The laws of physics by Stanton Freidman

I am sick and tired of people complaining that one or another law of physics
would have to be violated by flying saucers, and, therefore, since I am a
nuclear physicist, how can I say some UFOs are alien spacecraft?

There is a long list of such supposed violations: It would take too long to get
here from other star systems. It would take too much energy to get here from
other star systems. Right angle turns are impossible. High accelerations would
violate the laws of physics. People can't be taken through walls without
damaging the walls or the people. Etc. ad nauseum.

What we seem to be dealing with are claims by people who don't understand the
laws of physics, who have no comprehension that the feasibility of accomplishing
a particular objective is almost completely dependent on the engineering
assumptions made, and that much of the blind acceptance we give to today's
technology would have been totally rejected by other noisy negativists 100 or
more years ago.

It is easier and perhaps more erudite to suggest that something is impossible
because it supposedly violates the laws of physics rather than admitting, "I
don't know how to do that." Can we reach the stars? Can we withstand high
accelerations? Can we go into orbit? Can we make powerful computers that will
fit on a desk?

Slide rules and vacuum tubes won't cut it for today's computers. Neither will
transistors nor integrated circuits. . . But micro integrated circuits will do
it. They were only attained with the expenditure of billions of dollars and
thousands of man-years of effort by physicists and others.

The key thought is that progress comes from doing things differently in an
unpredictable way.

Acceleration

How much acceleration can people stand? This, of course, is a biology question,
but the simple answer to so many such questions is that it depends on the
duration of the acceleration, the direction of the force acting on the person
with regard to her body, the magnitude of that force, the restraints on the
person, etc. As it happens, the shorter the duration, the more one can stand.

This question is often confused by the units we physicists use. One G (ask any
physics class) is 9.8 meters per second squared-which means nothing to most
people. In normal units that is about 21 miles per hour per second. NASA data
shows that a trained pilot can perform a tracking task while being accelerated
at 14 Gs for two minutes.

Think about that for a moment. 14 Gs is about 300 miles per hour per second. A
Corvette going from 0 to 60 miles an hour in 6 seconds if uniformly accelerated
is pulling 60/6 or 10 mph per second, or only about 0.5 G�s! It turns out one
can withstand 30 Gs for 1 second without damage, if properly constrained, and
the force is in the right direction with regard to the body.

Notice how the astronauts are launched on their backs because people can stand
much more acceleration back to front than foot to head. Note, too, that contour
couches are used to distribute the load and that strong seat belt restraints are
employed.

There are really no laws of physics being violated here, though one book
foolishly claimed that when one gets to 8 G's, one dies. True, if one slams a
standing unrestrained person into a brick wall....Dr. Stapp actually lived
through deceleration of 43 Gs (From over 600 mph to zero), for a fraction of a
second. The rocket sled can be seen at the Clyde Tombaugh Space Museum in
Alamogordo, NM. No, you wouldn't catch me on such a sled.

Right angle turns

Some have said that saucers making right angle turns violate the laws of
physics. The laws of physics say nothing about the possibility of making rapid
right angle turns. Our present jet and rocket technology, which work by carrying
along something thrown out the back end, is not capable of providing right angle
turns, because we cannot rapidly change the direction of the rearward thrust.

A magneto-aerodynamic system which could provide rapid changes of the direction
of electric and magnetic forces probably could provide right angle turns. More
likely there is a technique about which we know nothing.

Sonic booms

Sometimes it is claimed that one cannot go faster than the speed of sound in the
atmosphere without producing a sonic boom. Therefore, any claims of supersonic
flying saucers without booms being heard would mean the laws of physics would be
violated. The truth is that the production of a sonic boom is dependent on the
shape of the high speed object and its interaction with the surrounding boundary
layer of air. If the air is electrically ionized (made to be a conducting
plasma) then there may NOT be an accompanying sonic boom.

