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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.
Have they accounted for the presence of skeptics during the experiments? That is likely the cause of any anomalies.
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!
More like blinded TO science.
Any 2nd year physics student should be able to laugh this garbage right off a lab bench without even running an experiment. Its truly pathetic.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
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".
Any good science student should be aware that our understanding of physics changes over time. Clearly this device is unlikely because it requires a change to the "laws" of physics.
The article explains why any good scientist should be able to laugh this off based on the reported experimental results.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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".
Wait, is this guy talking about space drives or global warming skeptics?
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.
FTFY
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.
Just because you can't prove global warming is happening doesn't mean that it isn't. The science behind it is settled since over 90% of the scientists voted that it is happening. You can't disagree with it without being anti-science because of that.
http://xkcd.com/1404/
Unfortunately, it could only get you to one star in your lifetime, and we have a pretty decent view of it from here.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
Sorry. Science doesn't work by votes.
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.
Except none of your points applies to climate change.
The effect is robust: there was a whole independent project to determine if the thermodynamically meaningless "global average temperature" is increasing. It is: http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
The threshold of measurement is around 0.5 C for a single station, and we have an effect that is about 1 C over the past 100 years. Not as big a margin as one would like, but difficult to ignore. And growing.
No one has produced any results that show the instrumental temperature record in the past century is not real. There are debates about causes, but the reality of the phenomenon is not in doubt.
Everyone who has looked at the question agrees that there is about a 1.6 W/m**2 addition to the Earth's heat budget from anthropogenic CO2, so clearly when taking the "positive cases" there is still good agreement.
There are large and legitimate areas of disagreement with regard to climate change (far more than the moron, anti-science, "the science is settled crowd" would have you believe) but the basic phenomenon, unlike the EMDrive, is not just consistent with but actually required by the laws of physics.
Finally: the summary is terrible, even by /. standards. The article does not point out any errors in the experiments. Rather it points out that reporters have been lying about the experiments, pure and simple. That is not the fault of the scientists, who honestly reported their null results.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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.
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.
> It does though.
So the earth really was flat for awhile?
The difference is that the space drive hypothesis is still falsifiable. NASA needs to adjust the hypothesis description so that both the presence or absence of any quantum thrust is proof of it.
So the earth really was flat for awhile?
Would you please list four or five scientists who claimed it was, more recently than about 500 BC when it was measured to 10% precision? Or did you buy that Columbus tale they taught you in fifth grade?
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.
Finally: the summary is terrible, even by /. standards.
samzenpus. i even bothered to find a way to hide him for my logged-in account, but unfortunately i can't just make him disappear for my anonymous visits, which is how i ended up here
Rich
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.
Actually, it was Magnus Pyke who said it. He was a presenter on one of my favourite 70s TV shows, Don't Ask Me. The PBS show Newton's Apple was pretty much an Americanized version of it.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
If they would have used an Oscillation Overthruster they would have got better results.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
So the earth really was flat for awhile?
Correct! And until the 1600's, the universe revolved around the Earth. And while politicians can't repeal the law of gravity, scientists can! Isn't that cool?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The difference is that the space drive hypothesis is still falsifiable.
More than falsifiable. The NASA experiment demonstrated that the hypothesis was false: the control experiment got the same results.
We're left with either an experimental error which, if corrected, would move the result into the error band or we're left with a real effect for which we don't yet have a satisfactory explanation.
N-rays started this way but so did relativity: the Michelson Morley experiments and their predecessors found a real effect of light which had a lot of quack theories explaining it until Einstein came along and figured it out.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
One of Isaac Asimov's short stories told how a guy made a photon pause. It ended the universe as we know it.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
The verification is crucial though. What happens when two scientists claim they can verify a hypothesis, and two thousand scientists say they cannot?
Either two thousand scientists have screwed up badly, or just two have. Which is more likely? Lacking the skills, time & equipment to verify it yourself, who are you going to believe?
A single person can come up with a major paradigm shift that overturns our old models - but not when their results can't be reliably verified, and certainly not when their claims require simply ignoring decades of observations to the contrary.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The threshold of measurement is around 0.5 C for a single station, and we have an effect that is about 1 C over the past 100 years. Not as big a margin as one would like, but difficult to ignore. And growing.
But... that's even smaller than the ratio versus the threshold of measurement the fellow in this article claims implied experimenter bias and bad science.
The "test" performed at NASA was sensitive to a minimum thrust threshold of about 10-to-15 microNewtons, and the "positive result" claimed detection of somewhere between 30-to-50 microNewtons of thrust.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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...
What's that watermelon doing there?
Wait, you're saying a photon pause somehow culminated in the PATRIOT act?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
Not to mention that there is a tonne more datasources than just weather stations.
But more to the point climate science has tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of scientists , most post-doctoral, most physics trained, so not just "opiniated geology undergrad" or "crusading economist" trained, and all are in pretty broad agreement that theres a lot of thermal and kinetic energy coming from anthropological sources and that energy has to go *somewhere*.
Quite different to a handful of optimistic experimentalists getting their press release misquoted by the worlds press.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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.
And this is what pisses me off with the climate "skeptics". If you don't know how the system will react when you're increasing the concentration of CO2 then why not err on the side of mitigating the CO2 concentrations instead of "business as usual".
It's been done. I don't know exactly how the physics works, but light has been halted in the lab. It involves a Bose-Einstein condensate.
Well played. Laugh while you can, Monkey Boy!
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Economic reasons. The big CO2 emitter is the use of fossil fuels, which are really cheap and really convenient - that's why we use them in such quantity. Cheap energy helps all industry. Restrict CO2 and you raise the cost of energy and the cost of transport, which will have a negative economic impact.
Millions of displaced people fleeing the rapidly expanding desert that used to be their home is going to have an economic impact too.
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.
Erring on the side of caution has great financial costs at the business level and great emotional costs at the citizen level.
Financially, whomever goes first on that carousel is going to lose a lot of money, unless every country on the planet agrees to jump in at the same time. Emotionally, just by looking at the aggression that pops up when someone suggests the very minute lifestyle change of having one vegetarian-food day per week... Well, you get the point.
