If you go read what the real experts in a field have to say about the state of knowledge, they are often incredibly humble. They state that there is so much that they do not know. That are so many things that could be wrong. That there are even bigger pictures just beyond their grasp.
Now these reactionless thruster concepts don't look to be doing too well. But I for one am not particularly convinced that mach 's principle is so stupid.
We are pretty sure of what we are sure of and we are pretty sure of what we aren't sure of, impressions notwithstanding. Science is a method, not a set of facts, and it has a built in mechanism to allow greater insights to replace lesser ones. As long as we stick to science we'll one day find the limits of what is knowable.
No physical law is holy for this purpose, although scientists will necessarily have heuristics for what presumed observations they consider good enough to examine closer. Evidently, the EmDrive observations made the threshold! And now we know for sure. Well, close enough, anyway.
I’m rather inclined to believe the opposite. That if we stick to science, we never will.
Well you're not sticking to science when you assume any non-explained phenomenon is "impossible" and dismiss it outright.
Science has a long list of "impossibles" that have been proven to be possible. Though of course that list was mostly of phenomenon we couldn't ignore.
Saying "EMdrive is impossible given our current knowledge therefore it is not worth measuring" is tautological!
Electricity and magnetism were seen as separate phenomenon as well and it seems a lot of people would be opposed to even try to put a compass next to a wire!
The only thing I know is that the skeptics don't get the Nobel Prizes.
Good, they measured, and as expected, no thrust. Cool.
Everyone who doesn't want to invest 10000 human lives and a small countries total resources trying to find out if maybe oxidization isn't really exothermic but just somehow always looks that way (is fire hot?), isn't guilty of being incurious or religious.
Come on now.
The person who discovered nitroglycerine didn't somehow find the amount they could make to be right on the edge of detection.
AKA, the bullshit asymmetry principle
Certainty doesn’t exist, in fact, the only certainty is the certainty that everything we know is wrong at some level of resolution.
Science is the philosophy of being less wrong about nature over time.
I think he’s conflating the process with all the other human factors involved. Sure, Galileo maybe did some shady stuff to convince people of his arguments. But that in no way makes a telescope stop working the way it does.
This has caused some controversy in the scientific community because researchers have been caught using the methodology to "reverse engineer" hypotheses without disclosure, effectively gaming the system.
(Albert Einstein)
"The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
(Sir Arthur Eddington)
"Newton's law of universal gravitation is usually stated as that every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers"
This is still a law. We haven't proved this to be true even though it looks to be true.
Laws can get superseeded.
The phlogiston theory is a superseded scientific theory that postulated the existence of a fire-like element called phlogiston (/flɒˈdʒɪstən, floʊ-, -ɒn/)[1][2] contained within combustible bodies and released during combustion
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory
Another example is Luminiferous Aether
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether
They are just theories in the end where most are probably correct somewhat.
At a fundamental level, you must throw your results at the wall of publication and see if they stick, the only way science sticks is when it can be replicated by others. It remain on the wall!
When people’s refutation of things like the em-drive is simply “this can’t work” my response is “prove it” not because I believe, but because “can’t work” just isn’t science, science is done by proving that something “does not work”. That means for something like the em-Drive you prove it doesn’t do what it claims, you prove it by replication and better measurement... and you learn how to build things better, learn how to measure better and that’s the value of these efforts! Or you prove it by detailed non destructive analysis of the experiment apparatus and prove your work by detailed physical simulation, publishing your code to prove you didn’t make any mistakes yourself! You cannot just give the answer you must show your work if you expect to go around calling what you do “science”. Providing such proof is not a waste, or bad science, it is the very essence of science itself.
If all we did was experiments we'd surely find some interesting stuff but without theory to guide where to do the next set of experiments science would be very inefficient. It's the closing of the loop that powers this tremendous progress you see from the renaissance to today.
Without that we'd be stuck in alchemy, astrology and other pseudo sciences.
Extreme “Exploitation” Bias: “For maximally economical progress, experimental physics must strictly stay within the hard boundaries established by theoretical frameworks.”
Extreme “Exploration” Bias: “For maximally fundamental progress, experimental physics must question all theoretical assumptions and boundaries with extreme suspicion.”
It makes sense to diversify the kind of experimental investments we make along this risk/reward or exploration/exploitation spectrum. There are unique dangers if we weight too heavily on either extreme.
No, science starts with an observation which is not explained by the prevailing theory. Then you form a hypothesis, etc.
At least in principle. The reality of science is a lot messier.
The purpose of these is to narrow down which experiments are being performed, trying to choose experiments that will try their hardest to break an existing theory.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light#Time_of_flight_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2%80%93Keating_experim... (This article currently has an incorrect edit made yesterday. It seems to be based on a mistaken assumption that the rotating earth is a stationary reference frame. The opening paragraph should read "were consistent" rather than "were not consistent".)
