EM drive fails again with diagnostics

[notFritzArgelander]

Looks like positive results previously reported can be explained by thermal effects and cherry picking the data.

https://www.sciencealert.com/in-a-compr ... CtWOqC_-Xk

[AntennaGuy]

Aww... too bad! Oh, ok, who am I kidding? Hah hah hah hah! Ya' know, that Newton guy was no dummy.

[notFritzArgelander]

Aww... too bad! Oh, ok, who am I kidding? Hah hah hah hah! Ya' know, that Newton guy was no dummy.

There was a meme posted on the jokes thread of 3 guys pushing a flat bed truck, two behind and one standing in the bed. The EM drive is just like only without the two guys pushing from behind. It's not that hard....

[ThinkerX]

I'm surprised this is still being pushed. 'Monomorphic,' - a truly dedicated craftsman, reached this conclusion with his setup a few years ago. some of the most sensitive scales ever - those little near microscopic motes you see in sunbeams? - his rig could weigh lighter particles than those with ease. Extensive thermal calculations to account for that end of things. And...nada. That was the experiment that convinced me the EM Drive was a chimera.

The one part of the EM Drive fiasco that still slightly intrigues me is something that pretty much all of the electrical engineers and scientist types agreed on: the dang thing acted like a capacitor, though strictly speaking it wasn't one/ (probably stated that wrong).

[notFritzArgelander]

More detail. A bad mounting design at the NASA group led to bad measurements. This article reports that the positive results are nullified by a three order of magnitude (factor of a thousand) margin.

https://phys.org/news/2021-04-comprehen ... drive.html

Has this publicity stunt finally come to its end? Tune in to see....

[Lady Fraktor]

I cannot believe that they had to spend money/ time/ effort to disprove this theory....

[notFritzArgelander]

I cannot believe that they had to spend money/ time/ effort to disprove this theory....

The original small funding for the NASA group that reported the positive results was a PR stunt to garner political support for NASA's mission from "trekkies". I opposed it every time the topic came up, I thought it a cynical and unethical attempt to politicize science. A hazard of doing pseudoscience as a PR ploy is that eventually some honest folks are going to feel honor bound to refute the falsehoods and that costs a little money to do so. I think that there would be less of this cynical and dishonest...... well..... crap, if the refuting folks could recover costs from the agencies that excreted this nonsense to begin with.

There needs to be a penalty for scientific fraud,

[Pikaia]

People are still working on cold fusion, 32 years after the first claim. I wouldn't be surprised if EM drive research lasts as long.

[AntennaGuy]

As noted in "The N-Ray Affair," an interesting article by Irving M. Klotz, Scientific American, Vol. 242, No. 5 (May 1980), pp. 168-175: " Science has no vicar on the earth to reveal doctrine and no central committee to proclaim dogma. In general, however, the evolution of scientific theories does appear to follow a pattern that is perhaps best described in an aphorism attributed to James Clerk Maxwell, the founder of the mathematical theory of electromagnetism. Maxwell is said to have observed in an introductory lecture on light: "There are two theories of the nature of light, the corpuscle theory and the wave theory; we used to believe in the corpuscle theory; now we believe in the wave theory because all those who believed in the corpuscle theory have died." Klotz then points out that the discoverer/chief proponent of N-rays, Rene Blondlot, "died in Nancy in 1930." Heh. Ergo, the EmDrive will likewise finally be dead, once those who believe in it and/or promote it pass away.

[GCoyote]

As noted in "The N-Ray Affair," an interesting article by Irving M. Klotz, Scientific American, Vol. 242, No. 5 (May 1980), pp. 168-175: " Science has no vicar on the earth to reveal doctrine and no central committee to proclaim dogma. In general, however, the evolution of scientific theories does appear to follow a pattern that is perhaps best described in an aphorism attributed to James Clerk Maxwell, the founder of the mathematical theory of electromagnetism. Maxwell is said to have observed in an introductory lecture on light: "There are two theories of the nature of light, the corpuscle theory and the wave theory; we used to believe in the corpuscle theory; now we believe in the wave theory because all those who believed in the corpuscle theory have died." Klotz then points out that the discoverer/chief proponent of N-rays, Rene Blondlot, "died in Nancy in 1930." Heh. Ergo, the EmDrive will likewise finally be dead, once those who believe in it and/or promote it pass away.

We can only hope. However I would point out that people are still trying to locate Atlantis. Ideas supported by romance are slow to yield to logic.

[notFritzArgelander]

The decease of the advocates is really a secondary effect. The primary cause of the death of bad ideas is that the next generation is not persuaded to adopt them. In the example of light, the corpuscular theory that did out in the 19th century has been revived by quantum ideas. The purely wave approach to light ran into trouble with Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect and Planck's on black body radiation.

Now we learn "wave-particle duality" or in more QED terms "Maxwell's equations are the Schroedinger equation for the EM potential which is the wave function for photons".