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Why the "NASA Tested Space Drive" Is Bad Science
StartsWithABang writes Just over a century ago, N rays were detected by over a hundred researchers and discussed in some three hundred publications, yet there were serious experimental flaws and experimenter biases that were exposed over time. Fast forward to last week, and NASA Tests Microwave Space Drive is front page news. But a quick analysis shows that it isn't theorists who'll need to struggle to explain this phenomenon, but rather the shoddy experimentalists who are making the exact same "bad science" mistakes all over again.
Said one Thomas Dolby !!
it really wants to dock with that nearest metallic object on your lab bench....
Have they accounted for the presence of skeptics during the experiments? That is likely the cause of any anomalies.
Wait, is this guy talking about space drives or global warming?
FTA:
1. The magnitude of these effects varied tremendously from experiment to experiment. //endtroll
2. The threshold of measurement—the difference between a detection and a non-detection—was always extremely close to the actual claimed detection.
3. Many attempts at confirming the experiments by some of the leading scientists of the day, including Lord Kelvin, Heinrich Rubens and Robert Wood, all produced null results.
4. And finally, even if you restricted your data sets to the positive the experimental results, their claims were inconsistent with one another.
Jeez, 100 years later, and you don't think that current day scientists account for, and try to eliminate voodoo science these days? This is just plain FUD. Get over yourselves!
I was SO hoping that this was true!
One step closer to sci-fi type of space propulsion - maybe relativistic speeds!
I feel so crushed!
News outlets like this is because it is being obfuscated. There probably really is something to this. But I doubt it will be implemented by anyone outside of the elite.
The NASA science is just fine: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-08/07/10-qs-about-nasa-impossible-drive
The result from NASA may or may not be real. However, this refutation is bad science writing and bad science.
There are two glaring errors in it:
Apart from these two actual errors in description, the only "evidence" the author has is "This looks sort of similar to cases where science has gone wrong in the past".
That *is* clearly a warning sign, but it is not actually sufficient to say "This is wrong".
The dogmatic scientists are at it again. Prove that the casimir effect has a relativistic effect in real world application and they spout off saying it's bad science. Next, you're gonna say, "Tesla had no impact on society".
One serious question I have about all this. The device isn't claimed to get energy from nowhere, or to be a perpetual motion machine. The device is claimed to consume electrical power and produce some small amount of thrust.
Is that theoretically impossible? The only way we know of right now to produce momentum is to push on something, or throw something away (like rocket exhaust).
When a falling object hits the ground and stops moving, if I am not mistaken the momentum is converted to waste heat. Would it be correct to say that heat is the motion of molecules, and thus the momentum doesn't disappear but is simply randomized? Or is that incorrect and momentum can be converted to a different form of energy?
P.S. I would like this drive to be a real thing, but I am not very hopeful.
After growing up dreaming about space, only to be depressed by reality as I studied physics, grant me one or two days to be excited about renewed dreams of flying to the stars in my lifetime....
http://xkcd.com/1404/
25 years ago there was desktop cold fusion. A lot of people wanted it, there were conferences on it, probably at least a hundred million was invested in it over a year or two. but it was bogus. The hypothesis was sound, it was no completely unreasonable, but the experiments showing a positive results on the hypothesis were flawed. It is not that cold fusion does not exist as something that might happen, it is that we have not shown it happens. I don't want to muddle the situation, but there is a clear line between what can happen and does happen in the lab. Theoretical people have told me that their models are necessarily not connected with reality. They are math, and the math sometimes tells us what is going on, sometimes fools us, and sometimes is just bonkers. What differentiates all this is good experimental science, which is really hard to do. I mean really hard, and for the most part does not lead to a theory, but only data that can be collected by math. This is why even though Galileo did a lot of good research, it was 100 years before the math caught up and we were able to do what we now classify as as science.It is why electromagnetic, the speed of light, quantum mechanics, and what is to follow is going to drop out the math. Which is to say we have a very complex interactions. Virtual particles drop out the math. The math says that they must exist, but inherently can't do anything useful. This is in the same way that photons can be coupled so they may seem to act faster than the speed of light(maybe, until we get distances longer than the earth-moon system we cannot really know) but no one expects information to be communicated faster than the speed of light. The end result is that if you have an experiment that violates the math, you have to be very sure it is a good experiment, and the consensus is quickly building that this is not. There is a certain responsibility to being an experimentalist. One can't just willy nilly say there are 40 dimensions of energy is created from the aether. On can be sloppy with conclusions, as Einstein was with the photoelectric effect, or Milikin in his oil drop experiment, but one does have a responsibility to do ones best to control systematic errors, and not jump to conclusions when one does not fully understand those errors. Unless, of course, like the two cited authors you are lucky enough to be accidentally correct.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I thought that this take was pretty appropriate when all we had to go on was the conference abstract. Now, however, the full paper (still not peer reviewed) is out, and it is much better. I still think it is wrong, but I do not think it is bad science, and it will have to be refuted experimentally.
