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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

So was it a hoax or a mistake by its inventors?

That's sort of an unnecessary dichotomy. Enthusiasm doesn't mean hoax, and the mistake was propagated by more than just the inventors.

Everything suggests that it was just science in action. There was an experiment, and it failed to reject the null hypothesis of 'no thrust'. A few groups have repeated the experiment, but not to the experimental power needed to thoroughly reject it. This test seems to be a more definitive rejection of it, but we're still not sure why there was any thrust measured in the first place, though there are some pretty reasonable leads on that.

I can see that to a point, but there was a commercial venture set up around it too.

Setting up commercial ventures based on speculative hypotheses is what a large chunk of Hacker News does for a living.

Those sort of things are always a bit grey and (IMHO) a bit sketchy, but it's worth noting that it's a bit costly to even test the ideas. Starting a business is a decent way to raise the capital to run the experiment, since grant money is likely far harder to get. But, yeah, doing it that way also really makes it basically impossible to be unbiased.

Let a few more rounds of experimentation and refutation go through, and if it's clear it can't work at all, and they stay in business without pivoting, then we can breeze right past hoax and jump to fraud. Time will tell about it, I guess.

I'd go more with mistake. Properly measuring things can be hard.

> Properly measuring things can be hard.

I think, if nothing else, this is the take-away from the entire EM-drive analysis. I like it because it applies to many things, including software.

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