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Every time these EM Drive people release another unconvincing result, oodles of people enthusiastically jump onto their bandwagon. Those of us who are experts i

• Alex3917 11y ago
  > if your mental model of the scientific community doesn't include "There exist a whole lot of crackpots out there", your mental model of science is wrong. Do you think this is a failure of your industry? E.g. there don't seem to be a lot of crackpots that go into plumbing or whatever. What is it about physics where it's apparently failing to provide most of the people in the field with adequate training?
  • Tloewald 11y ago
    Have you talked to a lot of plumbers?
  • scott_s 11y ago
    Most crackpots aren't in the field. The problem is that woking in physics requires an enormous amount of training, but some people are convinced they can contribute without that training.
    • deleted 11y ago
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  • Cerium 11y ago
    What about magnetic water cleaners? Anything crackpot is an attempt to usurp the way things are with the way people want them to be. Free energy, electric thrusters, magnetic health bracelets, one weird trick for clean teeth... these all apply to other professions but since they obviously don't work it is up to the physicist to ignore? explain? Physics is the belief in sanity in our confusing mess of a work. It is often an appeal to something simpler. What's the difference between a crackpot and a physicist? Physicists do science and get repeatable results.
    • Zardoz84 11y ago
      There is some effects of a strong magnetic field on a current of water over aragonite and other calcium minerals, on a way that make less probable to a pipe get obstructed. However, this requires : - a strong magnetic field in some special configuration. - a water current flow, like you can find on a pipe. These "magnetic water cleaners" that are only a mug with a magnet, don't match these two requisites. Ie, are a fraud.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
    The crackpots that go into plumbing exist... it's just that they're not crackpots about plumbing. They still email the other guy about discovering zero point energy and space aliens and whatnot. The crackpots about plumbing, call the plumber crackpots to fix their plumbing obviously. I've been trying to find a good barber for years now, last one I went to was a borderline schizophrenic. Off his meds, not on them, don't know. Didn't stop him from cutting hair. Being a crackpot doesn't stop someone from being able to snake a drain or fix pipes. > What is it about physics where it's apparently failing to provide most of the people in the field with adequate training? The same thing that's wrong with all fields... the people who go into that field do so because of enthusiasm for it. Not because they're competent at it. Enthusiasm for physics probably starts when some kid grows up watching Star Trek and whatnot.
  • DanBC 11y ago
    > E.g. there don't seem to be a lot of crackpots that go into plumbing or whatever. There are plenty of reality TV shows about crackpot plumbers - either idiot DIYers who don't know what they're doing and who ruin a home or cowboy rogue builders who con their customers and provide substandard work.
    • JadeNB 11y ago
      > either idiot DIYers who don't know what they're doing and who ruin a home or cowboy rogue builders who con their customers and provide substandard work. The idiot DIYer may be a crackpot, but the rogue builder isn't. A crackpot is someone who has no expertise, but (crucially) believes that he or she does (or at least that he or she has made a discovery in a domain believed to belong to experts); a con man is not a crackpot.
• grovulent 11y ago
  Crackpots get jobs at NASA apparently. See point 3).
  • Steuard 11y ago
    Yes, and I really don't understand it. Every dollar spent on these folks is a dollar that could more usefully be spent supporting, say, searches for life on Europa, or laying groundwork for asteroid mining, or improving exoplanet searches, or heck, mapping Earth's surface composition to find Mayan ruins. I've seen theories about why NASA continues to fund such a patently baseless project. (As I noted in my earlier linked comment, the project's own FAQ answer that tries to explain why their drive doesn't violate conservation of momentum essentially says that it does violate conservation of momentum.) I don't know which ones are right, or whether it's a good idea, but I'm frustrated about the credibility that NASA continues to lend to them.
