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[PTTG??]

More EMdrive noise.

I don't want to hope, but I'm hoping. People keep saying it might make free energy, but that is not necessarily true; it's quite unclear what's going on inside that thing.

It's just... a 32 month round trip to Saturn and back.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It's bizarre how many rounds it has held up. I'm not investing until we get a checked vacuum test, but its at least unusually good at being found out, whatever the thrust is.

[Reelya]

More EMdrive noise.

I don't want to hope, but I'm hoping. People keep saying it might make free energy, but that is not necessarily true; it's quite unclear what's going on inside that thing.

It's just... a 32 month round trip to Saturn and back.

The problem is that the sites citing evidence about the EMdrive are way more fringe that sites citing evidence for cold fusion. I mean, compare the EMdrive news to this:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090323110450.htm

- first, you have "Science Daily". Which is arguably one of the most mainstream science-only reporting site that exists.

- They cite the "American Chemical Society" as the source of the story, which is a mainstream science body. It's the umbrella organization for chemical scientists in the USA.

- The story has actual quotes from named PhD researchers from "US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR)", which is a reputable institution. And you can google the quoted scientists and find out they've published papers about the subject in relevant peer-reviewed journals.

But with all those verifiable levels of detail, most people will still say the story is a load of shit. So what does that say about hard-to-verify EMdrive claims on kooky-sounding websites like "next big future"? The claims are complete wank compared to even cold fusion claims.

[Starver]

More EMdrive noise.

Are they trying to make it look like pure technobabble?

I follow what they're trying to do (well, I think I do!), but there's at least three erroneous technical details that I saw that they could have done better proofreading, to catch, and the result looks like them throwing a load of buzzwords together to obfuscate the whole experiment.  IMO.

[wierd]

I read the article-- It was about how Nasa-Eagleworks has modified their experiment to account for additional sources of potential error. It acknowledges that there is still a problem with thermal expansion under load, which can cause an erroneous signal, especially while under vacuum. This last bit is quite telling; it means you haven't been paying attention Starver-- It has been getting tested in a vacuum chamber. (And on earth, there is only so much evacuation of the test chamber that can be accomplished. There's no such thing as a true vacuum. There will ALWAYS be a few stray atoms of gas in the chamber.)

Besides, wasn't EmDrive independently tested and confirmed by the chinese? How many confirmations WOULD it take to be considered "confirmed", in your opinion?  Remember, science is expensive yo.

[Reelya]

If you go off one single verification, then you'd have to automatically accept cold fusion, since not just dozens, but almost 100 labs around the world reported verification from 1989 to around 1994 when I read about it in New Scientist.

I mean, the US Navy's Spawar labs were one of the labs claiming they verified the original Fleischman-Pons experiment in the early 1990's. I remember reading (in New Scientist magazine, not a website) that they got no reaction at all with most palladium cathodes, then they stuck a different one in and got a reaction. So they said "what's different about these ones?", and had them chemically analysed, and it turns out the ones that worked for the Fleischman-Pons experiment had specific impurities - boron specifically. So, if you do the test with pure palladium you get nothing but if you have a palladium/boron alloy then you get the reaction. That of course doesn't explain what's going on or claim it's fusion, it just explains why some people failed to replicate the experimental data by following the "steps" that Fleischman-Pons took.

[Starver]

This last bit is quite telling; it means you haven't been paying attention Starver

Wut?

I know they were using a vacuum chamber, etc.  I never said they weren't.  I think you're reading something in what I said that I didn't even touch...

(And, when it comes to the Chinese 'confirmation', the Pons/Fleischmann 'Cold Fusion' results were at one point 'confirmed' by the likes of Texas A&M and Georgia Tech, before such results were withdrawn.  Last I heard about the Chinese researchers was that "publicity is very unwelcome", and apart from the normally-reticent nature of information transfer out of China, it also reminds me of South Korean Hwang Woo-suk who extensively fabricated his cell-line cloning experiments, among other things.  It might be a good idea to get a more consistent and global support for the concept of a reactionless drive before we start just throwing away Occam's razor without a care in the world...  Open minds are good, but they can be too open...)

[wierd]

Yes, but I was looking for a number. I agree, it's a very shaky plot, that only has two points of data.

However, one needs to consider the chain of discovery here.

1) The Cannae group "discovers" anomalous thrust on one of their test articles. They ask reputable scientists to test it. Fearing "cold fusion" backlash from such research, said reputable scientists dont want to touch it. They asks China.

2) China tests it, and likes the results enough to build a freaking HUGE test article; they report absurd amounts of thrust, given the energy input. (enough to exceed the thrust that would be expected through thermal excitation alone, given the energy delivered to the test article.)

3) In the US, Nasa-Eagleworks decides to test it further. They develop the Q-Thruster modelling framework hypothesis for the device, and begin more detailed testing. Their results with a number of different instruments show a clear alteration of photon paths in vacuum when test articles are active, which is how they derived their Q-thruster model parameters.

