19 Year Old Invents New Spacecraft Propulsion System

A nineteen year old college student has invented a new spacecraft engine - system that she says will make space flight much cheaper and ever so much faster. Aisha Mustafa, a student at Sohag University has developed her system to take advantage of the Casimir-polder force that I reported on last year at this time, in an article here  which, put simply,is the energy that occurs between separate surfaces and objects in a vacuum. The energy for all intents is a quantum force measured between two plates positioned quantum micrometers apart from each other, will generate virtual photons which constitute a field, and generate a net force - all this with no external electro-motive potential applied.

As mind bending as the casimir effect sounds, Mustafa feels that the potential (pun intended pac) is there to make space flight much simpler.

read the dvice article here

Static and Dynamic Casimir Effect

Ok folks...I'm turning off the lights....time to go home...why? Because I have this pain behind my left eyeball and I think my head is going to explode....

You know, I have tried my hand at understanding quantum mechanics, in a shaved chimp kinda way, but the closer I get to getting a handle on it, the rules change.... relatively speaking...

What put me over the edge this time? The Casimir effect, which wrapped up in a tidy bundle describes an effect whereby mirrors can and do produce their own light due to the interaction with virtual bits. Honest!

I was reading this article in IO9, that describes placing two mirrors close together (micro-meters and the wiki article calls for a vacuum) so that the virtual particles that "pop" into existence (you see now why my head hurts? virtual....existence? But if you are interested there is a nice article here on virtual particles. ) will force the two plates together. Now that is a rather badly explained Casimir-Polder force, much less than more. It's what happens when you accelerate this structure to relativistic speeds.

The first weird thing happens when you place your mirrors closer than the wave length of the virtual particle. First off, let me explain, in part, these virtual particles. Most importantly they came in pairs. A virtual particle and an anti-virtual particle. ( I know, ouch....) and when they come into existence they annihilate each other instantly. But as the plates are pushed harder and the speed becomes a goodly fraction of C it then becomes possible for the virtual particles to be separated by a plate so they can not annihilate and therefor become real and should said virtual particle be virtual photons.....? There, I give you light from ummm virtual light courtesy of the Dynamic Casimir Effect.

Really, I have done a poor job at describing a fascinating effect at the quantum level. Read the IO9 and the Wiki articles to get totally twisted.

(Good bye, good night, don't let the door hit you...I need to find my asprin)