Comments
* the "null thruster" is something of a red herring from the abstract. Reading the paper, they have a true "null load," which shows no thrust, while the "null thruster" was a mod of a Cannae drive, and so more of a test of drive theory than the experimental setup, and, in any event, they tested several types of drives.
* they did pretty much all of the things you would like to see (such as reversing the direction and making sure the thrust reverses).
* they seem to have done a thoughtful and careful job, including testing in vacuum.
So, I still think they are likely wrong, but this ups the ante. In my opinion, you can't just say "this is obviously wrong." I bet there will be a bunch of attempts to replicate it in labs all over the place.
I find the theories here (and I have now read several in some depth) to be bad, either wrong, or handwavy, or both*. I would discount them entirely. In the unlikely event that this effect is real (and I mean, some non-standard physics effect), then the theory is likely to be something different than any of the proposals, The experiment's the thing, and the game now has to be disproving the Eagleworks results. Only once a bunch of people have failed to do that (or one person has done it) is there much else to say.
* On pushing on virtual particles or quantum spacetime or whatever. These are 1 GHz photons, more or less. Such pushing would cause a _vacuum_ dispersion. Vacuum dispersion limits are set by timing of high energy photons from Gamma ray bursts across cosmic distances. These tests use ~ 100 MeV photons over ~10^10 light years, and so are many orders of magnitude tighter than the NASA Eagleworks results. This in my opinion rules out any photon - vacuum interaction as the cause of these anomalous thrusts.
It is important and necessary to independently verify and reproduce these results, meaning that if you detail the setup and methods, anyone else can achieve these results for themselves with the proper equipment
Interesting. I wonder what other popular and controversial "science" is missing this particular step.
He made three key points:
-The thrust from all 3 experiments varied by 500%. -Duh, the Chinese used kilowatts and Nasa used watts of energy.
-The thrust measured 30-50n was too close to the min tolerance 10-15n of the instrument. -3x-5x the min is "too close"?
-OMG the control showed the same thrust as the actual drive! -Not true. But hardly surprising given the wording of the abstract. You would think he would read the paper before tearing holes in it.
Don't get me wrong. I think the drive probably doesn't work. But this article is written by someone who is gleefully uninformed.
Just over a century ago, N rays were detected by over a hundred researchers and discussed in some three hundred publications
And just over two hundred years ago, the French Academy of Sciences steadfastly refused to believe that rocks could fall from space, with an abundance of supporting evidence to demonstrate that these "meteorites" had clearly come from weather conditions right here on Earth picking up rocks and flinging them about.
Funny thing about (good) science - It doesn't simply dismiss new ideas simply because they disagree with existing theories. Oh, but for the first time in human history we have it right? Yeah, about that unified theory of quantum gravity, Doctor...
It's the reporting. This wasn't a peer reviewed scientific discovery, and it didn't claim to be. It was just a paper that laid out how the experiment was done, and what the results were, nothing more. Just because IFL Science, like every other tech/science site, picks up the story and hints at trips to Mars in a matter of weeks, doesn't mean that's what the experimenters were claiming.
This is how science works. You do experiments, you post your methods and results. Other scientists may do the same. If there is enough evidence that something may be at work, you do more. If you end up showing that everything we thought we knew about the universe was wrong, THEN YOU START CHANGING THE TEXTBOOKS.
