High-accuracy thrust measurements of the EMDrive, elimination of false-positives | Hacker News Reader

High-accuracy thrust measurements of the EMDrive, elimination of false-positives

link.springer.com

51 pointsrbanffy20 comments

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This research was discussed 4 months ago (534 votes, 307 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26656206

Based on a different paper? This was only published last month.

Substantially the same paper (just at a conference, not a journal). Same authors, title, diagrams, etc.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350108418_High-Accu...

I guess it's the same group (lead by Professor Tajmar), but this is definitely a new paper.

One part of me is satisfied that contemporary physics proved its quality.

Another part of me would like to see it crashing down, if only for the thrill of witnessing a scientific revolution akin to the introduction of relativity 100 years ago.

I think every physicist thinks the same.

All of them want aliens, warp drives, an all that sci-fi stuff to be real, they are all super excited at the first anomaly, and then they work hard tearing all their own hopes up to pieces.

Also because known physics are really inconvenient!

From the abstract, I understand that this paper is meant to strengthen existing results about the impossibility of EM drives:

> We found no thrust values within a wide frequency band including several resonance frequencies and different modes. Our data limit any anomalous thrust to below the force equivalent from classical radiation for a given amount of power. This provides strong limits to all proposed theories and rules out previous test results by at least two orders of magnitude.

insane that we're still expending any effort on this. I can't imagine a single academic that would assist their own career by putting effort into this boring pseudoscientific nonsense.

Like, I guess you could do something like this if you were very late in your career with a little extra money and wanted to shake a stick at some halfwits but it would be very unwise to stick a grad student or postdoc on this unless you didn't care about them.

This whole thing is based on a confusion of group and phase velocity. Makes me so angry.

If you're already 90% of the way to disproving something, and someone else disproves it, might as well finish publishing your result also in case the other proof is weak or just to overwhelm the remaining easily confused supporters.

Publishing negative results should be celebrated.

I wonder where you stand on the replication crisis.

Publishing negative results is important for more reliable science!

The techniques developed to improve measurement accuracy are more broadly applicable than debunking this particular concept.

Or more directly, the EM drive claims can also be seen as pointing out inadequacies in our experimental capabilities, and the motivation could be to address that issue.

Is there a name for the class of scientific problems that can be disproven through experimental capabilities beyond what is currently feasible? Should we invent more such problems to induce urgency and motivation to create better equipment?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper.... They've been working on getting a lower bound as recently as 2013! https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25167384/

Having gone back and forth on this for a couple of years now, where does this put us?

This proves once again that the EM Drive is not generating any force whatsoever, which was the 99.999...% expected result since before any tests anyway.

It puts us at EM Drive as viable as a form of propulsion as pumping a bunch of electricity into a concrete block.

To be fair, depending on the amount of electricity you put in that block of concrete and your control of the direction of the expanding plasma, you may have something considerably better than an EM Drive.

there's no credible "back" on this. It's absolute bullshit.

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