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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.
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!
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
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.
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.
Read TFA and this one. If you believe that "science" has become altruistic and above corruption, you simply have not been paying attention to science. Sure, there is some good science, but there are always crap programs as well. Many of which are performed at the direction of our Government. You know, the same people that won't fund NASA but can waste money trying to figure out if you are a sociopath by your tweets (and that's not the worst waste of science funding, just an easy target).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.
You sound like a potential sociopath. Just as a precaution, can you share with us your Twitter information?
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.
No, it is perfectly possible (and well understood) that you can produce thrust using pure energy with no mass. Just put a lightbulb and a reflector on your ship; as long as you can power the lightbulb you will produce thrust. The problem with this is that it is ridiculously inefficient, and since your power generation is not massless, this is roughly equivalent to using pathetically bad fuel.
Also, don't confuse energy and momentum. They are separate things, and both are conserved independently of each other.
The trick to making a good spaceship engine is converting energy efficiently into ship momentum. As far as we know this means creating high-momentum exhaust; conservation of momentum then means your ship gains momentum in the opposite direction. However, the problem is that to create high-momentum exhaust you either need high mass (and this means your ship carries, and has to accelerate, tones of fuel), or you create high-velocity exhaust (which due to the kinetic energy formula means you use a lot more energy).
If you could find a way to skip the whole exhaust thing and transfer momentum directly into something not on your ship, you would have a space engine far superior to any we know of. The idea with this research was to transfer it into the quantum vacuum something-or-other. This would be analogous to how an airplane transfers momentum to the atmosphere or a boat to the water or a car to the land. In theory this could work and even be more efficient than using light as your exhaust.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I can't be a sociopath, I don't have a Twitter account.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
"In earlier times, they had no statistics, and so they had to fall back on lies". -- Stephen Leacock
"Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance." -- Morris Kline
"Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable." - Mark Twain
"Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything." - Gregg Easterbrook
And of course..
"42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot." -- Steven Wright
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Yes, N-rays were a false pursuit. (See book "Diamond Dealers and Feather Merchants")
Cold fusion also. The palladium was soaking up hydrogen, which the original experimenters (Pons & Fleischmann?) misinterpreted as demonstrating room-temperature cold fusion.
The public needs understand that un-refereed reports are not fact. Further, even refereed journal articles are not fact. It is only after others reproduce experiments and find confirming results that we get closer to "fact." Even then, it's just "confirmed theory."
Why the popular press loves to breathlessly report on recent journal articles as "fact" only confuses the matter.
You are mistaken. Energy is converted to waste heat (which is a form of energy, so total energy is unchanged). Momentum is unchanged - some of it is simply transferred to Earth.
Conservation of momentum is just as fundamental a principle as conservation of energy. That doesn't mean that a drive that requires no fuel is impossible - because you can convert energy to matter - it just means that it has to dump the counterforce somewhere to keep momentum accounts balanced.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I get your point. But the objective of science is to test a theory. And when your experiments get results, then you test it again to ensure you get the same results. Rinse/Repeat. And then you publish, in a hope that the scientific community accepts your results. This is what happened in this case. NASA saw a hint of credibility in the results of another teams work. They performed the experiment themselves, and got similar , though not as impressive, results. They published. Now it's up to others to either prove or disprove those results. Either deem the experiment valid or invalid by running the experiments yourself, or, with all due respect, shut the fuck up.
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.
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.
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"?
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?
Sadly, you're actually wrong even though you're right. Shawyer never said that the "null" device wouldn't produce thrust. That was the claim of a guy named Guido Fetta, who invented something he calls the Cannae Drive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive#Cannae_drive). Shawyer just said that the Cannae Drive is an inefficient EmDrive, with or without the slots which distinguished the "null" device from the "real" one.
Oh, and when NASA tested the actual EmDrive (which was months ago), it actually produced more than twice the thrust on just over half the power. Every result that TFA "reports" for the EmDrive is actually from the Cannae Drive test, not the EmDrive test at all! The author of that piece of dross needs to be hit with a clue-by-four...
Note that I'm not saying the EmDrive is "real". I'm definitely not saying Shawyer has a valid explanation for how it works either, even if it does. However, the experiments so far disproved nothing except Fetta's theory of the Cannae Drive; arguably, it actually provided *support* for Shawyer.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
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.
