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Originally Posted by aireal
If photons are purely particles, you must account for where they went, if purely waves then you don't
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No, I'm pretty sure you still have to account for where they went.
As for the conical shape, It's supposed to work by increasing the thrust applied at one end of the "engine." But it won't.
I found the momentum conservation problem, I think.
Imagine a trapezoidal pool table, set on a frictionless surface. If you were to launch a cue ball at the side of the table, it would bounce off at the same angle it impacted at. Imagine your cue ball is a photon and so it bounces around in there pretty much forever. It imparts some momentum to the table each time it hit's.
Now, the paper is right in saying that there will be more bounces at one end of the table / cone than at the other - however, they will not be in any useful direction. In order to develop forward thrust, the cue ball (or photon) needs to be moving opposite of the direction in which you want to go.
In that image, I didn't follow the path of the cue ball for very long, but all of those "hits" impart momentum in
the wrong direction.
As long as that cue ball is trapped on the trapezoidal table, the momentum from it will eventually cancel itself out. The table may wiggle a bit, but it's not going anywhere.
Now if you were to leave the narrow end open, you might be able to get a hair bit more of efficiency than simply launching the cue ball out the back - but I'm pretty sure there are more efficient rocket designs.
But, the guy did say his experiment worked. I would be interested to know what actually caused the thrust he saw, if he didn't just make a measurement error.
TFS
