Where you can psy to get yourself published? I don’t actually know the names of any but I know they exist. I don’t know where they plan to publish, just that they are planning to.
That’s just it. If the drive works (i.e. converts electrical energy into thrust), it violates conservation of momentum. From there you can easily construct scenarios in which it breaks conservation of energy and becomes a “free energy” machine.
The inventor’s explanations of why the drive works have been proven over and over again to be junk math (both at https://www.reddit.com/r/EmDrive/ and was recently given its own section at http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?board=73.0). The biggest reason the scientific community is so skeptical of the EM Drive is there isn’t even a theoretical reason of why this drive should work.
The problem is, NASA Eagleworks (a part of NASA who’s job it is to essentially investigate these super long shot projects, with appropriate shoestring budgets) tested this drive and measured an extremely small amount of thrust. As of yet, they have not been able to account for this thrust.
Unfortunately, the media saw some posts on the NSF forums and jumped on the whole “NASA INVENTS IMPOSSIBLE WARP DRIVE” which lead people to think this project has much more credibility then it currently does. It’s about as likely as cold fusion was in the 1980s.
That said though it IS possible the drive does work, and if it does, it would essentially unlock interstellar travel. We would just have to completely reevaluate our current understanding of basic physics laws.
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Why not both?
Seriously Fake 
Can a french translate me the last sentence ? Google translate didn’t help this time
Also, even if I can’t be sure of nothing because of my own lack of knowledge, I cannot be sure of what you guys say, because, according to you and to what I see here, nobody can prove anything (inventor apparently didn’t prove it works without breaking the law, just has a theory, and you guys didn’t prove that it actually breaks the law, or that its theory is invalid). I’m often disappointed by the modern scientist community because of its systematically skeptical behavior. Most of the time, scientists are right. In this example, breaking the law of conservation of quantity of move is impossible. I’m okay with this. Where I’m disappointed, is that a real scientist, according to me, would be so curious that he couldn’t stop its thoughts here. And I was waiting for you to have at least a begin of thought on the idea that if it’s not an error of measurement, and it cannot break the law, how to explain it <= AND HERE, science is ! Every experiment began with an idea, a speculation, or an observation that we didn’t expect.
Also, because of what we can see in life history, its desire of expansion, (“desire” of the entire universe ?), and because of the anthropic principle, I think that universe is made to have species like human, and life needs us to expand itself behind the frontier of the sky, so it’s for my intuition really obvious that interplanetary travel and life expand is possible and just a question of time, and so on for interstellar travel. For what the Universe is made if not made for life expansion ? For its observers expansion ? Thinking of that, if propulsion consuming propellant is clearly not the way we’re gonna travel in our galaxy, what is the propulsion that we’re gonna use ? Are we going to use propulsion ?
I’m okay with the fact that a real scientist has to be extremely precise, so I’m not sure at all it’s not a fake. But a real scientist has to be open-minded too, and that, for some of you, is a terrible lack that maybe prevent you to discover important things…
So the question is here :
If it’s not an error of measurement, and it cannot break the law, how to explain it ? I don’t wait for anything else than speculations, thoughts, sharing on this idea…
No one here actually knows that it doesn’t work. No one here is actually running experiments and exposing the source of the “signal”. E.G. Daiceman’s post reads as if Shawyer and Eagleworks are doing this hand in hand. When in fact there’s basically as many hypotheses as experimenters. You can see this if you actually read the NSF threads (5 of em).
The thing is falsifiable. The data is just not conclusive enough yet. Making your mind up or preaching what is “supposed” to happen or not, before the data paints a clear enough picture, is not science.
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The wonderful thing about burden of proof, though - and the burden of proof on this thing is incredibly high - is that we get to say that this thing is complete and utter bullshit right up until it isn’t. People arguing for “keeping an open mind” and all that crap are just engaging in apologetics.
People do not invent very specifically designed equipment to do very specifically aimed for things without some way of explaining the whys of those decisions. The inventor has no explanation as to why this works? Then they have no justification for any of the design decisions they made.
I’m sorry, but this is just ESP and Cold Fusion all over again. And we get to call it that, and worse, until discovery and independent confirmation papers are published in the world’s leading journals. Until then? We have no reason to believe any of this except that we want to. That’s motivated reasoning, and it’s not just the antithesis of science, it is also dangerous thinking. It’s what lets people be blinded and fooled, and led down dark alleys.
Until someone gives me a reason to believe it works, I will say with complete confidence that it doesn’t, just like I will say with complete confidence that they don’t have a bloody googily eyes bearded space unicorn in their back yard.
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Nasa is a fringe lab.
Plus Dr Martin Tajmar has a solid record of disproving propulsion produce by other drives that broke the rules and he himself got a positive result from the Em Drive his lab.
NASA isnt a lab at all. NASA is the government agency with a mandate to explore these things. Again, the CIA investigated ESP. That doesn’t mean we should take your neighbourhood psychic seriously.
And where is Tajmar’s in Science or Nature?
how could “it doesn’t work trust me” be more science than “it does work but don’t know how”
A lot of physicist is working to find a way to prove or indirectly confirm that the M theory is the good speculation that unifies laws at every scale, but nobody can prove it for the moment, and maybe nobody will be able to do but why physicist are still working so ?
And why not telling to Stephen Hawking that his work on black holes that he’ll never be able to experiment is antithesis of science ?