The law of conservation of momentum, like all scientific laws, comes with the caveat that our understanding of how the universe works is correct. They are not immutable. Given reproduceability, predictability, and strong empirical evidence, it probably is correct; but that doesn't mean it may not need "tweaking" in the face of new evidence. It could also be that no scientific principles are being broken here, it's just there's something else at play we don't understand.
People who claim otherwise are really just religious zealots in a lab coat.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
In otherwards, you can't make billions off of the infrastructure storing liquid hydrogen, billions off launch pad construction and maint contracts and most of all, nothing can go boom sp, instead of having to buy insurance and possibly building TWO in case of launch failure, there just isn't any good money....I mean good science in that or any idea that doesn't use rockets.
Rockets=The Chinese were doing it long before we were and somehow nobody gets it that it is old hat.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
... we might get an actual hoverboard before 2015?
Orbital Sciences has a Cygnus supply vessel to supply ISS. Why not just stick on of those devices on a Cygnus, and see how long it takes to deorbit. An accurate test.
How many times have I read as a 'matter of fact' that curved (or warped) spacetime is responsible for gravity in online articles and made for TV science specials?
What does that even mean? The Chinese reported some result, NASA tried to reproduce it, and didn't get very convincing results. Any halfway reasonable person looks at what was reported in the press and says "hey, nothing really to see here, they didn't really prove or disprove anything", to which one might add "how nice that people try some new and crazy stuff occasionally".
Which part of that chain of events is supposed to constitute "bad science"? Who exactly is supposed to have been fooled? Which step along the way does Siegel consider "bad science" and why?
Instead of making a rational argument for the cost/benefit of this particular experiment, Siegel goes off on some tangent about N-rays, supposedly illustrating the foolishness of some experiments. But there are many other cases where weird observations and experiments that most people thought never could work opened up entirely new areas in physics and biology. If one can learn anything from the history of science, it's that you should sometimes try crazy and foolish experiments because occasionally, they yield a big payoff.
Nobody knows whether reactionless drives are "impossible" or not; anybody who makes definitive statements one way or the other is a charlatan at this point, including Siegel.
The known laws of physics violate the known laws of physics, because they are not only incomplete but internally inconsistent. Somewhere along the line, you will have to do experiments whose results might violate the known laws of physics if you want to make progress.
I still don't know what that "this" is that Siegel is referring to. How do you know that the results aren't reproducible or robust if you don't try to reproduce them?
Siegel has the kind of dull mind that we don't want to teach our next generation of scientists or kids, and it is disturbing that guys like him are actually active in science education. Kids: try stupid things that violate known physics. Try things that sticks-in-the-mud like Siegel tell you don't work. And try to reproduce other people's experiments, both the ones that everybody believes and the ones nobody else could get to work.
Seems the NASA quantum-naughts are on to something !
Did the "revelation" occur after or before Colorado legalized weed !
Ah. The NASA "emDrive" will be "smoking" for years to cum. ;-)
Just put a payload experiment in orbit and see if you can drive it around. If the scientists running the experiments accounted for the motion of waves on a beach five miles away, I'm pretty certain that makes it worth a payload slot. We could dick around down here for years arguing about whether the results are valid or not, or we could put one up there and try it.
Sounds like the perfect cubesat experiment.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"In earlier times, they had no statistics, and so they had to fall back on lies". -- Stephen Leacock
"Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance." -- Morris Kline
"Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable." - Mark Twain
"Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything." - Gregg Easterbrook
And of course..
"42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot." -- Steven Wright
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Yes, N-rays were a false pursuit. (See book "Diamond Dealers and Feather Merchants")
Cold fusion also. The palladium was soaking up hydrogen, which the original experimenters (Pons & Fleischmann?) misinterpreted as demonstrating room-temperature cold fusion.
The public needs understand that un-refereed reports are not fact. Further, even refereed journal articles are not fact. It is only after others reproduce experiments and find confirming results that we get closer to "fact." Even then, it's just "confirmed theory."
Why the popular press loves to breathlessly report on recent journal articles as "fact" only confuses the matter.
It's sad how pathetic the pretenders on Slashdot are sometimes. So full of themselves and sure that they are smarter than the next guy.
I know it's appeal to authority, but NASA doesn't employ idiots. And if you had bothered to do even a simply Google search you would have found this which sheds some more light on the situation.
