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German Scientists Confirm NASA's Controversial EM Drive
MarkWhittington writes: Hacked Magazine reported that a group of German scientists believe that they have confirmed that the EM Drive, the propulsion device that uses microwaves rather than rocket fuel, provides thrust. The experimental results are being presented at the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics' Propulsion and Energy Forum in Orlando by Martin Tajmar, a professor and chair for Space Systems at the Dresden University of Technology. Tajmar has an interest in exotic propulsion methods, including one concept using "negative matter."
Until Mythbusters confirms it, I'll just say it's Plausible.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
This is the type of news I want to see more of. Between all of the pointless social narcissism platforms and SJW Bs this is enlightening news. I am excited to see what discoveries will be made. And if it turns out to be bunk, well who cares that's science!
Eh... The physics mechanisms proposed ARE very controversial! The classic physics mechanism simply shouldn't work and the quantum physics proposal are far off speculations that aren't likely to be true.
But the amount of experimental verification from separate sources indicates that either there is some factor they all forgot or that there are new physics at play. I hope for the last alternative :)
A propulsion device that provides thrust without using reaction mass would be an earth-shattering advance, assuming the amount of thrust is non-negligible. I hope you do get that.
Skeptical != cynical.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Lifting its own weight is irrelevant. Existing electric propulsion thrusters couldn't come remotely close to lifting their own weight, and yet are still in active use in space.
Modern physics is never incorrect. Although it can be misunderstood at times. In the same way that relativity does NOT disprove Newton it confirms it, but extends it. Who would have thought that a little denominator with square root 1-(v squared / c squared) was missing, especially since if v = 0 then the whole denominator ends up being one...which means that all previous laws are valid exactly as they are. Science is not about great schisms where meanings and understandings are suddenly reversed from one generation to the next. That's politics and religion. Science is about progress, with every additional step necessarily building on the steps that were before it. Of course sometimes when you're standing a few steps higher up you get a better overall view of your surroundings and realize that maybe you were misinterpreting a few things before but now you understand them perfectly... until someone comes and puts another little step under your feet and you can see even further...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You aren't following what he is saying--the research is saying is that THERE IS NO REACTION MASS. Per current physics, this device can't exist. That is why this is so big. No current physics explains it. It is not the opposite of a solar said, since the microwaves don't actual exit the device. If this device works, it does change everything, if only to point to new physics.
It's amazing how little science exists within science these days. Everyone has lost touch with reality.
Western science is very unreliable. Take sexuality for example. It would be impossible these days, in the western world, for a scientist to announce a result that showed that homosexuality is, in some cases, not something that someone is born with. They'd never work in science again no matter how valid their results. There are certain areas in which western science is just not allowed to meddle. Our understanding of climate change is hopelessly fucked up and its doubtful there will ever be any useful scientific results on this from the west. Its all confirmation bias and covering up/ignoring unfavourable results.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Which is exactly why this should be presented as a breakthrough in physics with the standards of verification and publication used in physics rather than announced as a way to propel rockets. Using the standards of a breakthrough in physics, they have an anomalous experiment. Now they need to replicate it under more idealized conditions and then we'll evaluate whether to give them a Nobel Prize. Almost certainly this anomalous experiment will turn out to be an experimental error or misinterpretation since the theory of conservation of momentum they are claiming to violate is so extremely well corroborated.
The crowd is skeptical because we're being told by everyone, including the researchers, that this should be scrutinized closely because while this might be entirely new science, that is a very high bar to jump over for a reason.
Humanity clearly doesn't know everything about physics, but we know enough that we've done some fairly amazing practical things with it. Recent scientists are not banging rocks together to get sparks, or even walking around poking radium in 19th Century dresses. That means we pretty much know where we think we need to look for new science, and until recently, this was not one of those places.
So yes, being skeptical is a good idea here, although dismissing it outright seems to be unwarranted at the moment.
Whoa, modern physics is never incorrect? Any science that claims to be perfect is inherently flawed because our current state of science and knowledge certainly isn't complete in any area. We may think we have a pretty good understanding of things but there is absolutely no way we've got it nailed with a flawless understanding. It's not possible.
