I watched Laithwaite's famous lecture on TV and I also attended one of his lectures afterwards. I agree with everything Duncan says about the man. I went on to try to develop a thrust machine using gyroscopic principles, corresponded with him about it and got encouragement. Unfortunately the machine didn't work because of the nature of inertia; although with precessing gyros we can conjure up a reactionless angular force, we cant conjure up a reactionless linear force. We need something a bit more clever than an assemblage of spinning flywheels to get that reactionless thrust. And that leads us into the aether and how we can manipulate things to get that thrust.
IMO such manipulation is possible when one realizes that the aether is a vast continuum of particles whizzing about at light velocity. Those particles, when they interact with electrons, can exhibit properties that we recognize as photons, both real and virtual. Real photons (the classical travelling photons that have both particle and wave-like properties) are simply a pattern imposed on the otherwise randomness of that aether background. The source transmitting those photons doesn't actually create and then radiate aether particles, it merely absorbs and and then emits aether particles but in doing so creates the wave pattern. So photons are simply a wave pattern superimposed upon something that is there anyway. To get such a pattern we have to give the aether particles a characteristic that can be changed, and the simplest one is spin, a vector carried with the particle that can have any angle with respect to its other vector, its velocity. Our background aether has a random spread of such spin-velocity angles.
When the spin has an angle relative to the velocity we have a transverse component, some transversivity, and this accounts for what we recognize as classical transverse fields. But more on this later.
If the spin lies along the velocity vector we have something we can call longitudinal, but it can have two directions, either parallel or anti-parallel to the velocity. The aether particles leaving an electron or a positron have this longitudinal characteristic, irrespective of the arriving conditions, hence such a non-random pattern represents the electric field. Virtual photons (that are used to explain near-field phenomena) do not necessarily have wave-like features because they also account for static fields, so the same principle applies, the source (say an electron or positron) modifies the randomness of the aether particles. So what is the difference between a virtual photon and an aether particle? A virtual photon is simply the minimum number of non-random longitudinal aether particles that have to arrive at an electron to nudge it to change orbit.
The point I am trying to make is that we have electromagnetic means for conjuring up forces from the aether, and since this also involves modifying the aether we can ensure that the reaction to a linear force occurs in distant matter in the same way that the reaction to angular force conjured up from gyros occurs in distant matter. It is simply a matter of designing the right experiment involving near-fields, but not static near-fields. It is already established fact that, using a directional antenna, we can transmit photons in one direction and obtain a thrust, the so called photon rocket. Unfortunately we have to transmit 300 megawatts to get 1 Newton of thrust. But if we have an array of antenna elements each in the near-field of the others we can emit virtual photons in one direction and obtain far greater thrust.
Smudge
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