Uncertain Propulsion Breakthroughs?
centauri-dreams.orgWow, I've not read something like that in a long time. More news needs to be like this. Examining what we know presenting where we are. Not taking sides and polarizing the discussion.
I do think people miss one small aspect of this story. How long has it been since we've had a device built that we've no understanding of the principles of it's operation? I think that's an amazing fluke and (if the effect is genuine) something worth celebrating (just because it's so rare).
There are others. There's cold fusion. There's a strange effect by which a rotating superconductor appears to induce gravity.[1] (Whatever happened to that? Articles from 2002-2006, then nothing.) They're all down near the noise threshold.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060325232140.h...
Here's what happened to it. The Austrian Institute of Technology tried the rotating superconductor thing with a big rotating superconductor and a fiber optic gyro nearby. No "dragging of the metric" was observed.[1] Too bad.
There was another paper about 15 years ago where a electrically pulsed, superconducting thin film was able to displace a pith ball from tens of meters, through walls. I can't find the paper but it was on arxiv. Some sort of gravity pulse; weird shit.
Made me think of this. Maybe when they were doing the experiment, a gravitational wave happened and they somehow reflected it?
> Thin superconducting films are predicted to be highly reflective mirrors for gravitational waves at microwave frequencies. The quantum mechanical non-localizability of the negatively charged Cooper pairs, which is protected from the localizing effect of decoherence by an energy gap, causes the pairs to undergo non-picturable, non-geodesic motion in the presence of a gravitational wave.
They were able to repeat it. Damn, I wish I could find it. I actually have it printed off somewhere.
The issue is that distorting gravity has far more consequential effects due to generally relativity than just moving something. You are actually distorting time too.
> You are actually distorting time too.
That explains the significance of the floating hole-puncher confetti in the movie Primer.
Quite a few medicines (especially antidepressants) state something like "we don't really know why this stuff works, only that it does."
From Wikipedia Paracetamol article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol#Mechanism_of_actio...):
"To date, the mechanism of action of paracetamol is not completely understood."
and:
"It is the most commonly used medication for pain and fever in both the United States and Europe."
"Not completely understood" is not the same as "we have no idea why it works", but still I find it telling for such a popular product.
9 years ago I heard a NPR interview with the scientist(s) who cracked the code on exactly how chlorine bleach kills bacteria. Something I assumed was known longer than I've been around using bleach to disinfect.
edit: link
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9700789...
But they (hopefully) tested the drugs in a double blind experiment. So they may not understand the exact mechanism, but they have a strong proof that taking the drug is useful.
In this case, all the em-drive test only give a very weak force that is very difficult to measure and may be caused by other causes (probably thermal because the device gets hot or something equivalent to an electromagnet because it use a current).
True. Before a surgery, never ask your anesthesiologist how exactly the anesthetic s/he'll give you works.. You might get an honest "we don't know" as an answer..
Very true. I'd not considered the medical world.
If people treated medical research with the same skepticism they treat this EM drive... the world would be a much healthier and safer place.
Medical research don't suffer from lack of skeptism, instead it suffers from unscientific thinking, shamanism, cargo cults, and so on...
For example: for 30 years we had research blasting cholesterol and saturated fats as evil, because predecessors had that result, some arguments were completely circular (saturated fats are bad because they raise blood cholesterol, and blood cholesterol is bad because a bad thing raises it... with no research trying to find how much any of the two really affect health).
Another example is thyroid diagnosis, after discovery of TSH test, medics started to use it exclusively, and accuse patients with normal results but with severe and advanced symptoms of having psychological issues, also many thyroid doctors never bother in ever asking for other relevant tests, like t3 and antibodies, and the TSH tests frequently use outright dated target ranges, with medics skeptical of new research because the old way is mostly working in their experience (since by their definition, people with symptoms but normal values aren't sick, thus their treatment is 100% effective, since it helps all sick people, and the "non-sick" are delusional and thus it is failure of other medical fields that they are sick)
Other example is any medic that saw patients improve under certain treatment, and then start to always use that treatment in a cargo cult manner, without paying attention to any research that proves that it is misguided, like all those kids forced to take ADHD medicine in their early life.
