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NASA Eagleworks Has Tested an Upgraded EM Drive

Posted by samzenpus on from the riding-the-microwaves dept.

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."

33 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. Scientists by skovnymfe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Scientists by jabuzz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Scientists by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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).

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    3. Re:Scientists by pla · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Scientists by jabuzz · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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...

    5. Re:Scientists by Beezlebub33 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
    6. Re:Scientists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    7. Re:Scientists by transfire · · Score: 2

      "Shawyer says net thrust occurs because the microwaves have a group velocity which is greater in one direction than the other and Einstein's relativity comes into play." http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

    8. Re:Scientists by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The problem is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
      This always repeated myth in /. is wrong.

      A proof is a proof, regardless how extraordinary, extravagant or hillarious the claim is.

      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.
      This is the second fault. You don't know how it works, but you already know it violates the law of conservation of momentum? How do you know that when you actually don't know _anything_ about the thing?

      Rest assured: when we finally figure *if* it is working we will sooner or later figure *how* it is working and then we see: oops, it does not violate any conservation law.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    9. Re:Scientists by sjames · · Score: 2

      Important correction, if this device is real and the most outrageous explanation for it is assumed to be true ...

    10. Re:Scientists by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      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.

      And this is a good thing, This is just exactly how science works - people repeatedly testing it and testing it until we finally come up with a theory as to why it works the way it does, and what applecart gets upset because of it.

      Perhaps there's some new science out there. Maybe. Or it's something that's just been unaccounted for. Or maybe it's a complete fraud. The best thing is, people are curious and they're trying to find out why. When that answer comes out, it means we've just increased our understanding of the world, which isn't a bad thing.

    11. Re:Scientists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      1KW is about what you'd use for a microwave oven.
      Thinking that amount of energy can lift a car IS crazy

      Pfft, shows what you know.

      One kilowatt (737.56 foot pounds per second, 1.34 British horsepower) will, if driving an (ideal) winch, lift a small car (say, a ton) at about 1/3 foot (4", or 10cm) per second. Half that speed for a mid to large sized car.

      The trick is using an EM drive to move something as efficiently as a winch and cable.

    12. Re:Scientists by pla · · Score: 2

      I think you have that inverted. It doesn't count as anything until someone can demonstrate that it can't possibly be cheating.

      Nope, not at all backward backward. Science needs to fit reality, we don't ignore reality because it doesn't fit our best models - That very attitude, that the High Priests of Science rule over their domain with an iron book, has done more to foster an anti-intellectual attitude in the modern world than the creationists could ever pray for.

      Now, whether or not you can get anyone credible to even look at your prototype requires a level of plausibility; but unless you mean to accuse NASA of cheating itself, we have some pretty credibly folks looking into the EM drive on this one.

    13. Re:Scientists by jfengel · · Score: 2

      A proof is a proof, regardless how extraordinary, extravagant or hillarious the claim is.

      Well... yes and no. Even a mathematical proof isn't just a proof, because humans are involved in creating and checking it. A complex proof requires considerable work, and occasionally even a fairly sturdy result has to be withdrawn and reconsidered. Some examples.

      Real-word experiments are never "proofs" in the mathematical sense. Directly, the only thing you can say about an experiment is "this thing yielded this result on this occasion". Everything else is extrapolation, and there are many different ways to extrapolate. The more you want to extrapolate, the the more work you're going to have to do to rule out the alternatives. When you want to extrapolate to something as big as "a new law of physics", you're going to have to rule out a lot of alternatives.

      That's what "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs" really means. There are, at this point, a lot of far less extraordinary alternatives to "brand new physics", especially since the effect is such a tiny fraction of the input energy. The clearer you can isolate the effect, the more likely your particular extrapolation is the correct one.

    14. Re:Scientists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      >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.

      Jesus. Its depressing to read this shambles criticism for the hundredth time.
      100 micro grams too hard to detect above noise?
      Are you living in a time before ancient greece?
      In 2012 the most accurate modern weighing scales could literally detect a septillionth of a gram ( Adrian Bachtold et all Barcelona ) .
      100 micro newtons ( 10 milli gram equivalent, about the weight of a small insect ) is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times over the detection threshold of modern equipment.

      In the 1950s and 60s the ion drive was developed and confirmed with thrusts of the order of 10 micronewtons - that's 10 times less than today's emdrives.

      The popularity of this inane " emdrive thrust too weak to be detected " myth can only be because half of the critics have no grounding in physics or mechanics, and don't even use wiki ( never mind doing any study ) before they dismiss emdrive with the 1st dumb thought that pops into their heads.