The only thing we can say for certain is that we don't know what we don't know.
And 50 or 100 years from now someone will look back on what we think we know right now and laugh at how silly and naive we were. And in 1000 years, what we know right now will be a joke if anyone even remembers it.
Sig for hire.
A) That's one hypothesis among several, and many physicists claim it is, to use your term, "bollocks". I did mention there are multiple theories about how it works. They all have supporters, but they all have counterarguments too.
B) No, classical rocket engines push real particles one way and itself the other way. Unless you intend to claim that "virtual" and "real" particles are the same thing, it's not working "exactly the same way". Analogously, perhaps, but hardly "exactly the same".
Oh, and just for the heck of it:
C) To conclusively state that the EM Drive works according to your preferred theory is quite absurd unless you're an extremely well-educated theoretical physicist, and only slightly less even then. To even *claim* that I claimed anything about how the drive works, much less that my supposed idea is "bollocks", indicates a lack of reading comprehension, lack of understanding of the concept of scientific hypotheses, and lack of maturity.
Good day to you.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
You are very wrong, any competent physicist would tell you so. You have made a religion in your mind about science.
We already know our models such as quantum theory and general relativity are incorrect; they break down in certain situations.
We already know the useful "laws" we use are just approximations, e.g. ohm's law, hooke's law, boyle's law, etc.
I've been following this invention for years; since the first announcements from Shawyer through his being trashed by various physicists and wanna-bees, through his redemption through work in China and NASA. It used to be very difficult to get information, but since the burst of activity on the NASA Space flight forums, there's now too much information to digest, especially for someone like me who only has an undergrad level of schooling in it. If you want lots of details and discussion, check it out - but please don't post unless you really know what you're talking about, as there's already been a hell of a lot of noise. http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=37642.0
Conservation of momentum is more than "new physics". It's quite fundamental, thanks to Noether's Theorem: conservation of momentum is mathematically equivalent to "the laws of physics don't vary with spatial coordinates", that is, the X, Y, and Z axes can be "zeroed" anywhere, the choice of coordinates are arbitrary as long as their consistent. The universe would be a very strange place indeed if this weren't true, and furthermore we'd have noticed by now.
So, whatever's going on here, momentum is being conserved. Just how that's happening is the curious bit. It wasn't obvious until the early 1900s that light had momentum - maybe there's something else we're missing, or maybe this really is an actual "warp" drive that locally changes the metric of space (in a way different from GR) and momentum really isn't conserved. Somehow I doubt the latter is true.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm with you man, but this was exactly the same thing that people said when NASA confirmed the results. I was with you then too. Skeptisisism and all that.
The fact that the Germans now have also confirmed this is pretty huge. I'd say this moves out of the 'anomalous experiment' territory and more into the 'can we devise more and newer experiments to understand what the flaven is happening here' zone.
It was created by an independent inventor in the UK. It is insulting to all of science to act as though a large organization like NASA is capable of breakthrough physics when literally all breakthrough physics has come from individuals.
> Because they predict things up to the level of accuracy that we can currently measure, within the very limited energy and size domains we have access to. That's all there is to it.
Fixed that for you.
When you can predict particle behavior inside a black hole with planck-length precision, or you can model gravity at the galactic scale without relying on unobserved "dark matter", I might be as confident as you that our current understanding is rock solid.
That is because they both explained previous results they already had. While this new thing violates 400 years of experiments and results.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
It's worth noting that there's a big difference between those theories and this engine. With this engine, they're putting forward a piece of technology and saying, "We don't know how this works, but we're claiming it does." In the case of Newton and Einstein, they put forward a mathematical model that was internally consistent, and the question was whether it applied to reality.
So in one case, they're putting forward a technology without a real explanation as to how it works, and in the other case, they're putting forward a coherent theory that seems to explain phenomena that we have witnessed. Also, both Newton and Einstein's theories had the benefit of providing a clean explanation to phenomena that we were having a lot of trouble explaining.