… Who is they? There’s as many models as experimenters/research teams.
Who cares?? That’s not even irreverence. It’s a straight, face-value question. Who cares if you or anyone feels comfortable armchairing it? The only thing that matters is data. Abstracting (these assertions of a priori confidence) the abstraction of reality (any of the conjectured models)'s unlikelihood is (again with all due respect even if it doesnt sound like it) just mental masturbation.
Data that identifies the source of the noise, or that characterizes the thrust. Anything else is just hot air. Both for and against EM-whatever. And I say this as someone who expects nothing more than a very messy variety of experimental errors. What keeps me interested is the investigative path started by Dr Rodal. I don’t know how you can pretend that only kooks are at work here if you’ve read his work to rule out thermal artifacts.
[quote=“ThornEel, post:100, topic:1425”]
Note, however, that overwhelming evidence is enough to replace proof in any other domain other than hard science. Engineering, justice, journalism, sociology, philosophy, marketing, finance… To put it simply, in any day-to-day life or even societal decision-making situation, that level of evidence is as good as proof.
[/quote]That’s shifting goal posts. We’re not in day-to-day life or societal whatever. We’re easily on the far end of that spectrum here.
[quote=“ThornEel, post:100, topic:1425”]
So they must indeed reproduce it, so it can be disproved and forgotten along Dean, hafnium batteries and cold fusion. Particularly as it will only cost a few thousand dollars to do so - a hefty sum for an individual but a drop in the bucket even for cash-strapped governmental organizations like NASA.
[/quote]You sound biased.
Yeah, a (non-)working, actual space drive to put on actual probes, that is clearly the domain of the purest theoretical science and not engineering and astronautics. Silly me.
Go figure, I’m biased against bad science and hack engineering.
So yeah, I give up. I and others put data, analysis and conclusion from qualified people whose job it is to work on the subject, and how the consensus is pretty much “it’s bonkers” but more polite; along with plenty of explanation about how and why it is the case to make it clearer, against repeated non-arguments of “you don’t provide data” and “you’re biased”.
If that’s not enough, I have nothing more to add.
This is actually exactly how science works, only we we throw in a few weasel words (like “probably”) to make it seem like we’re not wrong in those cases where we are.
The null hypothesis is always “no effect”. That means we assume it doesn’t work until there is strong evidence that it does.
I have no reason to believe you have a googily eyed bearded unicorn in your back yard until you give me some exceptionally good reasons to believe. I’m not going to be wishy-washy about that for the sake of appearing open minded. I’m happy to change my mind on the issue once you let me spend the afternoon with your magical beast, or if it gets documented and faces scrutiny in a leading and respectable journal.
Until then? Everyone is engaging in more apologetics than Agent Mulder.
Are you gonna write a paper on how googily eyed bearded unicorns do not exist, could never exist and will never exist, because he’s caliming to have on in his back yard though? I think that was the point of the sentence you quoted.
To carry on with an analogy, he might be riding that unicorn at some point in the future, future is a funny thing.
Point that you completely missed is that there is not much use to focus your scientific mind on disproving something that needs to be proven to be accepted.
I’m not trying to disprove anything, though. Ignoring the fact that proving a negative is logically not possible, and glossing over the fact that I’m a Popperian, I’ve put no actual work into disproving this drive.
All I’ve done is repeatedly assert the null hypothesis, and point out that there’s no reason for people to get their hopes up.
I’m an educator. I won’t let the Want To Believe Cheerleader Party go unchallenged on this one, because silence is too frequently interpreted as acceptance or agreement.
Kichae struck the head of the nail with that. Nobody here has put any more effort into disproving the drive than anyone here has spent proving it. However, the general public is easily swayed by bad journalism and things they see on the internet.
Remember the neutrinos that went faster than the speed of light? I bet almost everyone here does.
I also bet almost everyone here never followed up on the story to find out that the equipment was found faulty, and after adjusting for the error, the results were exactly the same as they have always been.
People are short minded and ignorant. They will happily gobble up a catchy headline and remember what it said forever, but never do the research to learn for themselves. That is dangerous, and stupid, because stupidity is nothing more than willful ignorance.
is also dangerous when you assume that people don’t do research, some of them might even be in the field of investigation and understand every single point of what articles say, even beyond, they might be also used to read articles like this one, they might be qualified people about the topic (EMF and/or general physics in this case), so be careful where you step in the internet, even more if you dare to call people stupid because they don’t think the same as you.
A fellow space sim gamer and a civil electronics engineer
Not once did I say nobody here has done no research on the subject, I said nobody has put more effort into disproving than proving. The opposite is neither affirmed or negated by that statement.
The point I was making is that the only reason I, and I believe Kichae, are bothering to argue against the disinformation and misinformation being posted here is that to not correct the falsehoods or question the theories is to allow anyone who reads the thread to believe that there are no opinions against it. There are plenty of other places on the internet that post these articles and unproven “truths” without allowing it to be spread here unchecked.
