Here are two nice posts by physicist John Baez with some reasons to be skeptical about the "reactionless drive":
https://plus.google.com/117663015413546257905/posts/WfFtJ8bY...
https://plus.google.com/117663015413546257905/posts/C7vx2G85...
https://plus.google.com/117663015413546257905/posts/WfFtJ8bY...
https://plus.google.com/117663015413546257905/posts/C7vx2G85...
Baez is right, of course. I've been checking the (Word-generated) "papers" from this guy's group at NASA, they're extremely shoddy: There's another report with their unstable calibration for the torsion pendulum which shows their complete lack of undergraduate lab report skills. And a poster from them where they say: "Q-thruster test articles are going to be tested in a vacuum to reduce possibility of air currents polluting the thrust signal during testing, but electrolytic capacitors in signal amplifier are not vacuum compatible"... Awesome.
I've also checked the Chinese Physics B paper. Their device is completely different from this one. It's an open cavity and they only use classical EM. I don't understand very well how their thrust measurement set-up works so I hold my judgement on their claims, but at least they're trying to be legit.
Violation of momentum is an extremely serious claim (in words of D.J. Griffiths, "there is no principle in Physics more sacred than that"). The Universe would look nothing like this if that were true and all the Physics that we've discovered consistent with thousands of experiments would be gone. The way they use the quantum vacuum has nothing to do with the formalism that made it possible. Several detailed QED calculations backed up by experiments to astounding precision would be completely wrong and we know that's not the case.
BTW, the fundamental principle is conservation of momentum, Newton's 3rd law of motion is a consequence that sometimes doesn't hold, for instance forces between charged particles in electrodynamics don't follow the 3rd law (but approximately at low speeds). If you take into account momentum carried by the fields you get conservation of momentum back, quite nicely as well.
Not defending this particular paper, but I'm curious why you highlighted the fact that it's written in Word. Just about everybody in physics these days uses Word to compose papers (Word + Mendeley is a dream, by the way). Maybe you think he's not a 'real man' because he doesn't sling raw LaTeX?
What subfield of physics have you worked in?
In my experience, this is not remotely true. Almost paper I read in grad school (e.g., on arXiv/quant-ph) was written in LaTeX. The exceptions written in Word were indeed quite likely to be the work of crackpots...
Experimental condensed matter physics (free molecular beams). Never met anyone in my research group, or any other research group that anyone in my group collaborated with, who recently (in the past five years) composed a paper in LaTeX. I'm sure my thesis advisor did so when he was in grad school back in the dark ages, but even he uses Word.
> (e.g., on arXiv/quant-ph)
Yes, well, that is where the crackpots tend to like to hang out, isn't it?
EDIT: Oh, you mean research groups that don't do math.
I think he's slipping from skepticism to cynicism here.
Hoax phenomenon and devices always seem to fail in precisely the way that this one has. As you more carefully examine the test setups, suspicious conditions of the experiment persist (like the lack of using a vacuum in the vacuum chamber), and observed phenomenon continue to diminish as the accuracy of the test equipment improves.
And I use the word "fail" knowing full well that they claimed that they had positive results. If they couldn't use best practices in performance of the experiment like evacuating the vacuum chamber and they couldn't even show that their null device that wasn't designed to produce the same effect didn't work, then they have some serious problems.
NASA is not universally populated with geniuses, but they're not high school idiots. I don't think they should be ridiculed for reporting a best-effort attempt to test surprising or controversial results. Otherwise how would surprising results ever be found?
The original description might be clumsy, but the idea of empty space being full of virtual particles is not wrong.
Here is Dr. Laurence Krauss's description of empty space:
especially the idea that what we think of empty space is really not empty, correct?
KRAUSS: That's exactly right. Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can't even measure them. Now, that sounds of course like counting angels on the head of a pin; if you can't measure them, then it doesn't sound like it's science, but in fact you can't measure them directly.
But we can measure their effects indirectly. These particles that are popping in and out of existence actually affect the properties of atoms and nuclei and actually are responsible for most of the mass inside your body. And in fact, really one of the things that motivated this book was the most profound discovery in recent times, and you even alluded to it in the last segment, the discovery that most of the energy of the universe actually resides in empty space.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/outthere/2014/08/06/nasa-v...
>>In the paper by White et al, they also write that the Cannae Drive “is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.” That last bit stopped me. What’s a quantum vacuum virtual plasma? I’d never heard the term, so I dropped a note to Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist whose work dives deeply into speculative realms of cosmology and quantum theory.
Carroll wrote back immediately, with a pointed message: “There is no such thing as a ‘quantum vacuum virtual plasma,’ so that should be a tip-off right there. There is a quantum vacuum, but it is nothing like a plasma. In particular, it does not have a rest frame, so there is nothing to push against, so you can’t use it for propulsion. The whole thing is just nonsense. They claim to measure an incredibly tiny effect that could very easily be just noise.” There is no theory to support the result, and there is no verified result to begin with.<<
You can take a look at some popular lectures of Dr.Krauss where he describes empty space in more detail, which is full of virtual particles.
When you're unfamiliar with some field, and insiders to that field tell you that misuse of technical terms is a strong red flag, you'd better believe them. Their words come from painful experience.
The faster-than-light neutrino experiment gave a result, too, but in these cases the onus is massively on the people making the wild claims, and rightly so.