These seem to keep cropping up. The guy appears to claim NASA credentials, for what it’s worth.
‘NASA Veteran Behind Propellantless Propulsion Drive Announces Major Discovery - Slashdot’
There’s a subtle line between deliberate scam and crackpot; I wouldn’t venture to say where on the spectrum this falls.
True. We will have to see how evidence from tests done by reputable scientists and institutions comes out.
It doesn’t necessarily break conservation of energy, but sure breaks conservation of momentum.
Me, I want a spindizzy. If we’re going to break physics, let’s go BIG!
I want to fly a planet halfway across the galaxy… 
If you know it doesn’t work, it’s a scam. If you think it will work despite all evidence to the contrary, you’re a crackpot.
Wait, " the outwardly amiable researcher presented his findings at a recent Alternative Propulsion Energy Conference (APEC)"
An Alternate Propulsion Energy Conference?
Scam and crackpot.
Well, the Alternative Propulsion Engineering Conference (APEC) is not sponsored by AIAA, IEEE, NASA, or any other broadly recognized engineering or space organization, it isn’t clear what (if any) peer review is performed by submissions, and the interviewer in the video, Tim Ventura, is an enthusiast of all kinds of “alternative science” including anti-gravity, “gravitomagnetism”, UAPs, zero point energy, time travel, and so forth based upon the playlist from his YouTube.com channel, so not exactly an authoritative or critical skeptic.
Charles Buhler does appear to have a Ph.D. in physics from Florida State university and been employed by NASA at Kennedy Space Center working on electrostatic phenomena, being listed on an author in published papers on characterizing charged Lunar dust and electrostatic charge generation at low pressure. There is also a paper on the NASA Technical Reports Server, not authored by Buhler, titled “Asymmetrical Capacitors for Propulsion, although it concludes that the only viable model is that a biased electrostatic field from a capacitor causes charges to transfer momentum to atmospheric particles which is not contrary to basic electromechanics.
I only skimmed quickly through the video interview but it doesn’t seem to present any mechanism or even describe the mechanism. It touts that “thousands of tests” have been performed, claiming to have ramped up to several hundreds of pounds of thrust developed which would seem to be a definitive result (at least that thrust is being developed) but no presentation of the experimental apparatus or how the thrust measurement is taken. Only a couple of charts summarizing the results are shown in the video but are part of a presentation which appears to show additional theory and maybe some experimental details, but I can’t find the complete presentation online. He does discuss the Casimir effect (refers to it as “Casimir force”) which is a real thing (negative pressure that occurs when you have two plates close enough together to exclude wavelengths larger than the gap between the plates) but this is a very tiny force and it isn’t explained how this applies to their electrostatic thruster or could conceivably produce such high impulse.
So there is insufficient detail to evaluate whether there is any viability to this purported “propellant-less thruster” but as Carl Sagan was fond of saying, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, and given how much a propulsion system that doesn’t require momentum exchange would contravene much of current physics, I certainly think more than one guy’s say-so and a couple of summary charts are prerequisite to even taking this seriously. I don’t know that it is a scam but the history of experimental physics is replete with remarkable and revolutionary discoveries that turn out to be experimental error, contamination, and bias from unrecognized sources. My off-the-cuff assessment is that they have some basic problem with how they are taking or interpreting thrust measurements.
Stranger
And if you think it will work eventually but need to “tweak” the demonstration for the investors, you’re somewhere in-between.
I would put that on the scam side.
If you think you need to tweak it because you got something wrong, you’re still a crackpot.
The problem is that investors are typically not buying into your concept; they’re investing in your confidence. If you have a promising concept with some basic demonstration but are detailing the practical issues and stumbling blocks to delivery to market, you aren’t going to get a dime from most investors, and especially SiVal venture capital. But if you promise practical life extension, controlled nuclear fusion, or an AI that will replace most human workers within five years in a presentation with flashy animations, not only are investors not going press to hard about implementation details and challenges, they are going to be pushing you to increase your estimates of revenue and compress timelines to market, and because those are often fictitious guesswork to begin with it doesn’t take much to ‘convincingly’ change them. So, as a startup looking for investment, you are encouraged and virtually required to “tweak” your claims and results in order to attract and retain investors.
Theranos has become the cautionary tale for this because it should have been obvious that the way the technology was purported to work was never viable, either from a standpoint of processing and distributing to different elements of the “Edison” machine or performing a vast array of complex tests on such a small quantity of blood taken in a way which almost assures contamination. And in fact, experts in hematology and microfluidics said as much, and medical experts brought in by CVS to provide independent assessment for due diligence also advised that the claims made about the Theranos technology by Elizabeth Holmes were at best exaggerations; and yet, the company proceeded into their investment. Had it not been for a couple of whistleblowers concerned about the ethics of providing inaccurate and faked medical test results, and various financial and legal improprieties with their business, Theranos would likely still be going today. And it is just the tip of the iceberg with regard to scammy startups. But Holmes and Balwani succeeded in doing the important thing in that industry; that is to say, not only convincing investors to put their money in but to become advocates and apologists for the company to give it the sheen of credibility and undermine knowledgable critics.