Energy and time

I have been told that getting here from another solar system in a time shorter
than the average person's life span would take far too much energy and would
violate the laws of physics, or it would take thousands or millions of years.
The fact is that the feasibility of any space travel is based upon the
assumptions made.

As I noted in my "Challenge to SETI Specialists" (see my Web site at
www.vj-enterprises.com/sipage.html), a "scientific" calculation in 1941 oft he
required initial launch weight of a chemical rocket able to get a man to the
moon and back concluded it would be a million million tons.

Dr. Campbell was off by a factor of 300 Million! He made all the wrong
assumptions, such as single stage rockets, a limit of 1G acceleration, using a
retrorocket to slow down when approaching earth on the return, assuming much too
low an exhaust velocity, and assuming that the rocket would have to provide all
the energy.

We use cosmic freeloading such as the earth's rotation of 1000 mph when
launching to the east near the equator, the gravity field of the moon to pull in
the rocket, and the earth's atmosphere to slow us down on return. It was Dr.
Campbell's ignorance that was the problem, not the laws of physics.

Another misunderstanding of the laws of physics comes from people pointing out
that since one would have to approach the speed of light (670,000,000 mph) to go
to nearby solar systems, the amount of energy required would be humongus because
the mass of the rocket increases as one approaches the speed of light. However,
it only takes one year at 1G acceleration to get close to the speed of light.

If one uses nuclear fusion of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) and helium-3 (light
helium one produces charged particles which can be directed by electric and
magnetic fields) then there is ten million times as much energy per article as
they can get in a chemical rocket. The particles are born that way and are not
accelerated to that energy.

In addition, time slows down for things moving that fast to the point that at
something like 99.99 % of light speed, it only takes a little over six months
pilot time (not counting acceleration time) to go the 39 light year distance to
Zeta l and Zeta 2 Reticuli.

Also, if one uses gravitational assist (the traveler doesn't provide the energy)
as we do on all our deep space probes, the increase in mass wouldn't matter
anyway. A black hole would be quite convenient.

Moving through walls

"But Stan, how do the laws of physics permit people to be pulled through walls
and windows without breaking them or the person?" I haven't the faintest idea. I
am sure that 150 years ago the idea of having information enter a closed room
and be reproduced to make pictures and sounds on TV and radio sets using
electricity, which also wasn't known at that time, would have been thought
absurd.

Remember that radio waves have been reaching Earth for billions of years even
though we weren't aware of them. Maybe we will learn how, with strong electric
or magnetic or unknowium fields, to go through the mostly empty space of walls
and windows with the mostly empty space of people.

New nanotechnology techniques are truly as extraordinary as the breakthroughs in
quantum mechanics, relativity, radioactivity, and solid state physics over the
past century or so. Does anybody really believe that the progress has stopped? I
certainly don't.

That we cannot either explain or duplicate what to us seems like anomalous
technology, doesn't mean a more advanced society didn't get there a long time
ago. It is our lack of understanding that provides the limits, not the laws of
physics.

Limited realms

Remember that the closest-to-each-other pair of sun like stars, Zeta 1 and 2
Reticuli, are a billion years older than the sun. An important aspect of the
laws of physic is that they apply in limited realms. Einstein's relativity
involving increase of mass and slowing down of time is only significant at
velocities near that of light, or in situations where the conditions are very
different from "normal"-for example, near very very dense black holes or neutron
stars.

Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, normally deal with the world of the very
small. In the biological sciences we find that a great variety of very new micro
scopes enable us to see the very small world.  Nanotechnology and quantum dots
are part of that very small world.

The myriad of applications for lasers, from the check-out counters, to CDs, to
very sophisticated analyses of materials, to the surgeon's special tools
frequently accomplishing what was thought to be impossible shoul dhelp us
recognize that violations of the laws of physic are not really very common.

What new realms will be discovered in the next decade or in the next century?
New variations on old theme of the world of physics?