Cannae/EmDrive

[Streetwind]

Why are you so angry, Leszek? If you're argumenting for level-headed rationalism in the face of unlikely experimental results, it's best to do so in a level-headed fashion. I know what you're trying to say and why, but your style of writing, frequent use of absolutes and extreme emotion really works against you here. You're sounding more like a zealot than those you wish to remind to not be zealots.

The truth of the matter is, Eagleworks doesn't release conclusive results because they don't have the funding to produce conclusive results (and likely because the scientists received a gag order after the whole media hubbub). There is no official EMdrive program at NASA. There's just a bunch of (admittedly highly qualified) enthusiasts with a license to think outside the box and an eagerness to experiment with this thing they got handed because of a third party's outrageous claim. The only reason this is even moving at any perceptible speed at all is because the device involved is so simple that it could be kludged together in a garden shed. Bigger test articles are under construction, to be used in bigger vacuum chambers with proper vacuum-rated equipment (which Eagleworks themselves does not possess). But this will take time, because again, there's no budget assigned to this. Only discretionary funding - in other words, whatever can be scraped together by the lab leads.

Until that has happened, it is nonsense to claim anything proven. But it is similarly nonsense to claim anything bogus and wrong. There is no "doesn't work until proven otherwise" in science. There is only "works if proven to work, doesn't work if proven to not work". You need to prove either case. And neither has been conclusively proven yet. Despite repeated attempts, the Eagleworks team has failed to come up with an experimental setup where it doesn't work. At the same time the results, while appearing clearly above the noise floor, are not yet good enough to rule out errors.

There do however exist simulations that explain the experimental results - down to being able to accurately predict the result of an experiment before it's been run, and down to being able to explain the experimental results achieved by the Chinese team as well. The simulation does not break any known laws of physics; it simply makes an assumption about the behavior of the quantum field that goes against the commonly accepted assumption. It's important to keep in mind, however, that the behavior of said quantum field also falls under things that are not conclusively proven either way. Even the commonly accepted assumption is just an assumption. It can be wrong, it can be right. We don't know for sure.

And then it's possible that the simulation just happens to replicate the experimental effects even with a wrong assumption, because that wrong assumption just happens to work in the narrow range of results observed so far, but it stops working outside of that range. It's even possible that the simulation uses the wrong assumption to accurately predict something that actually works because of a different reason that nobody has considered yet. Sometimes, math works out that way.

In the meantime, until the slow process of un-funded science produces a conclusive result, we're left to speculate. There's nothing wrong with speculating, so long as you don't claim it for fact. I also believe that there's nothing wrong with cautious optimism, based on the data that Eagleworks has released so far (and they shared quite a lot, at least until recently). As of today, there has been more progress made toward explaining why it might work than there has been made towards proving that it doesn't work, despite attempts to achieve the contrary. This may change wth future experiments - but there will be time to discuss that in the future, when they are published.

Edited May 7, 2015 by Streetwind

[ZetaX]

There's nothing wrong with speculating, so long as you don't claim it for fact. I also believe that there's nothing wrong with cautious optimism, based on the data that Eagleworks has released so far (and they shared quite a lot, at least until recently).

There is something very wrong with undeserved hype (i.e. the kind of completely unbound optimism seen in this thread and all those articles about "warp drive"). The reason for that was already pointed out multiple times.

There are three kinds of people here:

a) those that don't see relevant evidence

those that think there is sufficient evidence, but want to know the actual mechanism

c) those that cry "oh my god this is the best thing ever!!!"

Those in a) (e.g. Leszek) and (e.g. Mazon Del) are mostly being rational and scientific. But the majority here is in c), for example anyone who wants this to be tested in the ISS in the near future is (as has already been explained). Those that dismiss counterarguments based on things like "no better explanation has been found", "this will allow us to get to mars quicker", "the effect has been proven to exist" also belong to that group. And everyone who argues that the 'usual' explanations (quantum foam, virtual particles being pushed around, warping spacetime, ...) are factual instead of either very theoretical or just technobabble is.

In short: Most of the people here simple are "science fans", not scientists. Not unexpected in a KSP forum; but they should learn to listen to reason and those that actually do science.

Edited May 7, 2015 by ZetaX

[vger]

Zetax, last night I was told I was wrong about the article based on the following facts.

