Comment Re:Woodward (Score 1) 289
Thanks, I've read the book. The first part is a introduction to Mach effects. The second part reads like a lab book to a great extent (description of experiments, matching of theory to seen results, etc), leading to experimental descriptions to demonstrate the existence of these effects. The authors makes some interesting benchtop experiments. He sees some new physics happening, including very small reactionless thrust effect, in the order of a few microNewtons, that he cannot explain away with obvious side effects, like heating, varying electromagnetic fields, and so on. He has the theory for it, but not fully developed. It seems a little ad-hoc. This is still great, but this is not yet new real physics, and this is not yet useful. Someone else needs to redo the experiments and confirm them. We need to see if the effects can scale to something not so tiny.
The last part of the book is speculative with wormholes and so on. The authors is careful to draw attention to the work of others, well-respected physicists like K. Thorne. It is fun to read.
In summary, with the author's theory, if it were correct, and if it scaled, it *would* be possible to build Startrek-style engines. We are not *quite* there yet.