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New Test Supports NASA's Controversial EM Drive
An anonymous reader writes: Last year, NASA's advanced propulsion research wing made headlines by announcing the successful test of a physics-defying electromagnetic drive, or EM drive. Now, this futuristic engine, which could in theory propel objects to near-relativistic speeds, has been shown to work inside a space-like vacuum. NASA Eagleworks made the announcement quite unassumingly via NASASpaceFlight.com. The EM drive is controversial in that it appears to violate conventional physics and the law of conservation of momentum; the engine, invented by British scientist Roger Sawyer, converts electric power to thrust without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves within a closed container. So, with no expulsion of propellant, there’s nothing to balance the change in the spacecraft’s momentum during acceleration.
In Dr. White’s model, the propellant ions of the MagnetoHydroDynamics drive are replaced as the fuel source by the virtual particles of the Quantum Vacuum, eliminating the need to carry propellant.
Let's see: we can violate conservation of momentum by invoking some sort of vaguely defined quantum woo. Riiiight. Where do I send my check?
When you make a discovery violating conservation of momentum, you immediately publish your findings in an internet forum thread.
When it spends 99% of its launch mass lifting itself to orbit, you have a bad system. Nice to see people trying to think outside the box.
I want a non-Newtonian drive as much as any other nerd out there, but it's still more probable that (assuming it works) it uses conventional physics, just in ways they haven't figured out yet.
That said, I think this result is the point where NASA, DOD, Lockheed Martin, Boeing et al should turn on the money spigot for research. There's obviously something going on, even if it's just conventional physics in unexpected ways. And on the odd chance it *is* new physics, the results could change the world.
Had to read carefully to find this gem innocently hidden in the article:
"The ultimate goal is to find out whether it is possible for a spacecraft traveling at conventional speeds to achieve effective superluminal speed by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it. The experimental results so far had been inconclusive."
If nobody knows how it works, how did the guy invent it?
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Don't write "physics-defying", this is not a tabloid for uneducated morons, or is it? Nothing is physics-defying, motherfucker.
and I don't even know what all that means
Not saying this is how this thing works, but you don't need propellant. It already uses waves. You can set it so at one of the half period the waves amplify each other, and some physical piece goes into a resonance, yet on the other half period the waves cancel each other. What you get in the end is one way directed vibration. Subject something to that long enough and it will accelerate. It is the same as if you are locked in a cage and bump yourself against the wall - the cage eventually moves. yet nothing is expelled outside of the cage.
There is no law of physics that says physical propellant is necessary. Any light bulb and mirror can create momentum, with no propellant expended. SF writers have known for a long time that, in principle, electromagnetic effects like powerful lasers can create thrust. I need more details to make sense of this article.
it appears to violate conventional physics and the law of conservation of momentum;
No, it does not, otherwise it would not work.
the engine, invented by British scientist Roger Sawyer, converts electric power to thrust without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves within a closed container. So, with no expulsion of propellant, thereâ(TM)s nothing to balance the change in the spacecraftâ(TM)s momentum during acceleration. ... hence the name: EM drive.
The expulsion (should that not be expulsion or something?) are micro waves
I really wonder how retarded the /. community and in general the science community got meanwhile.
There is no violation of any physical law as we know it in EM drives. If you believe otherwise, point one out.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
They say one of the limiting factors (aside from violating the laws of physics) is the political will to launch a large nuclear power plant into space. The solution is obvious: use Cold Fusion to power the EM drive. There is great efficiency here because they can get two Nobel prizes with only one gadget.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
A lovely summary from the Physics StackExchange which sums up my thoughts:
"The initial tests were at atmospheric pressure. To test the fan hypothesis, an easy way is to vary the pressure, another easy way is to put dust in the air to see the air-currents. The experimenters didn't do any of this (or at least didn't publish it if they did), instead, they ran the device inside a vacuum chamber but at ambient pressure after putting it through a vacuum cycle to simulate space. This is not a vacuum test, but it can mislead one on a first read.
In response to criticism of this faux-vacuum test, they did a second test in a real vacuum. This time, they used a torsion pendulum to find a teeny-tiny thrust of no relation to the first purported thrust. The second run in vacuum has completely different effects, possibly due to interactions between charge building up on the device and metallic components of the torsion pendulum, possibly due to deliberate misreporting by these folks, who didn't bother to explain what was going on in the first experiments they hyped up. Since they didn't bother to do a any systematic analysis of the effect on the first run, to vary air-pressure, look at air flows with dust, whatever, or if they did this they didn't bother to admit their initial error, this is not particularly honest experimental work, and there's not much point in talking about it any more. These folks are simply wasting people's time."
