On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 9:46 AM, Bob Higgins <[email protected]> wrote:
Eric, my understanding of the Crookes radiometer is that it measures light > intensity by the rotation of its vane, but the effect is NOT due to photon > emission recoil, it is due to the effects of the differential heating of > the minute amount of gas present in the bulb. In a hard vacuum, this > radiometer would not work - photon emission recoil would be insufficient to > make the vanes move. I had one of these as a teen. > Thank you for the clarification. The fact that there is a vacuum tripped me up, and I jumped to conclusions. I wish I had some insight in the case of the Shawyer thrust effect. I > cannot say that I really even have an informed opinion - that would require > far more study than I have done. It is a marvelous mystery and perhaps > someday I will participate. For now, I am trying to stay focused on LENR. > The following thought occurred to me this morning: if neutrinos were the ballast, they could exit the Shawyer drive without the interference that photons would encounter. Since neutrinos have mass, and since reactions in which they arise are generally energetic, it seems likely that neutrino recoil will be bigger than photon recoil in a system like this. Of the two sources of neutrinos that readily come to mind, electron capture and beta decay, there will be different characteristics if one or the other predominates. If electron capture is the primary source, the neutrinos will be monoenergetic, and there will be little in the way of a rise in temperature of the source material, as there is no accompanying beta electron. If beta decay is the primary source, the neutrinos will carry away on average 2/3 of the Q value of whatever reaction produces them, and there will be a significant rise in temperature of the surrounding material as a result of the stopping of energetic beta electrons. I am curious about what kind of reaction rates would be needed to produce the thrusts seen in the EM Drive experiments. One figure among several to work with is 91.2 uN at 17 W power (one of NASA's results) [1]. To model this, one wants a function that takes as input the average energy carried away per reaction (going back to a specific set of Q values) and the anisotropy of the neutrino flux, from 1 (anisotropic) to 0 (isotropic). If the required reaction rates were below 1e15 per second, say, it seems like this idea would be within the realm of possibility. Whether the neutrino source was electron capture or beta decay, the combination of thrust and heat would make the drive appear as an overunity device to an observer with no knowledge of the internal mechanism. It seems, then, that LENR is possibly in play in this instance. Eric [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster#EmDrive
