I’m disappointed to hear that, just because it’d be very useful for this to be a thing. But I love the science behind it, and this is the way it should be.
It would have been so cool for something like that to have worked. We don't get many discoveries like that.
That, my friend is the very definition of Snake Oil.
> We don't get many discoveries like that
On the contrary, we get far more than our fair share of charlatans claiming physically impossible results. See also: Theranos, Energous, Fontus and a million other scam companies.
If the EmDrive team was trying to sell NFTs and sucker people into investing in their radical invention it would be snake oil. But instead they approached this very responsibly, saying "we don't understand why this works. help us figure it out."
That's science done right, and a lot of new science has moved forward by questioning and changing the known rules. Whether or not it happens here.
Something that challenges something as solidly established as conservation of momentum: Snake oil.
The whole point of the term "snake oil salesman" is that someone is getting defrauded, and a dishonest person is making a quick buck.
Things seem "established" until evidence comes along indicating it may not be. It doesn't always result in a reevaluation, but there's times it does.
This feels like one of those times where there's those in the establishment are yelling at others that their studies are a waste of time and that they shouldn't bother....and if that advice was followed, we'd be missing many of the breakthroughs in knowledge we have today. Of course there will be many times they're unsuccessful. That's why accepting a negative result is a lauded part of the scientific process. Without the bravery required in challenging convention, we would never make progress.
This was indeed snake oil from very the start. A couple of people at NASA EagleWorks got permission to use some of their time and facilities to investigate it as a personal project. They did an extremely lazy attempt to control for errors, published their result without review, and the hype exploded.
The whole saga is rather frustrating tbh. We knew what the definitive result was going to be 4 years ago. Getting some improved measurement technology is cool and all, but I don't think we had to go about it this way.
Is it? How does a bicycle work?
https://www.nature.com/news/the-bicycle-problem-that-nearly-...
A bicycle isn't some unknown mystery of the universe, the very article you linked lays it out pretty clearly. A bicycle's stability is a function of its mass distribution, geometry and the gyroscopic effect. Their exact relation depends on the bicycle and since there is no one standard SI unit of a bicycle in the Bureau international des poids et mesures, there is no apparent equation. The "nearly broke mathematics" in the title is just pure clickbait.
"Use the handlebars to stay up. Lean to turn." Just like that, and they're off. (I am absolutely not exaggerating.)
(And, no, gyroscope effect has nothing to do with it.)
They get the idea to twitch the handlebars the opposite way, to lean, all by themselves. Most never notice they are doing it.
What really happens is that you always fall either to the left or to the right. If you fall in a desired turn direction, you turn a little. If not, you turn even more than is required to support a normal turn, so that your bike moves below you to the point that now your mass part is to the other side of it, and now you fall in the other, initially desired direction. Then you quickly turn at where you need. With practice all this movement reduces to centimeters and very smooth curves at all joints.
You move and (importantly) rotate your bike under yourself. It has nothing to do with leaning, because it’s the road/front tire that make a difference in a balance, not your flanks. Leaning helps to not fall off the seat when you cycle, but not in turns.
It’s clearly a trainer’s delusion to me (that thing when your trainer explains things that do not actually work/exist but you translate or ignore these terms showing respect to a good man).
Normally the plane of the bike, normal to the axles, cuts right through your center of mass.
Starting a turn by leaning is not usual for experienced bikers, but certainly works. For a beginner, staying upright while going more or less straight is what they need to work out first, but that invariably involves some spontaneous turns, so both are practiced.
What a century of children have been told is to steer with the handlebars, which is a reliable recipe for spills.
A) you're not trying to sell anything to anyone
B) you fully open source the design, specifications, schematics and your notes, and invite any interested third party to try to duplicate or debunk the effect.
C) you intentionally refrain from making hyperbolic claims about how revolutionary your thing is, before it's been duplicated. Maybe some clueless third parties engaged in hyperbole but not the original creators of the concept.
Science is working as intended.
What's the saying? If a theoretician is right just once, he's a hero; if an experimentalist is wrong just once, he's a goat.
I'm an investor in a competitor: Reach Labs which has systems in production powering swarms of low power devices wirelessly. I've seen the technology work in person.
"Give us enough billions, we'll have one working in 2050. Or 2060, or someday. It won't produce any power, oh no, of course not. But give us ten times more money after 2050 (or 2060) and by 2100, or 2140, or anyway someday maybe, we will have a prototype power station for you.
"Sure, it will cost a hundred times as much for each kW-hr as whatever you will be using by then—and the plant will destroy itself after only two years—but it will be fusion power. And that will be so cool!"
Tokamak fusion is mainly a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists, to maintain a population ready to draw on for weapons work, but is also a massive boondoggle providing a steady flow of corruption money to well-connected pockets. (Hot-neutron physicists are not getting the $billions.) Every cent spent on Tokamak fusion is stolen from actually practical work.
So don't talk to me about snake-oil until after you kill Tokamak.
Anything aneutronic that works will be infinitely better than Tokamak. If it doesn't have to work, you are back in Tokamak territory.