Woodward’s Legacy: Michelle Broyles and the Long Road to Mach-Effect Propulsion

April 15, 2026

In the wake of James F. Woodward’s death, one of his closest collaborators is carrying forward one of the most controversial propulsion programs in modern physics—an effort to determine whether a vibrating stack of ceramics, asymmetric masses, and carefully tuned harmonics can produce real thrust without propellant. Michelle Broyles describes her independent lab research as she works to validate Woodward’s research and improve the propellantless propulsion output of the Mach-Effect Gravity Assist (MEGA) Drive.

A Legacy of Mach-Effect Propulsion Research

When Michelle Broyles presented her latest work on the Woodward Effect at APEC, she was not simply delivering an experimental update. She was speaking for a research program that had lost its founder. James F. Woodward had spent roughly three decades pursuing a stubborn proposition: that inertia is not merely a local property of matter, but a consequence of the gravitational influence of all matter in the universe. If that was true, he believed, then a carefully engineered device might couple to that larger cosmic background and produce thrust without throwing mass overboard.

Broyles’ talk makes clear that this was not an abstract memorial. It was a continuation. Woodward, she said, had done something rare: he had taken a piece of unconventional theoretical physics and forced it onto the bench. He had not stopped at equations, speculation, or conference slides. He built hardware. He tuned stacks. He lived with the humiliations of noise, the ambiguities of bearings, the compromises of fixtures, and the long grind of trying to separate a genuine signal from a lab full of ways to fool yourself.

“Jim had driven this project for approximately 30 years… he matched that to doing something on the bench.” – Michelle Broyles

At the center of the story is the old Machian question that has fascinated physicists for more than a century: where does inertia come from? Ernst Mach argued that an object’s resistance to acceleration is not wholly intrinsic, but somehow relational, bound up with the rest of the mass in the cosmos. Einstein took Mach’s ideas seriously, even if general relativity never settled the matter in the clean way later enthusiasts had hoped. Woodward’s contribution was to push this intuition into a concrete claim: if internal energy in a body is cycled rapidly enough under the right conditions, then tiny transient mass fluctuations should appear. If those fluctuations are timed properly, a net force might be extracted.

That idea remains deeply controversial. But what Broyles emphasizes is less the rhetoric of breakthrough propulsion than the procedural discipline of experimental continuity. She is not presenting a polished technology ready for spaceflight. She is showing a program still in the awkward, difficult phase where apparatuses must be improved, artifacts hunted down, interpretations revised, and old assumptions overturned. In that sense, her talk is less a victory lap than a field report from a frontier most of physics still regards with suspicion.

The MEGA Drive: Timing is Everything

The hardware at the heart of the Woodward program is disarmingly simple to look at. A typical Mach-effect, or MEGA, device consists of a stack of piezoelectric ceramic discs clamped between asymmetric end masses—often a lighter aluminum mass on one side and a heavier brass mass on the other. The stack is pre-stressed and then driven at frequencies in the tens of kilohertz, causing it to expand and contract in rapid cycles. Broyles describes the stack as “breathing,” an image that captures both the mechanical motion and the intuition of what the team hopes is happening physically.

In conventional terms, a vibrating device with internal asymmetry still should not go anywhere. It can shake, rattle, hum, and excite resonances, but if all the forces are internal, the center of mass of the whole system should remain where it is. Broyles returns several times to a simple analogy: a man stuck in a canoe without paddles. He can lunge forward and backward as violently as he likes, but he will not propel the canoe to shore. The system may oscillate; it will not translate. That is the baseline expectation, the Newtonian sanity check, and any propulsion claim has to begin by clearing that bar.

“If you time it just right, you push when the object is more massive and you pull when it’s less massive.” – Michelle Broyles

The Woodward claim is that this device is not merely oscillating. Under the right phase relationships, the changing internal energy of the piezoelectric stack is supposed to create transient mass fluctuations. Then, if the push comes when the device is effectively heavier and the pull comes when it is lighter, the cycle no longer averages to zero. Instead, a net directional force emerges. In Broyles’ telling, that directional force is not the result of a hidden propellant or a clever mechanical rectifier. It is supposed to come from coupling to the gravitational-inertial structure of the universe itself.