That shamanism was really corruption:
November 2016 Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents Cristin E. Kearns, DDS, MBA1,2; Laura A. Schmidt, PhD, MSW, MPH1,3,4; Stanton A. Glantz, PhD JAMA Intern Med. 2016;176(11):1680-1685. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5394
The SRF sponsored its first CHD research project in 1965, a literature review published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which singled out fat and cholesterol as the dietary causes of CHD and downplayed evidence that sucrose consumption was also a risk factor. The SRF set the review’s objective, contributed articles for inclusion, and received drafts. The SRF’s funding and role was not disclosed. Together with other recent analyses of sugar industry documents, our findings suggest the industry sponsored a research program in the 1960s and 1970s that successfully cast doubt about the hazards of sucrose while promoting fat as the dietary culprit in CHD.
http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article...
(PS - I've known a Shaman or two, and they were quite sensible people, for the most part, except when they started mixing in miscellaneous white people's trashy magic.)
It is not unusual for a physics experiment to produce a weird result, and it turns out to be experimental error.
True, it's but this has been replicated. It may yet be an error, but it's not a one-off by now.
Yeah there is a very good chance that's still the case here. But would be cool if it's not experimental error.
That's my sentiments here also - weird outcome would be cool, but I expect that we'll find experimental error. However, there is also the possibility of something in the middle - meaning no laws of physics are broken but the experimental error is itself an interesting engineering discovery.
There is also the possibility that the experiment itself is correct and the laws of physics are correct, but we applied them wrong, leading to a wrong prediction or experiment analysis. Many many calculations take short-cuts or make approximations. Or we apply a theory wrongly. In all these cases, we learn something new. Hitting the prediction (of the standard model) is boring.
It would be cool. But I've done similar measurements and this bears all the hallmarks of bad experiments. There are plenty of other ways the experiment might have gone wrong than those mentioned in the article - one that leaps to mind is RF interference (if that doesn't sound plausible to you you've never worked with lab RF).
I hope we'll find out in practice: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a22678/em-dri... (via lobster_johnson)
"Proud to say that we have a partnership now - so the launch is already funded, and we hope to get a launch slot in 2017."
Being in space doesn't solve the problem of errant forces completely. You can push against the earth's magnetic field, for example.
Satellite orbits degrade overtime due to drag, among other things [1]. Operators counter this decay with periodic boosts. (The International Space Station is boosted, on average, once a month [2].) Boosting, even electric propulsion boosting, consumes propellant.
If this works by impelling against the Earth's magnetic field, provided it is more efficient than a simple magnet, it could still have a market with satellite manufacturers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_decay
[2] http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9087/how-often-does...
> If this works by impelling against the Earth's magnetic field
That's a completely different premise than the em-drive has, though. It's supposed to not depend on an external field; developing a force between two magnets wouldn't exactly qualify as (non-)rocket science today.
The "premise" for the em-drive has been determined to be a thorough misunderstanding of the physics involved, so you cannot rule out any potentially contributing force in the experiment.
Yes you heard that right: guys who misunderstand physics go and design a reactionless thruster which, when measured in their shoddy experimental setup, produces a measurable thrust.
If there really is a measurable thrust, then the Laws of Motion are wrong and General Relativity is wrong. I'm disinclined to believe that long-held principles of physics will be upended by some guys who designed something based on a misunderstanding.
You sound very negative towards conducting more experiments on this, when the results have been unexpected every time it's been tested. You're displaying the kind of dogma that science has been fighting against since the dawn of time. Either it's true or it's not, but we can't tell until we test it. And so far, it's only been disproven in theory, not in practice. That's worth more experiments.
Occam's Razor says it is not true. If you read the linked article, it is saying, in the most polite and disinterested way possible, that it is not true although they allow, in the driest of terms, that it could be true. I expect if the same authors analyzed the Loch Ness monster or Big Foot, they would also disinterestedly point out the unlikelihood of either and point out the how awful the proofs put forth are while admitting there is no categoric proof that the monsters don't exist.
