or c) an alternative explanation that still fits with most of what we know.
Anyway I agree with you, although it has already surpassed initial expectations stronger evidence is required.
Anyway I agree with you, although it has already surpassed initial expectations stronger evidence is required.
Assuming it is not actually violating conservation of momentum, it's pushing off something. Either that something is some part of the apparatus (in which case it's a boring old reaction drive) or else it's something environmental (in which case it's probably not going to work in the very different environment of deep space).
For this thing to be exciting as a drive per se, one of the following must apply:
1. Violates conservation of momentum, and like literally everything we know about physics is wrong.
2. Pushes against some kind of omnipresent ether-like medium, and darn near everything we know about physics is wrong.
3. Pushes against something in the device in some kind of very efficient way (ie accelerates reaction mass to a much higher exit velocity than conventional drives do), in which case why haven't we detected these high energy emissions?
I don't actually think this is true, because measurement error sounds more likely, but unlike conservation of momentum violation it would require only a minor tweak to known physics.
1. A process can convert normal matter to dark matter and at the same time accelerate that dark matter to some absurd speed -- so you can take a small reaction mass with you and use it very efficiently, but you don't have an ultra-efficient weapon system.
2. A process can push against some background medium of dark matter.
But. If there is dark matter in the vicinity of Earth (and while I agree it's "in the same places as ordinary matter," that's at a macroscopic, galactic level), it's unlikely to be at some convenient rest-y-from-human-perspective frame of reference. Which would suggest that the EM drive would work better facing one direction than others. Which is, I think, not congruent with the experimental evidence in front of us.
If we accept for the moment the existence of a pseudo-CDM identical to the concordance CDM except that it can interact with EmDrive microwaves, then the first question must be: why doesn't it interact with astrophysical masers in GMCs, affecting the structure evolution therein? (e.g., if astrophysical microwave hotspots move pseudo-CDM then there will be a bias in the location and age of young stellar objects and H II regions due to the change in energy-density). Some astrophysical megamasers have luminosities on the order of a thousand suns -- that's a lot of watts to shuffle dark matter around in your idea about the EmDrive, and that shuffling will drag dust and gas along with it.
Tweaking CDM into pseudo-CDM without it collapsing gravitationally by radiating photons directly or by colliding with charged particles is probably impossible for any but a tiny fraction of the overall mass-density of the dark matter sector. Collision or direct dissipation removes angular momentum from the particles such that they can fall a little closer to the centre of the galaxy. On a galactic scale, that leads to a much higher total energy density at galactic core at even fairly small fractions of the local energy density.
Avoiding that would require extremely demanding work and likely would have you adding a lot more new particles to the standard model to capture all the additional (broken) symmetries -- and it gets worse the greater the local energy density or equivalently the greater the interaction cross-section you require in order to interact with a physically small device like an EmDrive.
An ether that can be pushed against is also an ether that has a frame of reference, and that frame of reference is unlikely to be one that is extremely favorable to use of the EMDrive as a drive.
An ether that is in some way massless or frame-of-reference-less but still can be pushed against is a fundamental rethinking of physics.