    15. Re:Scientists by DrJimbo · · Score: 3, Informative

      The problem is not the absolute smallness of 100 micro-Newtons. The problem is the relative size of 100-micro-Newtons compared to the forces that exist in the experimental apparatus. It is like confusing absolute signal level with the signal to noise ratio. Yes, we can easily measure the weight of a snowflake. But if the total thrust from this 100 watt drive is equivalent to the weight of a snowflake then I am exceedingly unimpressed. If you read the fine post that is linked to, you will see that this is literally down in the level of noise that can be produced by ground loops and so on. The author is basically saying that they tried to remove even more noise sources than last time and still have not yet tracked down what is causing the extremely tiny anomalous thrust they have measured.

      I am a physicist so I am well aware of just how bloody difficult it is to track down and account for every form of noise and error in experiments like this one. Or in the experiment that measured neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. I am often cautioning my friends to not get too excited about weak experimental results like this that contradict foundational physical theories. I also cautioned people to not get too excited about the so-called "face on Mars" for the same reasons. Lots of fascinating things are seen in weak signals that are close to the experimental noise floor.

      In addition, I have not seen any reasonable theoretical explanation for the anomalous force that is purported to power the EM drive. There is certainly no relationship between the purported physics of an EM drive and the actual physics of a ring laser gyroscope. Nor have I seen any reasonable theoretical explanation for why the thrust should scale as a large power of the input energy. Yet many people here who ignore the experimental challenges of measuring the weight of a snowflake on top of the forces acting on an apparatus dissipating 100 watts of RF energy seem to blithely accept these remarkable and, AFAIK unfounded, theoretical claims as gospel truth.

      --
      We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
      -- Anais Nin
    16. Re:Scientists by DrJimbo · · Score: 2

      > I have not seen any reasonable theoretical explanation for the anomalous force that is purported to power the EM drive
      The only thing that critics have managed to say about emdrive theory over 10 years is " muh momentum "

      What else can we reply when there is no actually theory presented that we can reply to or refute? All we have to go on is some micro-wave engineer claims that he has invented a device that violates conservation of momentum without providing any reasonable theory for how it might work. Your attempt to blame the critics for the complete lack of theoretical underpinnings by the inventor is ridiculous. The inventor himself said:

      I am just a microwave engineer and all that matters is that it works.

      In addition, the Anonymous Coward engineer claims:

      Emdrive has been experimentally verified by 5 institutions with results published.

      (emphasis added)

      Have experimental results been published? Yes. Has the effect been verified? No. Most of the extraordinary experimental results seem to have been either debunked or retracted, claims such as nearly one Newton of thrust by a paper from China which has been shrouded in mystery. The more recent and reliable Tajimar paper explicitly says:

      ... we successfully identified experimental areas needing additional attention before any firm conclusions concerning the EMDrive claims could be made. Out test campaign therefore can neither confirm or refute the claims of the EMDrive [...]

      In one of their experiments their measured thrust was in the wrong direction! Their conclusion that the experiments need to be improved before they can be used to verify the EMDrive claims echoes what I already said (and you mocked) that the current experimental results are buried down with the noise. That is what the fine post linked to by the summary says as well. The experimentalists are working on beating back known sources of noise so they will eventually be in a position to confirm or refute the EMDrive claims. It is not all relevant if totally different experiments with totally different devices had better signal to noise ratios with similar input powers and output thrusts.

      Your mocking, your ad hominem attacks, and your appeals to emotion and irrelevancies do nothing to bolster your argument. Your claims far exceed the claims of the very experimentalists whose work you (appear to) cite. You are, of course, free to believe whatever the heck you want but it seems your claims of experimental verification are greatly overblown. For me, the lack of theoretical underpinnings, the violation of the conservation of momentum, and the lack of experimental verification (as I cited above and from the fine post linked to in summary) all make me highly dubious that the effect is real.

      --
      We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
      -- Anais Nin
    17. Re:Scientists by RubberDogBone · · Score: 2

      It doesn't necessarily violate conservation of motion if the action and reaction are taking place in a way we didn't know about and therefore don't measure.

      For example, if the EM drive is pushing against a force we don't perceive, then it IS having an action that conserves motion. We just aren't measuring it correctly so it merely appears to be happening by magic.

      A real world example of this would be a linear motor. One of the fancy roller coasters will do for an example. The linear motors on the track push the coaster. We can see the motor and the ride carriage and measure the force and so on and it's clear electric power is making the magnetic field that does the pushing.

      With an EM drive, we see movement (or at least thrust) happening but we don't yet see the other half of it, i.e. what it is reacting against. It is like the roller coaster is operating in fog and you can't see the trackway. The fog is our lack of understanding of the physics behind it. Not because we are dumb but because this is going to be some weird aspect of physics we never suspected before and apparently can't easily perceive with our normal senses, so literally nobody has ever even tried to come up with how it works.