Pons and Fleischmann were straightforward in their error. This is bozo territory.
I don't expect the em-drive to work, but the parent post has a point. We've had repeated experiments yielding unexpected results. It's worth an inquiry; if nothing else, to thoroughly explain what went wrong so the same mistake is avoided in future experiments.
Outright dismissing new ideas, no matter how far-fetched, is very much the antithesis of the scientific principle. You mustn't forget that everything we take as indisputable fact today, was an outrageous far-fetched theory at some stage.
It was barely yesterday that Barry Marshall was ridiculed for proposing that stomach ulcers are bacterial, because everyone 'knew' that bacteria can't survive in such an environment.
Many possibilities of what went wrong are well-explained in the parent article, drawing on experience of other scientists that make low-force measurements. (E.g. forces on rig due to electrical current flow, or liquid flow.)
Unfortunately it seems likely we won't learn much by finding the possible sources of error - the sources are already well understood by people doing low force experiments.
Wouldn't it be worth repeating the experiment controlling for different factors at the very least to rule out some of the "many possibilities"? If there are "many possibilities" for why something is happening, by definition we don't know why it's happening. Science says repeat the experiment until we know why it's happening, or at least until we can't rule anything else out.
> it's only been disproven in theory, not in practice
There's a hell of an experimental body that led to (and supports) our current laws of motion. These laws aren't "just theory", and they definitely aren't dogma. Are these experiments probing the laws in a region they haven't been tested before? Can these unexpected results be reproduced outside of the framework of a cool engine for space travel?
E.g. there's a difference between measuring for the first time the spectrum of antihydrogen, which we predicted with the strongest confidence would be the same as hydrogen's; and measuring the spectrum of hydrogen with Rock&Roll sounding within, because "we can't know if any specific music genre will have an effect until we test it".
So yeah, if people want to spend their own resources testing this, the more power to them. But the way it's been done makes it look like they're more interested in a cool positive result than in unveiling the truth, and that mindset leads to things like the N-rays.
> You sound very negative towards conducting more experiments on this, when the results have been unexpected every time it's been tested.
This is wrong. There is a strong selection bias, where a many team tried this and only those that got a "successful" measurement get press.
It's very difficult to get the list of all the unsuccessful (unpublished) experiments, but someone recollected a list em-drive test http://emdrive.wiki/Experimental_Results The important column is the last one. More than 1 means that if it's correct the device is breaking the current laws of physics. Anyway, I count 5 zeros in that list. [And I think that the other are experimental errors.]
A relatively strong argument for experiment pre-registration as a prerequisite for eventually publishing.
The only unexpected "results" happened in experiments with a lack of controls, so while nothing can be ruled out, it would not be surprising if all the data so far is explained by well known forces (like flow in the liquid supply lines.). It's on the previous experimenters to do proper controls.
But it's not dogma. Dogmatic principles are one "laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true." 'Science'--with a capital 'S', denoting a specific authority--doesn't say that the laws of motion are accurate. Years of empirical research, with repeated and verifiable confirmations by other scientists, do. The laws of motion are held to be true not because scientific authorities say they are so, but because of the method by which they came to be able to say it.
It's a subtle distinction, but an incredibly important one. But that same subtlety can sometimes be lost when it's discussed by the general public. The policy debate over climate change is an excellent example. Speaking strictly in terms of the often quoted statement that "97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree," [0][1] it's clear how different individuals can read very different meanings into that statement. For the scientists themselves, while the statement is referring to scientists as individuals, it's based on the published research that informed their views. Amongst the general public, particularly those who don't accept anthropogenic climate change, the statement is understood as referring to the beliefs of the individuals. It's taken as an appeal to authority (and it doesn't help that many politicians and activists who want to take action often use it as such). The same statement is understood in two very different ways based on the reader's background and understanding of what the scientific method actually is.