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23725/is-the-emdrive-or-relativity-drive-possible
In conclusion, they did a really really bad experiment and got a bad result. Wow!
was based on the physics of this theory. So real world results will prove very interesting when time travel is thrown into the equation.
The other thing you get when you generate RF is eddy currents in nearby materials, generating magnetic fields from nearby materials. Nothing to see here, move along...
Try NASA or the guy that invented it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Impulse Power Mr Cuthulu!
this gem ... hidden in the article:
"... whether it is possible for a spacecraft traveling at conventional speeds to achieve effective superluminal speed by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it. ..."
They've been playing at that for a while. It would allegedly work by creating a condition of cosmic expansion behind the craft and its converse in front of it, so the spacecraft is in a bubble where it's running slower than lightspeed (i.e. stopped) but the cosmic expansion and contraction regions behind and ahead of it each total to the opposite sides retreating or advancing faster than light (which is allowable).
I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to fall out of this - or anything. Effective superluminal translates to "Sending messaages into the past." and "Violating causality." if you pick your reference frames correctly. So I expect flies to appear in this ointment at some point: Like something broken about what happens at the sides, needing big-bang energy levels (and not being able to transfer them between the front and back so they're free), or not being able to set up the condition in front because the agency making it happen must involve actual superluminal signal propagation.
Nevertheless, an "electric motor" that works by pushing against virtual particle-antiparticle pairs (or the total mass of the matter in the universe, or of an inverse-square weighting-by-distance of it so it's mostly the local stuff, or dark matter, or the neutrino background, or whatever), instead of ejected exhaust, is just DANDY! Let's see if they can make it work for real at human-palpable, nontrivial, efficiencies and power levels.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This would be really awesome and exciting if it really worked, but, well, it's apparently challenging models of physics which have withstood a tremendously diverse battery of scientific tests. Smart money is on the measurements being a mistake with the experimental apparatus.
What are we calling "propellant"? It requires power to generate the radiation. How is this diff than say an ion engine? It needs SOME energy source, just not necessarily traditional sources such as flammable chemicals.
And as the radiation bounces around inside the Gumby-head-shaped chamber, it does lose some energy on each bounce such that the radiation generator has keep doing its job.
What's unknown is if we get "bonus" energy beyond what say an ion engine can do with the same amount of electricity.
The speculation is kind of like cold-fusion for space: direct matter-to-energy conversion without the messy side-effects such as high temperatures and dangerous radiation found in traditional nuclear reactors.
Table-ized A.I.
I wonder if radiation pressure from the solar panels supply the power would alternatively augment or inhibit the effectiveness of this drive.
Before we call this real, we need to put one on some object in orbit, leave it in continuous operation, and use it to raise the orbit by a measurable amount large enough that there would not be argument regarding where it came from. The Space Station would be just fine. It has power for experiments that is probably sufficient and it has a continuing problem of needing to raise its orbit.
And believe me, if this raises the orbit of the Space Station they aren't going to want to disconnect it after the experiment. We spend a tremendous amount of money to get additional Delta-V to that thing, and it comes down if we don't.
Bruce Perens.
It was made by a guy in his garage who "published" the test results and the concept behind it online seeking either to get the credit or attain financial support to continue working on it. From there everyone more or less called him a whacko until it was tested by the Chinese who published in one of their journals - Chinese journals have a tendency to publish fake reports so people still considered it fringe science at best. A bunch of other independent researchers (people in their garages) then tested it and reported success on various websites. Then NASA decided to test it. It was never, not even remotely, created by NASA - they will at best draw attention to it so the original creator can get the credit and reap the rewards but in any case it is a horrible misstatement to attribute the idea to NASA in any way.
If you learn of an alleged unusual phenomenon, and you have an immediate rigid response, please stay away from science. Go into religion or politics. The only appropriate response is "Hmmm interesting, let's look into this". Human knowledge is always provisional. Careless, absolute, knowledge claims are the currency of religion.
Seriously in the links provided there was absolutely nothing that made it possible to evaluate the claims.
The expulsion (should that not be expulsion or something?) are micro waves ...
hence the name: EM drive.