Multiply that by three (USA, Russia, and China all have to agree) and it is suddenly more likely that Hillary Clinton will be invited to the Arkansas High School Reunion of 1921 by a Triceratops riding John Wilkes Boothe.
Science works regardless of what you think, scientist try to figure out how it works by working together and following a very practiced method that, underneath it all, is developed to bypass human mistakes and its own ego. Therefore, when you get 90% of them to agree, there is a very good probability that it is in fact happening. What do you want 100%? you mean like the bible and god.
You know what, fuck it, i don't care...in the future, years from now, when everyone is dying off, at least your the one that looks like the idiot.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
One of Isaac Asimov's short stories told how a guy made a photon pause. It ended the universe as we know it.
Every change we do ends they universe as we know it. Luckily the new universe isn't all that different from the old one.
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
Millions of displaced people fleeing the rapidly expanding desert that used to be their home is going to have an economic impact too.
Nonsense. The war in Syria is all about the power of social media and the "arab spring", nothing to do with the abandoned farms. Nothing to do with mass internal migration away from the rural areas (10% of the population in Syria), nothing to do with skyrocketing food prices, nothing to do with food riots in cities such as Cairo. It's just coincidence these events immediately preceded the uprising(s).
Surely the worst drought ever recorded in the "fertile crescent" (AKA - the birthplace of agriculture) could not cause that much social unrest, a grumbling tummy and dusty throat maybe, but riots, revolts, and a civil war? Surely it's more plausible that millions of ordinary arabs were "awakened" to the fact they were being oppressed by ruthless dictators because they signed up for facebook and discovered our idyllic democratic world. The fact that none of the factions in Syria are even pretending to be fighting for democracy is irrelevant, that they have seen the "light on the hill" is all that matters.
And let's not forget the reason that lone protester set himself on fire "triggering" the first uprising - he was driven to do it because they had cut his internet access. The rest of the nation saw the injustice on facebook and took to the streets.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
No, not even. I read the original 'paper' if it can be called that. The authors couldn't even properly construct a Poynting vector. They DID admit that in order for their device to work the Law of Conservation of Momentum would have to stand aside. This is enough. While I understand the "keep an open mind" attitude there's nothing closed-minded about noting that 400 years worth of classical and modern physics, with its millions of consistent observations, has to crumble entirely in order for this one badly misconstructed hypothesis to prove true. Its not even worth testing, the thing can be dismissed out of hand without batting an eyelash. No scientist who can't do that is frankly qualified to work for NASA and they should be looking into who they need to fire for basic incompetency. Yes, its that bad.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
But... that's even smaller than the ratio versus the threshold of measurement the fellow in this article claims implied experimenter bias and bad science.
No one claims global warming exists based on measurements from a single weather station. Averages are wonderful things.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
a Triceratops riding John Wilkes Boothe.
I can't decide whether this is funnier with or without a hyphen between "Triceratops" and "riding."
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
"Finally, a 50 ohm RF resistive load was used in place of the test article to verify no significant systemic effects that would cause apparent or real torsion pendulum displacements. The RF load was energised twice at an amplifier output power of approximately 28 watts and no significant pendulum arm displacements were observed."
null
Yes, the reported MILLINEWTON thrust was surely the missing link to warp drive.
The discovery, if real, would have not gotten us warp speed. The parent posted said "relativistic" speed, which means close to c, but not higher than c. If this discovery were true, then that implication absolutely holds as we would then have a mechanism where we could gain speed without need for a propellant.
Disclaimer: My opinions are my own and do not, in any way, reflect the opinions of my employer or university.
I forget the story's title, but it was in one of his anthologies I read long ago.
In the story, it was done in a vacuum. The buildup was about ancient societies that used 3 to represent pi, when obviously pi is more than 3. But what if pi was 3 when that value was being used, and only became its current value when some smart mathematician decided it had to be something else? Basically following up on the topic of reality changing based on scientific understanding mention in the posts before mine. The story took that concept as a fact.
So, the speed of a photon in a vacuum is constant. Our modern world is based on the physics that supports that. So, if you manage to make a single photon pause, its speed is not constant, and it means our world is not correct and must change to conform to the new reality.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
And laughing this off without even running an experiment is precisely the wrong thing to do.
Science is about replication. Replication requires doing the experiment. Or, at a minimum, not laughing at other people who do the experiment.
Now: the actual results of the experiment are pretty minor. The results they show, first, didn't replicate the results that they were attempting to verify, second, falsify the hypothesis that they were testing, and, third, are pretty low in magnitude-- probably spurious, in my (professional*) opinion.
The article explains why any good scientist should be able to laugh this off based on the reported experimental results.
Exactly.
This is the way science is done: you test stuff. You present your results. Other scientists then critique the results, point out flaws and sources of noise and bias.
It's rather brutal, actually. But if your result holds up to the criticisms (and most don't), maybe you've pushed the boundaries of science.
These results don't-- yet. They are not yet reporting consistent results (in that their results differ significantly from those of other researchers). They have not yet eliminated possible spurious effects.
That's science.
---
*in fact, I am a rocket scientist
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Yes. Then inflation theory happened.
Seriously, there's almost nothing in science that is steadfast and "settled". Science is all about trying to find new ways to explain the universe. Every 15-25 years you basically have to throw away your old science books and understand how older models have been modified and updated.
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
It doesn't have to "crumble entirely" any more than Newtons laws "crumbled entirely" when they were applied to the orbit of Mercury.
Sure, conservation of energy is maintained, but conservation of momentum is *not*, at least not according to the currently accepted standards (though the relativistic analysis or virtual plasma or something else might possibly be able to maintain it)
Though given the miniscule thrust measured you could be right, it could be, like the Pioneer anomaly, the result of radiation pressure. In which case this would be a very bad investment - there's much more efficient ways to harness radiation pressure as a thrust source than accidental leakage. Still not efficient enough to actually be useful without a low-mass fusion reactor on board though.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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...
The NASA experiment demonstrated that one man's idea of what was required for thrust generation was wrong. The null device differed from the real device only in not having some ridges machined into the case.
That doesn't mean the device really is producing thrust useful as a space drive, but it also doesn't mean it isn't. The experimenters reported "anomalous thrust," which is exactly what they saw. More experiments, in a vacuum to start, are required.
