A Long-Abandoned Idea From Einstein May Transport Us to the Stars

Long-range space exploration is currently hamstrung by having to accelerate spacecraft in comparative fits and starts using rocket engines that can only fire for a few minutes at a time, followed by months, years, and even decades of the spacecraft coasting from planet to planet. However, a propulsion method that could produce continuous thrust, even if it was just a weak push, could cut the months-long journey to another planet like Mars down to mere weeks. Toward that end, an eccentric physicist in California has developed what he believes to be a fledgling propulsion system designed to produce this very effect, using piezoelectric disks charged with precisely timed electrical pulses that alter the very fabric of spacetime, to achieve continuous thrust without having to use bulky rocket propellant.

The concept behind this new propulsion method finds its roots in a conversation that took place over a century ago: according to legend, the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach presented Albert Einstein with a simple thought experiment: what if there was only one object in the universe? According to relativistic principles this object could not have a velocity, since at least two objects are required to measure their velocity relative to each other, such as a moving spaceship and a planet.

Mach went a step further: if this object was alone in the universe and had no velocity, it also could not have a measurable mass, because mass varies with an object’s velocity.

This led Mach to conclude that the inertial mass of objects only exists because our universe contains multiple objects, all exerting an influence on one another; for instance, the inertial resistance experienced by an object, such as an automobile trying to accelerate, is due to the collective gravitational pull of not only the Earth, but also the rest of the Universe—the stars, planets, even the mass of a little Gormarzub from far-flung Zazmar VII, despite being just an itty-bitty shularp of a creature.

Einstein was intrigued by this idea, to the point where he tried to incorporate it into his theory of general relativity—to him, Mach’s thought experiment just made intuitive sense—with the professor calling the idea “Mach’s principle“. Unfortunately, mathematics didn’t agree with this otherwise elegant concept: the idea proved to be controversial, and was ultimately disproven in the 1961 PhD thesis of physicist Carl Brans, using mathematics to demonstrate that inertia could not be explained by the gravitational influence of distant matter in the universe, leading the scientific community to abandon the concept altogether.

Six years after Brans’ thesis was published, a young physicist-turned-flamenco guitarist named Jim Woodward was satellite spotting one night on the rooftop of the Pensión Santa Cruz Hotel in Seville, Spain, when he witnessed a satellite suddenly change its course as it crossed the sky.

This decidedly unconventional satellite behavior led Woodward to conclude that he had just witnessed the passage of an extraterrestrial spacecraft across the sky. And if someone from somewhere else had figured out how to make a fast-moving spacecraft double back on its original course in short order then that meant that “critters at least as clever as us had figured out how to get around spacetime far better than we are capable of doing,” setting Woodward on a lifelong path toward discovering this secret.

Now an 80 year-old lung cancer survivor working out of an isolated lab in California, Cal State Fullerton professor of physics Jim Woodward took an unconventional route to develop his advanced propulsion theories: in his pursuit of trying to discover the secret of manipulating spacetime, he combed through old scientific journals, searching for the crumbs of promising gravitational research that had been abandoned or hit a dead end; this prompted a shift in his career to being a historian as a way of enabling his research. “I was doing the history of science already, so I might as well get a degree in it,” Woodward recounts. “It was an obvious thing to do.”

Woodward’s efforts paid off in his discovery of Einstein’s concept of Mach’s principle, and he reasoned that if the collective mass of the Universe tends to keep a resting object at rest, then a change in the mass in part of that object would result in it moving toward that change in mass. And as Einstein’s famous equation E=mc² states, mass is simply energy: change an object’s energy, and you change its mass.

Since 1989, Woodward has focused his experiments on piezoelectric materials, substances that bulge ever so slightly when charged with electricity; if his hunch is right, then the electrical charge will add a minuscule amount of mass to the material, meaning its effect on spacetime should also be affected.

By capping a stack of piezoelectric disks with a block of brass, the bulging of the electrically-charged disks will initially shove the brass block away; but if they are indeed gaining mass—and thus affecting spacetime around them—then they should also attract the block back toward the stack; by the time the electrical pulse has ended the whole apparatus should have moved forward ever so slightly.

Over the decades, Woodward, along with his lab partner, physicist Hal Fearn, have tweaked the device they call the Mach-Effect Gravitational Assist (MEGA) drive, a gizmo designed to (potentially) produce and measure any possible movement from the piezoelectric disks incorporated in its design. The duo eventually began to coax a few micro-newtons of thrust, movement imperceptible to anything but sensitive scientific equipment, out of the MEGA drive by repeating the process in quick pulses to amplify any effect the disks might be producing, and finely tuning the resonances of those pulses into harmonized vibrations to romance even more movement from the strange device.

Those few micro-newtons wound up being enough to attract grant money from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program, allowing Woodward and Fearn to expand their experiments. Then one day Woodward realized that the mounting the drive was attached to might have been dampening the harmonized vibrations that were crucial to amplifying the device’s meager thrust.

When the MEGA drive was tested on its redesigned mount, the results were dramatic: the new setup started producing tens of micro-newtons of thrust, and with further tweaking it was putting out more than 100 micro-newtons, an increase two orders of magnitude over their previous designs, producing enough thrust for the two researchers to see the device lurch forward a half-millimeter with their own eyes.

This new success is scheduled to be tested by two independent labs: the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Maryland, and Hathaway Research, a civilian lab in Canada. Woodward and Fearn’s efforts over the years have attracted not only an army of critics but also support from other researchers, such as engineer Chip Akins, who is building a custom amplifier that will cycle through the MEGA drive’s resonant frequency as it changes to better tune its thrust capabilities; and an expert on interstellar mission concepts, physicist Marshall Eubanks, designed a spacecraft called the SSI Lambda that is designed around the MEGA drive, that would power its exotic engines with a fusion reactor during its voyage to nearby star systems.

Everyone involved, including Woodward and Fearn, are cautiously optimistic about the new drive. “I’d say there’s between a 1-in-10 and 1-in-10,000,000 chance that it’s real, and probably toward the higher end of that spectrum,” says Mike McDonald, an aerospace engineer at the Naval Research Laboratory in Maryland who will conduct independent testing on the MEGA drive. “But imagine that one chance; that would be amazing. That’s why we do high-risk, high-reward work. That’s why we do science.”