Just to clarify - are you implying scientists crave certainty, or non-scientists who enjoy reading about science crave certainty?
The life scientists I know are the people in my life who are the most comfortable with uncertainty, or at least can recognize how uncertain the world can be. Perhaps they crave quantifying the uncertainty? But they certainly understand, respect, and live with uncertainty.
Mostly the latter, but also the former to some degree. The scientists holding the status quo are often the most resistant to a paradigm shift.
Which is ironic as we know our models are wrong somehow as we can't mesh Quantum mechanics and general relativity. There is clearly some undiscovered idea or principal.
Science is about the process not about the body of knowledge we amassed. Science is about doing experiments to poke at the gaps of our knowledge. Not to like the Ancient Greeks debate our way to truth or worse declare something false based clearly on our flawed understanding.
Celebrity scientists aren't deified... in fact, they have a tough life because people assume they're all knowing. Look at our man Neil DeGrasse who called a Bull a Cow because where he lives in NYC everything is a cow and he got ripped by other scientists for being stupid.
There is no universality to people period... i'm not sure why you feel its important to label some as "scientism" when there is no such thing as "scientism" with any universality.
As for scientism, there's a lot of people in this thread who essentially said "We could have known it wouldn't work by basic application of conservation of momentum". Or some other principal held to the standard of absolute truth.
Our knowledge of the world is faulty and incomplete. All scientific knowledge is subject to tweaking or replacement based on experimental evidence. Not the other way around.
We have models and guesses of how the world works, we don't have its source code.
The strength of the established physics just means that there is an extremely high chance that the EM drive is experimental error, especially with the small effect size, rather than something novel.
For many of us, we just accept that science is, what it is, and its the facts we know at this time. That doesn't mean unwavering absolute faith as implied by saying it's religious, it's just we don't feel the need to have knowledge be anything else other than knowledge that we continuously build upon.
Of course in general, lots of scientists know much more than other scientists and there is always bickering, people who have their identities married to it and so much more - but often times those very same people are often religious too so i question if the religiosity argument really exists or if its merely weaponized by people who fear the comfort of others who are ok with science without faith.
Throughout history the greatest clashes between faith and science have occurred when scientific understanding threatens the faith-based assumptions of the age. Imagine Abraham arguing with God over his request to sacrifice Isaac. Instead, he reasoned that God would find another way.
Sometimes our understanding of religion limits our thinking with regard to not just science, but our faith as well.
So, I'm not an enemy of science, I just dislike people harping on about 'impossible' from behind their keyboards when they have little more than a rudimentary knowledge of the subject at hand and too high an opinion of authority.
Impossible is a absolute and science doesn't deal in absolutes. Just in likelihoods and observations.
I think this is a common misconception made mostly by people who distrust science as a whole, but not really broadly held. I don't know anyone who understands an area of science at any depth who holds such a view.
The really broad problem is that in science there are things we have very high confidence in, and there are things we have very little confidence in but are the best working models currently - and everything in between. However, communication about where the confidence lies is often poorly done. Many observers who mostly hear about things through the lay press have no good tools to differentiate between "some person with a Ph.D said Y once" and "the vast majority of experts in this field are confident that X".
You are quite right that real experts have a healthy feel for what they don't know - and often humility - but those are often very different things from those that worry people outside the field. All of those same experts could happily give you a list of things they and their colleagues have very good confidence in. It's almost always the right thing to do to accept these and move on.
On the flip side any scientist will tell you there is small but real value at the margins for someone plugging away at a "crazy" theory. They are almost always wrong, but occasionally it turns up something really interesting. The trick is not to involve more people or too much resources, as these are long bets that will mostly fail.
If you go to read what the real experts in the field have to say then you would learn that not a single one of them thought that the EM Drive had even the slightest chance of being true.
In fact all the publications and work on EM Drive strictly avoided the real experts (physicists). They were all engineering journals. A paper that claims experimental evidence that overturns all physical theories from Newton onwards that's very telling isn't it?
Science is never 'settled'. There is the current understanding of the art, but that current understanding is not always fulfilling. There are edges and holes in most domains in science where people are poking around wondering how it really works.
A lot of the things I implemented as an engineer (I am not a scientist, but I worked with scientists) were attempts to answer questions. Many of them having to do with "how do we measure this thing, without touching it?" Modeling information and making decisions based on observations against what you were expecting to observe.
Sure, we do know!
And we know how to recognise when someone masters current literature (a.k.a. factual knowledge) and proposes a breaktrough in a yet uncovered field, and when someone is speaking out of his ... nothing!
If you prefer a non-car analogy: we all do know that a hundred consecutive heads is possible, still you are not going to bet your week pay on it, even if you were promised 2^100 weeks of pay in return.
The expected reward is just one-week's pay --- you have to offer better than that with all the uncertainty ;)
What if the reward is potentially infinite amount of money? If the investigation proved our current understanding of physics wrong, that could lead to historic breakthroughs in natural science.