Returning to the subject of the em-drive, the reason for skepticism is precisely because it flies in the face of our basic understanding of the physical world. The more well-founded a theory is, the greater the burden on any new findings that would seem to contradict it. That's as it should be. But if those new findings hold up under scrutiny and are verified, even a basic, fundamental law can and will be revised. That's how the scientific method works.
Personally, I'd love for the em-drive to be proven if only because it would represent such a fascinating shift in physics. To say nothing of potential applications. But I'm inherently skeptical. Not because of a dogmatic acceptance of the laws of motion, but because those laws are already so well-supported.
0. http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ 1. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048...
The way science works is by doing experiments.
The people have been doing experiments on the EM drive and have been getting unexpected results.
Nobody really knows why yet, but that's kinda the point.
Is thermodynamics flawed? Is it pushing off of "dark matter"? Is it a completely new and novel scientific effect?
Any of these circumstances would be interesting.
Yes. Even if it's the most likely thing, experimenter error, for a half-dozen teams to all have errors and not spot them? That's quite interesting! It's the same situation we had with the FTL neutrinos a while back.
Except the neutrino paper then was a big lot of physicists asking colleagues to help them review, so as to find where the problem was. What I see here is just hype. The former, as opposed to the latter, is what gives confidence that the people involved are doing their darnest not to fool themselves. That what they're doing is actually science.
I don't know. I see a few universities looking into building their own setup. I see the Chinese filing patents, testing them in orbit. I see a 2017 microsat launch. I see a healthy debate continuing over on the reddit Emdrive board.
That doesn't look like people trying to sell things to me. That looks like a lot of different people from different backgrounds playing around with an experimental setup that does something unexpected.
The only difference I see is that with the FTL neutrinos, folks were saying this breaks a mathematical model that we've proven over and over again. With the emdrive, folks are saying If this works, it's by some model we do not yet understand. It doesn't attempt to disqualify an existing model; it suggests there's some other model applicable that we don't quite understand yet.
For most folks, this is quite more upsetting than the FTL guys. I get that. Still, observe first, theorize second. I'm sure the theory folks will catch up, and it'll probably be some sort of EM leakage we're talking about. But maybe not. Maybe we've accidentally come up with a new kind of photon rocket. That's what makes the story fun.
> It doesn't attempt to disqualify an existing model
It would very much disqualify conservation of momentum, which is another way of saying that the laws of motion are the same here and one meter down the road.
Conservation of momentum has been observed in countless experiments for centuries, in a broad range of conditions. It was indeed observed first; there's no catching up needed for the theory. It's always valuable, and in a sense exciting too, to test it again beyond the range where it's already been tested, even if you expect a negative result (the null hypothesis holding). But that's not what's happening:
If your goal is to learn, and you see momentum not being conserved in your prototype space engine, you start dismantling it, simplifying it, until you stop seeing it. And then go back one step to see it again. Your device might not be a space engine anymore! But now it's simplified; easier to reproduce, and easier to model and analyze. The laws of nature don't care about the purpose and coolness of your device, they apply the same. You also take your measurement apparatus and calibrate it against something unrelated, in many conditions, to make sure it's not lying.
You might have a different goal than learning: to achieve cheap space travel, which is a great thing. If then you build a prototype space engine with the hope that it won't conserve momentum, and you see a positive result, there's already the first red flag. If when you see that, what you do is trying to explain it with new (or with wrong) theory instead of questioning it, there's the second red flag. Healthy debates, and playing with technology in a lab, are good things. But not all good things are science. Our minds are too easy to fool, and people are doing this without condoms.
> With the emdrive, folks are saying If this works, it's by some model we do not yet understand.
A summary of the parent article is "The experimenters did not do the obvious control experiments [e.g. testing under a null load], thus there are currently no results at all."
But it would represent an improvement on what we have today, which is a finite amount of fuel use to keep the satellite in orbit that eventually runs out.