What you are describing is a photon drive where photons are the propellant. But the fine article explains:
After consistent reports of thrust measurements from EM Drive experiments in the US, UK, and China -- at thrust levels several thousand times in excess of a photon rocket, and now under hard vacuum conditions -- the question of where the thrust is coming from deserves serious inquiry.
The reason I don't believe it is real is the same reason I don't believe cold fusion is real. They put in metric ton-loads of energy and measure a very small effect. They say they will need to increase the efficiency by many orders of magnitude to create a practical device. I say they probably made a mistake somewhere and the tiny effect they measured is either noise or due to something else they haven't yet accounted for.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
While there's still obviously (a lot more) testing to be done, it's hilarious how far people who identify as scientifically minded have gone to dismiss this out of hand.
At no point does scientific principle advocate dismissing repeatably testable results merely because it can't be explained by current understanding.
The unexplained is the epitome of everything that makes science exciting and relevant. It is precisely why science is so important.
from "The hobo guide to travelling the galaxy"
After a certain amount of many many many yrs. and hopefully not your energy source running out you will have gained mass by speed without jogging and not by eating:
but relativistically which is why it is sooo hard to reach even near relativistic speeds[1].
So with this "flash light" with a certain amount of power and energy (and direction) you can travel the universe.
Back to topic:
So the described idea is basically that of a "photon gun" or flashlight or microwave gun
Micro waves are "also" part of the electromagnetic spectra therefore we can ask them "wave" or "particle" and they will answer "trans" and decide politcally correct in a s(p)lit to interfere into a figure of light and shadow.
But therefore the laws of physics still apply:
Photons have a mass equivalent to their energy the energy of a photon can be descbribed by it's frequency, the higher the frequency the higher the energy the higher the mass and if there is mass there is an impulse.
final advise to travel the universe with a flash light, a wodden back plate and some mylar sheets:
And for goods sake if you're in space use a monochromatic high power photon gun (L.A.S.E.R.) or a (M.A.S.E.R.) or a Magnetron for propulsion. Not an old flash light!
And use some solar sails where solar sailing is ultimatly cheaper.
rubber bullet point
And if you want to be initially driven by your friend standing on the moon shooting with objects at you, demand (s)he takes elastic objects like a rubber ball and make sure to have your solid deflection plate perpendicular to the intended flight vector but between you and the "ball" otherwise your journey start will be painful or deadly (but it would work, however not that good)
And if you think after all these experiments that you have violated the laws of physics .. No you don't have.
physical bullet points to rubber ball propulsion
The rubber ball will transmit force when hitting you and when bouncing off instead of an inelastic object (Elastic collision)[2].
- "solar sails"
- photonic impulse
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Not believing a word of this till they let some practical types have at it. Scientists are really easy to trick - just ask Penn and Teller.
Shaping quantum vacuum states was covered in my graduate quantum mechanics class many years ago - by an experimental spectroscopist who was doing it in his lab. This isn't something your average rocket scientist will know about, but mucking around with the vacuum state is well established in physics.
This reminds me of an article that was posted in Omni magazine back in the 1980s about a company that noticed that an electrically charged metal structure lost weight when it was electrified. The weight loss was not significant but was measurable.(The Omni article called it "antigravity" but it was actually more like electrostatically caused air movement.) The company marketed the technology as an air purifier, seeing as it ionized the air that was passing though the structure and caused an increase of weight in some of the particulate matter in the air.. causing it to either stick to the metal structure or to drop out of the air.
On Youtube there are countless hobbyists who make serpinski style triangular frames of cardboard and aluminum foil and light wires and charge them with an external power supply and note they are "lifters" the amount of thrust is tiny though, not nearly big enough to lift the power source, to say nothing about using it to power a craft to leave the atmosphere or achieve escape velocity. I don't remember where I read it, but I do think it was in Scientific American that the "Lifters" lift was attributed to electrostatic movement of air through the structure and would do nothing in the vacuum of space. (Best buy does have some nice indigo colored fan "rings" that work this way and that are silent because they have no moving parts.I also think that this is the same technology that was supposedly used in the Red October's "Magneto hydrodynamic", "Silent running" drive, and I have heard that something like that was actually used in submarines.) This may be different, though a peer review is needed and some alternative methods of testing are needed to differentiate what is happening here apart from the various notions about what could be happening. This is part of the peer review process to determine what the properties of such a propulsion method are so we can know if it is viable for space travel. My guess is that this is not something that would allow you to build a flying car or anything like warp drive, more like impulse power in theory, but would produce an amount of force close to the weight of a business card on a spacecraft, in Earth gravity, that is.