Certainly it's worth *testing*, especially if you've had multiple semi-credible researchers claiming positive results. After all *every* law of physics we have today stands on the bones of laws that came before them. Newton's law of universal gravitation? False. Not to mention Newtons laws of absolute space and time, which had thousands of years of evidence supporting them until Einstein came along and said well, you know, if you go *really* fast maybe these don't work so well. And there's absolutely no reason to believe that today's physics will be any more permanent than the many incarnations that came before.
As the article points out - physics is an experimental science, so long as you have repeatable experimental data it doesn't matter if it breaks every law in physics, the experiment is the final authority, and has just exposed something not completely explained by those laws, potentially opening whole new fields of physics. Consider how black body radiation, spectral lines, etc were once considered to be among the last handful of unexplained phenomena in science, and yet their eventual explanation, quantum mechanics, fundamentally transformed our understandding of the universe in ways we're still trying to wrap our collective head around.
Of course in this case we're talking about a tiny thrust hugging the lower bounds of detectability, and detected in both the test and null device, so we're not actually seeing much evidence to question the foundations of the laws it "breaks". It it was producing a few Newtons though, something well in excess of explanations based on radiation pressure of instrumentation errors, well then it would likely be the laws themselves that are flawed, or our understanding of those laws, and we would proceed from there. After all explanations such as using a virtual plasma as reaction mass would be basically consistent with all current laws, it would simply be a matter of exploiting effects that are neither easily invoked nor particularly useful except in space.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
What contrary observations? Some guy creates a device he claims harnesses an effect that would not be expected normally be visible in nature, and would be far too energy-inefficient to expect any planet-bound organism to have evolved a use for. Aside from the lack of repeatable evidence the situation is not unlike the discovery of semiconductors - a new and unexpected phenomena that is nonetheless not in violation of observations to date.
As the saying goes - absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You kind of have to sneak new physics in through the chinks in the armor of the old physics, but that happens all the time, occasionally in earth-shattering ways that offend the sensibilities of the vast majority of the scientific establishment, such as with the discovery of quantum mechanics.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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?"
Just so we're clear - the well-understood increase in solar energy trapped by human CO2 emissions completely dwarfs all other human energy sources combined, by a factor of ~1,000,000 if I recall correctly. As in the CO2 produced by burning one watt-hour worth of oil is going to capture an average of one *Megawatt*-hour worth of additional solar energy during its stay in the atmosphere. Hence the reason nobody knowledgeable is complaining about anything other than fossil fuels with respect to global warming. If we eliminated CO2 emissions from our energy sources we could increase our energy consumption a thousandfold and still not have to worry about global warming.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
One of Isaac Asimov's stories ended the world as we know it? I thought the credit for that went to Bono.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Empty space contains a very low concentration of hydrogen which could be used via fusion, not to mention there are solar panels that can, you know, generate electricity.
Disclaimer: My opinions are my own and do not, in any way, reflect the opinions of my employer or university.
Personally I've looked at the data and it seems pretty obvious that things are getting warmer but that doesn't mean fixing it is free. Significant restriction of CO2 emissions will have a large economic cost. As a Libertarian I think we should be forcing the re-internalization of all externalized costs anyways just from principle so something along the lines of a carbon tax should be a no brainer but there are plenty of others who don't agree. (Including the corporate shill faction of my own party)
Emotionally, just by looking at the aggression that pops up when someone suggests the very minute lifestyle change of having one vegetarian-food day per week... Well, you get the point.
How about we just let the market set the price of meat and people can make their own decisions on whether it's worth it or not? The important part is to ensure that externalized costs are re-internalized so that prices reflect the true cost of production.
Any good science student should be aware that our understanding of physics changes over time. Clearly this device is unlikely because it requires a change to the "laws" of physics.
The article explains why any good scientist should be able to laugh this off based on the reported experimental results.
The problem is that the article is saying this is bad science, when it's really bad science reporting
NASA did the right thing. They tested something, they got weird results, they published it. The article points out the results were no different than the null control, and that's true, so clearly the supposed design of the drive is bullshit. What the article doesn't point out is that the interesting part is that neither of them should have shown any thrust. So something is going on that the experimenters don't understand, and they've published the results to find out why. Is it a measurement / equipment / methodology error? Probably, actually. But if you can't find the error yourself, you publish the results you get, and let your peers help you. Papers will be published criticizing their methodology if there are problems with it, or proposing reasons for why the measurements look like they do. It's a long shot, but maybe there is some effect actually happening which we don't understand, and papers will be published with possible theories.
That's not bad science. It's the definition of good science. It's bad science to imply that you should ever not publish the results you get. And it's bad science reporting to look at what NASA published and incorrectly translate it to the public as, "NASA proves impossible drive"
The original paper is wildly ambiguous about whether they actually tested the device in a vacuum. It seems apparent from the surrounding commentary and the paper that they clearly didn't (they describe the apparatus, they never say what the actual conditions they used it in are for the experimental section).
Which means they've proved precisely nothing. Microwaves and heat in a shaped chamber? It's just a wildly inefficient thruster.
Did the resistor have a reaction chamber around it? Maybe a conical structure which would only leak hot air through certain outlets, looking suspiciously like a rocket reaction chamber?
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.
No, that's just not true. Conservation of Momentum is a symmetry of the laws of nature. The entire mathematical edifice is built on the fact that using these symmetries we can have been able to build explanations for basically everything beyond the simplest view of classical mechanics (which itself is fraught with issues which is why we did this all in the first place). So you can't destroy the fundamental conservation laws without ripping down the whole edifice. You have to provide an equally compelling explanation for practically all of the experiments in physics done in the 20th Century. That's a huge and essentially impossible task, you're just not going to find a mathematical structure, post-hoc that fits the bill.
