Historical research guide · 1014 · 2011
Vortex Formation in the Wake of Dark Matter Propulsion
Glen A. Robertson · Mário J. Pinheiro
In one minute
Glen Robertson and Mario Pinheiro open this SPESIF-2011 paper with the premise the whole site is built on: a spacecraft that has to throw mass overboard to move is the wrong architecture, and the future needs a propulsion theory that does not eject propellant. Their route to one is a picture in which closed electric currents run through the whole universe, and the same vortex currents seen driving matter out of blazars and black holes over astronomical distances can be made to appear behind a craft. Working from a modified Chameleon Cosmology model and what they call the density excitation method, they show vortex structures forming in the streamlines behind a ship moving fast through the vacuum, and argue those structures resemble the warp-drive and wormhole geometries of general relativity. The thrust then comes from Hawking and Unruh radiation: virtual electron-positron pairs swallowed ahead of the ship reappear as real particles in an annular vortex behind it.
Connection
Chapter 8 is about moving without reaction mass, and this paper is one of the clearest statements in the library of the alternative — the exhaust is not carried aboard, it is drawn out of the vacuum by the craft's own motion. Chapter 4 gets the geometry: the wake structure Robertson and Pinheiro derive is claimed to look like the warp-drive and wormhole spacetimes, which is what makes it a metric-engineering proposal rather than a fluid-dynamics curiosity.
From the source
The paper's premise is stated in its first line: ’Future spaceflight will require a new theory of propulsion; specifically one that does not require mass ejection.’ That is the architecture question, not an efficiency question — the objection is to carrying the reaction mass at all.Abstract, first sentence
The proposed theory rests on the general view that closed currents pervade the entire universe, and in particular that there is a cosmic mechanism to expel matter to large astronomical distances involving vortex currents as seen with blazars and black holes. Robertson and Pinheiro pair that with the terrestrial case, where force-producing vortices have been related to the motion of wings — birds, duck paddles, a fish’s tail.Abstract, second and third sentences
The paper’s own result is that vortex structures are shown to exist in the streamlines aft of a spaceship moving at high velocity in the vacuum. This is accomplished using the density excitation method per a modified Chameleon Cosmology model — that is, the vacuum is treated as a medium whose density can be excited, and the wake follows from that treatment.Abstract, fourth and fifth sentences
This vortex structure is then shown to have similarities to spacetime models as Warp-Drive and wormholes. The claim is a geometric one: the wake of a fast craft in an excitable vacuum resembles the metric configurations that general relativity already describes for warp shells and throats.Abstract, final sentence
The propulsive mechanism the authors propose is a natural extension of Hawking and Unruh radiation: virtual electron-positron pairs, absorbed by the gravitational expansion forward of the spaceship, emerge from an annular vortex field aft of the spaceship as real particles — in the authors' phrase, ’in-like to propellant mass ejection in conventional rocket theory’. The exhaust is real, but it is drawn from the vacuum rather than carried from the launch pad.Abstract, final sentence
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.phpro.2011.08.002How to cite it
Glen A. Robertson, Mário J. Pinheiro (2011) Vortex Formation in the Wake of Dark Matter Propulsion doi:10.1016/j.phpro.2011.08.002