Lazar's UFO drive mechanism seems highly improbable
according to current physics. While element 115 may
eventually be synthesized, it is not expected to have any
isotopes with half lifes longer than 10-2 to 1 second.
Even the most stable superheavy elements are expected
to have half-lives of the order of a few days maximum.
The second problem is making 115. Current nuclear
chemistry experiments have stalled around 109 or possibly
110 as the production rate gets too low. The problem is that
such elements cannot be built up from lighter ones by successive
neutron capture in reactors or in nature in supernovas because
the fission half-lives around 94-100 become too short. Hence
they have to be made by fusing heavy nuclei (U, Pu, or higher)
with medium sized nuclei such as Ca, Fe, etc. To get such
nuclei with their high electric charges to fuse requires so
much energy that the compound nucleus fissions before it
can evaporate enough neutrons to deexcite to a stable state.
Finally, there is no reason to believe that 116 would
decay into antimatter. The total kinetic energy released by
the fission of a nucleus of 116 is estimated to be about
250 to 300 MEV. An antiproton or antineutron has a mass of
about 940 MEV with the positron or antielectron about 1/1800
of this. So even assuming there was a plausible route not
violating any known conservation laws, there is not enough
energy in the decay of superheavy nuclei to generate atoms
of antimatter.
Also, Lazar's physics is suspect. While some theories
predict that gravity and the strong nuclear force are aspects
of the same force, the energy level of unification, the point
at which they become indistinguishable, is about 10 to the 15th
GEV. Current accelerators are <= about 1000 GEV, far above the
energies available in atomic nuclei.
With our technology, scaling up by a factor of 10 to
the 12th would mean building a machine whose circumference
is about that of the Milky Way galaxy. If we had access to a
technology that could reduce this scale to vehicular dimensions,
do you really think we would even consider building something
as primitive as the SSC.
Gravitons are not out of vogue theoretically, but they
have never been observed due to the weakness of their interaction
with matter. If the LIGO or similar gravitational wave observatories
are built, they will provide the first direct evidence for gravitons
or rather the wave-like aspect of gravitational radiation, which
is equivalent to the particle aspect by the Correspondence
Principle. Gravitation is about 39 orders of magnitude weaker
than the strong nuclear force so even though the SNF may have
gravity-like properties, they are unobservable even at nuclear
energies.
Antimatter per se has not yet been made in the
laboratory although both positrons and antiprotons are
made routinely in accelerators and stored. The difficulty lies in
cooling both components down sufficiently and mixing them to produce antihydrogen while still confining them and the resulting neutral
atoms. It should be doable and I would expect the announcement
to be made at any time. However, these experiments will produce
only a few atoms at a time, nowhere near enough for bombs or
space vehicle fuel.
Lazar is correct that fission and fusion bombs release
only a very small fraction of the total available energy. The
problem here is confinement; the bombs destroy themselves and
the density of fissionable and fusionable materials drop too low
for the reactions to procede. Similar problems would exist with
matter -antimatter reactions as well. It has been predicted that
matter and antimatter stars might just bounce off each other as
the annihilation energy released as their outer atmospheres touched
would push them apart before more than a fraction of their masses
had been consumed. They might, however, be sufficiently disrupted
by the shock and acceleration that their cores would be exposed,
producing two novas. In any case, the collision would be spectacular,
even if it did not result in mutual annihilation.
Even if one could 'distort space time' what is to prevent
the distortion from affecting the vehicle and its crew? There
might very well be strong gravitational tidal effects which would
destroy both in the process as a space-time distortion would look
like a very strong and inhomogeneous gravitational field. Creating
and terminating such 'distortions' would probably generate
gravitational radiation. Such strong fields might also create
Hawking radiation and be visible to outsiders, if not lethal
to the crew. 'Worm holes,' which might be what Lazar means
by these distortions, might very well actually be longer and
slower routes. Lazar needs to think this one through further.
It is difficult to design a gravitational wave amplifier as
it would require a source of energy to power a gravitational
wave generator that could respond to incoming GW's and draw
on this energy to generate new waves of increased amplitude.
Perhaps orbiting black holes might contract their orbits in
response to a passing GW and generate a stronger replica wave
if the phases were right. If the black holes were electrically
charged, then perhaps electrical energy could be converted to GW's.
There are some severe technical constraints, however. Are there
any engineer/physicists out there who want to try designing a
GW amplifier?
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