Beyond that, there is the more practical consideration that this driver is simply too easy. If it works then nature finds it very easy to build reactionless drives and they should come up just by chance as natural phenomena that we should have observed already. It doesn't make sense, this thing is not reasonable.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Again though, you cannot break Conservation of Momentum alone, and it is NOT something that can be 'tweaked'. It either works as we think it does, or all of the existing laws of physics mathematically crumble to nothing. At that point you must now POST-HOC explain the entirety of 20th Century experimental physics and do it elegantly and parsimoniously. That means you have to construct an entirely new framework, not built on the symmetry concepts that give rise to the global conservation laws you have now discarded. This is not an evolution like when Einstein created a new set of laws that incorporated the existing ones as good approximations. This is blowing it all up and starting over from scratch, except you aren't just going back to the 18th Century and starting over with all new experiments, you have to explain all the experiments that were already done and why ALL OF THEM EXCEPT THIS ONE were consistent with a now-discarded mathematical approach. It is so fantastically preposterous that no experiments need even be done. When someone says "violates conservation of momentum" you are fully justified, even obliged if you are literate in the physics, to laugh them out of the room without a hearing.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
That's a shockingly unscientific attitude from someone who presumes to lecture NASA researchers on scientific competency.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
Why do you asume you cannot break Conservation of Momentum? True, we've never seen n instance of such a violation (unless this turns out to legitimately be so) but it's still a *human* law - our "best guess" as to how the universe works, not some holy fundamental Truth. Truth is not something science is concerned with, only successive approximation. And the nature of successive approximation is that occasionally you'll stumble upon something that totally uproots your understanding of the universe.
It's incredibly arrogant to hold the belief that *today's* physical laws are "True". We already know everything that came before was eventually proven false, and can only assume that all the current laws will eventually be falsified as well.
And no - this isn't necessarily "blowing it all up" - all it would mean is that under certain specific conditions the law of conservation of momentum may not operate entirely a we believe. And we already have things like the casmir effect that have firmly established that virtual particles can and do interact with the macroscopic world in ways that "break" aspects of conventional physics.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
No, actually it isn't. I'm a skeptic, I like to have evidence of things. I'm entirely supportive of research in areas which are not well understood, or even in areas of established science where there are valuable things left to be observed. This is just not one of those cases. This is a case where someone is saying something just as fundamental as "I'm going to drop this stone and it is going to fall upwards" it just isn't happening. We have already done MILLIONS of experiments which exclude the possibility of this one working. If it 150 years ago and someone had proposed this? I'd say "wow, interesting idea", but its not.
There's a right and proper place for doubt and curiosity and then there's just foolishness. What a good understanding of science will get you is the ability to tell the two apart.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
You are correct. Physical Laws do not exist. Human beings observe reality and construct laws based on their observations. Conservation of Momentum is such a law. HOWEVER, the way we decide which constructs are most useful and practical is by using the most elegant and parsimonious ones. LONG EXPERIENCE has shown us that when we construct elegant and parsimonious mathematical descriptions of nature that they have a power and utility far beyond what would be expected by just chance. We find that these laws in fact apply in much more wide-ranging and powerful ways than we ever imagined. Conservation of Momentum is a VERY core piece of this elegant description. It is what is called a 'global conservation law' and it arises out of what is called a mathematical symmetry. That is a way in which the mathematics of classical mechanics (and then again in various other places in SR/GR and Relativistic Quantum Field Theory) have a self-similarity at a deep level. This symmetry has allowed us to greatly extend the utility of our math, and in EVERY SINGLE CASE this vastly increased utility has led to the successful description of a vast array of phenomena with incredible precision. This is to the point where right now today EVERY SINGLE THING YOU HAVE EVER EXPERIENCED DIRECTLY IN THE WORLD is completely explained to the limits of physical observation by existing theory. This is why we have to build 10 mile across atom-smashers to even do basic research anymore.
Now, when you stack THAT edifice up against a theoretically flawed thruster concept that if it was true would mean all sorts of things that we have observed and incorporated in our theory would be just pure random chance VS "it's bullshit" the its bullshit just has to win.
So yes, all of our theories and ideas can be wrong, in principle, but IN REALITY what we know today, and the mathematical structure that underpins it, is essentially unassailable. There are plenty of things we don't know. We can't say what happens in big bangs, black holes, or even for certain neutron stars and massively powerful fields of all sorts. In some very arcane technical sense some people can say "we don't understand anything at all" and they aren't 'wrong', but what we DO have is a vastly detailed and precise description of ordinary observable nature that has proven 100% consistent. In that sense some theories ARE proven, they simply aren't breakable anymore. They may prove to be approximations of reality that don't work at an event horizon or whatever, but they absolutely do describe what happens when you put a standing wave in an asymmetrical resonant cavity, and it ain't magical momentum-busting thrust.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
And you're probably right. On the other hand, history is littered with the dust of skeptics whose names have been forgotten, while the names of many of those they attacked are remembered. Which is as it should be: while skeptics are often right, knee-jerk skepticism is also a particularly risk-free approach to things, isn't it? These researchers will have a chance to prove their results further, and others will attempt to replicate. We'll see what happens.
Kythe
If I understand it correctly, they have to carefully fine-tune the frequency to achieve resonance. From the abstract:
So I think you are greatly overstating how "easy" it would be to randomly occur in nature, it's not just "microwaves bouncing off walls".
IF the effect is real, I suspect we will learn it doesn't really violate conservation of momentum, it only appears to. (ie, pushing off the quantum vacuum increases the net expansion of the universe or something).
More testing should ABSOLUTELY be conducted. Even if it's not a real effect, it is worth testing until the flaw with the testing can be identified (because there is scientific value in understanding failure as well, especially one that three different teams would have to be missing).
Until a flaw in their methodology (and an explanation for the anomalous thrust being the result of such) can be definitely proven, this is Good Science. The article is flat wrong.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Yeah, I'm not worried in this case. The truth is that history doesn't even remember all the quacks that were just so far wrong they shouldn't even have gotten an ear, they are legion. The cases where people were outsiders but were RIGHT? They're a very select and exceedingly rare breed, its happened maybe half a dozen times in the whole history of modern science. Its not THAT uncommon in engineering, where people say "oh its impossible to build a flujiwigger" and some guy does exactly that. But he's not working against the known laws of physics, just against someone's overly unimaginative or wrong-headed impression of how they should work. My father held patents for a number of proportional flow valve designs that people said were 'impossible' to build. They were HARD and required inventing some machining techniques that never existed before, but they were quite possible. Reactionless drives just aren't in that category of the complexities of application of known principles aren't clear. Its not hard to see why a lot of people that don't know basic physics of EM can't tell the difference, but NASA scientists should know better.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Well, we'll just have to agree to disagree, but of course everyone who called it narrow minded to say it was a waste of time will quickly forget they said that and never understand how silly it was. Meanwhile reality will pull a wet blanket over the whole sordid affair, hopefully before another dime is wasted on the whole thing. So it always goes, and such is the life of the true skeptic, you're rarely appreciated for being right. In fact nobody has ever come to me and said "yup you were right about that" even though I have yet to ever be wrong about one of these things.
