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EmDrive: NASA Eagleworks' Peer-Reviwed Paper Is On Its Way (ibtimes.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from International Business Times UK: An independent scientist has confirmed that the paper by scientists at the NASA Eagleworks Laboratories on achieving thrust using highly controversial space propulsion technology EmDrive has passed peer review, and will soon be published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). Dr Jose Rodal posted on the NASA Spaceflight forum -- in a now-deleted comment -- that the new paper will be entitled "Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio Frequency Cavity in Vacuum" and is authored by "Harold White, Paul March, Lawrence, Vera, Sylvester, Brady and Bailey." Rodal also revealed that the paper will be published in the AIAA Journal of Propulsion and Power, a prominent journal published by the AIAA, which is one of the world's largest technical societies dedicated to aerospace innovations. Although Eagleworks engineer Paul March has posted several updates on the ongoing research to the NASA Spaceflight forum showing that repeated tests conducted on the EmDrive in a vacuum successfully yielded thrust results that could not be explained by external interference, those in the international scientific community who doubt the feasibility of the technology have long believed real results of thrust by Eagleworks would never see the light of day.
Underwhelmed.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
...but hey, it is peer reviewed by some people.
The trouble is that the thrust is so low that measuring it reliably is so hard that nobody knows if there is thrust at all or just measurement problems. It's said to be about 1mN/kW, much lower than even an ion drive.
I think there is just noise and no signal and people are seeing a rabbit in the clouds because they're looking for it very hard.
Likewise. I'm hopefully sceptical :)
At worst there is an interesting effect going on that is worth further study and might provide some new insights into some aspects of physics, or simply improvements to experimental techniques. At best it has the possibility to revolutionise some aspects of space exploration.
I am sceptical that this will live up to the best case, but I really hope that my scepticism turns out to be wrong.
This is what science is all about. There's an odd effect, people are doing experiments, whatever happens we will have learnt something which may one day be useful. This is an extraordinary claim, it requires extraordinary proof, which we will hopefully get.
Paul Leader
Caution with a little optimism is good. What we must not do is to say that does not work just because it goes against someone dogmas (I doubt the haters here have the technical capability to do the tests and especially the impartiality necessary to analyze the results). I for myself say that at least is something really interesting going on that should be investigated further.
> No advanced propulsion ever has or ever will be invented by accident by a random guy ....
And there, folks, is a fine example of a completely unscientific statement :)
Nobody gives a fuck about whether humanity is going to another star. Sending a probe there is possible. Some far-flung descendant of humanity could probably go there. You claim to know exactly what's going to happen or not happen, and that doesn't make you reasonable, it makes you a fucking crank just like the 'space nutters' you rail against. Being on the polar opposite end from 'too fucking optimistic' doesn't make you reasonable, it just makes you a fucking grind.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
It's a bullshit hoax because you don't believe it? Shit you'd be the same type of person to persecute Galileo. The only narcissist here is you, thinking you're better than anyone that shares a differing opponion. Why don't you wait until this peer review is published and see how it works out, and until then let people believe that what appears to be credible information from a credible source might just be credible. Why don't you quit your "drivel" ranting without any justification. NASA is certainly more credible than some random grumpy asshat with an inflated ego. Do the world a favor and shutup.
The alternative is that the peer-reviewed paper describes a new phenomenon which cannot AT THIS TIME be explained easily by applying the basic laws of physics.
That doesn't mean the basic laws of physics are wrong, it may just mean that there is something going on we cannot easily detect or haven't considered looking for, that if detected would explain the whole thing. Or some of the basic laws of physics have loopholes that are exploited in this instance. Or they need refinement.
As an example, the motion of planets is explained by Newton based on basic laws of physics. However, until Einstein refined the whole explanation a bit with his theory of relativity, we had unexplained deviations between theory and practice - like we have now.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
You know what hurts science? People who are more concerned with their dogma than things that contradict their dogma. A person who is really interested in science VALUES things that contradict their dogma because... SCIENCE!
Will the Em Drive pan out? I have no idea. But the whole point of science is that when we see contradictions to what we expect we take a look at it, not just dismiss it out of hand because "These hoaxes come and go and people waste time on them." Stupid ideas like the earth revolving around the sun.
As much as I love the science, I mostly hope the EM drive proves to work so we can all smack you around for being an anti-space nutter.
It's a bullshit hoax BECAUSE IT VIOLATES BASIC LAWS OF PHYSICS.
Well, it appears to violate the known laws of physics, but that doesn't mean that it's necessarily a hoax.
It may be that there's something going on physics-wise that's yet to be understood, or perhaps we may need to rewrite or add a few laws. I'm not a sucker looking for perpetual motion machines but I'm also not so arrogant to think that we know everything there is to know.
Personally I'm skeptical but I'm also willing to see where the research leads. Yes, it seems to violate the basic laws of physics, but we may be wrong about that or we may just not understand what the fuck is going on yet. It wouldn't be the first time.
For example, I remember when almost everyone flatly declared that blue LEDs were simply impossible, period, and a decade later they were commonplace. Not that long ago plenty of respected scientists scoffed at the whole notion of quantum physics, and now it's taken for granted as a fact.
No, the EM Drive isn't a "fuel free" engine as the press has touted, but it may be a hitherto unknown form of propulsion. We'll see, and I think before long we'll know if it's bogus or not.
"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." – Albert Einstein, 1932
"X-rays will prove to be a hoax." – Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1883
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
There are a lot of loopholes in the physical laws. Fifty years ago, if you had told someone that you could take a ceramic insulator and turn it into a near-zero-resistance conductor by cooling it to near absolute zero, they would have assumed you were wrong—the laws of electricity as known at the time just didn't allow for that. And if you told them that you could float magnets on top of such a superconductor, they'd have hauled you off to a sanitarium.
A hundred years ago, if you could have somehow launched GPS satellites, everyone would think that the clocks were broken, because the time would keep drifting due to relativistic effects, and that concept didn't exist yet.
We're constantly learning new exceptions to the established rules, and we have been doing so throughout all of our planet's history, from the moment we discovered that you could bang two rocks together and start a fire. It is thus utterly ridiculous to assume that at this particular point in history, we magically haver reached the pinnacle of human understanding.
Now don't get me wrong here; this supposed "EM drive" is probably bogus. There's probably some particle emission caused by electrical charge propagation through the material or some other similar curiosity. But it isn't impossible that this is something new that we don't know about—just very, very unlikely. And there's also a very slight possibility that we might learn something new about the physics of matter or gravity or who-knows-what-else from studying this, so either way, it is fascinating, and should not just be dismissed as a hoax out of hand until we know why it is happening and whether the answer to that question tells us something new that we didn't know before.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.