A. I questioned why the author would question the validity of claims that the device was tested in a hard vacuum

B. The article's conclusion, The EM Drive is still poppycock" is correct.

Therefore, I am in the wrong to cry foul against an argument that the device may have not actually been tested in a hard vacuum

There was more I found in the article that was unfair, but I was sticking to that particular point (while ignoring a couple other ones that I felt were unfair) since it seemed even THAT was falling on deaf ears. There was no reason for the author to say that the hard vacuum test may have been falsified or mistaken. But it was being defended by Leszek, even though Leszek is convinced that it WAS tested in a hard vacuum. The only reason I can think of for that, is that Leszek could only see the larger picture, which is me defending the validity of the EM Drive itself. And since that points to me not being as skeptical as I should be, that means I'm wrong about everything I've said in this thread. That's a classic logical fallacy.

As has been said multiple times, the odds of the drive working is insanely slim. And if someone wants to write a story about why that is, then fine. But some of the reasons cited IN THAT PARTICULAR ARTICLE, were unfair and borderline nasty. The author basically tried to claim that because it was reported on a forum instead of in a journal, the device may have not actually been tested in a hard vacuum. That is completely illogical, and reads like elitist nonsense, almost in the same way that some writers would accuse a successful self-publisher of not being a real writer because they have never been picked up by a reputable publishing house.

The truth of the matter is, Eagleworks doesn't release conclusive results because they don't have the funding to produce conclusive results (and likely because the scientists received a gag order after the whole media hubbub).

In the meantime, until the slow process of un-funded science produces a conclusive result, we're left to speculate. There's nothing wrong with speculating, so long as you don't claim it for fact. I also believe that there's nothing wrong with cautious optimism, based on the data that Eagleworks has released so far (and they shared quite a lot, at least until recently). As of today, there has been more progress made toward explaining why it might work than there has been made towards proving that it doesn't work, despite attempts to achieve the contrary. This may change wth future experiments - but there will be time to discuss that in the future, when they are published.

I sure hope that doesn't end up being permanent. Things like this have a tendency to be swept under the rug. If they find out what is really going on, and it isn't sensational, will they even bother going through the paperwork to lift such a gag order? To the outside observer, this would create a lot of concern that the device works, but has been permanently classified so it can be turned into some new super-weapon in a top-secret military facility. Or even if they DO announce their findings, the press will ignore it if it isn't sensational. Conspiracy theorists and religious conservatives would have a field-day, and I don't want to see the 'Area 51' label getting slapped on NASA. They have more than enough trouble getting funding already. I've already seen a lot of comments under articles about people accusing NASA of fabricating the whole thing, in order to get more money.

And PS: Decided this thread needs a bit of lighthearted humor.

Edited May 7, 2015 by vger

[Geschosskopf]

Modified Newtonian Dynamics, which, last I heard, didn't work in several areas and explained things more poorly than the theory of Dark Matter. Its main advantage is that it doesn't absolutely require exotic undiscovered matter, though even it still needs some form of dark matter, according to the wiki.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics

Wikipedia isn't the most reliable source, especially on a controversial topic. It tends to reflect the opinions of 1 partisan or the other.

Anyway, here is the actual MoND source material if you care to look. MoND is still alive and well, last I heard.

http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/mond/

MoND has it's strengths and weaknesses. It does indeed to better than Dark Matter in some cases, although seemingly does worse in others, and in others neither does as well as would be liked.

The upshot is that neither MoND nor Dark Matter are totally correct in their present forms, and the beauty of having 2 alternative explanations is that they each point out areas where the other can be improved. Why is it that MoND does better, or even just equally well, as Dark Matter in some cases? That's the sort of thing that needs investigation. And it's another of those vexing "why?" questions that seemingly surround EM drives more than the "what?" questions.

[Mazon Del]

I feel I should clarify something. ONLY the Eagleworks experiments were run near the noise floor and they had very good reasons for doing this as I've gone over time and time again. Regardless of what we or the rest of the world believes, they produced enough data to convince the scientifically and fiscally conservative NASA to extend their funding through the end of the fiscal year and to build an actual high power test. Instead of a measly 10-60 watts, they will be able to play around with 1.2 kilowatts. Further funding will be decided based on the results from this test.