I am forced to wonder as an electrical engineer, if they are using strain gauges to measure the amount of thrust.. as I understand it, Strain gauges use metal traces that are of a known capacitance the way they are placed on a material and any slight amount of distortion of the surface it is mounted on causes a predictable change in this capacitance, which is how most electronic bathroom scales measure your weight. I wonder if the electrical field of this type of device would mess with the capacitance in their detector.. provided they are using that method of measuring thrust.. it might be a measurement error due to the method they are using to gauge the amount of thrust.
It is funny though, the part of my brain as a kid that loved Doctor Who is forced to wonder, if in a pinch The Doctor could fashion an "impulse thruster" out of the Klystron of an old microwave. I do know this, Those devices are dangerous, point it in the wrong direction, you can cook body parts. Don't try this at home! In a class in my Bachelor's degree we literally "Nuked" grapes in mid air with a Klystron under controlled conditions and, it burned the grape so intensely hot that it created a pinkish glow.. which was Plasma! Don't point this space drive at your junk, was the takeaway I would add. Not to say that all the people that are paranoid about electrical fields from cellular phones and high transmission lines cause cancer are right.. that has been thoroughly debunked. (and I am not interested in hearing from people who believe that I am wrong about that.. The amount of energy put off by a cellular phone transmitting at full power is not even 1/10th of what is needed to even pop a kernel of popcorn.. or even get it perceptibly warm for that matter. It is funny though that they say oh "Cellular phones on planes can cause all kinds of electrical inte
Since more than a century it is known that in electrodynamic action reaction principle has no meaning.
Discussion in www.asps.it/azione.htm
Probably our prototypes on ballistic pendulum work as EM drive
http://www.asps.it/prova116.mpg
http://www.asps.it/prova121.mpg
http://www.calmagorod.org/inerzia-della-pnn/
I'm not a physicist, but could the anomalous force simply be a reaction between electric currents generating the microwaves, and the Earth's electric field? As I recall, wires carrying current generate a force within a magnetic field, and we all live within a magnetic field.
Oops, I meant PMM. I have Lexdysia. My ships travel backward.
Table-ized A.I.
No that's not enough! I need to know what Penn and Teller say about this or no dice.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So who thinks its just an accident they setup SpaceX, the GigaFactory and have the worlds largest battery factory on tap?
Conspiracy theorist might be proposing about now; this has happened before.. and it will happen again.
Oops, I meant PMM. I have Lexdysia. My ships travel backward.
I think you mean Lexxdysia. (link)
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I have an ugly feeling this ultimately involves unpleasantries with cats.
Table-ized A.I.
I think it would be nice to create a test rig, send it up to the ISS in the next supply haul, and let them try it from orbit.
To me, that would an excellent way to test if the propulsion is real, or is just another 'cold fusion.'
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
this gem ... hidden in the article:
"... whether it is possible for a spacecraft traveling at conventional speeds to achieve effective superluminal speed by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it. ..."
They've been playing at that for a while. It would allegedly work by creating a condition of cosmic expansion behind the craft and its converse in front of it, so the spacecraft is in a bubble where it's running slower than lightspeed (i.e. stopped) but the cosmic expansion and contraction regions behind and ahead of it each total to the opposite sides retreating or advancing faster than light (which is allowable).
I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to fall out of this - or anything. Effective superluminal translates to "Sending messaages into the past." and "Violating causality." if you pick your reference frames correctly. So I expect flies to appear in this ointment at some point: Like something broken about what happens at the sides, needing big-bang energy levels (and not being able to transfer them between the front and back so they're free), or not being able to set up the condition in front because the agency making it happen must involve actual superluminal signal propagation.
Nevertheless, an "electric motor" that works by pushing against virtual particle-antiparticle pairs (or the total mass of the matter in the universe, or of an inverse-square weighting-by-distance of it so it's mostly the local stuff, or dark matter, or the neutrino background, or whatever), instead of ejected exhaust, is just DANDY! Let's see if they can make it work for real at human-palpable, nontrivial, efficiencies and power levels.