    • grovulent 11y ago
      I wasn't going to give your reply further consideration than what I gave... It doesn't deserve more. But I really feel something needs to be said here - given that you are in a position of power, and imo - setting an appalling example. Since we're citing experience - let me give you some of mine. I have been in academia for many years as both a PhD student and an administrator. I have worked in many different departments - with many different types of academics. I have studied under them, I have sat in their committee meetings, I have gotten drunk with them. The majority of them are just decent folk. Sure, there were some weirdos, some lazy... and plenty whose research is questionable. But I would say with supreme confidence that exactly 0 of these people deserved to be called a "crackpot"... i.e. deserving of the implication of being totally divorced from reality. But there was a significant minority (20% approx) that I would quite happily describe as arrogant, status obsessed assholes, who would sooner shove their own colleagues under a bus than acknowledge the SLIGHTEST value in what they were doing. So no - my mental model of science does not include large numbers of crackpots. And I will rejoinder if your mental model doesn't include large numbers of arrogant, status obsessed assholes, then YOUR mental model of science is wrong. I will further retort, that if you are going around calling significant numbers of your peers "crackpots", then you need to seriously consider that you might be one of those assholes I just described. And if this is something you really can't bring yourself to do - I would advise a more general maxim as a matter of simple pragmatic, self preservation: Stop whining about what's in your neighbour's bowl. It just doesn't play well.
• quesera 11y ago
  While that's all certainly true, NASA physicists are not all crackpots, and at least some of them are careful experimenters. Newtonian mechanics was also extremely well-tested. Unexplained error is always interesting and sometimes exciting.
  • eru 11y ago
    Newtonian mechanics still holds for `normal' levels of energy. Relativity and Quantum mechanics only show up on the edges. dzdt says that this device does NOT probe the edges---no high energies for example.
    • TearsInTheRain 11y ago
      The photoelectric effect which led to the discovery of Quantum mechanics is not at all high energy physics and could barely be called an edge case...
    • rbanffy 11y ago
      > dzdt says that this device does NOT probe the edges A Cesium clock on board a 747 will slow down even though the 747 will not be flying at relativistic speeds. It's just that it's a clock good enough to show a very small difference. They are measuring a very small, barely detectable, force.
  • deleted 11y ago
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• Cshelton 11y ago
  I think this is a case where the physicists and engineers working on these experiments say one thing, but what gets delivered in the headlines and articles, including NASA's own marketing/journalism department, is completely off. It's just PR. People have been talking about successful experiments with perpetual motion for how long...
• ChrisArgyle 11y ago
  My thesis advisor had a saying about crackpot physicists: The easiest way to get noticed is to say that Newton is wrong, Einstein is wrong.
  • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Also every other biography - Jefferson was human, Washington was just a man, MLK was a regular guy...
• dllthomas 11y ago
  Even assuming we knew with perfect certainty (which may be a reasonable approximation but isn't actually the case) that the effect was due to experimental error, given that we yet cannot point to the error we may very well have useful things to learn about experimentation. Any tiny chance of upending well-established laws of physics is just a bonus.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
    Even this seems unlikely... while it would be great if we could learn to conduct better experiments or learn to recognize the flaws of bad experiments earlier, what's missing are instruments precise enough to determine the exact cause of the results here. Am I wrong?
    • dllthomas 11y ago
      "[T]hings to learn about experimentation" probably sounded more fundamental than I'd meant it. Improvement of precision of instruments should probably fall in the category, as far as my reasoning above goes. It could certainly still be useful.
  • Steuard 11y ago
    Can't we learn a lot of wonderfully useful things about experimental technique while studying phenomena that are more likely to be of interest in their own right? Because in this case, the subject matter of the experiments is explicitly in contradiction with some very well confirmed physical principles, and well within the range of conditions where those prior tests have been done. (This isn't like quantum mechanics supplanting Newtonian physics at molecular scales, this is like someone designing a funny-shaped inclined plane and claiming that Newtonian physics might not apply because nobody has measured accelerations on that shape of ramp before.)
    • dllthomas 11y ago
      "this is like someone designing a funny-shaped inclined plane and claiming that Newtonian physics might not apply because nobody has measured accelerations on that shape of ramp before" My understanding has it (and admittedly I've not been paying that close attention, precisely because it's not likely there's anything super exciting here) that the difference between that case and this is that it's not just a claim that understood laws "might not apply", but that we actually have experimental results that look funny. That is precisely the case when we're most likely to learn something. (Probably not something tremendously surprising - that's what "tremendously surprising" means :-P)
• chojeen 11y ago
  As an ex-doctoral student in astrophysics, I can confirm that there are a lot of crackpots out there. The most common claim was that heliocentricity was correct, if you can believe it.