More testing is a waste of good money after bad. There's no effect. If it was this easy to grab hold of the 'vacuum energy' it would be routine. And needing a tuned resonance is no big deal, that happens naturally all the time. Just blow on a guitar string and here it sound.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Mercury's orbit isn't a fundamental principle. The Law of Conservation of Momentum is, by Noether's Theorem, is a consequence of the invariance of physical laws from place to place. (Emmy Noether put teeth into conservation laws.) This means that, if it doesn't hold, physical laws do vary over space.
This doesn't mean the drive doesn't work, but that if it does we throw out something we've been using for a long time as a fundamental symmetry. This isn't impossible, and we've had comparable conceptual changes before, but it's going to take one heck of a lot of evidence to convince me (or an actual physicist).
In the meantime, I'm figuring it's a measurement error, or it wasn't in a hard enough vacuum, or it's interaction with the planet's magnetic field, or something like that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Semiconductors followed known physical laws. This thing would violate the Law of Conservation of Momentum, and hence require that physical laws changed from place to place.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
We have a way of producing thrust without propellant: fire off photons in one direction. A flashlight gives off a teeny bit of thrust when turned on. It's not particularly efficient, since the momentum of a photon is its energy divided by the speed of light, so you need a whole lot of energy to get measurably momentum, but it has the notable virtue of not contradicting a pretty fundamental law of physics.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
This (appears to) fly in the face of accepted theory, which means it is probably the result of an error somewhere. Everybody realizes this!
However, taking that "probably" and stating it as "definitely" does not make you wise, or a "true skeptic". It makes you dogmatic. And that is not the scientific method.
That is why you are "wrong", even if the effect turns out to be a mistake. This perhaps explains the lack of kudos you've received in the past.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
There's no 'probably' about it though in this specific case. You have to learn enough about physics in particular to understand what is and isn't possible. Now, some of these miraculous energy machines and whatnot, some of them actually had to be checked out. Some of them maybe even still could use a bit more checking out. There are a LOT of possible outcomes lurking out there at the margins of different complex physical regimes. Its probably true that we will find some things, but reactionless drives aren't one of them. Again, you have to be able to pick the possible from the impossible.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Not 100 years ago they didn't - we first had to create new laws of physics to explain how electrons could do the impossible and pass through impassable obstructions.
All I'm saying is that just because something looks impossible according to current understanding of theory, doesn't mean you can't augment the theories in ways that make the impossible possible without breaking anything. Contrary evidence breeds new insights, and new perspective can sometimes reveal an insurmountable obstacle to be naught but an inconvenience.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I agree, we have a vastly detailed, extremely useful model of the fundamental workings of universe refined over the course of centuries. Notice though that we said nothing about the *accuracy* of that model - it could be that what we take as elegantly simple fundamental physics is an emergent phenomena of something far more subtle and complex - well-ordered ripples on the bed of a turbulent stream. We just don't know. *Can't* know, except when that ever-so-rarely we discover some phenomena that's just not possible according to existing theory. And then we get to revise the theories - and occasionally that means replacing a simple, elegant theoretical framework with an arbitrary monstrosity like quantum mechanics, and just hoping eventually we'll reach a new understanding that makes things simple again. That's why we build billion-dollar particle accelorators - not to smash atoms, but in the hopes of smashing theories, of discovering new impossible phenomena to lead us toward discovering physics not yet dreamed of.
Who are we to say that such extremes of the subatomic world are the *only* place where unknown mysteries await? Any number of sufficiently subtle and obscure phenomena could be hiding in plain sight, just waiting for somebody to stumble upon the right set of conditions to evoke it on a noticeable scale. And sometimes it takes some crackpot chasing a ridiculous theory far off the beaten path to stumble across something really unexpected. And sure maybe his theory is pure bunk, but if his phenomena is repeatable then he's discovered the door to some manner of new physics, even if only by falling through it ass-backward.
And we know perfectly well that their are at the very least *huge* gaps in our understanding - I mean if our current theories are correct then everything we can see in the universe accounts for only 5% of the total contents, we are being continuously interpenetrated by some sort of strange mass-like "stuff" that only interacts gravitationally and makes up 27% of the universe, and the other 68% of the universe is some non-masslike "stuff" even stranger which causes the very fabric of space-time to steadily inflate. And we haven't the foggiest idea about what either "stuff" really is, we only know that if our theories are correct this "stuff" must exist or the universe we see couldn't.
In this case we have now had at least three "EmDrive-inspired" engines tested by NASA - an EmDrive a while back, plus these two - the Cannae and null-Cannae (which I hear is still a valid EmDrive design), and all three have been measured to generate unexplained thrust, while the resistive experimental control loads did not. Sure, most such hints of new physics will prove to be false leads, but every now and then one of them opens the door to something new and wonderful.
"Cold Fusion" is another such tantalizing phenomena - nobody has come up with a reliably repeatable reaction, much less with a theory that would explain how such an impossible reaction could occur (much-er less how it could happen without cooking everyone in the room). And yet despite the mainstream infatuation and eventual dismay and derision, 100s of respectable researchers around the world have duplicated the experiments and measured excess heat and elemental transmutation from experiments so unreliable that only charlatans and crackpots are claiming to have managed to do anything remotely useful with them. Could they all be deluding themselves? Perhaps - many hundreds more were unable to duplicate the results after all, but the only way we'll ever discover new physics that don't involve bestowing the mass-energy of a baseball on a single electron is if we actually explore other avenues as well. As such, derision of those who dedicate some measure of their time and energy to such exploration is unbecoming of a scientist.