I always wondered if that is how we could be able to go from subliminal.. to super luminal speeds in a fraction of a second while on the ship.. I can be sitting there in a chair and not spill my coffee. I think that might be Star Trek Physics.
Several labs have detected the effect, now NASA has shown it happens in a vacuum.
Theorists must be scrambling to make sense of it.
Here's a paper that uses something called Modified inertia by a Hubble-scale Casimir effect. (MiHsC)
http://www.ptep-online.com/ind...
Just put a small version of this thing on some spacecraft/satellite (ISS, Progress, Dragon, etc) and run it for a while, if it works the satellite should show some noticeable change in its orbit if it doesn't its garbage. Unfortunately the supposed thrust of this thing is so miniscule that it is the only way we're going to get definitive proof that there is an actual thrust from this thing.
I get that this is Slashdot and almost nobody reads TFAs, but seriously, the last time this thing was discussed there were plenty of comments pointing out that it had already been replicated in three different labs around the world... *last year*! True, I don't know if the "... in a vacuum" result has been replicated yet (though at least one lab has offered to do so) but considering that the results in the vacuum were consistent with the atmospheric results (and also considering the care that was taken to ensure that the result wasn't being caused by the atmosphere anyhow, like comparing the operational device with a dummy load that still generates the same heat, or turning the device around) I don't think that the error in our expectations is due to vacuum-vs.-atmosphere, so the other experiments are useful examples of the same effect.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
There are a number of reactionless drive proposals, not all of them unreasonable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Given that space is far from empty (vacuum fluctuations, dark matter, dark energy), the traditional view of reactionless drives is also not entirely supported, since in non-empty media, you can "swim" in one form or another. So, you may not only be able to "swim" against spacetime (see the link), but also against these other backgrounds.
Of course, anything that ejects photos can also be used for propulsion (photon rocket), and you can eject photons even from an antenna, so in principle, even a wire with an oscillator can generate some thrust which looks reactionless.
please see the classic case of Lee De Forest and the Audion Tube.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audion De Forest was famous for saying [of the Audion] that he "didn't know why it worked, it just did".
See also Ken Burns adaptation of Tom Lewis's 1992 "Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio"
See additionally the story of Edwin Howard Armstrong, a brilliant engineer who most certainly DID "know why it worked" but was driven to suicide by the philosophical ancestors of our modern patent trolls. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Armstrong
A brainy science man called Lord Kelvin told a young* upstart called Darwin that there was no way the earth could possibly be millions of years old. Reasoning that no known chemical processes could sustain the sun for more than a few thousand years, and thus his "natural selection" was a load of unscientific nonsense.
*for certain values of young
I can attest that it is not thermal. It works in a vacuum. It works in a Faraday cage and it works when you reverse the device (the thrust reverses).
From wikipedia
If they had anything real, they would not demonstrate a drive, they would create a minimalistic, clear and reliable lab-setup that demonstrates the effect beyond all doubt and that could be recreated by other teams. Instead, they insist on a relatively complex set-up that cannot easily be recreated but can easily be manipulated. This is the hallmark of scientific fraud: Make grand claims and demonstrate them in a way that looks good but could be entirely due to measurement errors, hidden energy sources and effects, etc. and that cannot be validated by other teams.
Furthermore, if it violates established physics, it needs more than simple scientific proof (i.e. an experiment that other groups can repeat), it needs extraordinary proof. It does not even have simple scientific proof.
For some nice other fraud in this venue, look up the Rossi E-cat or centuries of perpetual motion machines.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So event horizon, basically.
The earth is flat, man cannot fly, earth is the center of the universe, internal combustion engines will never exceed 1 hp per cubic inch,the sound barrier cannot be broken,The 4 minute mile is impossible for a human.
All very modern and solid scientific facts based on "known scientific laws"
Never assume that physics "laws" can't be broken, they are, after all, only the "law" insomuch as our current knowledge allows.
To me, she has 2 vaginas and 1 tit
Table-ized A.I.
Its not easy to measure 50 micro-newtons of force when you change a power level by 50 watts.
Currents cause magnetic forces. Things get hot and outgas producing thrust. RF power cables get hot and distort causing a force.
Think about it. The device weighs something like 5Kilos. That is 50 newtons gravitational force. So a 1 micro-radian tilt will cause a 50 micro-newton force. Walking across the lab floor could cause that amount of deflection. If the chamber is 1 meter across, a 0.1 degree temperature change on one side of the chamber (from a nearby power supply) could cause that much tilt.