That is a grand claim for such a small machine, and Broyles does not try to make it sound ordinary. What she does insist on is that the key is timing, phasing, and resonance. The device does not simply work by vibrating hard. It works, if it works at all, by entering a narrow regime in which internal harmonics and phase relationships line up in just the right way. The challenge is not merely building a robust piezo stack. It is identifying the conditions under which a system that ought to behave like the man in the canoe suddenly begins to behave like something else.

The Problem of False Positives

If the Woodward Effect has remained controversial for so long, one reason is that the experimental terrain is littered with traps. A vibrating device can load and unload bearings. Springs can store and release energy. Structures can flex, ring, and shove back. Heat can creep through a fixture and shift alignment. Air can move where nobody expects it. A propulsion claim lives or dies on whether those ordinary effects have really been ruled out rather than merely ignored.

Broyles spends a notable amount of time on that problem, and it is one of the most serious parts of her presentation. She does not portray the older work as a clean linear march toward confirmation. She portrays it as a measurement problem. For years, the group relied heavily on torsion-arm deflection as a proxy for thrust. But a deflecting arm is not always a thrusting arm. A system can look persuasive on a graph and still be telling the wrong story about why it moved.

That is why her repeated return to the canoe analogy matters. Internal forces alone do not count. A system that merely wriggles against itself may produce impressive plots, but it has not broken out of Newtonian bookkeeping. The central question is not whether the device can kick, chatter, vibrate, or produce a strong transient. The question is whether the entire assembly shows net translation that cannot be reduced to internal motion and restoring forces.

This is also what gives the presentation a more credible tone than the usual fringe-engine pitch. Broyles is not arguing that skepticism is unnecessary. She is arguing that skepticism has to be met on the bench, with better test stands and better post-processing. That means asking not only whether the device moved, but how it moved, what else moved with it, when the center of mass shifted, and whether total momentum reconstruction tells the same story the eye thinks it sees.

From Fullerton to a Frictionless Test Stand

For years, the Woodward group’s most important facility was the vacuum torsion-beam setup at Cal State Fullerton. There, the device sat on a balanced torsion arm with optical sensing at one end and video monitoring at the other. The apparatus could run in vacuum, track deflection, and correlate multiple signals during a test. It was serious experimental hardware, and it formed the backbone of the program’s public evidence for a long time.

Broyles did not abandon that legacy. She tried to build on it by changing the geometry of the problem. In her own lab, she set up a frictionless air-bearing system enclosed within a thick polycarbonate structure, designed specifically to suppress stick-slip and minimize uncontrolled airflow effects. Instead of leaving the apparatus open to suspicion that it might be acting like a tiny acoustic pump, she housed it in a configuration where those forces could be trapped and cancelled within the enclosure itself.

The point was not simply to make the apparatus look cleaner. It was to change what could be inferred from the motion. A frictionless air bearing with very low parasitic resistance offers a much more sensitive stage for separating ordinary action-reaction oscillation from movement of the whole system. If the internal device thrashes around, that is one thing. If the enclosing tube, bearing structure, and supporting assembly begin translating together, that is harder to dismiss as internal sloshing alone.

“Like the man in the boat, all of a sudden now I am changing direction. I’m actually gaining forward momentum.” – Michelle Broyles

That engineering move—from vacuum torsion arm to sealed frictionless platform—gives Broyles’ work a stronger narrative arc than a simple replication story. She is not merely repeating Woodward’s tests. She is testing the tests. She is asking whether the original measurement logic survives in a different mechanical environment, with different failure modes and different artifact pathways. In controversial propulsion research, that may be as important as any individual thrust number.

Resonance, Motion, and the Whole Assembly

One of Broyles’ more striking claims is that in her air-bearing system, nothing particularly interesting happens until the device reaches resonance. Below that threshold, the assembly behaves like one would expect: small oscillations, loading of the system, some visible motion, then relative quiet. But when the drive frequency enters the right resonant window, the behavior changes. The internal device continues to show ordinary Newtonian back-and-forth action, yet the larger structure begins to accelerate in one direction.