At this point in the game, we need experimental refutation of the Q-thruster modelling framework postulated by the Eagleworks team.  Not rhetorical grandstanding arguments.

[Starver]

At this point in the game, we need experimental refutation of the Q-thruster modelling framework postulated by the Eagleworks team.

Wrong way round.

Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof.

ETA: That probably looks very blunt.  Let's put it this way: At this point in the game, it's the same as the Italian physics lab tentatively saying that it appears that it is detecting faster-than-light neutrinos from CERN.  Everyone knew that they had to check that there weren't experimental errors involved.  Of course, the media picked it up and ran with it, before it before they discovered that there were experimental errors, in that case...

[wierd]

Considering the degree of laser light deflection in at least 3 different kinds of interferometer that eagleworks has used to examine the test articles, Unless you are claiming that eagleworks is straight up fabricating data, there is clearly something going on in the q-thruster. 

Given that the test articles are not that sophisticated, and that laser interferometers are not that unusual for precision instrumentation in labs, this kind of research could be mass replicated, but isnt.

Why? "OMG! Its cold fusion all over again! Ooow my funding!"

[Starver]

Why? "OMG! Its cold fusion all over again! Ooow my funding!"

As I obviously ETAed it after you replied, I'll also put it in the reply.  It's more like "OMG! It's faster-than-light neutrinos all over again!"  More testing!  More rigour!  More people replicating the results!  Then we can talk.

Eagleworks probably isn't fabricating data (and, for all I know, neither is NWPU), just like OPERA didn't.  But more science please, to make sure there aren't any trivial errors...

[Reelya]

There seems to be some confusion about the peer-review status of the paper on EMdrive. It was published in Acta Astronautica, which is a supposedly peer review journal according to the article.

But unfortunately, there are two unrelated publications called "Acta Astronautica". One is the peer-review journal, and the other is the monthly journal of the International Academy of Astronautics which basically covers interesting developments in space travel research, and I'm guessing is not as rigorous in the review as the older and more prestigious independent Acta Astronomica.

I checked the source cited from the hacked article, and it's Acta Astronomica with publisher listed as International Academy of Astronautics. So it's the society's gazette and not the peer-review academic journal. Kinda confusing all this.

[wierd]

Why? "OMG! Its cold fusion all over again! Ooow my funding!"

As I obviously ETAed it after you replied, I'll also put it in the reply.  It's more like "OMG! It's faster-than-light neutrinos all over again!"  More testing!  More rigour!  More people replicating the results!  Then we can talk.

Eagleworks probably isn't fabricating data (and, for all I know, neither is NWPU), just like OPERA didn't.  But more science please, to make sure there aren't any trivial errors...

Which is exactly what I was decrying-- This isn't like the OPERA experiment, where it cost billions of dollars to build the testing suite, which naturally discourages third party verification.  We are talking a simple test article that can be fabricated with minimal effort by a bozo in his garage, and a laser interferometer. 

Other than "OMG! It hurts my reputability to even CONSIDER testing this!" as an explanation, what other is there for the q-thruster not being more widely tested independently?

More bluntly-- Why is EagleWorks the ONLY research group willing to look at this?

[Reelya]

If bozo can build it in his garage then that's dubious in a different way. Go make a working on then drive it down the street. The visual proof of something moving should convince everyone.

Well, the lack of a peer-reviewed paper to analyse probably has a lot to do with it. Go publish a paper. Also the way almost all the knowledge comes from some fringe website no-one ever heard of wouldn't grow confidence in the scientific community that there's something worth investigating. That would be like me uncovering a political scandal then only posting about it on the forums of infowars.com, then complaining that no-one takes my inside information seriously.

I mean, the trickle of insider information from "Paul March" that's basically written to be deliberate unreadable is another red flag. It's like he's deliberately trying to make it look more crackpot with every utterance. Go write a blog, or articles on a less-fringe website, and use language that can be understood as non-gibberish if Paul March is really interested in getting support. I mean if you ONLY post a wall of technobabble on forum.nasaspaceflight.com, and that's 99% of your public-relations efforts, you're an idiot who deserves to lose your funding. Either keep your mouth shut or make press releases.

[wierd]

Think critically about what you are actually saying there though.

The reason why Q-thruster is not being published in reputable journals, is because the editorial boards of the reputable journals wont accept such papers-- Due to lack of peer review. (Which they wont get much of, since they arent in a reputable journal)

Its a vicious little circle.

About the best they could probably muster is Arxiv. You can totally forget getting this into Elsevier unless several big labs got behind it to add clout.

Also, RE: Bozo driving down the street--- There are plenty of Youtube videos of bozos building and testing the emdrive, with varying levels of experimental quality control. (I would not consider that good evidence personally, given the nature of youtube hoaxing.) Basically, this kind of proof does not convince anyone-- let alone everyone.  The fact that Eagleworks is actively listening to criticism and altering its test aparatus accordingly indicates that peer review *IS* happening. That scientists are bad at PR is not surprising; that isn't what they do for a living.