At this time the team, and apparently the funding distribution group, is taking the experimental results as well as the reported results from the Chinese, Shawyer, and Cannae teams as positive indication that this is worth clarifying and pinning down.

An important thing to note about NASA's funding of this team is that they have done so DESPITE the fact that they disagree with White's theories on why it works quite heavily.

Now, don't take all the above as 'an appeal to experts' so much as just a clarification on the current state of things.

[Leszek]

/me looks up N-Rays on the Wiki.

Heh, this sounds familiar:

If Eagleworks gave in to the same sort of thinking, they would have abandoned the project after the first experiment with the removed slits.

A proper scientist aims to find out what is happening, rather than disprove a specific claim and leave it there.

I don't follow you. The experiment with the removed slits was a deliberate change to test a hypothesis. An analog to what Wood did would be to disconnect the power to the EmDrive and not tell anyone. If they then run the experiment and still detect thrust and space warping, that would be a definitive test of a different sort.

I actually find your post really interesting in that there were many problems with the N-Ray experiments. The whole thing would get you a failing grade in 1st year university if you tried it today. But as the saying goes, experience isn't something you get until right after you needed it. But even after all it's flaws, you managed to pick the one thing that was right and criticized it while talking about what a proper scientist would do. I hope you just skimmed the article quickly.

Anyway, I have to go now so I will not be responding to the other posts right away. But it is hard to miss the first line of the next post so I will just say that I am not angry. Not even a little. Exasperated a bit perhaps...but that is my fault.

[Rakaydos]

I think the simplicity of the test rig is actually a pointer that the effect might be real. Fundamental physics dont change because you add more flashing lights. If the effect exists, it's probably shown up in unrelated tech before, but noone bothered to check for a result of physics we still dont understand.

It presumably took a crackpot looking for something that doesnt exist to discover a real thing noone was looking for. Once we go looking, a simple rig and paying attention are enough to demonstrate the effect.

A higher power rig will be invaluable, of course, as it would allow more resolution on the effect than "something is happening". Even if the "effect" it's just a hyperefficent ion drive, better data would likely let us improve the efficency even more.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I don't follow you. The experiment with the removed slits was a deliberate change to test a hypothesis.

So it was. So was Wood's change to the N-Ray experiments. The obvious difference being that Wood was running his experiments separately from the N-Ray experimenters, and the hypothesis he was testing, was that the N-Ray experimenters' experiment was hogwash.

An analog to what Wood did would be to disconnect the power to the EmDrive and not tell anyone. If they then run the experiment and still detect thrust and space warping, that would be a definitive test of a different sort.

Wasn't the Eagleworks test likewise definitive? It was testing for the alleged operating principle of the device. That operating principle was definitively proven to be false, because thrust was still observed with a key component of that operating principle removed. I have no idea of the details of the N-Ray experiments, I just saw familiar elements in their description in the quote I posted.

In both cases, an experiment is performed, and is then modified via removal of a key component of the experiment, with no change to the observed result. With N-Rays the change was discreet, and the result was used to disprove the whole concept of N-Rays, rather than the experimental setup involved, but the similarities are there.

I actually find your post really interesting in that there were many problems with the N-Ray experiments. The whole thing would get you a failing grade in 1st year university if you tried it today. But as the saying goes, experience isn't something you get until right after you needed it. But even after all it's flaws, you managed to pick the one thing that was right and criticized it while talking about what a proper scientist would do. I hope you just skimmed the article quickly.

I read the article, but only the article, not any of its ancillary documents. I was mildly curious, not enraptured with the concept, to go that far. As such, I'm not aware of any 'problems' in the N-Ray experiments, only that they were performed, tampered with, and consequently invalidated along with the thing they were supposed to detect.

My only criticism of that whole affair, is that unlike the Eagleworks today - who admittedly are working with a known and detectable concept, i.e. thrust - as far as I know so far, back then nobody thought to ask "okay, so their experiment is not what they say it is, but what are these people detecting, if it's not what they claim?" and look further into it.

Just to clarify, I have no stance on N-Rays, and I've no idea what all was actually done about them, but the above was my impression from reading the Wiki article on them.

