For everyone that’s expressing a view like “what a waste of time”, consider this. This hypothesis was by a respected scientist. The experiments have been done by lots of labs. There has been a reasonable position the skeptics have taken throughout. It still has taken a very long time of a bunch of smart people on how to build an experiment to rule these kinds of things out. That means theories have tighter bounds. Technology has been improved in the area which can have knock on beneficial educational and technological effects, etc. Being able to quickly and efficiently rule out hypotheses is a hallmark of the area that science shines in. Being able to say “no, definitely not” with very good certainty is a useful thing to this disciplines toolbelt. From that perspective it’s a pure win and worth any distraction on the scale of all human investment globally.
Yeah this is great - they have made an advance in how they can make measurements. There will be many more reaction-less thruster concepts to analyse in the future. Now we have a much better idea how to test them effectively.
These measurement techniques are useful in other areas, too. Less error means more confidence in results for experimental physicists and potentially one less source of error to care about.
Or maybe finally learn mechanics 101 - what the conservation of momentum is. The kind of stuff we expect to understand from smart 16 year olds.
This is the physics equivalent of someone writing a brute-force recursive SAT solver and wondering why it takes so long. Perhaps we don't measure time correctly? What if mirrors are an illusion? We mustn't stop advancing the field!
This argument reminds me of the historical arguments made against heliocentrism vs geocentrism. Just because we have widespread belief of one thing to be true does not mean we should blindly accept it and not test things that appear to oppose it.
In my opinion, the tests that have happened with the EmDrive are exactly what _should_ happen to make sure that our knowledge is strong and that we do keep advancing the field.
"Velocities add" is also mechanics 101, and turned out to be incorrect at sufficiently large speeds. I think we have to go to Noether's theorem to show why we should be so sure the EM drive doesn't work: EM drive proponents must either tell us where the momentum goes, or explain why space isn't symmetric under translation.
(Actually, fun side note, in a gravitational field, space isn't symmetric under translation. IIRC, this was the original problem that caused Noether to prove her famous theorem. She found that while there was still a conserved quantity of a sort due to "translations" in space and time, it wasn't just the energy-momentum tensor, but also depended on the gravitational field. In any case, the EM drive is supposed to work in flat space, so that shouldn't become an issue.)
This fellow (Eagleworks guy) was told in no uncertain terms by his PhD thesis committee at Rice that this was a bad idea and forced to rewrite his thesis. He clearly doesn’t know when to take a hint.
Yes there are commonly clever people that know how to play organizational ladders with minimum amount of work in every sufficiently large organization. Also a fair amount of "morons".
Arthur C Clark has addressed this general point in his first law:
“ When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
I have MSc in mathematics, I can follow the idea of conservation of momentum. I just know a little more than you and understand that things are not so simple.
So far I think it has been handled well. Let's just hope this doesn't end up like cold fusion where no amount of proof that it doesn't work can't make it go away and conspiracy theories keep growing.
