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Can the Vacuum Drive Fuel-Free Propulsion?

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The vacuum Casimir force on two plane-parallel plates. (Image credit: Wikimedia)

The optimal propulsion of a payload to space is without fuel. Our current space rockets rely on carrying the fuel along with the payload for the ride. Most of the fuel energy is wasted in this way, allowing the terminal speed of the payload to grow only logarithmically with increasing fuel mass.

The most elegant way out this conundrum is to create artificially a negative mass. Adding a negative mass of equal magnitude to the payload mass would make the total mass of the system on the launch pad zero. This means that the Earth’s gravity will not be pulling the system down. Ignoring friction with air, an infant could kick the zero-mass system from the ground into space where it will continue along its path at its initial speed without ever being slowed down by the Earth’s gravity.

This sounds like a pipe dream. But whether a negative mass can be created is a legitimate physics question. Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, General Relativity, allows negative masses, as discussed in a seminal 1957 paper published here by the physicist Herman Bondi.

By now, we learned that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, suggesting a form of repulsive gravity sourced by a non-zero the energy density of the vacuum, so-called `dark energy’. Apparently, the cosmic vacuum has a positive energy density and a negative pressure that is nearly equal in magnitude. According to General Relativity, cosmic gravity is sourced by the sum of the energy density plus three times the pressure, yielding a negative gravitational effect for the vacuum proportional to minus twice its energy density. Hence, the resulting gravity of the cosmic vacuum is repulsive rather than attractive.

This raises the naïve thought that all we need to do in order to create a negative mass, is to bottle up the cosmic vacuum in a container with thin walls, so that the net gravitating mass of the product will be negative. Unfortunately, there is no way to bottle the vacuum in this way to yield a negative mass. All attempts to conceptualize a way of engineering the production of a negative mass failed. So far, we know of no way for producing a negative mass so as to launch a payload to space without fuel.

Harold G. “Sonny” White is a mechanical aerospace engineer at NASA who claims to be working on a new thruster concept by utilizing quantum-mechanical effects, so-called “Casimir cavities”, for potential propellant-less thrusters. According to quantum electrodynamics, the vacuum is described as a sea of virtual particles that constantly pop into and out of existence. White claims that his thruster can “push off” these virtual particles — primarily electrons and positrons — to generate thrust without carrying traditional propellant.

The Casimir effect (as reviewed here) is a physical force acting on the macroscopic boundaries of a confined space, which arises from the quantum fluctuations of a field. It is named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir, who predicted the effect for electromagnetic systems in 1948. After a conversation with Niels Bohr, who suggested that the effect had something to do with the vacuum zero-point energy, Casimir formulated the theory predicting a force between neutral conducting plates.

The simplest manifestation of the effect is for electromagnetic fields in the presence of two parallel and perfectly conducting plates. Because the electric field must vanish in a perfect conductor, the vacuum only admits fluctuations which satisfy the boundary conditions of zero electric field on the plates. This limits the number of possible fluctuations, or virtual photons, between the plates relative to the outer space, triggering a lower vacuum pressure between the plates and a resultant attractive force between them. Alternatively, the Casimir effect can be understood as an electromagnetic-polarization interaction between the two plates.

The Casimir effect is real. In 1997, a direct experiment by Steven K. Lamoreaux quantitatively measured the Casimir force to be within 5% of the value predicted by theory (as reported here).

White’s “Quantum Vacuum Thruster” (as described here and here) claims to be “pushing off” the quantum vacuum consisting of a dynamic sea of virtual particles — principally electrons and positrons — that constantly emerge and disappear. White argues that the quantum thrust is generated similarly to a submarine using a propeller to push water. By using custom-designed Casimir cavities — nanoscale structures with strategically placed pillars and walls — White aims to increase the magnitude of negative vacuum energy density.

Nevertheless, the implications of the Casimir for propulsion are dubious. The Casimir force is extremely weak. It is obvious that the rest-mass energy of the conducting plates vastly exceeds the vacuum energy modification in between them. This means that the Casimir energy has a negligible contribution to the total rest-mass energy, making it an extremely weak resource for propulsion.

Perhaps if we ever detect vehicles of extraterrestrial visitors, we might find some of them to be propelled by manipulations of spacetime. For that reason, we must stay curious to check if there is any evidence for non-human made vehicles in the UFO videos to be released by the White House, following on President Trump’s recent directive (posted here).

As I noted yesterday to Bianca in her morning program Across the Nation on Newsmax (accessible here): “We are probably not at the top of the food chain, cosmologically speaking.” Following that interview, I summarized on Fox 32 Chicago here the latest scientific studies within the Galileo Project in search for extraterrestrial technological artifacts, and finally — close to midnight — I explained here in Jesse Weber Live on NewsNation how much we still do not understand.

Indeed, there is a lot that we might learn from more accomplished siblings in our family of technological civilizations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

1*LE3Xlzc3hNG5VDAGlDP8KQ.jpeg
(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (2005–2026), and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb

https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb

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