Slashdot Mirror
Finnish Scientist Provides Another Explanation For The 'Impossible' EM Drive (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington quotes a report from Examiner: Ever since the EmDrive entered the news about a year or so ago, it has sparked considerable controversy. The device is alleged to work by using microwaves that produce, in some fashion as yet unknown to science, thrust. Many scientists suggest that the EM drive is impossible as it violates known physics. However, a number of tests conducted in Great Britain, Germany, China, and at NASA's Eagleworks at the Johnson Spaceflight Center have resulted in thrust that cannot, as yet, be explained by experimental error. The International Business Times reported that a Finnish scientist has published an article in a peer-reviewed science journal with a possible explanation as to how the drive works. International Business Times writes, "A new peer-reviewed paper on the EmDrive from Finaland states that the controversial electromagnetic space propulsion technology does work due to microwaves fed into the device converting photons that leak out of the closed cavity, producing an exhaust. The research, entitled "On the exhaust of electromagnetic drive," is published in the journal AIP Advances 6 and is the brainchild of Dr Arto Annila, a physics professor at the University of Helsinki; Dr Erkki Kolehmainen, an organic chemistry professor at the University of Jyvaskyla; and Patrick Grahn, a multiphysicist at engineering software firm Comsol."
You've got a cavity. Inside you pump some energy. The energy is nominally trapped and bounces around. Eventually, some of it finds its way out in a coherent way. Seems like the paper is describing a similar explanation as to how LASERs work, roughly-speaking. Sounds plausible for sure.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
This is proceeding the way that scientific progress normally works. An experimenter found an effect that did not fit in the current paradigm. Other experimenters found similar results. Now theoreticians are coming up with hypothesis that may explain the result. Other theoretical types will either agree or disagree. Other experiments will be done to test the hypothesis. Eventually a general consensus will emerge. It's all completely normal.
Remember it was 100 years ago that Einstein predicted gravity waves, and they were just detected. Eventually can be a long time.
Why is Snark Required?
Photons are not really mass less. They have mass due to their enormous speed: E=mc^2
That's an old way of thinking. These days they are treated as purely massless.
The full version of Einstein's formula is E^2=(mc^2)^2+(pc)^2 where p is the momentum, which in photons is related to the frequency. The (mc^2)^2 bit remains 0.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
All it shows is that our knowledge of physics is just very limited.. Laws of physics are only a template to try to explain stuff, it isn't set in stone, it's just our (lack of) understanding of physics..
The quality of trolls is really slipping around here
Sherlock Holmes: "Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth"
Dirk Gently: "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks."
I'm not ready to give up on a plausible answer based on physics we understand, it may be that it is doing something we understand and we are simply not realizing it.
First: magic? Nobody claims it have anything to do with magic. Well except idiots and trolls.
Second: how the fuck do you know? IF the em-drive does work it requires _very_ specific circumstances to work, do you expect that those circumstances would be common in the neighborhood so that people could trivially detect the effect?
Third: continuing your line of reasoning would lead a reasonable person to conclude that semiconductors and the field effect are "magic" and doesn't naturally exist, the same for super-conductors. Yet we are using machines based on semiconductors using the field effect to do Boolean logic to read this very website!
Now that I think about it, other than internet pedants, I've never heard anyone of any nationality use "American" to mean anything but a citizen of the United States. (along similar lines, when traveling and asking where people are from, Americans usually reply with what state they are from, whereas others usually reply with which country). At what point does a correction of your sort move from 'technically correct' to merely 'antiquated and wrong', I wonder, with languages changing as they do?