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This is the worst part of the internet. Amateurs and 2nd year college students dismissing months/years of hard work by actual professionals​. They take all thi

• throwanem 9y ago
  Professionals don't always get things right, either, and reactionless thrust doesn't really fit into our best current physical model. That doesn't mean it can't exist - but, given the general usefulness of our current model in predicting how things will behave, there's reasonable cause for extraordinary skepticism in response to claims that one of its "can't happen" conditions is inaccurate. Maybe the paper's conclusion is accurate! Maybe this physical "can't happen" actually can, and the model needs extending to account for that. It wouldn't be the first time. But it also wouldn't be the first time that a "can't happen" really can't happen, and the result suggesting otherwise is an artifact of the way an experiment was run, rather than an accurate description of a previously unsuspected physical phenomenon. Going by past examples, the latter is much more likely than the former. So there's nothing unreasonable, even for people like myself who aren't knowledgeable enough to evaluate the paper on its own merits, in reserving credulity until the result is shown by other experimenters to be reproducible.
  • Jedd 9y ago
    I totally understand some scepticism, but there appears to be the archetypal response of 'Oh, I bet NASA hasn't thought of this ...' when it's inconceivable that NASA hasn't, in fact, thought of that. Some of the most sensible comments I've seen here have basically said 'It seems to violate what we know of physics, so hopefully it's right and we have some interesting times ahead'. It's the dismissal, out of hand, after a relatively extensive amount of research and study -- especially compared to what the armchair critics can supply -- that I find frustrating. Yeah, sure, I get that it seems implausible, but it transcends hubris to know that it's simply experimental error.
• anc84 9y ago
  This is the best part of the internet. Amateurs and 2nd year college students challenge professionals to make their months/years of hard work comprehensible. They take all this work and question it unless presented with hard, verifiable facts and data, sometimes over a coffee. The internet is full of amateurs and they are very very eager to point out when they are not fully grasping something, in one way or another.
• vorotato 9y ago
  Lets be clear here, the people who ran published this test are also skeptical about this. However they did everything possible to reduce and remove errors from their calculations. This means one of two things, either our present understanding of physics is incorrect, or our present understanding of experimental physics and the ways errors creep into our experiments is incomplete. The scientists who did this test suspect the latter, however they've done everything they know to remove mistakes. Much like when we are troubleshooting why our computer won't start we don't jump to the CPU is dead, they also don't just jump to the big conclusion. It's still neat though because we'll still learn something meaningful, and you never know it really could open new understanding of reality.