  • KMag 11y ago
    They believe heliocentricity is correct as in they believe the orbital mechanics work out only if you pick Sol as your inertial reference? They don't believe you can pick an arbitrary inertial reference and get the physics to work out, a la general relativity?
• baldfat 11y ago
  Released by NASA. I still as a non-scientist see this as something big. If NASA is saying there is thrust than there is thrust correct? Or is it just "impossible" so it means an error in testing instantly? Did you look at the results? (Fishing for more details)
  • jlmorton 11y ago
    It's not NASA, the organization, that has released a vetted, reviewed technical paper about this. This article is based on the casual communications of a NASA scientist, who works for EagleWorks, and has been communicating with a community of interested persons via the NasaSpaceFlights.com forums. Indeed, NASA is annoyed with the continued press from this, and has prohibited any press releases from being released without proper NASA vetting. The clickbaity online media, however, is more than willing to take a forum posting by a "NASA scientist" as NASA proper. I have nothing but respect for the work being done by EagleWorks and Paul March, but this is not a NASA communication.
• JoeTwelvePack 11y ago
  Perhaps your mental model of `the regular folks community` is wrong? Let me try to explain why I, a regular schmoe who knows nothing about physics, reads these articles (and frequently, the comments) every time a new round comes out. This is how this story looks to me in the news as someone who has no association with NASA, etc. 1) Some nutter comes up with a theory of "mystic orgone drive" or something and explains how it works and demonstrates that if he hooks his widget up to the mains, it pulls. 2) A bunch of other people are like "lol idiote" and do the same thing with their own copies of his widget and are like "wtf..it is pushing..." 3) Somehow, NASA decides to investigate the mystic orgone drive. Because they are NASA and not a bunch of morans, they do a couple things differently from everyone else: - They are very very careful to try to eliminate sources of error such as breezes from experimenter tinfoil hats, etc. and they document this experimental rig very carefully. - They run the experiment backwards as well as forewards. Why not see if there's a dose response curve? Why not see if hooking the negative cable to the positive terminal produces backwards mystic orgone drive or whatever? - They build a version of the device very similar to the original mystic orgone spec, except they put different runes on it or something that are incompatible with mystic orgones. The results of this are (1) still pushing (2) hooking it up backwards makes it push backwards (3) the mystic orgone runes do nothing; that is to say the non-mystic version works just as well, so the mystic orgone priest's explanation of the device is wrong. I just don't see how this is not interesting to you, as scientist. Science, especially physics, is about building mathematical machines that can predict the future: if you do this and this, this will happen. Classical mechanics is probably the second-most rigorously tested and understood of the mathematical future prediction machines of all time. Here, you have a bunch of very careful, expert men and women hooking up the mystic orgone drive to the mains power, and it pushes! But the prediction says it should NOT push, at least not nearly this much! How is that not interesting?! I would think this would seem to a physics professor to be the essence of science, and exactly what ordinary people would and should get excited about. It's very difficult for regular people to understand that its surprising that at three giga electron volts the tau lepton did not decay into any of the known lucky charms marshmallows or whatever, DESPITE what Cereal Supersymmetry predicts. It's very easy to understand that putting a pair of empty jiffypop tins in a vacuum and powering them should not lead to them trying to bend their handles. It's very easy to understand that if anyone would be capable of checking this carefully, it's NASA. So if NASA does this and they don't know why they are detecting measurable jiffypop handle bend many orders of magnitude higher than predicted, how do you not click on that article? How do you not think that's interesting?
• snowwrestler 11y ago
  What's wrong with enthusiasm? It's bad when enthusiasm can be abused to defraud investors or customers. But that's not really what's happening here. The NASA guys are not trying to scam anyone, they're spending a bit of time and money to run some good-faith tests, just in case the universe can still surprise us. I'm not saying the "emdrive" is likely to work--it's almost certainly not going to change physics. I'm just saying I can't see the harm in folks getting excited about the possibility. It's essentially hope--hope that we'll get to experience some of the amazing things we tell stories about, stories like Star Trek and other sci-fi.
  • scott_s 11y ago
    Steuard answered a very similar question the last time around: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9473914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9473914