There of course could be force just from photons - but that is a simple and well understood photon drive - known for at least 50 years now - basically a light-sail.
This is a very difficult experiment to do correctly, and they have not published in enough detail.
Meanwhile: conservation of momentum has been tested under conditions ranging from ultra-cold gas atoms to 100GeV particle collisions, to orbiting neutron stars. The RF fields they use are very modest. At SLAC we run hundreds of megawatts, not 50 watts. We have superconducting cavities where we easily see the deflection caused by the momentum in the microwave fields - operating at many thousands of times higher power than this experiment - we see nothing unexpected.
So: Difficult experiment. No unusual physical conditions. Apparent violation of one of the most carefully tested conservation laws in all of science.
It it literally more likely that the sun will not rise tomorrow (since that is also based on conservation of momentum) than that this experiment was correct.
Not logged in I saw a post by someone about Flubber. Can't easily find it (or log in) using an iPhone so here I am.
im a pretty firm believer that gravity has a lot to do with everything. Action over a distance is poop. There's something underneath the vacuum -- we are all just jiggles of whatever that is, and space is just a little less jiggly.
If someone is pulling energy from nowhere, it's likely scooting in nearly undetectable across the aether.
What if a space ship had a proton factory that made protons out of thin air via pair production. Manufactured protons and anti-protons were then accelerated to 99.999...lotsof9s..% C for thrust to maneuver the space ship.
It takes a lot of energy to make protons and a lot of energy to accelerate them. If you used that same amount of energy (assuming 100% efficiency) to power a laser for thrust wouldn't it produce the same amount of thrust as the proton accelerator?
mm awesome stuff. Curious. mmm knowledge honeypot.
Does it break a few known laws? If yes then redo the laws :p time to move forward!
Or just being unable to find a way to have negative energy density in a volume of space required for expansion of the universe (unless there are other ways to expand spacetime, but as far as I know, the quantum physicists haven't yet found a way to replace the Einstein Tensor)... Maybe we'll get our hands on some condensed dark energy ;)
Have none of you read Three Body Problem??? No spoilers in my post, but the answer is out there... (Yes, I'm going for funny)
Seriously, though that book is awesome and should win the Nebula this year. If you like hard SF you need to read it right now.
The EM drive is controversial because it was never shown to work in proper test condition (at rest - starting up by powering it) and excuse are being made up for why it needs to be in motion to be tested , a fact make it magnitude more harder to test if there is ANY effect whatsoever.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Try the xkcd forums; I believe they have one for physics or chemistry....
First let me grant that this is obviously worthy of more study due to all of the experimental confirmations. However... you can't go through life saying "hmm, interesting" to every weird claim everyone makes. For example, if you listen to a moon hoaxer or 9/11 truther you will very quickly hear something that is either:
1. Complete nonsense, delusions and/or lies
2. A gross distortion of the actual facts
3. A somewhat interesting and entirely truthful claim about reality, but one that has a much simpler explanation than the one the nutjob is putting forth.
4. (not yet seen this one) an unexplained phenomenon
5. (not yet seen anything remotely resembling this one) Proof that explains away the evidence that appears to support conventional wisdom and supports the nutjob's theory instead.
You literally can spend your entire life examining the claims made by these nutjobs--just these two specific types of nutjobs (nevermind the homeopaths and miracle workers and such.) You occasionally run into item #3, which is cool but doesn't significantly add to our understanding of the world. It's not reasonable to chastise us that we must keep digging, we must stay perfectly neutral and agnostic because of the possibility of #4 or #5. The world is utterly teeming with nutjobs and cynical snake oil salesmen. The burden of proof must remain on those with the extraordinary claims, even if us skeptics do not have a ready alternative explanation.
One main issue here is the nutty behavior and statements of the original inventors). This is somewhat alleviated by experimental replication, but the other outstanding issue is, as others (and XKCD) have noted is the very low efficiency. If you pump a large amount of power into something and there is a small unexplained movement, the natural assumption is there is some unnoticed flaw in the system that is somehow allowing the apparatus to turn a small portion of that energy into physical motion through conventional, well-understood physical laws. It's a mystery, sure. But it's not one that automatically demands huge amounts of our attention and money.
Here is an idea, build a really big one, point w.e. end it's supposed to push on to the ground and see if you get lift.
We can drink some Champagne on Mars and figure out how the hell we got there later.