There is also the pilot wave theory to consider.
Hereās why itās taking so long to hammer this stuff out:
Data sources: U.S. Office of Management and Budget and Centers for Disease Control & Prevention
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Physics isnāt wrong because it has unanswered questions
1900: How is understanding the precession of Mercury going along?
1880: How is understanding the relationship between electricity and magnetism going along?
1860: How is understanding the luminiferous ether going along?
1600: How is the discovery of the phlogiston going along?(The alleged particle that carries heat out of an object)
Also 1600: How is the seeing the perfection of the Moonās surface going along?(This one troubled Galileo a bit because the heavens were supposedly made in Godās image and must be perfect. Seeing craters on the Moon contradicted that idea)
All unanswered questions at the timeā¦yet eventually all were answered 1 way or another. The only one to totally rewrite some of our thinking was the precession of Mercury and maybe (for the time period) checking out the Moon at the time. The rest are all based on the discoveries of previous generations. Maybe Dark Matter/Energy will rewrite the physics textbooks. Maybe they wonāt.
Iāll be happily be wrong, but show me evidence that Iām wrong. Donāt just say āwell we donāt know about A!ā to try to prove something about C, of which we do know quite a bit more aboutā¦especially when A and C are unrelated. Want them to be related? Prove it!
Edit: To elaborate, I donāt see how dark energy is related to a photon drive but I would love to be shown than it is.
Is this necessary Sky?
Dark energy is linked to the EM drive through the pilot wave theory, a perfectly valid alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Iām sure there are many examples of competing theories throughout the ages of science.
@crayfish surely knows more on the matter, I just want to believe, it would really make humanity better.
Fair point. Probably not. Iāll tone it down.
Iāve stopped reading about the drive since it got all the headlines so I havenāt been keeping up on it. I only know the Copenhagen interpretation and Iāve never heard of Pilot Wave Theory except when talking about the EmDrive. I figured it was the pseudohandwavy math created to make it work(whether it really does or not) and I donāt have the time these days to try and figure it out.
Week before midterms, stressing due to work and studying, etc, etc. Sorry guys 
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As far as i am concerned, a drive can run on fairy farts as long as it works.
Sadly noone has yet presented a working fairy fart drive.
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what
The EMDrive is violating basic thermodynamics, something that is the foundation of everything we know about physics, and has been so ever since physics were a thing. That isnāt going to change. The EMDrive is a Dean Drive 2.0, nothing more, nothing less.
Now, assuming some EMDrive-like engine was actually possible would be the worst news in history (and a solution to the Fermi paradox). Because such a reactionless drive is an infinite source of energy, and by extension an absolute, unstoppable weapon. A cheap one would invite any half-baked terrorist/emo teenager to make a literally world-shattering bomb.
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It doesnāt need to violate anything if you assume some other phenomenon that we are not aware of yet, like an object being attracted or pulled towards different energy states and what an EM drive does (badly) is create that state.
Anyway, as I said, I donāt follow this closely, surely someone else can pick it up from here.
Unfortunately I donāt follow it closely either. Iām 40/60 on whether there might be real effect or not. Iām waiting for somebody to identify the source of the probably mistakenly identified thrust before I make my mind up.
At the same time I donāt think itās helpful when people get dogmatic about science when our knowledge of science only maps on to about 5% of what exists.
āPhysics is physicsā sounded like a dogmatic statement to me. One that ignored the fact that our knowledge of physics is constantly evolving and implied that it is complete.
In all experiments that have properly accounted for sources of error, the āgenerated thrustā is lower than the margin of error. The smaller we shrink those margins, the smaller the detected thrust becomes.
This is not some magical, unexplained effect: this is a clear indication that the shitty idea, which violates CoM/CoE OR violates the fact that there is no universal fixed frame of reference, doesnāt work. No matter the explanation, some/all of these very well understood, very well explained, and very well verified through rigorous ACTUAL experimentation will be violated, by a non-functioning experiment.
I actually do follow up on /r/emdrive a lot, and browse NSF infrequently. Thereās the usual conspiracy nutjob ramblings of āthe gubbermintā and āChina is doing it,ā but nothing of substance. In fact, since one of the most unintelligible AI to ever exist was banned from /r/emdrive, it has effectively died.