No you have not disproved anything, just took an impassible opportunity to mock someone with Fairy Dragons and Unicorns based on a out of context and misunderstood quote.
And you bitching about it is going to make a difference? People remember these type of headlines because of the wild possibilities that they open up for our future, they might not read about the followups, but anybody will notice that we don’t have flying cars, do not have free energy, are not colonizing Mars and don’t have instant communication that was promised/implicated by some of these wild claims.
I was going to post something along the lines of “this discussion is a few levels more pointless than usual, are you sure you guys want to keep arguing about whether or not you should be some specific level of optimistic about some test that may or may not have a result despite the likely timeframe of results being years and continued tests being very likely” but thought better of it, 70 posts ago.
but hey this thread has devolved to the point that i figure what the hell
The flaw in the neutrino experiment once it was found was equally reported on around the world, certainly there was articles in all of the major websites stating exactly what happen an how the false result was generated.
The difference with the EM-Drive to date is that no one has so far explain the thrust being recorded by multiple labs and multiple teams, . Using using different measuring tools. An now at least three different designs of the engine. Which all but eliminate faulty hardware explanation.
There likely to be a mundane explanation likely to be falsum being heated up by the microwaves but until someone do the experiments to show that and account for all of the thrust being recorded by the instruments, there likely to be a small chance of new physics but until someone either eliminate all thrust or identify the anonymous thrust there still a mystery there to be solved.
To use words like probably is not just “to look pretty”, or to protect you in the case you are wrong, it’s to protect you to not be wrong immediately.
About EM drive advancement, for the moment, the only way to be exact, a thing required when you pretend to speak science, is to admit there’s only probabilities, with one statistically stronger than the others, that’s all, because for the moment NOBODY KNOWS TOMORROW.
You and Red_Syns should stop take us for more stupid than we are, or stop to take you for more clever than you are. I think there’s a lot a smart people in I-Novae forums. It’s not a matter of physics, it’s a matter of logic. logic is not just to look pretty and is not the property of physicists or people with diplomas or anything else.
edit: I should never start this thread, I was in a spirit of sharing, and the result is sooooo far away from that. Thank you all.
I rarely hear people say “There’s a very high chance this pencil will fall to the floor if I drop it.” Most of them say “This pencil will fall to the floor if I drop it.”. If something has such a low chance of happening that it is almost certain, then people will consider it certain, even though at the back of their minds they have the knowledge that nobody is perfect and that there’s a very small chance they might be wrong.
I think this argument has been more about semantics and the threshold of probability that should be crossed for something to be considered certain and less about the actual probability of the EmDrive working.
Except you’re wrong. It is about physics, because this device breaks at least one of the fundamental laws. Not theories, not hypotheses. Laws. The few things we have found to date that have no known exclusions. And you want us to entertain the beliefs of someone who is heavily invested in this monetarily for…what reason? There is nothing more logical than math, and the math says “No, it doesn’t exist.” There are few things investigated as thoroughly as physics, and everything to date screams “No, it doesn’t exist.”
There is a modicum of evidence from reliable sources that there might be something there. The evidence, however, is nowhere near the original claims (3 tonnes of force for 1kW of power, IIRC). It is within the realm of error of the equipment used to measure results. What little has been detected has been detected not only in the “correct” design, but also in the control design.
You started a thread asking if it’s real or not, then get butthurt over everyone telling you no, it doesn’t exist. That makes you either stupid or insane.
By “it” I meant “to say it won’t where you logically can’t say more than it probably won’t”… definitely a matter of logic
But you’re right in one thing : I am probably stupid to maintain a discussion with people saying to me I’m stupid, I believe in unicorns, and telling me “how it works” like if they had seen Everything… I must be stupid, or insane.
Remember that science is a method, and it allows any of it’s results to be tested even if those results have been codified as laws. Testing is welcomed in science because it only makes the assertions presented more credible. To state that scientific laws are unchanging gospel that can never be questioned is a dogmatic standpoint.
The idea of the universe expansion accelerating appears to violate the laws of physics to me, but we are pretty sure that it is and some new science must explain it.
There are possible answers to the anomalous thrust problem that do not need to violate the (very probably safe) laws of physics and still result in the product of a useful propulsion device. The device could use quantum behaviour similar to the Casimir effect or some entirely new effect we’ve not codified yet.
I just leave this here from wikipeadia:
“Well-established laws have indeed been invalidated in some special cases, but the new formulations created to explain the discrepancies can be said to generalize upon, rather than overthrow, the originals. That is, the invalidated laws have been found to be only close approximations (see below), to which other terms or factors must be added to cover previously unaccounted-for conditions, e.g., very large or very small scales of time or space, enormous speeds or masses, etc. Thus, rather than unchanging knowledge, physical laws are better viewed as a series of improving and more precise generalizations.”
Similarly the EM drive could indeed invalidate these “laws”, I won’t argue about the likelyness however No offense, but your statements can sometimes come of as a little arrogant/belittleling.
