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.

Comments

A little behind the times

[mbone]

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 Now, however, the full paper (still not peer reviewed) is out, and it is much better.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.

Re:A little behind the times

[mbone]

In my opinion, you can't just say "this is obviously wrong."

Yes you can: it's obviously wrong. Read the paper from the inventors on how the engine is supposed to work. It's a series of novice-level mistakes about physical principles and mechanisms. The entire idea is completely fucking batshit from the very beginning. The very fact that somebody actually got funding to build one of these absurd snake-oil devices indicates very little except that something is very, very wrong with the funding process. NASA is infamous for this kind of loony bullshit, and they really need to stop. It makes them look like morons.

I agree that the theory (or, at least, that theory) is obviously wrong. Cool, but from experimentalist standpoint, irrelevant. This paper, and the chinese paper, do not appear to the written by charlatans, they claim positive results, and so this will have to confirmed or denied by experiment. I have seen some very bad experimental NASA studies of new physics (*cough*warp drive*cough*), but this one doesn't appear to be so. If you see an obvious flaw in the full paper, please post it and I will publicize it.

I would advise in general that you don't hyperventilate so much. 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 that the standard model will still prevail when this is over.

Re:Is it really "impossible"?

[ultranova]

When a falling object hits the ground and stops moving, if I am not mistaken the momentum is converted to waste heat.

You are mistaken. Energy is converted to waste heat (which is a form of energy, so total energy is unchanged). Momentum is unchanged - some of it is simply transferred to Earth.

Conservation of momentum is just as fundamental a principle as conservation of energy. That doesn't mean that a drive that requires no fuel is impossible - because you can convert energy to matter - it just means that it has to dump the counterforce somewhere to keep momentum accounts balanced.