For the power required to generate minimal thrust, this will not be useful in low orbit. The solar panels required to power the drive would result in more drag than the truster might overcome. So no market. And this test flight will not result in a clearcut "it stays up" rather "it fell slower than expected". There will be much calculation and debate re drag, magnetics and gravitational anomolies, so small are the expected forces.
To get a clear result we need something out closer to geostationary, flying for months well away from the earth's irregularities.
> For the power required to generate minimal thrust, this will not be useful in low orbit
A recent paper [1] quotes this system's predicted efficiency at 1.2 mN/kW. Hall thrusters, a propellant-throwing electric engine, perform at 60 mN/kW. Non-propellant systems like light sails, laser propulsion and photon rockets perform around 0.0033 to 0.0067 mN/kW.
If this works, and that's a big if, a 50x performance improvement over the prototype is not unrealistic.
But how big will the panels need be? And how much extra aerodynamic drag will they create in a low orbit?
Electrodynamic tethers push off the Earth's magnetic field directly and don't need fuel.
If it does, I think that would be detectable. As the device gets into higher orbits, the magnetic field will get weaker and the force will drop. I'm not sure how much the orbit would have to change to make that apparent though. It might take a very long time.
Another way it might work is by freeing atoms from the backplate of the resonant cavity, like an ion thruster. I hope they include a method of measuring the degradation of the backplate.
I suspect it just won't work, though.
According to the inventor, The Mach thruster (also discussed, and potential underlying physics for the EmDrive) supposedly "pushes against" the Earth's gravity.
So no proof will ever be enough for some? Are EM-Deniers going to be a 'thing' now?
I'm also a yeti-denier!
With enough proof you can convince the physics community, even if the result is initially weird. My favorite examples are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_experiment and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti... .
I think you can push a little against the magnetic field to rotate and change your orientation, but to gain height the magnetic field is not useful.
[Edit: Mmmm I'd change "but to gain height the magnetic field is not useful." to "but to gain height pushing against the magnetic field is not efficient."]
If it can accelerate forever, thats proof enough for everyone. However violating the conservation of momentum is a Big Deal. Mathematically that shouldn't be possible due to Noether's. The bar to proof is therefore very high.
General relativity doesn't conserve energy in some spacetimes, so it's not unheard of.
I'm fairly certain GR conserves momentum, even if it doesn't conserve energy.
I thought so too until recently, but in GR energy and momentum are unified in an energy-momentum metric which is only locally conserved [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_theories_modified_by_...
That was quite a thoughtful, and IMHO balanced, discussion. I wish this was the usual level of discourse on scientific news.
If they have two versions of the resonant cavity, one that is tapered and one that is just a simple cylinder that to me would be a big step in the right direction to address many of the concerns. Basically the cylinder with no taper should show zero thrust. And the version with the taper should show a thrust. Then if they test that setup inside the huge Apollo program vacuum chamber far away from the side walls and change the orientation of the coolant and power wires into different orthogonal directions that sounds promising..
We don't know if the taper does anything though. If we don't have a working theory we can't really use variations of the working device to prove anything.
Oh I had thought that the asymmetric shape with the tapered cone shape was an important feature from the original inventor. But yea, hard to guess without more systematic theory to leverage off of yea..
From what I've read, the theory amounts to "there are more photons bouncing off the fat end versus the thin end hence thrust." Which personally I think is highly questionable given the low-energy regime involved.
The Summary: "this most recent report is a significant improvement, but has many shortcomings. Questionable subjective techniques are used to infer the “thrust” from the data. Other likely influences are not quantified. But also, despite those inadequacies, the possibility of a new force-producing effect cannot be irrefutably ruled out. This is intriguing, but still falling short of defensible evidence."
tl;dr;
> First, I cannot stress enough that there is no new EmDrive “effect” yet about which to theorize. The physical evidence on the EmDrive is neither defensible nor does it include enough operating parameters to characterize a new effect. The data is not even reliable enough to deduce the force-per-power relationship, let alone any other important correlations.
I don't think that's a fair summary... The author provides a more nuanced view than just "there is no effect." You're nitpicking from one section about theory, without considering the article as a whole. This is especially egregious considering that the article spends so much time talking about confirmation bias.