Even those scientifically club-handed crackpots chasing insane theories in utterly improbable directions are doing a valuable service to the cause. That's not to say we should be invitin
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It doesn't matter. IF something disagrees with it, it's wrong. That's really all you need to know. Now it's more likely that what's going on here is an error or some kind of mistake in the set-up of the apparatus, but the idea "we've built our edifice on top of this principle so it can't be wrong" is anti-science and horrendously arrogant.
A simple thought experiment will tell you that if this thing works as stated, it's a source of free energy. I was amused by a post from a power satellite fan saying that the thing could be used to get parts from LEO to GEO to make power satellites economical.
It might make stuff cheaper to move in space, but the near free energy these things can generate eliminates the market for energy from space.
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
Yeah, I know, I get your drift. We just have to agree to disagree. I think if you got a bit more into the guts of both classical and modern physics you'd start to agree with me. QM for instance is NOT a 'monstrosity', its a beautifully elegant mathematical construct. And it fits TOO WELL, nothing is going to displace it. What we need is research on how to sort through the various proposals to extend QM and GR, not ignorant snipe hunts for non-existent phenomena. Learn some of the math, learn more about how these theories work, you'll come to understand how powerful and generalized they really are, and how simple they are in essence.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Yes, but I think a lot of you fail to comprehend the degree of that 'more likely'. Its something like 10^100th power to one odds against all of physics being wrong. I don't have to check that out, I can dismiss it. Reality agrees with me, not with the reactionless thruster people. They need to go back to school and learn to use Maxwell's equations right.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I am not a funding agency. Whether I apply 10^100th power to one odds is neither here nor there.
Yup, and we'd have to create lots of new laws of physics if this thing does violate the Law of Conservation of Momentum. It would probably be more of a rework than quantum mechanics and relativity (and it would screw up relativity something fierce).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You have a theory. You test it. You get results. thats good science regardless of the odds of getting favorable results
It's worth noting that Roger Shawyer (the original inventor) maintains that this effect does not violate Conservation of Momentum.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Well, I have nothing to say about it if you want to do some research its your money, do what you want. Its a free country. For myself I'd vote not to have NASA funds spent on such things when there are good solid scientifically defensible lines of research just begging to have some funds all over the place. Plasma sailing, solar sails, better ion drives, magnetohydrodynamic (VASIMIR, etc) drivers, and 100 other things. Heck, work on a warp drive if you must do something pie-in-the-sky, at least its not outright impossible on the face of it. There's just a lot of stuff to work on and little money, so I don't want to spend PUBLIC money on ridiculously unlikely things.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
It's also worth noting that his claim reeks to high heaven - if the momentum is somehow extracted from the microwave photons then it should be balanced by the momentum imparted to those photons when first generated. The drive+power source is operating as a closed system, and thus according to classical physics the net momentum cannot change, and the microwave photons remain completely contained until they are eventually absorbed by the resonance chamber.
It's possible that this thing actually works, but if it does it will almost certainly prove not to be governed by his theory of extracting net momentum from bouncing photons. Maybe it's pushing against the quantum vacuum, maybe it's pushing against the fabric of space-time itself, but if it does in fact accelerate it's almost certainly pushing against *something* that is not confined within the resonance chamber. But hey, that's fine. Science is full of people who have discovered fascinating new phenomena only to have their theories about the cause smashed when others in the community offer a better explanation.
I'll admit I'm not well-versed in relativistic effects, but a quick skim of his principle of operation page appears to throw up a huge red flag at the beginning of the third paragraph:
If the same EM wave is travelling at a fraction of the speed of light...
Which sounds like nonsense to me - EM waves (aka photons) travel at the speed of light in vacuum - no more, no less. Ever. You can alter their energy and thus momentum by choosing a different frame of reference, but their velocity is constant from any frame - that's the crazy impossibility that Einstein uncovered.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Oh, no argument that QM fits the data beautifully - the problem is that it's jam-packed with completely arbitrary constants. String theory and some of the other highly speculative explanations offer the tantalizing promise of "beautifying" it again, and perhaps one day someone will come up with a testable prediction. Until then we've just got an ugly kludge that happens to fit the data really, really well while telling us absolutely nothing about the underlying cause. As I recall it doesn't even offer any explanation for a number of well-established phenomena such as gravity. That's a situation that practically screams "ugly".
Meanwhile among the top theoreticians in the field there's increasing acceptance (or at least non-dismissal) for theories such as the universe being a holographic projection of the event horizon of a black hole, the mathematics of which are also completely consistent with all observed phenomena while suggesting that entirely new phenomena unbound by the limits of four-dimensional spacetime may also be possible - for example what would be the implications of a collision of some "metaverse" object with our event horizon? I would assume you'd get an *extremely* non-localized event with no apparent cause.
>not ignorant snipe hunts for non-existent phenomena
How do you know they don't exist until you've looked for them? You're engaging in circular reasoning, and assuming they don't exist simply because they have not yet been discovered. Certainly non-existence is a perfectly reasonable assumption for the non-discovery, but it is just that: an assumption. Given anything short of 100% accurate and comprehensive observations it is also reasonable to assume that at least some existing phenomena have never been observed. And not being gods I'm disinclined to credit humanity with 100% accurate observations, while any claim of comprehensiveness is clearly laughable.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I don't really disagree with you. I think QM isn't PARTICULARLY fraught with constants which it doesn't explain though. Classical Newtonian mechanics has plenty of them as well. There are constants galore in classical electrodynamics, etc. I share everyone's belief that there are some sort of 'more fundamental' physics which 'clean up' these things, but we cannot be sure. No absolute rule says that there are no arbitrary constants, and if we reduce the number to only 1 then in effect we still haven't explained ANYTHING because our theory will base EVERYTHING else on that one. So you have to ask what really is the value of a theory? Its only use is practical, as a predictor of things. In that sense what we have is quite good, though not perfect. The diameters of protons are still being argued about, as are a number of other fairly basic things. Our value for G is still not as good as we'd like, etc.
The thing about all these 'theories of everything' is they EXTEND what we already know. None of them proposes things like violations of Conservation of Momentum. If they do allow for us to observe that happening then they've also got some other way to extend these conservation laws that we should be able to test. Honestly, while I can't possibly know the potential ramifications of all the various permutations of TOEs that are out there, I don't believe any of the ones that are considered likely or 'on the right path' would allow for the type of violation that a reactionless drive would require. In any case I'd just want to see a much more convincing mathematical basis that touched on how one of these theories would allow for reactionless thrust before I thought it was at all worth looking into.
