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Comment by tantony | Hacker News Reader

This may turn out to be another EMDrive. But the implications of this claim being true are too great to ignore and warrants further investigation.

I wonder what it would take in terms of expense/equipment to do an independent verification.

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In many ways this is the core of good science. "Hey, this seems unusual." followed by "Here is a theory, and a hypothesis with a prediction of this theory is what is going on" then "Here is an experiment to test that hypothesis with all the ways we can think of that might mess up the answer compensated for." and then "Here are the results of the experiment." At which point other labs can go do the same experiment and see if they get the same results, and if so they can try to screw with those results in ways that they believe invalidate the theory, until everyone can reproduce the canonical experiment and on remaining theory agrees with the evidence produced by the experiments.

That said, nothing I saw in the paper suggested it would be expensive to reproduce this effect. The palladium is pricey but you don't apparently need very much and the fabrication, as described, it pretty standard semiconductor fabrication steps. Feature size is pretty large compared to modern processes so you wouldn't need a state of the art fab to make a wafer of these things.

It’s a bit like the FTL neutrinos. We knew it couldn’t be, but the data showed otherwise, so they got to check everything down to the cable connections.

The EMDrive is a better example, I think. The OPERA people knew from the start that they likely had an "uncontrolled systematic" and their measurement was likely to be wrong, so very few people got excited. The EMDrive got a lot of people excited over a minor error in a very difficult measurement. In both cases the general "science" public picked up on it, inappropriately, but in only one of the two cases were the flames fanned by the research team. (Compare also the Pioneer anomaly [0].)

I do suspect this is just another EMDrive. Interacting with the vacuum to shift energy around is well-known (again, see Hawking radiation [1]), but holding on to it overall for long enough to violate the uncertainty principle (the one for the E-t commutator [2]) doesn't work. And I don't think you can hold it just long enough to reverse entropy... though that doesn't sound prima facie impossible. Making a measurement incorrectly, though... I do that every day I'm in the lab.

Addition: Also, the MDPI journals are kinda-sorta just one step up from trash-tier, at least in my mind, so I don't pay much attention to work that can only manage to get in to one of them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle ...at least I think it's in there somewhere. Otherwise grab Griffiths!

They also got published in an APS journal - "Physical Review Research"

https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev...

However, I do not know how reputable that particular journal is.

> And I don't think you can hold it just long enough to reverse entropy..

Sounds like a good quantum analogue of Maxwell’s demon!

Expensive. For all the legitimate pointers to quackery, it seems he somehow scraped together >$10k (maybe much higher) to get a photolithography batch done.

I wonder if someone like Jeri Ellsworth or Sam Zeloof will be able to reproduce this with their home-fab techniques

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