It even says explicitly:
> Do you want to know our conclusions without any regard to how we reached those conclusions? ... If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, then you, like me, have natural human cognitive dysfunctions.
I don't understand that. Since I can't educate myself on everything required to make an informed decision on whether the paper is true or not, I decide to just trust someone else's opinion. I pick people to trust based on various criteria (how well they've cited their sources, how much other trustworthy people trust them, etc) and then just blindly believe whatever they say.
What else can I do?
> how well they've cited their sources, how much other trustworthy people trust them, etc
That sounds to me like a "regard to how they reached those conclusions" (maybe a regard to how they reached a subset of their conclusions, and extrapolating to the rest). It's not the most regard you could possibly have, but it's lots.
Actually, reading the article as a whole, I would say an even stronger conclusion is warranted - almost certainly bad science but we should keep investigating just in case.
The highest the actual summary reaches is "But also, despite those inadequacies, the possibility of a new force-producing effect cannot be irrefutably ruled out."
This.
> ...take the time to notice both the pros and cons of the article, not just the parts you want to be true. Deciphering reality takes time instead of just listening to reflexive beliefs. It requires that one’s mind be open to the possibility you might be right and equally open to the possibility you might be wrong.
It's so near the noise threshold. Most of the energy goes into heating the thing; only a tiny fraction comes out as possible thrust. The heating prevents using enough power to get more possible thrust; the thing would burn out.
Very frustrating.
If we had any idea how they work (if they work) we could work on optimised designs that generate more thrust and are thus easier to study. But we're not yet anywhere near the stage and instead have to study a design that if it works, is so inefficient that we can hardly tell whether it does anything. Very frustrating indeed
Yet it's happened before in engineering history. Edison discovered the "Edison effect" - he put an extra plate in an incandescent lamp, and discovered that some current, not much, would flow to it through vacuum. This, in 1875, was the beginning of the vacuum tube. But lacking the theory to understand it, it couldn't be improved. Early on, it was thought that there had to be some air, or something, in the tube for it to work. But then it was discovered that hard vacuum worked better. This confused electrical inventors of the era - how could electricity conduct through a vacuum? It wasn't until 1904 that tubes started to be figured out.
Tube filaments are quite different than lamp filaments - tubes need a material where electrons are easily emitted from the surface. Tungsten is good for lamps but terrible for tubes. A little thorium oxide or barium oxide helps a lot. But there was no theory to indicate in what direction to go, and it took 30 years before trial and error produced results.
I know Marc Millis, let me know if anyone has any questions and I can try to get his feedback here.
He did so partially in this article, but I would love to see a detailed explanation of a valid experimental setup to test the EmDrive effect. What would an experiment look like where, if thrust were observed, then we could really start to say there might be something here?
There is a list of improvements in the article under "Latest Paper".
Its mainly the need to carefully characterize and document all the test equipment and EM Drive support equipment to make sure its not caused by the test setup. This would involve testing with a dummy load so things like interactions with chamber wall can be ruled out or if there are, the effect can be mitigated or accounted for.
Basically they proved their test setup produces thrust, but haven't proven the thrust was a direct result of the EM Drive. They need to more rigor to prove its only the EM Drive and not a setup error (eg: something like the FTL neutrinos turning out to be a poorly tightened connector).
Cool, I read all of the BPP pages a while back. I wonder what happened to them, they seem to have been down for a while.
I had always wondered about something there, though it isn't related to the EM Drive. The original pages posted a few numbers claiming that even with a Fusion rocket-based propulsion system, interstellar travel was still wildly impractical, like thousands of supertankers of propellant to send a Space Shuttle-sized capsule past the nearest star system in 900 years without stopping. Yet many Sci-Fi and semi-scientific sources make it seem as if nuclear rockets are a viable interstellar propulsion. I always wonder who's right, and if I can find some more detailed numbers to back it up either way. Thought about it enough that I might actually try and calculate it myself one of these days.