[vger]

It presumably took a crackpot looking for something that doesnt exist to discover a real thing noone was looking for. Once we go looking, a simple rig and paying attention are enough to demonstrate the effect.

Somehow, for me, I think that would even be cooler than the potential for advanced space travel. Marvelous accidents like that used to happen with experimentation all the time, but it seems like it has become a very rare thing in recent years. At least in physics and chemistry.

[Scotius]

Somehow, for me, I think that would even be cooler than the potential for advanced space travel. Marvelous accidents like that used to happen with experimentation all the time, but it seems like it has become a very rare thing in recent years. At least in physics and chemistry.

Maybe because everyone look for big things. To be treated seriously you have to have budget counting in millions and access to a huge collider - LHC preferably If you have less than that, and report something new and unusual you are labelled as crackpot and shunned by scientific community. /end of bitter rant/

[Leszek]

Why are you so angry, Leszek? If you're argumenting for level-headed rationalism in the face of unlikely experimental results, it's best to do so in a level-headed fashion. I know what you're trying to say and why, but your style of writing, frequent use of absolutes and extreme emotion really works against you here. You're sounding more like a zealot than those you wish to remind to not be zealots.

The truth of the matter is, Eagleworks doesn't release conclusive results because they don't have the funding to produce conclusive results (and likely because the scientists received a gag order after the whole media hubbub). There is no official EMdrive program at NASA. There's just a bunch of (admittedly highly qualified) enthusiasts with a license to think outside the box and an eagerness to experiment with this thing they got handed because of a third party's outrageous claim. The only reason this is even moving at any perceptible speed at all is because the device involved is so simple that it could be kludged together in a garden shed. Bigger test articles are under construction, to be used in bigger vacuum chambers with proper vacuum-rated equipment (which Eagleworks themselves does not possess). But this will take time, because again, there's no budget assigned to this. Only discretionary funding - in other words, whatever can be scraped together by the lab leads.

Until that has happened, it is nonsense to claim anything proven. But it is similarly nonsense to claim anything bogus and wrong. There is no "doesn't work until proven otherwise" in science. There is only "works if proven to work, doesn't work if proven to not work". You need to prove either case. And neither has been conclusively proven yet. Despite repeated attempts, the Eagleworks team has failed to come up with an experimental setup where it doesn't work. At the same time the results, while appearing clearly above the noise floor, are not yet good enough to rule out errors.

There do however exist simulations that explain the experimental results - down to being able to accurately predict the result of an experiment before it's been run, and down to being able to explain the experimental results achieved by the Chinese team as well. The simulation does not break any known laws of physics; it simply makes an assumption about the behavior of the quantum field that goes against the commonly accepted assumption. It's important to keep in mind, however, that the behavior of said quantum field also falls under things that are not conclusively proven either way. Even the commonly accepted assumption is just an assumption. It can be wrong, it can be right. We don't know for sure.

And then it's possible that the simulation just happens to replicate the experimental effects even with a wrong assumption, because that wrong assumption just happens to work in the narrow range of results observed so far, but it stops working outside of that range. It's even possible that the simulation uses the wrong assumption to accurately predict something that actually works because of a different reason that nobody has considered yet. Sometimes, math works out that way.

In the meantime, until the slow process of un-funded science produces a conclusive result, we're left to speculate. There's nothing wrong with speculating, so long as you don't claim it for fact. I also believe that there's nothing wrong with cautious optimism, based on the data that Eagleworks has released so far (and they shared quite a lot, at least until recently). As of today, there has been more progress made toward explaining why it might work than there has been made towards proving that it doesn't work, despite attempts to achieve the contrary. This may change wth future experiments - but there will be time to discuss that in the future, when they are published.

So as I said, I am not angry or even upset.

My use of absolutes are carefully chosen. I never said EmDrive doesn't work for example. Where I use absolutes I mean them. Because they can't be ignored or more accurately if you do you are drifting into pseudoscience territory.

In fact as I read your post, I find that in general I agree with it. I am left to wonder if we talked past each other or something. So I am going to be explicit about what I disagree with...