Just to save you the effort, the abstract sucks (most likely written by a public relations flunky), they were very careful in setting up the experiment, it WAS done in a vacuum, there is something there. Note that they didn't explain it, they just report their observations.
But you go ahead and stick with your second year physics student attitude.
To scientifically prove/disprove something you need experimental data, which is exactly what NASA seems to be doing in this case. The results are less than stellar but as long as they are not burning any significant amount of money whats the issue? If we really want to know if this thing works or not just put it in a small cubesat and piggyback it on another satellite launch, if it can change its orbit then we know it works, if it can't we know its useless. Again no significant amount of resources should be expended and the inventors shouldn't profit in any way until the effect is proven, but sometimes the most astounding discoveries start out as a little unexplained quirk that someone plays around with.
Just remember, a power (nuclear electric) is the input, microwaves, or whatever else (remember heat exchanger panels voyager) are the output. Yes you must follow conserve rules. But you have free input to give off. It ain't just a closed circle around the microwaves, duh. I'm investing in this.
Oh for fuck's sake... Time to debunk this shit, again.
TFA got it wrong as well, so I suppose I can't blame you people for getting it wrong too, but please try doing a little more research?
A little background: The EmDrive was invented by a guy named Shawyer. It was tested by NASA, among others, and found to produce about 91 microNewtons. (I'll address the 30-50 that TFA talks about too.) That's way less than the Chinese found, but NASA was also testing it at much lower power and say they are planning to test a higher-power version.
The article mentions "... and a third person, Guido Fetta, have built three separate versions of the EmDrive". This is wrong, at least according to Fetta. Fetta invented what he calls a "Cannae Drive" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive#Cannae_drive) which resembles an EmDrive but supposedly works on a different principle. In particular, Fetta believes that his drive requires radial slots in the chamber to operate. To test this, two versions of the Cannae Drive were (also, separately from the EmDrive test) tested by NASA: one with and one without the slots. Those tests both produced the same thrust (30-50 microN, about half what the EmDrive produced), which disproves Fetta's theory as to how the Cannae Drive is supposed to work.... and nothing else.
The null test device that everybody is so dismissedly claiming claiming disproves the EmDrive wasn't even supposed to be an EmDrive! Fetta, inventor of the Cannae Drive, was disproven. Shawyer, inventor of the EmDrive, was actually vindicated because according to his theory, the Cannae Drive (slots or no) is basically an inefficiently-shaped EmDrive.
I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
If one considers gravity in our nominal 3d space, isn't it correct to say that gravity imparts momentum without anything comparable to "high momentum exhaust"?
Serious question -- the physics are beyond me, but the curiosity isn't. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I remember being fascinated by the initial reports of the EmDrive years ago, and I was very, very frustrated that so-called "scientists" preferred to sneer at it and declare it impossible rather than pursuing such a fascinating possibility with, you know, those things they call experiments. I thought that's what scientists did - explore new things, chase the frontier - and that the potential to learn something new, the potential that there was a previously overlooked mystery right under their noses, would be unbearably exciting for them.
How hard is it to build one of these damn things, strap it to a lab bench, and test it? And then test it in a vacuum, underwater, upside down, in a house, with a mouse, with green eggs and ham, etc? Isn't that what scientists are paid to do? Test things? Over and over, under every conceivable scenario? The test these fellows did is great and all, but it should have been done years ago. If the EmDrive and its permutation(s) are bullshit, then why wasn't it killed and buried years ago, with the inescapable power of repeatable experiments and test results? We spend millions trying to detect cosmic particles that aren't there, and then spend MORE millions to NOT detect those cosmic particles to a greater degree of accuracy, but nobody can be fucking arsed to strap a microwave gizmo to a lab bench, flip a switch, and see if this is a world-shaking breakthrough or just another sad data mistake? Thanks for nothing, poindexters.
So the earth really was flat for awhile?
To the limits of measurement at the time, yes From the link - Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I haven't seen any of the articles, but I'm guessing the news about it has been spread in this fashion:
Rocket companies hate this. NASA has built a new type of engine using a simple trick. You will NEVER believe what happened when they switched it on. When I saw it, my mind was blown!