Better yet, we don't know what the odd is. It might only need 32 consecutive heads.
A water molecule contains 18 nucleons, thus a mole of water weighs 18 grams. 10 million moles of water are 180 cubic metres: an Olympic pools contains an order of magnitude more moles than that! ;-)
Sure, I hope nobody is paid so poorly that 2^100 times its week salary exists!
Are you talking about anyone who was born in the last 100 years?
Negative results are good. Utter quackery is not good. But hard data from experiment is usually not quackery. Even if the whole thing stands outside the established paradigm. I’d argue we could stand a bit more of it, in this age of funding bandwagons and careerism.
That's the OP's point. The EmDrive is utter quackery. It cannot exist because it necessarily violates the laws of thermodynamics. Anything that disproves those will literally undermine the entire foundation of what we understand about the universe. It would be directly comparable to discovering that the earth is flat.
We know for certain that our understanding of physics is incomplete. General relativity (as formulated) is certainly wrong, because it precludes the possibility of small things existing; and yet they do. Quantum mechanics (as formulated) is certainly wrong, because it precludes the possibility of curved spacetime, and yet we know spacetime is curved.
There is, of course, a minuscule possibility that the emdrive actually works. It almost certainly doesn't. Ballpark one in a thousand. But we can't exclude the possibility that it works, based on the principle that the the laws of thermodynamics, which already has two exceptions, cannot have a third exception.
There's big talk about humanity traveling to other stars, colonizing other star systems, colonizing the galaxy and so forth. For this to happen, we would have to be wrong about physics. There's simply not any way to do it by building on the foundation of what we understand about the universe. So investing in low probability speculative ideas like emdrive is still necessary, even though for any given idea, there are lots of nines that say it won't work.
No, they don't. The "laws" you learn in high school are large scale approximations to the actual rules, which is codified in stat mech.
It's like claiming solids are not solid because atoms... Of course physicists know all this.
>General relativity (as formulated) is certainly wrong, because it precludes the possibility of small things existing
Having worked on GR stuff for a long time, this is news. GR most certainly allows any size thing to exist - it's a continuous theory.
>Quantum mechanics (as formulated) is certainly wrong, because it precludes the possibility of curved spacetime
No, it does not. QM in curved spacetime is so old and well understood it has a Wikipedia page [1] - from which you can start digging back into the literature.
You should really google such claims when making them to be sure you understand what you're claiming.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory_in_curved...
There are far more such cases where the outsider was wrong, so many more of these, that using the extremely rare event to claim this may be one is simply terrible reasoning. It is far more likely that this is yet another crackpot pushing nonsense.
No outside has found a breakthrough that for decades (the length the EmDrive people have been making noise) was discarded. In fact, when an outsider finds something useful or novel, for a long time now the science community nearly immediately understands and embraces it.
This is the opposite of that.
They also know they have experimented extensively over the region this effect claims to exist, and have found nothing of the kind for well over a century, and that if the EmDrive did what some claimed, it would violate literally thousands to millions of experiments already conducted.
Claiming physicists don't know everything about possible physics does not imply they don't know a tremendous amount about the places they have extensive experimental and theoretical agreement. Those places are not likely to ever change.
Technically, yes. but not in the sense that the word "wrong" is generally used. Existing measurements confirm that the current theories are mostly correct to high degree of accuracy, and over a lot of measurements, in a wide range of circumstances.
Current understanding may be proven _incomplete_, but it won't be superseded by something completely different that contradicts those measurements. That would be a non-starter, but it's what people think of when they hear "x is wrong".
e.g. Newtonian mechanics is "wrong" or "incomplete", but it gives very good answers for everyday circumstances. Just not for very small or very fast.
The best essay on this subject is "The Relativity of Wrong", Asimov, 1989
https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.ht...
People are generally aware that if someone is presenting a perpetuum mobile they are wrong. Free energy doesn't exist. The fact that you can't have free momentum is just as strong (and has been known longer), yet less widely intuited.
Let me give you an analogy though:
Let's say someone proposes a water base perpetuum mobile like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion#/media/File:W...
It only works if you place the machine under a massive waterfall though. Now this would be very difficult to refute experimentally, because you have to account for all possible interactions in the waterfall.
That's what the EM Drive is. A perpetuual motion machine built in such a way that there's a lot of energy going around and it's hard to eliminate all spurious interactions.
Or take computers for that matter. People designed and built them from scratch. Someone had to design and lay out the transistors on the CPU, and presumably they know everything about how to do that. And yet we are currently trying to figure whether there's an ordering to switching the transistors on and off that would imbue the CPU with human-level intelligence. There are plenty of people who know computers inside and out, yet there are still questions that need answers. We have a whole discipline called Computer Science that performs experiments on computers for the purpose of answering these questions.
that's just plain wrong, friend.