I disagree with just one thing here. People insist on making statements beyond the reasonable limits they can. For example statements like "It is doing something" are totally false as point of fact. We don't know, we can't know, until we have results that are outside of the margins. Until that point, we have nothing concrete. I can answer any result claimed by anyone here with "It doesn't matter until it is outside the margins." That is not the same as claiming the device doesn't work. That is not the same as claiming the results are fallacious. As long as people are counting their chickens not just before they have hatched, but before the eggs have been laid, I am going to have issue. Any model that claims to explain the results that may or may not actually be there are nice. But if you can't even be sure you are modeling a real phenomenon they don't really help. Sure you can use them to inform what experiments to do next. But imagined results can follow any theory or model produced. Even the theory that faeries are how EmDrive works. You don't know whether you have imagined results until you are outside the margins. It is a failing of human perception, and it has hurt us before. That is why we are sceptical now.

And yes I can get a bit passionate with my speech. Sorry, I am human.

- - - Updated - - -

There was more I found in the article that was unfair, but I was sticking to that particular point (while ignoring a couple other ones that I felt were unfair) since it seemed even THAT was falling on deaf ears. There was no reason for the author to say that the hard vacuum test may have been falsified or mistaken. But it was being defended by Leszek, even though Leszek is convinced that it WAS tested in a hard vacuum. The only reason I can think of for that, is that Leszek could only see the larger picture, which is me defending the validity of the EM Drive itself. And since that points to me not being as skeptical as I should be, that means I'm wrong about everything I've said in this thread. That's a classic logical fallacy.

Hmm.

Perhaps I came off too far to one side. I have dealt with lots of pseudoscience topics before. In those cases, there are lots of claims by "paranormal investigators" and "UFOlogists" (Where did they go to school for that?) along lines that sound much the same as the claim they were tested in vacuum. I have learned long ago to be sceptical of such claims until the data is shown in peer reviewed journals. That is not because the people in question are telling falsehoods. It is not because the people in question are not scientists. (There are people with doctorates in pseudoscience.) It is because until you have someone really double checking your work under scrutiny it is very easy for very human scientists to fool themselves.

Having said that, I have real hard time with the idea that those involved were unable to tell if they had a vacuum or not. But as a point of principal, and perhaps too generally applied, I am loath to accept any claim until the data is shown. The trust that comes with that is abused so much so often by so many both deliberately and accidentally.

- - - Updated - - -

Sean Mirrsen

As I read your post I am sure you misunderstood the situation.

"So it was. So was Wood's change to the N-Ray experiments. The obvious difference being that Wood was running his experiments separately from the N-Ray experimenters, and the hypothesis he was testing, was that the N-Ray experimenters' experiment was hogwash."

Is wrong.

Blondlot, was running the experiment as a demonstration to other scientists. Wood removed the prism and the source from Blondlot's experiment without tell them. Blondlot and his assistant then proceeded to run the experiment with successful results anyway. The fact that the wood he put in as a source was the same kind of wood Blondlot already said didn't produce N-Rays, or that without the prism there was no way to focus said N-Rays onto the detector didn't stop the prism from focusing the N-Rays on to the detector and producing the required results.

So if I had gone to Eagleworks, and removed various required parts of the EmDrive without telling anyone, and the drive continued to work, that would demonstrate the results are imaginary.

[ZetaX]

Maybe because everyone look for big things. To be treated seriously you have to have budget counting in millions and access to a huge collider - LHC preferably If you have less than that, and report something new and unusual you are labelled as crackpot and shunned by scientific community. /end of bitter rant/

No you are not. You are labeled a crackpot if you actually are. Which mostly includes ludicrous statements, very unplausible claims, no documentation, no accurate descriptions of what you are doing/want to do, and generally everyone else being unable to reproduce anything at all. They normally don't even use accepted ways to communicate (e.g. using LaTeX, using accepted platforms, ...), but act like nobody is taking thems eriously just because [insert some paranoia here].

Don't defend them. The chance that an actual scientific find will go unnoticed because of what you said is very small (probably not nonexistent, but surely pretty small).

Some of the more recent weird claims are EM drive and the FTL neutrinoes. Neither was considered crackpottery, but obviously (and rightfully) people are/were very sceptical. Actual crackpots are more along the lines of "I invented yet another perpetuum mobile based on the quantum fluctuations in my cat".