(Photo with a couple of red circles around guys in lab coats)
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Insightful? - Seems like the new generation of slashdotters have never heard of Karl Popper, much less what he had to say about the "Republic of science" (AKA scientific consensus). The whole idea of peer-reviewed publications and repeatability is aimed at arriving at a consensus among peers. Without it, all you're left with is an appeal to the authority of individual scientists, naturally the authority you pick will be the one that's telling you what you want to hear, therefore Science (with a capital 'S') will fail to progress, and stop being so damned useful.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
... it conjures its reaction mass from thin air, err, vacuum?
I want to find the moron who wrote it and force him to actually read the paper that he gets almost completely wrong.
The measure of a person's character is not found in the way they handle success. The guy who writes the SWAB blog is usually pretty good, been following him for years. If he has read the comments here, I'm pretty sure he's (re)reading the paper now.
Disclaimer: I've never heard of this device but I'm stocking up on popcorn in anticipation of Ethan's follow up blog.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It just occurred to me, if this effect is real--if this drive actually works, then it is worth billions of dollars, especially to NASA.
It seems like a good use of the taxpayer's money to me to make this a centennial challenge with a nice juicy prize. NASA could publish a specification for this and give a prize to the first team to meet the specification, as tested by NASA. To cut down on wasting NASA's time and money, the claimants would first have to have their apparatus tested by an independent organization, to NASAs standards, at their own expense.
I propose a prize in the form of $100 million cash and a license agreement to license the technology on a royalty basis.
If it's real, we all win. If it's not, we don't lose anything but the relatively small costs of managing the contest.
All this reminds me of Harry Harrison's story, Toy Shop. There is also a story by Poul Anderson (I am sorry I cannot remember the title) where a NASA administrator funds a crackpot only because he needs to be seen doing something—success results, and the story ends with his seeing his Russian counterpart at a conference, and having the intuition that his opposite number made the same decision, for the same reason!
Now you are talking about Truth. Truth has nothing to do with science, other than it is possibly the unattainable goal. If you want to talk about Truth go to Phil101 class.
So yes, at a certain point in time the earth really was flat, as that was the currently accepted theory that most of the world believed in. It became un-flat if you will when others postulated a theory other than the generally accepted facts, did experimentation to prove it, and then convinced other scientists with their work that their theory had more merit and should be accepted as the new ideal. As you may recall, many were persecuted for their various beliefs mostly because if didn't fit with religious dogma. If you consider that the church was a even larger part of society and government at the time there are certainly analogs where things like Climate Change for example do not fit some political ideology and thus have a harder time gaining traction.
Science is about trying to better describe the world around us using experiments that are repeatable using acceptable standards. Leave "Truth" out of it.
Oh for fuck's sake... Time to debunk this shit, again.
TFA got it wrong as well, so I suppose I can't blame you people for getting it wrong too, but please try doing a little more research?
A little background: The EmDrive was invented by a guy named Shawyer.
I have have a copy of the paper in question, "Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum," and have read it in detail. It does not reference Shawyer. This paper is not about the "EmDrive."
It was tested by NASA, among others, and found to produce about 91 microNewtons. (I'll address the 30-50 that TFA talks about too.) That's way less than the Chinese found, but NASA was also testing it at much lower power and say they are planning to test a higher-power version.
"Way less" means "over four orders of magnitude less." The Juan et al. test-- reference 1 in the paper-- did not test a thruster at hundreds of kilowatts input power! At best, you can say that the JSC test was testing something different form the Chinese test. They did not replicate the Chinese tests in any way.
...To test this, two versions of the Cannae Drive were (also, separately from the EmDrive test) tested by NASA: one with and one without the slots. Those tests both produced the same thrust (30-50 microN, about half what the EmDrive produced), which disproves Fetta's theory as to how the Cannae Drive is supposed to work.... and nothing else The null test device that everybody is so dismissedly claiming claiming disproves the EmDrive wasn't even supposed to be an EmDrive!
The EmDrive was not mentioned or referenced in the paper being discussed.
Fetta, inventor of the Cannae Drive, was disproven.
Correct. This is a valid conclusion of the results of the paper.
Shawyer, inventor of the EmDrive, was actually vindicated because according to his theory, the Cannae Drive (slots or no) is basically an inefficiently-shaped EmDrive.
