visitation’, JBIS 58, 43 (2005), the latter cited against the ideal-craft feature list; the Klauber arXiv reference is dated as accessed 26 November 2010, after the DIRD’s March 2010 date. The three figures — the blueshifting of an infrared heat power spectrum, light-bending in a spacetime-altered region, and the Alcubierre warp drive metric — are legible here, where the released DIRD scan’s figures were not reproducible.
How to cite it
Harold E. Puthoff (2010) Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering. arXiv:1204.2184
Where it sits in the curriculum
The metric, warp drives and wormholesInertia and gravity from the vacuumInertial mass reduction and transmedium craftThe unified picture