[magnemoe]

Maybe because everyone look for big things. To be treated seriously you have to have budget counting in millions and access to a huge collider - LHC preferably If you have less than that, and report something new and unusual you are labelled as crackpot and shunned by scientific community. /end of bitter rant/

Not everywhere, the medicine industry has looked into any folklore and medicine man inventory an many times. IBM has used 10% of their profit to science in their field for decades. This NASA group is designed to look into weird effects who will change spaceflight, they will not look at stuff who has general interest like cold fusion. Just stuff who is space only.

Second they are after the long shots.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Sean Mirrsen

As I read your post I am sure you misunderstood the situation.

"So it was. So was Wood's change to the N-Ray experiments. The obvious difference being that Wood was running his experiments separately from the N-Ray experimenters, and the hypothesis he was testing, was that the N-Ray experimenters' experiment was hogwash."

Is wrong.

Blondlot, was running the experiment as a demonstration to other scientists. Wood removed the prism and the source from Blondlot's experiment without tell them. Blondlot and his assistant then proceeded to run the experiment with successful results anyway. The fact that the wood he put in as a source was the same kind of wood Blondlot already said didn't produce N-Rays, or that without the prism there was no way to focus said N-Rays onto the detector didn't stop the prism from focusing the N-Rays on to the detector and producing the required results.

So if I had gone to Eagleworks, and removed various required parts of the EmDrive without telling anyone, and the drive continued to work, that would demonstrate the results are imaginary.

Okay. But what of the next step? Eagleworks would have went "huh", and tried to determine what creates the thrust, since thrust is a thing you can measure, and they had been measuring it. If the tampered-with, beyond-a-shadow-of-doubt nonfunctional test article still produces measurable thrust, something is going on. That is, as I said, the one area where Eagleworks is at an advantage. They were not aiming to prove the existence of thrust as a concept. They already know that thrust is a thing that exists, so when their results show that there is thrust, they know that something is happening. Blondlot had to prove that he wasn't, as it were, "seeing things" first.

Like I said, I don't know if anyone tried to do any follow-up experiments to determine what, if anything, the experiments were actually detecting before. But unless the creator of the concept of N-Rays admitted that he made the whole thing up, I think it was a thing that could have been looked into - at the very least so that whatever that factor was does not interfere with any future experiments.

[Aanker]

However, it would be nice to see some more negative controls. Remove this and that part - does it still work? Those experiments.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I think they're down to just two parts right now. The RF emitter and the resonance chamber. And they already tested the RF emitter on its lonesome, I believe. (Assuming the "RF Load" test back during the slits/no-slits experiment series was that) It didn't produce thrust.

[Scotius]

The baffling beauty of EmDrive is in its simplicity. It consists of a metal box and some off the shelf electronic components. There is not much you can remove from this setup. And yet this box, while powered by relatively small current produces more thrust than new and sophisticated ion engines. And i refuse to believe a team of NASA propulsion specialists doesn't know how to detect and measure thrust of anything resembling a rocket engine

[vger]

Perhaps I came off too far to one side. I have dealt with lots of pseudoscience topics before. In those cases, there are lots of claims by "paranormal investigators" and "UFOlogists" (Where did they go to school for that?) along lines that sound much the same as the claim they were tested in vacuum. I have learned long ago to be sceptical of such claims until the data is shown in peer reviewed journals. That is not because the people in question are telling falsehoods. It is not because the people in question are not scientists. (There are people with doctorates in pseudoscience.) It is because until you have someone really double checking your work under scrutiny it is very easy for very human scientists to fool themselves.

Having said that, I have real hard time with the idea that those involved were unable to tell if they had a vacuum or not. But as a point of principal, and perhaps too generally applied, I am loath to accept any claim until the data is shown. The trust that comes with that is abused so much so often by so many both deliberately and accidentally.

Quite understandable. And yeah, I've seen tensions unusually high on this topic in many places. For me the reaction to the news is almost as fascinating as the news itself. For example, I don't remember this happening at all when the alleged FTL neutrino news broke. Something about this has gotten people much more excitable than other alleged groundbreaking discoveries that later proved to be the result of a random error.

I guess if the cold fusion debacle had happened with today's communication, it might've been this crazy. But then lab tests looking for a warp bubble based on the Alcubierre drive have been inconclusive, but still hopeful so far. Yet you don't even hear a peep about that project anymore - even though it seems that NASA's PR department tried a lot harder to generate buzz for it.

