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NASA Eagleworks Has Tested an Upgraded EM Drive
An anonymous reader writes: A team of researchers at NASA's Eagleworks Laboratories recently completed yet another round of testing on Engineer Roger Shawyer's controversial EM Drive. While no peer reviewed paper has been published yet, engineer Paul March posted to the NASA Spaceflight forum to explain the group's findings. From the article: "In essence, by utilizing an improved experimental procedure, the team managed to mitigate some of the errors from prior tests — yet still found signals of unexplained thrust."
The problem is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. This is an extraordinary claim because it at appears to violate one of the most sacred law of physics (the conservation of momentum) for which we have previously never had even the slightest hint might not hold.
That said unlike Mr. Rossi and his eCat for example there is no cloak of secrecy involved here. All details are out in the public for anyone to build one and test it out. This is where in part the fuss is arising because even the best labs are unable to show that it is baloney that every fibre of our beings tells us it should be.
In the end no matter how dear we hold the principle of conservation of momentum verified experimental results trump ALL theories without exception.
Personally I am highly sceptical of the EM drive. However I have to concede that the experimental results are so far with it, and thus further investigation is entirely warranted. In fact I would go further and say that further investigation is absolutely required.
The problem is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
A working prototype counts as a pretty damned good proof of concept, at least until someone can demonstrate how it cheats.
Sure, someone might eventually figure out a way that it doesn't really cheat conservation of momentum - And that finding might have its own useful applications.
There is a simple reason this is controversial. Any Electromagnetic drive that produces more than 3.34 nanoNewtons per Watt by EM emission is a demonstration of new physics that is not included in our amazingly successful theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED). (The simple calculation is here: https://www.physicsforums.com/... They use a reflecting mirror, so an emitting craft would have half the force.) QED has been very precisely corroborated, sometimes to more than 10 digits (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). Claims of macroscopic objects that violate quantum electrodynamics simply have an extremely high prior probability of being false. (Just like claims of perpetual motion etc.). It doesn't mean we know a priori that they are false. By all means, do the experiments more precisely. But this is a claim that requires extraordinary proof because if it is true it will upset a lot of what we have good reason to think we understand about how the universe works.