I remember him from the Nasa BPP page, that was a very nice work.
He gets bonus points for mentioning "extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims" twice in the article!
Remember that "tacking"* in sailboats (going upwind, using only the force of that wind) was held to be impossible, a violation of the laws of nature until people actually witnessed it, too. Severe violations of our expectations don't always break the actual math of a physics model.
*more properly said "beating to windward" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacking_(sailing)
IMO the "rational" approach is to treat the claims as a bunch of pointless lies until there's a repeatable demonstration. Remarkable claims demand at least some evidence before wild speculation commences. As it is, Harry Potter is just as credible a theory of reality.
After all, they've made the same claim repeatedly for 15 years after their first experiments were demonstrably not what they claimed.
Yes and no. Hume's dictum that miracles must have a shit-ton of evidence (extraordinary claims, blah, blah) helped science dismiss the reality of meteorites for a very long time, for example. Rocks falling from the sky? Go on! Epigenetics is a vital field now - but one that was discovered, rediscovered and buried and ignored for many, many decades. "Methodological Conservatism" shouldn't be generalized into a dismissal of anomalies.
This is what they are doing. They are sending something into space to demonstrate the effect.
Let the experiments decide what is right or wrong.
There are a ton of simple experiments that can be done in the lab that aren't being done by the people claiming that this thing works. The article mentions a few. The people launching something are going to get another inconclusive result with a high price. At least it isn't tax dollars.
So "space" is some magical place where measurement error does not exist?
Low earth orbit isn't perfect either. You still have micro gravity. And the experiment requires a lot of power, and very sensitive instruments to measure the phenomenon. How do you get sensitive instruments which are expected to be operating near their error threshold into orbit without damaging them?
Orbital experiments will have to be smaller, and use less power, so the effects will even be smaller. But the instruments will have to be tough enough to withstand 5G. And the apparatus could still be introducing other errors, like coolant momentum, which also isn't magically eliminated by being in space.
The experiment is pretty simple.
You put the engine in space, with solar panels, and you see if it stays there or falls back to earth.
There is no experimental error, or even measurement devices.
It is a space engine. Either it flys or it doesn't.
Over the course of a year, it will be obvious if it works or not. Because if it doesn't work it will fall to earth.
> until there's a repeatable demonstration
Not just repeatable, but in different physical configurations of the drive test bed. Right now the tests are using a rotating base that has little to no calibration, much less the hardware, if I understood the link correctly.
If it's rational to ignore everything unproven then science is irrational. Science is about proving things. Proving how they work, why they work, etc.
We have a thing, it's owner claims it works by either Method_A or Method_B, science is about taking the thing, testing the crap out of it, and being able to say at the end of all if it, "actually it turns out it works by Method_C"
It seems you have some wires crossed somewhere. Science and Rational behaviour are unrelated, they are quite well correlated but as separate concepts they are not causally linked. Historically connected obviously, but not causally linked.
No, science is about disproving things. You come up with experiments to test if method a or b are wrong. The more experiments that fail to disprove a theory, the stronger the evidence for that theory is - and any new theory has to Either match the old results under the same tests, or give a good reason why it doesnt match.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which is why every good scientist expects this effect to go away (regardless of hope as to whether it is a real effect or not).
we have several unexplained things which possibly look like some interaction between gravity and EM - em-drive, spinning magnet/superconductor gravimetric effects and unexpected velocity of stars in the galaxies (which are big rotating piles of plasma)
Anybody know anything about the quantized Unruh radiation -> inertia theory?
Perhaps this: https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.2775
"Inertial frames are the reference frames upon which the laws of motion and the conservation laws are defined, yet it is still unknown what causes inertial frames to exist or if they have any deeper properties that might prove useful."
"...we must begin a more in-depth experimental program using qualified and impartial labs, plus qualified and impartial analysts."
Maybe humans don't really belong in labs in the same way that they don't belong in factories.
Busted by Thunderf00t
It's amazing people are still giving this bollocks the time of day.