Edited May 8, 2015 by vger

[Frozen_Heart]

Anyone know when the next round of tests is going to happen? I'm pretty fed up of this maybe it works maybe it doesn't debate. Hopefully they can prove or disprove it completely ASAP.

[K^2]

alleged FTL neutrino

Well, for starters, FTL neutrinos wouldn't really be nearly as big of a deal. Neither from theoretical nor practical standpoint. It seemed likely that there was an experimental error, but it wouldn't have uprooted anything fundamentally if it wasn't. Enough things appear to propagate FTL on both Quantum and Cosmological scales to merit merely a "huh" on the freaky physics scale. And there were no direct applications. If they could propagate slightly FTL through vacuum, maybe there would be some use. And even that's a stretch. If you have to send them through a rock, well, that's just a theoretical curiosity, then, with no practical use.

EMDrive supposedly generates enough thrust to be practically applicable already. And at power/thrust ratio that blows away all competition. That's not just a curiosity. That's something a lot of people would genuinely very much like to have. And that's even if it turns out to be just an ion drive. It's not something with maybe some potential applications in the future. We can find fantastic uses for it right now.

And on the flip side, it wouldn't be just a minor curiosity in theoretical physics. It's a big fat cross on the entire discipline. It's not another, "The theory wasn't quite right, here's a fix." It's a genuine square one. And square one here goes back to the Greeks. Not only that, but it leaves all of the questions of how theory so wrong could have given predictions so right all along completely open. Which kind of casts doubt on scientific principle overall. And then we're completely up the creek without a paddle.

So if you're wondering why EMDrive generates so much more tension than superluminal leptons, it's because the later has not a tiny fraction of conflict between value to application and theory of the former. Whenever something has potential of providing immediate practical benefits, but casts under doubt the system that brought forward advancements before it, there is tension. And few things we've encountered have as much potential to do both as a reactionless drive.

Fortunately, it's also a reason to be absolutely certain that nothing will come out of it, beyond, maybe, new applications in ion propulsion. We just can't be that wrong about foundations and only be finding out about it now.

[Rakaydos]

And on the flip side, it wouldn't be just a minor curiosity in theoretical physics. It's a big fat cross on the entire discipline. It's not another, "The theory wasn't quite right, here's a fix." It's a genuine square one. And square one here goes back to the Greeks. Not only that, but it leaves all of the questions of how theory so wrong could have given predictions so right all along completely open. Which kind of casts doubt on scientific principle overall. And then we're completely up the creek without a paddle.

Didnt someone mention that Dr White figured out a way for it to work while "only" rewriting quantum mechanics?

At the very least it would mean we're only throwing out 100 years of scientific progess, not ten thousand.

[Leszek]

Didnt someone mention that Dr White figured out a way for it to work while "only" rewriting quantum mechanics?

At the very least it would mean we're only throwing out 100 years of scientific progess, not ten thousand.

There is also the fact Roger Showyer's original theory and math doesn't pan out, so that means he built a perfectly functioning drive effectively accidentally.

[Rakaydos]

There is also the fact Roger Showyer's original theory and math doesn't pan out, so that means he built a perfectly functioning drive effectively accidentally.

It's an incredible coincidence, one that boggles the imagination, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

As I said, it presumably took a crackpot looking to prove a bad theory to accidently discover physics that noone had any idea existed.

[K^2]

Didnt someone mention that Dr White figured out a way for it to work while "only" rewriting quantum mechanics?

No, because conserved currents. The momentum has to be carried away by stable particles, or it can't work in vacuum. That means mass poles. That means you have to have propellant.

At best, Dr. White's hypothesis buys it a greater length scale, which could allow the craft to use low vacuum, such as that found in low orbit, as propellant. It would prevent the craft from operating in interplanetary space, but could still be useful for LEO operations. Of course, even this is a huge if.

[KSK]

It's an incredible coincidence, one that boggles the imagination, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

As I said, it presumably took a crackpot looking to prove a bad theory to accidently discover physics that noone had any idea existed.

Anyway - as you've probably guessed, we now need your help.

Sorry - not intended to be a dig at Rakaydos' comment but the way it was written would fit right in with some KSP contract or other.