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Article summary - the science and the experiment behind the EmDrive claims are flawed. My take - the people pushing this are charlatans and should be ignored c

• dpark 10y ago
  I don't see why they should be ignored. Right now what we have is an unexpected and unexplained effect. The scientific thing to do is to understand what is happening. The fact that the initial claims may be from charlatans is irrelevant. "We don't understand it and the explanation is likely boring, so let's ignore it" might be a decent engineering tradeoff, but it comes from a goal of cost savings, not from a goal of improving our knowledge of physics. Science is about improving our knowledge and understanding.
  • simonh 10y ago
    I agree ignoring it isn't a responsible approach, but if the paper is flawed and the 'measurements' are below a meaningful level, what that means is we still don't yet even know if there is any effect at all.
    • dpark 10y ago
      For sure, we don't know if there is any effect. I'm guessing there isn't. There also weren't any faster-than-light neutrinos but investigating the anomalous measurements from OPERA until they were understood was the scientifically sound choice.
      • euyyn 10y ago
        Because those scientists: 1) Were looking for the error in their method, not trying to get press and/or budget using a claim of FTL particles. 2) Had already done their darnest to not be fooled by their experimental setup. And this was a huge lot of phycisists having looked. Neither 1 nor 2 hold here; and so these people are wasting other people's time.
        • dpark 10y ago
          Haven't multiple independent scientists now replicated the results? It's no longer just the original proponents. It's multiple scientists trying to understand what is causing the measurement.
  • archgoon 10y ago
    "They're making shit up" is a perfectly scientific explanation. See N-Rays or Vulcan.
    • dpark 10y ago
      "They're making shit up" isn't a scientific explanation for repeated anomalous results by independent experimenters. The likely explanation is "it's really hard to isolate this setup so that we can measure it effectively".
      • archgoon 10y ago
        Sure it is. It happens all the time. See N Rays and Vulcan. Small effects, barely reproducible results are expected when you've got people all over the world looking at something.
        • dpark 10y ago
          Thankfully the scientific community just ignored N-rays and Vulcan entirely despite the repeated observations. Or well-respected scientists investigated and debunked the anomalous results. Because that's how science works.
          • archgoon 10y ago
            Actually, Vulcan basically got discarded because a better theory arose independently (we still don't know what people actually saw that resulted in the Vulcan transits). People still on occasion poke around looking to see if anything shows up, but so far, nothing. That is to say, investigating Vulcan actually increased the false belief in Vulcan. In the case of the emdrive, we've got plenty of theoretical reasons to assume it's wrong. It's really on the proponents to come up with more convincing evidence. Occam's razor and all that. If you feel bored, check it out, but there's probably nothing there.
            • dpark 10y ago
  • powera 10y ago
    > Right now what we have is an unexpected and unexplained effect. It's expected that the people working on this for 15 years would claim to find an effect, since they clearly have an agenda that they want to be seen as right. It's explained by this very article how there are many reasons other than "propulsion-less thrust" that would cause the reported results.
    • kobeya 10y ago
      Except that the recent work is by new people who were skeptics trying to refute the idea and failed. That's why people are so interested now while no one cared 15 years ago.
      • euyyn 10y ago
        > new people who were skeptics trying to refute the idea and failed Jelly beans cause acne. But if you investigate further, only green ones. Unless you keep pouring money down the drain with it, in which case it's only the green ones of a certain weight. https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
        • kobeya 10y ago
          That has zero relevance to the current situation.
          • euyyn 10y ago
            No. The relevance is that you aren't going to read of the cases in which someone built the thing and didn't find any effect at all.
            • dpark 10y ago
              Given the press this has received, negative results for EmDrive seem extremely publishable.
            • kobeya 10y ago
• madengr 10y ago
  Maybe so, but it's the duty of science to disprove it now.