No, NASA Did Not Accidentally Invent Warp Drive

StartsWithABang writes: As Slashdot has previously reported, NASA Spaceflight has claimed to have vetted the EM Drive in a vacuum, and found there is still an anomalous thrust/acceleration on the order of 50 microNewtons for the device. While some are claiming this means things like warp drive and 70-day-trips-to-Mars are right on the horizon, it's important to view this from a scientist's point of view. Here's what it will take to turn this from a speculative claim into a robust one.

Comments

Bad title

[Iamthecheese]

NASA did not invent a warp drive. Roger Shawer might have. The title should read, "NASA has not been robustly proven to have built a warp drive" Three teams have reported the same effect from three different devices. And these aren't teams of hacks. Furthermore the test duplicates our best prediction of the cause of the thrust. It's premature to throw a Singularity party but it's definitely premature to declare the device to not be a warp drive.

Skepticism is a good thing. This isn't proper skepticism.

Re:Seriously ? What a non story

[Crashmarik]

That came from yesterdays story and actually searching for the numbers. This isn't this devices first test outing, as far as I can see he took the most discreditable data point to attack.

Apparently people cannot even read...

[gweihir]

All the proponents of this "device" are just an example of how incompetent and delusional humans can get. From the NASA publication abstract: "Thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust. Specifically, one test article contained internal physical modifications that were designed to produce thrust, while the other did not (with the latter being referred to as the "null" test article)."

Listen up kids, this means that they tested the "true em-drive" and a dummy and _both_ gave them thrust. The dummy is specifically designed so that it _cannot_ do this! This means the "thrust" comes from some other effect, not the "em-drive". That truly and utterly pathetic thing here is that NASA actually did sound science and people are missing the necessary reading comprehension skills to even understand the abstract.