A few years ago, before this news of the EM Drive started to appear, I was contacted by a friend who wanted to introduce me to an "inventor". This young invent

A few years ago, before this news of the EM Drive started to appear, I was contacted by a friend who wanted to introduce me to an "inventor". This young inventor that had not taken any courses in physics, but believed that he had invented a mechanical inertial drive mechanism that worked with rotating wheels and moving rods and weights. He was looking for investors to fund the construction of the mechanism. I tried to explain that conservation of momentum meant that his "drive" could not generate any net motion, but he never accepted my assessment; he kept asking me to explain in detail why this or that force combined with a rotating pair or arms wouldn't propel a vehicle forward. I told him that the laws of Newtonian physics would have to be tossed out if his invention indeed worked; he responded by saying that this is how scientific revolutions happened. It was all quite frustrating for both of us and reminded me of seeing a report on a national news program (NBC) perhaps twenty years ago of a farmer in the US that had inventing a perpetual motion machine. They showed the complex machine turning a wheel in the farmer's barn. The reporter was quite excited by the possibility that this would be the answer to unlimited energy. Seriously! Now there is this EM Drive, of which I am naturally skeptical, and no one seems to be able to explain the experimental results. It's ironic.