In one run, she describes the system accelerating for several seconds until a lightly centering polyester thread was pulled taut. Then the apparatus held against that restoring force for a brief interval before relaxing as the frequency sweep moved out of resonance. The implication is important. The device was not merely jolting the mount. It was entering a regime in which the entire assembly behaved as though a sustained directional force was present.

Broyles reports that one such run yielded a thrust estimate on the order of hundreds of millinewtons, while another configuration using Woodward’s bearing-mounted assembly inside the sealed tube produced a smaller but still positive thrust estimate in the milliNewton range. The spread in those values is large, and that alone will make cautious readers step back. But in the logic of her presentation, the variability is not fatal. It reflects different drive conditions, different mechanical supports, and different resonant interactions rather than a single fixed engine performance number.

What matters most in her framing is that the signal appears across more than one apparatus and more than one style of support. A device on bearings in vacuum shows intriguing behavior. A device inside a sealed, frictionless air-bearing system also shows intriguing behavior. That does not prove exotic propulsion. But it does raise the stakes of the experimental question. The puzzle is no longer just whether a single instrument can be fooled. It is whether multiple instruments are being fooled in the same way.

When the Data Changed the Story

Perhaps the most revealing part of Broyles’ presentation is not the claim of thrust itself, but the admission that earlier interpretations may have been wrong. For years, much of the Fullerton work treated torsion-arm deflection as a key proxy for force. But a deflecting torsion arm can deceive. Springs compress. Bearings load and unload. Structures store and release energy. Slip-stick events produce impulses that look dramatic on plots and can seduce a research team into thinking it has found the decisive region of operation.

Broyles revisited one Fullerton run from August 2022 and reprocessed it using video analysis, tracker software, center-of-mass calculations, and total-momentum estimates that attempted to account for masses, spring behavior, bearing effects, and friction. The result, she said, was a conceptual reversal. What the team had previously thought was the force-producing interval turned out not to be the decisive part of the event. Once total momentum was reconstructed, the signal appeared in a different place than expected. The apparatus had not merely added detail; it had changed the interpretation.

“We thought that was the force. We thought that the device was driving down and here’s our force. We were wrong. That’s not where the force was coming from.” – Michelle Broyles

That kind of reversal is easy to miss in popular retellings of controversial science, which tend to flatten everything into believers and debunkers. But it is actually one of the more credible features of Broyles’ talk. She is not simply insisting that the old method was right all along. She is saying that better analysis complicated the story, forced a rethink, and led to larger inferred forces in at least some cases than the original torsion-deflection picture suggested.

In her account, smoothed momentum analysis on one reprocessed run pointed to forces reaching the Newton range, with average values around eight newtons during the key interval. Those numbers are striking and will obviously invite scrutiny. But the more important point is methodological. The team is no longer treating one measurement channel as the whole truth. It is trying to reconcile multiple channels—video, motion tracking, center-of-mass behavior, total momentum, and drive conditions—into a single physically coherent picture.

Hunting the Harmonics

If Broyles’ talk has a true engineering center, it is not in the dramatic videos of moving apparatuses but in the harmonic analysis. Over time, the group has learned that brute-force frequency sweeps are a crude way to interrogate the device. A broad sweep can drive the system through resonant conditions too quickly, producing impulses and transients that are hard to interpret cleanly. What matters more, she argues, is understanding the internal harmonic structure of the device as it operates.

The second- and fourth-order harmonics play a privileged role in her account. When those even harmonics rise into the right relationship with the primary drive, and the phase between current and voltage also falls into the proper window, the system reaches a narrow operational sweet spot. The third harmonic, by contrast, is treated almost like an enemy. It brings heating, parasitic behavior, and degraded performance. On one stack, she identifies a maximum-thrust region near 37.427 kilohertz, where the second and fourth harmonics peak, the third harmonic is minimized, and the power required can fall surprisingly low.

