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Comment by tobinfricke | Hacker News Reader

These were other, earlier experiments, which the current experiment is attempting to duplicate. Importantly, while the new experiment has superficially "confirmed" the previous ones, it shows a much smaller effect.

When the magnitude of the observed effect scales roughly with the margin of error of the experiment, one has very good reason to be skeptical ...

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The previous tests were on an EmDrive, while the current one was a Cannae drive, which is a related but different design. The EmDrive guy claims the lower thrust is to be expected due to the design difference.

they found 91 mmN of thrust and they claim their detector is sensitive to about 10mmN. that's almost an order of magnitude.

this doesn't mean that it sounds too good to be true.

edit: fixed units - dont have easy access to micro, thanks for pointing that out.

"u" is an acceptable replacement for "µ". I've never seen "milimili" (mm) before.

You can spell it out, like "91 micronewtons".

You can also use exponential notation like 91e-6 N or 91x10^(-6) N.

To be fancy you can copy-and-paste unicode characters and write 91×10⁻⁶ N.

I've seen "mm" used very frequently as millimetres. 1cm/2=5mm.

<Cough> You shocked me so much that I read the article! :-)

(I follow the subject by browsing news now and then at http://talk-polywell.org/ which really is about the small fusion projects. That place should have more details then at Wired.)

Use 'μ' for micro, 'm' is for milli.

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