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by Steuard
3503 days ago
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The arguments against boil down to "Any reactionless drive must by definition violate conservation of momentum." We shouldn't reject any scientific conclusion as unquestionable gospel, of course, but off the top of my head I'm not sure that I can think of any fact about the laws of nature that I consider more firmly established than "momentum is locally conserved". (I'm a physics professor, for the record.) Conservation of momentum is part of the bedrock of everything from relativity to quantum field theory, so if you throw it out, you'll need to come up with entirely different (seriously: entirely different) replacements for those theories that nevertheless manage to reproduce their hundreds of enormously successful predictions (to just as many decimal points). Again, it could be true! Keep an open mind! But if it is, then literally every discovery in (say) particle physics in your lifetime has been a fluke: just dumb luck. You can decide how to balance that likelihood against the evidence presented thus far in favor of the drive. I'm really not sure what the argument against impossibility is, apart from a fervent longing for something of the sort to be real. (A longing that I share, for what it's worth.) They claim to have some data showing that something really is generating thrust, but as I recall some experiments have shown comparably large results in both the "actual test" and "control" conditions, so I'm not sure what to make of that evidence. |
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Note that I'm not grasping at straws wrt the EmDrive. The distinctions between incompleteness and error is far more interesting to me, especially in the context of science. And I'm curious if your statement was more than a rhetorical assertion.