Maybe my examples are not good ones… but sure you can honestly find some things you believe in whereas there’s no proof for… how many mathematical conventions did you accept to play with for a lot of physic theories ? nobody prove that 0! equals 1. It is just admited, because this is the only way to explain some equations…
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Sawyer does have an explanation on how his engine work.
But you don’t need an explanation on why a thing works to develop it. We didn’t know how penicillin work, we just knew it killed bacteria without killing the patient, that didn’t prevent us from mass rollout of penicillin. Even today drugs get to market without fully understanding how they work. Thomas Edison developed the light bulb pretty much through random testing of materials and tinkering in his lab to find the perfect design. In fact many of the great inventors did the practical work of building stuff way before they ever bothered about developing the theory of how they work.
totally agree, hypothesis can engender experiments, but the inverse is inevitable too. how many law that we use now are the result of experiments that didn’t turn as it was expected ?
Still, I’m not admited that EM drive is working or it is total crap, none of these two assertions is strong. Just to say that you can imagine “what if”, because it’s fun and it’s also what science is made of : “what if”…
He didn’t when he built one. Post hoc explanations for decisions made in the past don’t cut it when one has to explain why they made the decisions they did.
You do when you’re designing highly sophisticated machinery for custom-built purposes. This guy wasn’t building a frigging bread box and accidentally stumbled across a violation of momentum conservation! He was building an engine that he had no reason to believe would work.
I’m sorry, but that smells fishier than rotting cod in the middle of an August heat wave.
But we knew that penicillin worked! We observed it working in the wild! Where did we see momentum conservation being violated in the wild?
No one designs a drug today without some ideas as to why they think it will work. They’re either designing something to reproduce effects they’ve witnessed in the wild, or in specific conditions in the lab, or they’re working from theory or the results of fundamental research to explore whether those ideas pan out when implemented.
So tell me, what reason did anyone have to explore the initial production of this tin rhombus? Other than it looked vaguely spacey?
No, he didn’t. I highly suggest you look into the history of the development of the lightbulb. Neither Edison, nor anyone else who was working on the issue, just pulled their ideas out of thin air without any reason for believing they would work. There is a long, well documented trail of strongly directed investigation leading from Volta all the way up to Edison for that.
Meanwhile, the EM drive has no such history.
And I bet you believe that they laughed at Einstein, too, don’t you?
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It a nasa run lab through, so hardly a fringe lab. And they have a mandate to explore these things. And they have repeated their results several times and got positives results each time.
An you can read all of Tajmar papers and where his work has been cited on Google scholar.
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?start=10&q=Dr+Martin+Tajmar&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
Dresden University of Technologies Space Systems isn’t a fringe lab either.
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They did when Einstein said God doesn’t roll dice, his whole argument against Quantum Mechanics. Which of cause has been proven wrong.
Most of those investigations involve building stuff to experiment with, not trying to come up with theoretical formulas on why they work first.
An Sawyer claims his ideas for the engine claim from working with British satellites.
Aww. I am disappoint. A googily eyed bearded space unicorn wouldn’t even overturn three centuries of established theory on the nature of reality. D:
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Shawyer was investigating the cause of orbital drift in UK government satellites when he discovered that thrust was being generated by the microwave transmitters. He was then granted development funding (UK taxpayers’ money) to produce the emdrive prototype. He pretty much did stumble upon it. Also, the process of discovery is entirely plausible given his career as an aerospace and orbital engineer (Matra Marconi Space).
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WHAT!!! /cries
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Two things.
First thing is that that doesn’t need proof because it’s an axiom. Math is not something natural, not something you can find in the wild. Math is a construct of the human brain, a set of rules we have created to help us in our lives. Upon the foundation of those rules (or variations of those rules, see non-eucledian geometries) we build other rules or discover properties of the constructs created by those rules. You can’t compare science to math because math works with something that is concrete, something we have built, a system with known building blocks from which we tend to build or discover other structures. In science we usually use the inverse process. We go from the higher level to the lower level.
Second thing is that in Principia Mathematica there is actual proof that 1+1=2. So some mathematicians really did bother with such things when at the time they thought that Math is something real. That they could use their minds to create a perfect self-consistent and self-proving system that would hold some absolute truth of nature, like the philosophers of old. In fact, some mathematicians still believe that Math is something real, something that exists and we discover, not something we have created.
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assuming you are right and math is only a construct of the human brain : humans being part of the nature, are you saying that human brains, that created mathematics, are able to create things that are not part of the nature ? With reductio ad absurdum it’s easy to understand the error in what you said… or it says that you assume human soul and human body don’t make one
math is on the nature (everybody knows the famous example of Fibonacci). And also explain me what is the difference between axiom and convention I don’t get it, and explain me what it changes in the fact that people saying that they can’t believe without proof on something are lying ?
Maths have no measures, because maths are not a real thing, but we use it to measure real things, giving it a measure unit, in other words is an agreement, an axiom,
Math is NOT on nature, because nature is not absolute, maths are absolute (1 is 1, 2+2=4), there are not absolutes on nature, if anything, quantum mechanics talk about an absolute nature but even there are inconsistencies (quantum energy = e but e can also be decomposed!!). There are no maths on nature, it’s not that we have maths on nature, but we have maths that MATCH what happens on nature, which is a whole different thing.