The laws of physics have been broken. The impossible has been achieved and it’s puzzling the greatest minds on the planet. I am talking about the EmDrive, a thruster that has been making major headlines for over a year and which has been shrouded in hype, controversy and debate.
The EmDrive
The EmDrive stands for Electromagnetic Propulsion Drive. It was invented by an English scientist named Roger Shawyer. Although it was invented in the early 2000s, it has only been getting the spotlight more recently.
Image Credits (English scientist Roger Shawyer with the EmDrive)
Basically, it is an engine that provides thrust to a spacecraft by bouncing microwaves around in a closed container. To power the microwaves, solar energy is used, meaning, there is absolutely no need for a propellant.
You read that correctly. For the first time in history, we have an engine that doesn’t require fuel to run and in doing so, it breaks a fundamental law of physics and everyone is absolutely freaking about it.
The law in violation is the Law of Conservation of Momentum, which states that for anything to be propelled forward, some kind of propellant needs to be pushed out in the opposite direction. Since, the EmDrive doesn’t need any fuel, it violates that law.
Recent Developments and Breakthroughs
- As it violates one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the EmDrive has faced and is still facing a lot of skepticism. Many physicists have straight out denied that such a system could even exist.
- But, independent teams from the US, UK and China have all replicated the drive and showed that it actually works, and things got more interesting from there and NASA itself decided to step in and test it out last year.
Image Credits (A prototype of an EmDrive)
- In May, 2015, NASA reported that they had tested out the drive and it seemed to work. Moreover, they ruled out the possibility of any errors by conducting the tests in a vacuum. They also reported that they would conduct a range of tests to replicate the phenomenon every time.
- In November, 2015, NASA reported that they had upgraded their experimental protocol to rule out even the slightest chance of errors and the drive still seemed to be producing thrust without any fuel.
- In 2016, NASA Eagleworks’ paper on the EmDrive passed a peer review process and it is soon going to be published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ AIAA Journal of Propulsion and Power. This increases the credibility of the drive and brings it one more step to becoming a reality.
- Just recently, Guido Fetta, CEO of Cannae Inc, announced that he would be launching the ‘Cannae Drive’ which is based on Roger Shawyer’s original EmDrive, into space, which will demonstrate once and for all whether the drive does actually work in space.
- Engineers in China and Shawyer himself are also working on their own EmDrives that can be launched into space for testing. It is a whole another space race this time around.
Applications and Implications
- If we are one day able to create a working EmDrive based spaceship, it will have huge consequences for our space missions. It will literally catapult humanity several decades if not centuries ahead in terms of our technological abilities.
- Spaceships equipped with the EmDrive will be much lighter than the current ones as there will be no need of heavy rocket fuel on board. This will make each flight much cheaper, making space travel like travelling to another city.
Image Credits
- Also, a spaceship with EmDrive will have much higher speeds. In fact, we could reach Mars in just 10 weeks, compared to 9 months we require today. NASA engineers also estimate that we could reach Alpha Centauri the closest star to our sun in just 92 years with higher capacity EmDrives. Compare that to the 20,000 to 100,000 years that ships with current technology would take!
- More impressively, NASA engineers also theorise that the EmDrive may be able to produce a warp bubble. It is quite far fetched but not impossible. Well, the word impossible loses all meaning anyways, when we are talking about the EmDrive. So, in theory we could have Warp Drive capabilities where we could travel faster than light without violating any laws of physics, just like in the movie Star Trek.
Image Credits
Apart from enhancing our space travel abilities, the EmDrive could be used in other areas as well:
- We could have safer and more efficient automobiles here on Earth.
- Shawyer suggests that this technology can be used to send solar-harvesting satellites in orbit. These could then beam the solar power back to the Earth. This will solve a lot of our energy woes.
- This technology can single handedly solve some of the biggest problems that we are facing today as a race. Let’s hope it gets to see the light of the day.