      In this way, it does not break rules. It's making new ones.

      My suspicion is that the EM drive is reacting against some sort of background EM field that we don't yet know about.

      --
      Sig for hire.
    18. Re:Scientists by jabuzz · · Score: 2

      It cannot be reacting against dark matter because it is located on earth and the biggest and I mean huge massive problem with the whole dark matter thing is that there is none of it on earth, or even anywhere in the solar system.

      So something that is supposed to constitute over 80% of the entire matter of the universe is utterly absent in our solar system. We know it is absent because the primary reason for believing it exists is that we cannot explain observed galactic rotation with the amount of matter we believe exists in the galaxies (though we are using Newtonian mechanics rather than General Relativity to come to that conclusion which I regard as a problem in itself). However we know from observation of our own solar system that is is perfectly explained (well within observational error) using General Relativity. As such there is no missing mass in the solar system and hence no dark matter.

      I my personal view the idea that there is something special about our solar system that means there is zero dark matter here or even in the vicinity of our solar system is too massive an ask and fails Occam's razor.

  2. physicists? by ThorGod · · Score: 2

    How does the "law of conservation of momentum" square with the the momentum imparted by photons? (iirc it's the light pressure from fusion that keeps stars from collapsing on themselves)

    --
    PS: I don't reply to ACs.
    1. Re:physicists? by rpresser · · Score: 2

      Photons carry momentum away from the electron when they are emitted ("recoil") and to the electron that absorbs them ("pressure"). This momentum is real and measurable. https://goo.gl/CkjOxe

    2. Re:physicists? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:physicists? by tomhath · · Score: 2

      Harold White postulates

      In other words, he's making stuff up with nothing to support it.

  3. I don't even have a solid-state drive yet! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    My my how technology continues to march on. I haven't even upgraded any of my systems to the new-fangled solid-state drives. Is this new EM drive going to have a higher storage capacity or are they just faster?

  4. Re:Summary by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  5. Re:Summary by delt0r · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
  6. Re:Scientists and Conservation by NReitzel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    At first glance this sounds for all the world like another perpetual motion machine. It deserves a second glance.

    We (Physicists) know for absolute fact that a phenomenon called "dragging the metric" exists. The results are small, but every attempt at verification shows that the effect exists, and that general relativity predicts the magnitude of the effects. It is conceivable (though absolutely unverified) that a device might create it's own drag on the metric, and thus provide "impossible" thrust.

    History is replete with experiments that show impossible results (two slit electron experiments, superconductivity) that have turned out to be true. Any experiment that provides verifiable evidence that contradicts theory shows that the theory is wrong, period. (Feynman Lectures)

    The ostensible effect is small, and right up against the boundaries of bad science, but it needs to be verified, again and again, until the numbers either show that it doesn't exist, or show that it does. And if it doesn't exist, it's important to know -why- the results seemed to show it. This one is a long shot, but hey, -somebody- wins the lottery. Stick with it.

    --

    Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.

  7. Re:Controversial? by ganv · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. What's going on here? by sjames · · Score: 2

    This is genuinely confusing. Who the hell is claiming that this is a violation of the conservation of momentum? I haven't seen any such claims from any of the people actually doing the experiments. There's probably a zillion alternative explanations, all more likely.

    Once and for all, this violation of conservation of momentum BS is a strawman.

  9. Re:THIS. ISN'T. SCIENCE. It's SCIENCE-FICTION by drwho · · Score: 2

    Eagleworks is NASA. Not anyone can't just 'rent a NASA facility'. The crackpot, here, is you!

  10. Re:THIS. ISN'T. SCIENCE. It's SCIENCE-FICTION by drwho · · Score: 2

    Wow, such anger, much distortion! It HAS been replicated. there IS published experiments, peer reviewed. Are Tajmar and Fielder not respectable enough for your tastes? Some people, which may include 'gavron', call themselves physicists but are really just engineers who took some physics in college, and now don't want to think that there's so much more physics that they have to learn. There are huge frontiers in physics, but there are usually are abstract and at one end of the scale or the other: cosmologic or subatomic. This area of exploration is human-scale, potentially disruptive, and that makes some old farts nervous.

  11. Re:Why aren't radio satellites pushed out of orbit by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 2

    For me to confuse an EM Drive with a photon drive, I would have to believe in the EM Drive. I happen to be a member of a private club called AMSAT that has its latest cubesat in orbit right now, and that is OSCAR 85 in a series running since 1963. Obviously, there isn't really anything standing in the way of testing this on a cubesat. I'm sure that if you can raise something's orbit that there will be a lot more attention. Until then, color me dubious.

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  12. Re: Controversial? by binarylarry · · Score: 3, Funny

    Who is this Einstein guy all you kids keep bringing up? Is it someone on reddit?

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!