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As I said, I donāt follow it closely, I had a look for peer reviewed experiments more recent than the NASA one in 2016 and with better setups for identifying the source of the error but didnāt find anything (Iām totally not saying they donāt exist). Do you have any links?
Sadly, I donāt know of anything that has actually passed peer review except that NASA one. I was referring to the reports of the few builds that seem to be currently interested in removing sources of errors (monomorphic in particular).
Edit: to clarify, each time these builders test after removing a source of interference, the apparent thrust shrinks. Unfortunately, since the experiments are all by people not being paid for it, updates are extremely infrequent at best.
5% may be inflating quite a lot, but as far as can be told, everything about the EMDrive falls right in the middle of those 5%. The three laws of thermodynamics are possibly the most fundamental laws of all physics, and there have never been the tiniest shadow of a hint that they may not quite always be entirely inescapable in the Universe we know and inhabit.
Faced with literally hundreds of years of hard work by world-class experts, you will need something serious to even start being taken seriously on the idea that this could possibly be otherwise. Something that the EMDrive has not done so far.
To use an imperfect analogy, ancient sailors may not have known what the 95% of the oceans below the surface were made of, nor how currents, ecosystems and weather worked, but they could have still called bullshit on a boat made of a giant, non-hollw iron ingot supposedly using the power of waves to stay afloat.
Again, look at recent history, namely the Dean Drive.
- It was supposed to be a reactionless drive turning power into movement (as a closed system, so solar sails donāt count)
- It was so stupidly simple and cheap itās a wonder no-one made it by accident
- The supposed physics behind it made no sense and ran against everything established so far head on
- No experiment outside of the ones made by its supposed authors ever reproduced any significant results
- There was surprisingly big hype around it
- It was sold as the real deal by SF that should have known better
- It working would have literally meant the end of the world, but no-on seemed to care anyway
All things that are equally applicable to both. And I suspect, soon the EMDrive will meet the same fate:
- At some point people caught up with it and understood how stupid the whole concept was to starting with, and it died down
- Though from time to time, some SF author that should know better still put its now forgotten nonsense back in some story
They would have called bullshit on any ship that was made of iron.
sshhhā¦donāt give Elon Musk any more crazy ideasā¦
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Not necessarily. The Archimedesā principle has been known since Antiquity, and shipbuilders probably had an instinctive grasp of it long before that.
They would have called bullshit on something so heavy it would make a slow, unmanoeuvrable and fragile hull, a ridiculous expenditure of precious iron and something that wouldnāt survive the harshness of sea water. If you could show them modern, late-XIXe Century steel and steel-manufacturing techniques, they would have taken you seriously. They could probably even accept the principle of a heat engine if you explained it to them well enough or showed them a working scale model.
For example, we can make a boat out of stone, and some people even did so. Still, any shipbuilder would call bullshit on it for about the same reasons, even if they accepted the fact that yes, you can probably make some thing that can float with it. (Pikrete doesnāt count.)
Thatās a very different reason to call bullshit than with a lump of iron floating by itself thanks to the energy of waves.
With respect, you know people as well as I do. Perhaps 1 in 10 would be as considered as you describe. The rest would have just called bullshit because it was the accepted dogma of the time.
Right, but if you showed it to them they would not have denied it.
Thatās the problem with the EMDrive: it has zero evidence above the margin of error, AND it violates several well tested theories, in both the āhypothesesā presented AND (if it worked as advertised) in the theoretical operation of the device.
The peer reviewed 2016 NASA paper did find thrust that was outside their error bars. Iām more curious to know where that anomaly came from than to say the ship wonāt float because I know that iron always sinks. Iām more on the side that someone will find an explanation and that will settle it, but until that happens Iāll keep an open mind.
The āNASAā (read: EagleWorks) paper did not properly account for external influences, to include thermals. They did perform it in a vacuum, but thatās not the only issue at hand.
Basically, the peer-reviewed paper ended up still being junk, and is not replicable.
Hereās a pretty good thread to read through about that paper: https://www.reddit.com/r/EmDrive/comments/5epl96/comments_regarding_the_problems_of_eagleworks_em/