That shift in emphasis is important because it recasts the device from a mysterious black box into something more like a difficult resonant machine. The problem is no longer to turn it on and see whether it moves. The problem is to find the narrow frequency, phase, and harmonic regime in which the device behaves optimally, then hold it there long enough to extract a clean force measurement. That is a harder experimental problem, but also a more mature one.

It also suggests that the apparent variability in the program’s historical results may be less mysterious than it first appears. A device that only performs inside a very narrow band will punish broad sweeps and sloppy tuning. It will seem inconsistent, temperamental, and prone to flashing interesting signals only for brief moments. In that sense, the harmonic picture is not just an engineering note. It is an explanation for why the program has spent so many years hovering between tantalizing evidence and stubborn ambiguity.

From Frequency Sweeps to an Impulse Engine

One of the clearest forward-looking ideas in Broyles’ presentation is her plan to stop relying so heavily on wide frequency sweeps. A sweep can be useful for finding resonant behavior, but it also creates its own interpretive headache. The device may pass through the interesting region too quickly to establish a clean, steady force. What emerges is an impulse, a jerk, a transient event that then has to be untangled from the mechanical response of the rest of the system.

Her proposed solution is straightforward in concept and demanding in practice. Instead of sweeping from 30 to 40 kilohertz or from 35 to 40 kilohertz and hoping to catch the right moment cleanly, she wants to park the drive at the narrow thrust-producing frequency and modulate the amplitude. Impulse, stop. Impulse, stop. Not a broad search, but a deliberate pulse train at the resonant point itself.

That approach matters because it could turn the device from an elusive resonant curiosity into something much more measurable. If the frequency does not drift, if the harmonics remain favorable, and if the power stays low enough to avoid thermal wander, then the resulting motion can be tracked against a controlled sequence of pulses rather than against a constantly changing sweep. The experiment becomes less like chasing a flash and more like interrogating a machine.

It is also a sign that Broyles sees the next stage of the work as one of refinement, not just repetition. The question is no longer whether the old setup can be made to twitch one more time. The question is whether the effect, if real, can be driven in a cleaner, more disciplined, more reproducible way. That is the point at which a controversial laboratory phenomenon starts to become an engineering problem instead of merely a provocation.

The Long Game After Woodward

There is a temptation, whenever a propulsion concept carries even a faint scent of Star Trek, to rush toward destiny: the first interstellar probe, the end of rocket tyranny, the opening of the stars. Broyles’ presentation resists that temptation more than it indulges it. Yes, she references the famous Moonshot segment about a real impulse engine. Yes, the broader MEGA-drive program has long lived in the imaginative space between laboratory curiosity and civilization-changing breakthrough. But the tone of the talk is not science fiction. It is persistence.

That persistence matters because the Woodward Effect occupies an awkward place in the culture of science. It is too specific, too hardware-bound, and too experimentally stubborn to be dismissed as pure fantasy. Yet it is too far outside established propulsion and gravitation practice to be welcomed easily into the mainstream. Programs like this often die not because they are definitively disproven, but because the founder ages out, funding thins, apparatuses grow idiosyncratic, and no one remains willing to fight the bench for another decade. Broyles’ presentation is evidence that this one has not died.

She also makes clear that progress is not just theoretical. It depends on stacks that work, stacks that fail, and stacks that can be resurrected from old boxes of half-dead hardware. It depends on measurement systems that are light enough, clean enough, and honest enough to reveal what the device is actually doing. It depends on accepting when a cherished interpretation has collapsed under better analysis. And it depends on a team that still believes the question is worth asking in public, even if the answer remains unfinished.

In that sense, the most compelling thing about Broyles’ talk may be its scale. This is not a billion-dollar propulsion program. It is a handful of people trying to coax a disputed effect into clarity by tuning ceramics, watching harmonics, redesigning test stands, and rethinking old data. The grandeur lies not in the apparatus, but in the wager. If Woodward was even partly right, then inertia itself may be more negotiable than physics has yet admitted. And if he was wrong, then the only honorable way to find out is the way Broyles is still doing it: one run, one resonance, one brutally examined signal at a time.