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."

Comments

Scientists

[skovnymfe]

It's like someone has posted a theory on the internet which is wrong, but not knowing where the thrust comes from means they can't explain to this person why he's wrong. And it irks them to no end.

Re:Scientists

[serviscope_minor]

And for those who don't understand why the conservation of momentum is one of the most "sacred" laws, you might want to check out Neother's theorem.

If this device is real, then it means that the laws of pyhsics are not constant but instead vary across time and space. The implications are vast, and the corollary of that is that it's a very, very, very well tested law.

It's hard to overstate how extraordinary the claims really are. And while ultimately experiment trumps all else, there have been a lot of experiments showing the contrary too and it's awfully easy to let errors slip in somewhere (see the recent articles on the number of incorrect papers being published).

Re:Scientists

[jabuzz]

Sure verified experimental results trump everything. The problem at the moment is that the forces the device produce are very small 100uN. That means there is still the possibility that there are flaws in the experiment and the effect is not real. A bit like those superluminary neutrinos a while back.

My gut feeling at this point is stop messing about with an 80W drive, and build something a bit bigger say a few kW at least. That way the produced thrust should be large enough to rule out experimental errors. Of course this would require money...

Re:Scientists

[Beezlebub33]

One of two things is going to come out of this: they will determine that it's real, in which case we'll have some new physics to work with; they will determine it is experimental error, in which case we'll have a better understanding of how to measure small forces when the device is relatively large, in both air and a vacuum.

Either of these is a good thing; I'd bet on the second but would be happier with the first. In any case, the best course is to remain sceptically hopeful and continue testing.

Re:Scientists

[Anonymous Coward]

My gut feeling at this point is stop messing about with an 80W drive, and build something a bit bigger say a few kW at least.

OK, I'm going to go into some depth here because this is common sentiment, even from what I've read coming from Eagleworks, and it's probably wrong. Here's why I say that:

The inventor of the EMDrive is a retired aerospace engineer - he's too old to want to test anything but threw the idea for the EMDrive out there with a low-power test early in retirement as more or less an act of mental masturbation. Why is this important? Because his prior work, from which the EMDrive stems, is a laser-gyroscope functioning on the exact same principles as the EMDrive in reverse capable of measuring absolute accelerations based on relativistic effects without any outside coupling to the surrounding environment. Why is this important? Because it works so well it is in use in missile guidance systems and has been for decades. People tend to refer to Shawyer as a quack but he is the inventor of it, the invention came from sound and proven theory and all the hype about violating conservation of momentum isn't even correct based on the theory.

How does this relate to the "make it bigger" mentality? Shawyer's theory states the greatest way to improve thrust from existing models would be to make a perfect-Q cavity, at which point 1KW of power would be enough to lift a small car at Earth gravity. This isn't a difficult test - you just need a superconducting cavity. Thus far nobody has built an EMDrive with a superconducting cavity because they think Shawyer is just a crazy guy that stumbled into something interesting.

TL;DR: don't make it bigger, just make it superconducting.

Re:physicists?

[Anonymous Coward]

Due to the photons being pushed forwards and backwards in the cavity, that cannot be the reason. Harold White postulates that the law of conservation of momentum is not affected, that the drive is indeed transferring momentum to space-time though an interaction with the virtual particles that are continuously popping and collapsing everywhere.

Re:Summary

[serviscope_minor]

However, it's a shame that we're so bombarded with crap these days that the default conclusion is that everything is BS unless it's unequivocally shown to not be.

It's fair to assume that an extraordinary claim of this magnitude is wrong. Think about what it's saying. There have been a lot of very precise and importantly repeatable experiments performed in physics over the years. None have found a variation in the laws of physics over space or time. A single, new experiment reporting a minute force (100nN) claims they do in fact vary.

What's more likely? An experimental error in which 100nN on an 80W device (think about the relative scale of the device and size of the force) has been missed somewhere or the most ground breaking physics result of the last 350 years?

Other reasons to be suspicious: the device was first invented theoretically using relativity. This was clearly wrong as relativity has conservation of momentum baked in at a fundamental level (via Noether's theorem). Eventually someone found the specific mistake he'd made in the maths.

The device apparently works anyway but via a different mechanism. Either you've got the mother of all coincidences, or you've got a case of severe optimism mixed with the difficulty of measuring really tiny forces on large objects with a lot of power going through them.

Re:Summary

[delt0r]

Relax i did go to the effort of reading the material on this thing. I did also regret wasting that time on it. But this is just bogus, has all the hall marks of bogus (literally made up terms and math that doesn't work) and worse still. Very sloppy experimental work and plain misleading statements.

For example the german dude (has a patent on an antigravity device i may add), showed no force out of the errors, yet claimed there was a force anyway. btw NASA does not endorse these results. Reputations based on "but nasa.." are way out of line here. Also if your any good at science reputations are worth shit. Show me the data! They can't they don't have any. They have no plausible mechanism why it word work. 300 years of results need to be wrong if this is true.

This is why we have peer review. It doesn't mean the results are correct or right, but it does at least get rid of the first order bullshit. And this is it i am afraid.