Its not circular reasoning to expect some phenomena to not exist. MANY, in fact the vast majority, of possible phenomena do not exist. The ones that DO exist have UNIVERSALLY proven to exhibit certain characteristics. Universally, that's IN ALL CASES. Its not 'circular reasoning' to say that because some hypothesized phenomenon doesn't exhibit those characteristics it doesn't exist. That's just using your plain old common sense and basic deductive reasoning. Science has to operate on a basis of deduction and inference because otherwise you can't tell what to believe or not believe and you would literally have to go around testing every ridiculous idea. What if I send NASA a paper that shows how pink unicorns can carry your spaceship to Atlantis without using any power at all? Do they have to build a unicorn harness to decide this is ridiculous? Of course not. This is in the same category, its ridiculous and there's no reason to expect it would work thus no reason to test it. Its really that simple. You can wave your hands all you want about TOEs and maybe we don't know everything but we don't have to know everything to use fekking common sense.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Okay, two things:
One: I would be *very* surprised if this thruster truly violated conservation of momentum, as you say that's a fairly foundational thing. I would be much less surprised however if it only *appeared* to violate conservation of momentum by pushing against quantum vacuum, dark matter, the fabric of space-time, or something else entirely whose nature and interaction with "normal" matter is poorly understood or completely unexpected. And I would fully expect such a (working) device to be derided by the establishment as impossible until it was thoroughly proven to actually generate anomalous thrust, at which point many, many smart people would start trying to figure out WTF was really going on.
Two: I think you're not giving enough credit to past researchers. Until somebody noticed the anomalous exposure of some film that had been left in the same drawer as a mineral sample, nobody had any reason to expect the existence of radioactive decay - it was in fact impossible according to the then-current theories. That discovery shattered atomic theory (atom literally means indivisible) and opened whole new fields of science. Imagine the derision they would have faced if instead of only requiring some film and a mineral sample, duplicating the key phenomena required tens of thousands of dollars of equipment and testing apparatus. Nobody would have wasted their resources trying to duplicate such an obviously impossible phenomena, and nuclear physics might never have been born.
>Its not circular reasoning to expect some phenomena to not exist.
Certainly not. It is however circular reasoning to extend that reasoning to conclude that NO unknown phenomena exist. And unknown phenomena will, by definition, appear to break the well-understood laws of physics, at least until the principles behind them are understood. And that does occasionally involve completely uprooting the existing laws, such as relativity did to Newtonian mechanics, which are now only kept around as an approximation that is accurate enough for most purposes - incidentally also a great example of simple, elegant physics being replaced by something far more complex and counter-intuitive. The universe is after all under absolutely no obligation to make sense to us, making sense of things is what *we* strive to do, the universe only offers an occasional hint of untapped mysteries if we poke it just right.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Correction:
Certainly not. It is however circular reasoning to extend that reasoning to conclude that NO unknown phenomena exist and thus refrain from looking for them, and dismiss them as impossible if/when found
When making the accusation it does kinda help to actually close the circle...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Okay, two things:
One: I would be *very* surprised if this thruster truly violated conservation of momentum, as you say that's a fairly foundational thing. I would be much less surprised however if it only *appeared* to violate conservation of momentum by pushing against quantum vacuum, dark matter, the fabric of space-time, or something else entirely whose nature and interaction with "normal" matter is poorly understood or completely unexpected. And I would fully expect such a (working) device to be derided by the establishment as impossible until it was thoroughly proven to actually generate anomalous thrust, at which point many, many smart people would start trying to figure out WTF was really going on.
Yeah, I'm exceedingly dubious. If any of these kinds of mechanisms was so easily accessed then its very VERY unlikely we haven't seen it before. Not only that but this sort of interaction would almost surely be only one of a CLASS of interactions of various sorts. Also I don't think you can cheat by pushing against 'vacuum energy' (who's existence and nature are highly dubious) or other non-material things. I'm not really facile enough with GR, and I'm not sure ANYONE is to be frank, to say exactly what might or might not be allowed absolutely in theory, but it seems like a cheat to me, and nature isn't very fond of cheats. I think momentum will be conserved in its classical sense and I don't think any other sort of conservation suffices.
Two: I think you're not giving enough credit to past researchers. Until somebody noticed the anomalous exposure of some film that had been left in the same drawer as a mineral sample, nobody had any reason to expect the existence of radioactive decay - it was in fact impossible according to the then-current theories. That discovery shattered atomic theory (atom literally means indivisible) and opened whole new fields of science. Imagine the derision they would have faced if instead of only requiring some film and a mineral sample, duplicating the key phenomena required tens of thousands of dollars of equipment and testing apparatus. Nobody would have wasted their resources trying to duplicate such an obviously impossible phenomena, and nuclear physics might never have been born.
But you have to understand how far less developed high energy physics was at that time. VERY many experiments had never been done, so entire fields of possible phenomena were unknown. They couldn't 'balance the books' in even the simplest way, so they really didn't understand what they were looking at. Today we DO balance the books. We can analyze atomic and subatomic interactions and tell exactly what energy is going in and out, and in what forms. Its not an analogous situation.
>Its not circular reasoning to expect some phenomena to not exist.
Certainly not. It is however circular reasoning to extend that reasoning to conclude that NO unknown phenomena exist. And unknown phenomena will, by definition, appear to break the well-understood laws of physics, at least until the principles behind them are understood. And that does occasionally involve completely uprooting the existing laws, such as relativity did to Newtonian mechanics, which are now only kept around as an approximation that is accurate enough for most purposes - incidentally also a great example of simple, elegant physics being replaced by something far more complex and counter-intuitive. The universe is after all under absolutely no obligation to make sense to us, making sense of things is what *we* strive to do, the universe only offers an occasional hint of untapped mysteries if we poke it just right.
Well, when I claim that no unknown phenomena exist, then your argument is relevant, but since I haven't its really not...