Stranger
Either that or it is a complete scam. If they claim that they can produce ‘enough thrust to overcome Earth’s gravity’, that should be very easily demonstrable in any basic lab without need for any testing in space.
I don’t believe it.
I don’t know what Buhler, et al would have to gain from such an obviously falsifiable scam. The end goal of a scam is that you get someone to give you a lot of money with which you abscond (or at least live high on the hog for a while) before they realize they’ve been swindled. Nobody who actually builds spacecraft or space launch systems is going to invest many millions of dollars into a “propellantless propulsion system” without seeing a practical demonstration, and the entire physics community is going to inquiring as to how this could possibly work, not only because it would revolutionize physics and space industry/exploration but also probably be a way to make a “free energy” device.
Unlike the Theranos technology, this is basic mechanics and there really isn’t an effective way to obfuscate how it works or conceal any trickery other than refusing third party review and independent experiments, and this isn’t like commercial fusion companies promising to deliver net power output but not really dealing with all of the complexities of scaling up power density to something useful and accounting for all of the required inputs and practical issues such as tritium breeding that make it non-viable in practice even if they can technically achieve a burning plasma state. This thing either works or it doesn’t.
My guess is that Buhler at al have some basic error in how they are measuring thrust (since it is presumably a static experiment) due to electrical or thermal effects, and absent those it conforms to current physics. If it doesn’t, that will be very interesting, and more efficient propulsion is about the least of the innovations it would offer. But I would bet real money against it.
Stranger
Nowadays there’s also the quasi-scam of startups that are the equivalent of vaporware. They just somehow never produce anything and the investors get screwed (hey, investment is always a risk) but the people who started the whole thing walk away with a few year’s worth of comfortable salary. Failure as a business model: it works for Boeing and Donald Trump.
Right: where is the payoff?
We will have to see how it plays out. I suspect that they will refuse to submit to real independent tests and the whole thing will fade away. But yes, what’s the point?
Sounds a bit like the ADE 651 which was a fake bomb detector produced by the British company Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd (ATSC). Its manufacturer claimed it could detect bombs, guns, ammunition, and more from kilometres away.
Sales demonstrations would be rigged to succeed, she says. Anyone sceptical of the devices would be publicly humiliated. And users were instructed not to open the equipment - to avoid damaging the “sensitive technology” inside.
As soon as I read this, the words Dean drive (see Dean drive - Wikipedia) came into my head. A seventy yo memory.
So you don’t try to sell it to spacecraft builders. You sell it to investors, with the promise that, in a few years, when you finish getting all of the bugs worked out, they will be able to sell it to spacecraft builders. Of course they won’t, but they don’t know that.
There isn’t always a bigger fool. But there’s still an abundant supply of them.
Ask Steorn.
Well, it is possible that it the goal but given that if this device works as advertised it breaks basic physical principles in a readily demonstrable way I would expect stronger criticism versus a medical device or longevity treatment where the claims can be broader and the criteria for success can be vague. Also, unlike something like the Theranos machine, a propulsion system isn’t an end use product; it is something that gets acquired and integrated into a larger system like a spacecraft or flight vehicle, so the people who are most likely to invest a lot of money in it are also going to be more technically astute and more interested in detailed characterization than someone just investing in a life extension technology which offers vague, unverifiable promises of increasing lifespan by 50%.
And because I follow this, I’ll note that there is a lot of current skepticism in the venture capital world regarding investments in space and propulsion because so many of them have not turned out to be profitable even when they are technically viable. Launch and space services startups are going belly-up on an almost weekly basis just because their promises of turning a few million dollars into billions of revenue just have not happened, and those that have done IPOs and SPAC conversions have typically tanked in value after a few months, so there is a lot less of an appetite for investing in even very practical space ventures much less fringy speculative technologies.
That being said, major aerospace companies and government agencies like NASA and DARPA do invest in a low of edge-of-physics efforts even if they seem really questionable in the hope of catching a technomagical innovation like anti-gravity or net power generating desktop fusion, but these are typically funded at very low levels; basically enough to sustain a couple of researchers and staff a small lab for a few years, but not walk-away money that will allow you to sit on the beach next to an erudite multimillionaire German expat “earning twenty percent”.
It just seems unlikely that someone with an actual career and publications has decided to run a transparently falsifiable scam for a few bucks and yucks. It’s far more likely that they are honestly pursuing what they believe to be a legitimate line of inquiry and getting a seemingly successful experimental result (which he clearly can’t explain in workable principles) which is actually due to experimental or measurement error, which happens all the time.
Stranger
Great post overall. Agree completely. As to this tidbit I’ll expand / quibble a smidgen:
Or they’ve taken a long walk off the short crackpot pier. Drugs, booze, a few mini-strokes, an excessive desire to believe, runaway ego, whatever. All these things can result in a maniacal dedication to a hopeless cause on the part of a well-respected researcher with decades of reputable good work behind them.
I’d take the opposite stance. Anyone with multiple publications under their belt knows darned well just how big of a violation of the laws of physics as we know them a propellantless drive would be, and hence also knows that any apparent result is far, far more likely to be a measurement error than an actual violation of conservation of momentum. But someone being an established researcher in no way decreases the likelihood of them being unethical. So an established researcher who’s claiming a momentum nonconservation is far more likely to be a scammer.