[rwallace]

Because taking a small fraction of the total budget and throwing it at a bunch of wacky longshot research projects is how you find the occasional important thing you would otherwise have missed.

I'm not saying I think they've really got a reactionless drive here. They probably haven't. I'm saying if you fund a hundred of these things, ninety-nine of them will fizzle but the other one might find something interesting you didn't expect, that could far more than pay for the other ninety-nine.

[Steuard]

But why spend that money on a project that we already know is almost certainly wrong? Surely there are bold, crazy ideas out there worth exploring that aren't in violation of well-tested physical principles! Fund a hundred of those.

[techdragon]

Because science is built on evidence. All the chalk on blackboards didn't prove Einstein was right, experiment after experiment over the decades did.

We built the LHC, we're building ITER, we built the Kaminokade neutrino detector, we build things because we're human and desire to "know" things. For some of us, the chalk on blackboard version isn't enough for us to feel we know it yet.

[Steuard]

But this isn't some new, untested regime: this is an ordinary metal cavity with some sort of resonant electromagnetic wave inside. There's nothing about it that I can see that would lead me to expect results here that would so fundamentally contradict the countless experiments that have been performed on similar systems over many decades. If the folks doing this work had some compelling (or even just plausible) mechanism to suggest why this system ought to be radically different, that would be one thing, but I've seen no indication that they do: it's just a metal tube and some EM waves.

This isn't some grand battle pitting hidebound theorists unwilling to imagine flaws in their sacred equations against bold experimentalists seeking to test those models against the real world for the first time. This is a fundamental incompatibility between the best-tested mathematical models in human history (QED agrees with experimental tests to 11 digits of precision, and both sides of that agreement represent stunningly careful work) and a marginal signal from a fairly complicated system with a whole range of possible sources of systematic error.

So why do so many people seem so willing to throw out those decades of heroic experimental work in this case? (I honestly don't understand it. You're clearly passionate about the value of experimental evidence: why does the hard-won evidence that we already have carry so little weight?)

[techdragon]

I completely concur with your point that people shouldn't throw out the existing experimental evidence. I think there is far to much "wishing for new physics" going on.

At the end of the day I want experimental research done, and more importantly I want science to embrace greater value in "reproduction" of existing research. The bias the current "publish or perish" system has developed towards the novelty of each item of research, hurts the foundations of knowledge. Painstaking hard work on the reproduction of an experiment is valuable. Yes there's a reduction in value for each successive reproduction, but the bulk of modern science sadly never gets any reproduction at all.

The EagleWorks team may only succeed in reproducing the past work on resonant cavities, but I see no shame or reason why they can't as scientists decide "we want to measure this $foo, because these exact permutations have not yet been tested". So we gain one more data point, we rule out one more thing, this is the essence of science and I just can't in good conscience be negative about it.

If we focus on only the waste of money and resources... Congress literally forces NASA to be much more wasteful as an entire organisation, in this environment, singling out EW feels like mandating smaller font sizes in order to save on paper costs. The biggest examples I can immediately think of are the entire SLS boondoggle, and the Constellation program complete with the crown jewel of NASA's waste in the last two decades, the A-3 test stand. I'm pretty happy with how I see EagleWorks operating budget wise compared to the rest of all of NASA.