I disagree that unknown phenomena will appear to break anything. Does the Higg's appear to break anything? No, it doesn't. Neither does Dark Matter, etc etc etc. They aren't entirely un
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
The Casimir effect is generally considered to be strong supporting evidence of the existence of virtual particles and their ability to interact with normal matter, and it seems to me that if they can bounce off metal plates then they can potentially interact in other ways as well. And I've heard a few respected potential solutions to various singularity-related paradoxes that presume the ability to transfer momentum to "the universe". Seems hand-wavy to me as well, but if the top theoreticians consider it worthy of conversation I'm inclined to believe it wouldn't break anything too badly.
Yes, today we've explained almost everything we've observed - except for the fact that according to our theories the universe couldn't possibly exist in it's current state unless 95% of it is stuff we've never seen, and whose necessary properties are improbable to the point of ridiculousness. And of course Dark Matter and Dark Energy don't appear to break anything - they're openly accepted as theoretical kludges whose properties have been explicitly specified in order to make the universe we see possible under the accepted laws. Their acceptance is an open declaration that there are, at the very minimum, gaping holes in our understanding of physics, to the tune of the vast majority of the stuff in the universe. They are "Dark" not because they're not emitting light, but because they're total unknowns - much like Africa was "The Dark Continent".
As for the early radiation experiments - of *course* many of the experiments hadn't been done yet - before the discovery of radioactive decay and the accompanying implication that atomic nuclei were mutable there was no reason to believe there was even a field there to experiment on. Maybe someone would have eventually tried to slam two ion streams into each other at ridiculous speeds just to see what would happen, but what would be the point? An atom-smasher is an awfully expensive piece of equipment to build without the expectation of any particular results. What makes you so certain that there aren't still other totally unexpected phenomena lurking just a happy accident away, waiting to open whole new fields of experimentation? We're combining structured energies in ways that just don't happen in nature - if there's bizarre corner cases to be found you wouldn't necessarily expect them to reveal themselves in chaotic astronomical events, nor would something like this horribly low thrust-per-watt effect be expected to be harnessed by biological systems and reveal itself there - at least not on a planet where you have so much convenient matter to push against far more efficiently.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The Casimir Effect doesn't conflict with any of existing physics. Its a consequence of renormalization, a process that was developed in the 1960's by Feynman et al. Its quite interesting that the 'book keeping' has a real physical effect. It tells us that the theory really is not just an arbitrary description, but that there's some deeper correspondence between theory and reality. The point is The Casimir Effect doesn't 'point to something new', it is just telling us that yes indeed the vacuum exists. That in no way implies that it can be used to subvert basic laws of physics. Casimir doesn't imply anything about momentum at all.
There's nothing 'improbable to ridiculous' about dark energy and dark matter. They are perfectly reasonable and don't actually change our overall view of the basic story of the Universe at all. They don't undermine the big bang, they explain some observations about what happens later and some of the characteristics of the CMB, that's all. Now, there's clearly going to be new/extended theories required to explain dark matter. Dark Energy, it looks like its just a 'cosmological constant', which begs some questions about what exactly is the cosmos and how does it exist, but its not clear that we need to explain the value of this number to understand the physics of THIS universe. Nor is there any implication that this means there's some physics that would allow an ordinary asymmetrical oscillator to generate reactionless thrust. I don't believe that DM/DE mean there are 'gaping holes', just that there is physics that we haven't codified yet and it will be compatible with the existing physics just like GR is compatible with classical mechanics. Anything that was impossible in CM is also impossible in GR.
I'm sure there ARE unexpected phenomena, but they won't cause massive flaming violations of basic conservation laws with trivial ease. If they DO allow for such violations they will be at event horizons or the beginning of time, etc. They won't be significant effects that show up in a simple tuned driver that doesn't happen to be symmetrical. I just don't find that to be plausible at all. Unexpected phenomena and new theories WILL LEAVE CONSERVATION OF MOMENTUM INTACT. I'm sure of that to a very high degree of certainty. Just like an 18th Century cartographer was sure there was no land bridge from Africa to South America even those his map of the interior of Africa was a big blank with a few hazy rumors drawn on it. Its just that kind of a thing.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
- Richard Feynman
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Like I said, exceedingly unlikely, very very exceedingly unlikely. Spend the money on better bets.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
No, that is not that you've been saying in this thread. Not at all.
Your previous post literally starts "There's no 'probably' about it", goes on to talk about understanding "what is and isn't possible", and ends with "you have to be able to pick the possible from the impossible".
Now you say, "Like I said, exceedingly unlikely"? Give me a break.
And if you have a "better bet" than something replicated by 3 independent teams, I'm sure NASA would be all ears. I really don't understand your strenuous objection to more testing to prove/disprove the effect. As I've said multiple times, even if there is a flaw in the testing there is scientific value in understanding failure. But you keep repeating your same argument without actually addressing any of these points, so we will have to agree to disagree.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
when you are dealing with 'odds' on the order of 10^100th power against something there's no real point in calling it odds anymore. Nothing is 'certain' if you can't call that sort of thing certain. I'm simply trying to demonstrate that yes indeed I can argue the argument from your perspective as well. It really doesn't matter. I can say "we know for certain that Conservation of Momentum is never violated, period" or I can say "the vast number of observations which ONLY fit a mathematical model that included inviolable Conservation of Momentum makes the probability of its violation too low to worry about", its the same thing when the odds are as remote as I've already stated. So I don't find there to be any contradictions in my position, but I probably didn't make that clear.
Is there really scientific value in finding the flaw in the experiment? Lots of people have already suggested very mundane ways the experiment appears ON THE FACE OF IT to be flawed. Ways that would involve nothing new at all, just garden variety scientific crappy experiment design coupled with a fondness for ridiculous projects just because they offer some tantalizing revolution. Its POSSIBLE when observing anything to stumble upon some sort of useful knowledge. This is however just as likely if you were say working on Solar Sails, which are a technology that needs a LOT of basic work still but which we know operate according to established principles. I don't see anything to indicate to me that SS experiments wouldn't be a better use of NASA's limited funds. The WORST CASE is they add to our ability to build a solar sail, best case they might lead to some sort of interesting new science.
Again, I appreciate the scientific endeavor and the value of turning over many different stones, but its best to turn over stones in the most fertile areas. Since we can't do every possible experiment we can think of we should do GOOD experiments, not bad ones.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson