NASA has published this paper. These guys presumably know what they're talking about. Moon landing, space shuttle, Voyager, etc. They ran actual experiments on this drive.
Why are half the comments here saying 'They must be wrong' - seemingly based on nothing more than a strong belief that NASA must be wrong.
This is the worst part of the internet. Amateurs and 2nd year college students dismissing months/years of hard work by actual professionals. They take all this work and "hand wave" it away in less time than it takes to make coffee.
The internet is full of amateurs and they are very very confident about their abilities.
Professionals don't always get things right, either, and reactionless thrust doesn't really fit into our best current physical model. That doesn't mean it can't exist - but, given the general usefulness of our current model in predicting how things will behave, there's reasonable cause for extraordinary skepticism in response to claims that one of its "can't happen" conditions is inaccurate.
Maybe the paper's conclusion is accurate! Maybe this physical "can't happen" actually can, and the model needs extending to account for that. It wouldn't be the first time. But it also wouldn't be the first time that a "can't happen" really can't happen, and the result suggesting otherwise is an artifact of the way an experiment was run, rather than an accurate description of a previously unsuspected physical phenomenon. Going by past examples, the latter is much more likely than the former. So there's nothing unreasonable, even for people like myself who aren't knowledgeable enough to evaluate the paper on its own merits, in reserving credulity until the result is shown by other experimenters to be reproducible.
I totally understand some scepticism, but there appears to be the archetypal response of 'Oh, I bet NASA hasn't thought of this ...' when it's inconceivable that NASA hasn't, in fact, thought of that.
Some of the most sensible comments I've seen here have basically said 'It seems to violate what we know of physics, so hopefully it's right and we have some interesting times ahead'.
It's the dismissal, out of hand, after a relatively extensive amount of research and study -- especially compared to what the armchair critics can supply -- that I find frustrating.
Yeah, sure, I get that it seems implausible, but it transcends hubris to know that it's simply experimental error.
This is the best part of the internet. Amateurs and 2nd year college students challenge professionals to make their months/years of hard work comprehensible. They take all this work and question it unless presented with hard, verifiable facts and data, sometimes over a coffee.
The internet is full of amateurs and they are very very eager to point out when they are not fully grasping something, in one way or another.
Lets be clear here, the people who ran published this test are also skeptical about this. However they did everything possible to reduce and remove errors from their calculations. This means one of two things, either our present understanding of physics is incorrect, or our present understanding of experimental physics and the ways errors creep into our experiments is incomplete. The scientists who did this test suspect the latter, however they've done everything they know to remove mistakes. Much like when we are troubleshooting why our computer won't start we don't jump to the CPU is dead, they also don't just jump to the big conclusion. It's still neat though because we'll still learn something meaningful, and you never know it really could open new understanding of reality.
I looked through the comments, but I don't think many commentators here are actually saying "I am 100% sure this is wrong". I am mostly hearing "there are a lot of reasons to remain skeptical". NASA certainly is an authority and I don't think most people here dispute their bona fides, but keep in mind the working models a working quantum vacuum thrust engine would disprove have even greater providence.
I'm skeptically optimistic about the em drive (I think it probably doesn't work but the upside is so great it's worth tinkering with)... NASA has been spectacularly wrong in the past. Arsenic life, for example. In many ways the em drive stuff has the same hallmark "press release-driven" science feel to it.
This is true, but don't you also think that once extraordinary claims have this much publicity they warrant extraordinary investigation? If for no other purpose than to prove it wrong?
Chances are that this is just experimental error. But part of me really wants this to be true. That it's possible some crack pot shoved some microwaves in a tin can and created a device that may reveal a new phenomenon.
> This is true, but don't you also think that once extraordinary claims have this much publicity they warrant extraordinary investigation? If for no other purpose than to prove it wrong?
Absolutely, I'd be surprised if it wasn't happening already, within nasa and around the world. I'm guessing they're being a lot more thorough though, controlling for more variables and trying more permutations (different engine sizes, different materials, etc) to try to either isolate the cause or to rule some out. I'd suspect anything less would risk the experimenters being labeled as cranks, that's why we're not seeing direct replication efforts.
Why are half the comments here saying 'They must be wrong' - seemingly based on nothing more than a strong belief that NASA must be wrong.