Shawyer was not mentioned nor referenced in the paper. The EmDrive was not mentioned nor referenced in the paper.
I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand.
It is hard for people to understand because in an article about the results of a paper "Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum," you reference a garbage-dumpster full of other stuff that is not mentioned nor referenced in that paper.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This process will work out just as it should; I have no doubt that in a year there will be a dozen tests of this and we will likely know for sure one way or the other; in the meantime, I would take a $ 200 bet [xkcd.com] that the standard model will still prevail when this is over.
The problem is the opportunity cost. Is disproving obviously crackpot ideas really the best use of money, brains and time? While sometimes seemingly crackpot ideas actually turn out to be not-crackpot but that is the exception that proves the rule. In this case it looks like snake oil, smells like snake oil and behaves like snake oil. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary proof, etc.
"at it's core"
Um, at its core.
It's = it is
Learn this.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Instead of writing articles let's setup test rigs and get a repro... omg people
The term that applies here is either "Bad Journalism" or "Bad Science Reporting". Calling it "Bad Science" and leaving it at that is giving the real charlatans a free pass.
Scientist: "Hey, this is weird... We just put together something that shouldn't work but it sort of looks like it did."
Headline: "NEW EXPERIMENT PROVES THAT EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT PHYSICS IS WRONG!"
Scientist: "It's not that... Look, here's a copy of a presentation we just gave to the rest of the department. There's a tiny and barely measurable bias in our results that we should be able to explain away but can't."
Headline: "SCIENTIST WITH TWO ASSES HAS RESEARCHERS BAFFLED!"
Scientist: "Um, that wasn't a press release, just a little paper we threw together to discuss our results. It's for other people familiar with what we're doing, and who know what words like 'bias' mean."
Headline: "LEAKED INTERNAL DOCUMENTS REVEAL NEW LAWS OF PHYSICS!"
Scientist: "I'm just going to back away slowly now and call some nice friends of mine who can show you out of the building. Try not to make any sudden moves..."
Headline: "SCIENTISTS INVOLVED IN COVERUP OF REVOLUTIONARY NEW SPACE DRIVE!"
Scientist: "Well, look at that. I just put a minus sign instead of a plus sign in one of the equations. If you do the math over again the results make a little bit more sense this way."
Headline: "REVOLUTIONARY SPACE DRIVE SCIENTIST WITH TWO ASSES IS A FRAUD! HOW WERE WE ALL FOOLED?"
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=MIT+cold+fusion+2014
It has always been real, and only High Energy physics and theory have said otherwise. DOE review 10 years ago said it was normal science.
TFA itself has committed the sin of not reading the fucking article. They and their cohort of skeptics read only the summary from NASA without even bothering to get the full paper before drawing exceedingly obvious yet wrong conclusions.
There is nothing wrong with dismissing something you assume is crap and don't want to waste your time with... as a practical matter there is only so much time we all have to make assumptions to operate. The problem arises when we forget or pretend we didn't make them.
When you go that extra step of actively debunking you should no longer be able to hide behind your own ignorance and laziness. All those "skeptics" who think they know something simply because they elect to operate under the safety of default position need a good checking from time to time.
Whatever ultimately happens at least NASA has the guts to go there and actually run experiments which is more than you'll ever get from the armchair skeptics.
I was there when, back in January of 2011, the Cannae drive was tested at Niowave, Inc in Lansing, Michigan (http://accelconf.web.cern.ch/accelconf/pac2013/talks/weyb1_talk.pdf). I cannot / should not speak for everyone involved but lets just say the test results did not entice Niowave, Inc to invest in his project when the money ran out. Let's also imagine that the cost to continue testing it was relatively negligible. However, if you do a search for nothing comes up.
Sorry I'm posting ac. If you think about it... it makes sense as to why. Ama would be dishonest, so, some questions welcome.
Oh Well! Back to the ole VAZIMIR engine created by former astronaut Chang Diaz. Tests on the VAZ are scheduled on Space Station Freedom for 2014 :)
You have a theory. You test it. You get results. thats good science regardless of the odds of getting favorable results
Never trying an experiment because of ideological purity or arrogance is the ultimate "bad science". Sadly this isn't obvious despite being true. Actually trying the experiment even when everyone says it can't be so is always "good science".