A little background (good question): To the best of our knowledge, there's no such thing as gravity "on" something; all gravity is *between* things. Think of it like magnetism (in fact, if you change the constants and swap charge and mass, the formulae for computing magnetic attraction and gravitational attraction are the same). When the Earth's gravity imparts momentum to an object (an apple you drop, say), the apple's gravity imparts the same momentum on the Earth. Of course, since momentum is mass times velocity, and the Earth masses ludicrously more than an apple, the delta-V of the Earth is basically imperceptible. Momentum is still conserved, though.
Now, as far as a space drive goes... we can't use gravity as a drive right now, because it always just pulls towards nearby massive objects (and because we can't control it in any way). We can accelerate using gravity - you've probably heard how some space probes would "slingshot" around massive planets to gain a lot of speed on a different vector - but in order to do that we first need an acceleration that we create ourselves, so that we don't just fall straight down the gravity well.
So yes, gravity imparts momentum (to both spacecraft and the planets they slingshot around) without *itself* involving a high-momentum exhaust... but only because the spacecraft already had a lot of momentum in the correct direction for the maneuver. Getting *that* momentum has, so far, always required an exhaust.
There are other options for generating thrust in space - light drives (the "exhaust" is just massless photons) and solar sails (where the high-momentum particles come from something else, like a star), for example - but neither are currently practical. Of course, even if the EmDrive happens to really work (which the experiments support but have definitely not yet proven) it isn't yet practical either. NASA has tested a *lot* of experimental drive types. However, at this time, all of the ones that have actually flown are reaction drives (throw something out the back of the ship, get an equal and opposite reaction forward). That may change at some point in the future, though.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Well played. Laugh while you can, Monkey Boy!
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
All he really is pointing out is the ignorance of man. We believed it was flat for so long simply because we could not see a curve, but yet it still existed and its still a ball. You cannot have a flat ball. If you look at it from a distance you dont wonder if its a flat land or a round ball. It isnt nearly right, its completely wrong and only human ignorance would say it was 'nearly right'
No it was very much 100% wrong, nearly zero is not zero. Thats like saying 2+2 is nearly 5, its technically true, but utterly wrong, math is absolute.
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.
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
It isnt nearly right, its completely wrong and only human ignorance would say it was 'nearly right'
No it was very much 100% wrong, nearly zero is not zero.
I suppose you're also absolutely opposed to teaching Newtonian mechanics to intro physics students, too -- right? I mean, after all, we now know it "was very much 100% wrong." Sure, relativistic effects are basically irrelevant at normal speeds, but "nearly zero is not zero." So, we need to revamp our physics curriculum and introduce full-blown Einsteinian space-time to our students immediately on their first day... who cares if they won't have the math to do much with it, or if they'll never be able to do a lab experiment in the physics classroom with sufficient precision to display relativistic effects? We know Newton was "100% wrong," so let's stop teaching our students that ignorant nonsense!
Of course, I'm being sarcastic here. Why do we still teach Newton when we know it's "wrong"? Because it's a good enough approximation for most purposes. Most of the measurements we take in everyday life will never require us to take relativistic effects into account, because most of our everyday measurement devices don't have sufficient precision to even show those effects at normal speeds. In effect, Newton's theories make sufficiently good predictions for everyday purposes, so we still teach them.
That's the point of science -- to make good predictions. We can now teach Newton to do physics at normal speeds in everyday life, but we have caveats that say, "If you're going too fast or if you're in an intense gravitational field or... well, you need a better model." Science is not about debates concerning the ultimate nature of reality; it's a tool.
And we do the exact same thing with the flat-earth model. We use maps all the time, which are generally projected onto a 2-D surface. All 2-D projections of the earth have flaws -- they either screw up distance or distort shapes or area in some way or whatever. And maybe that's an argument to use more globes and computer simulations of globes for students (since many map projections are very misleading)... but we still have little reason to worry about this when we're looking at a map of a small area unless we're firing long-distance projectiles or doing complicated surveying or something.
Science is a tool, and we use a model that has sufficient accuracy for the task. At one time, we didn't have sufficient tools or applications to worry about the curvature of the earth, so for scientific purposes it was irrelevant. The models weren't "100% wrong" -- they were merely sufficient for the necessary accuracy. Same thing with Newton.
Science is not concerned with questions about the ultimate nature of reality -- that's something for philosophy or religion or something. It's not really concerned with whether claims about that ultimate reality are "right" or "wrong" or whatever -- what matters is that we can have a sufficiently predictive mathematical model. For some purposes, the flat earth model was reasonably good... which -- as Azimov pointed out in the GP's link -- is why smart people made use of it for so long.
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?"
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"
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