[xupybd]

Wow, I've not read something like that in a long time. More news needs to be like this. Examining what we know presenting where we are. Not taking sides and polarizing the discussion.

I do think people miss one small aspect of this story. How long has it been since we've had a device built that we've no understanding of the principles of it's operation? I think that's an amazing fluke and (if the effect is genuine) something worth celebrating (just because it's so rare).

[Animats]

There are others. There's cold fusion. There's a strange effect by which a rotating superconductor appears to induce gravity.[1] (Whatever happened to that? Articles from 2002-2006, then nothing.) They're all down near the noise threshold.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060325232140.h...

[Animats]

Here's what happened to it. The Austrian Institute of Technology tried the rotating superconductor thing with a big rotating superconductor and a fiber optic gyro nearby. No "dragging of the metric" was observed.[1] Too bad.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0608017.pdf

[madengr]

There was another paper about 15 years ago where a electrically pulsed, superconducting thin film was able to displace a pith ball from tens of meters, through walls. I can't find the paper but it was on arxiv. Some sort of gravity pulse; weird shit.

[therein]

Made me think of this. Maybe when they were doing the experiment, a gravitational wave happened and they somehow reflected it?

> Thin superconducting films are predicted to be highly reflective mirrors for gravitational waves at microwave frequencies. The quantum mechanical non-localizability of the negatively charged Cooper pairs, which is protected from the localizing effect of decoherence by an energy gap, causes the pairs to undergo non-picturable, non-geodesic motion in the presence of a gravitational wave.

https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0661

[madengr]

They were able to repeat it. Damn, I wish I could find it. I actually have it printed off somewhere.

The issue is that distorting gravity has far more consequential effects due to generally relativity than just moving something. You are actually distorting time too.

[zachrose]

> You are actually distorting time too.

That explains the significance of the floating hole-puncher confetti in the movie Primer.

[alasdair_]

Quite a few medicines (especially antidepressants) state something like "we don't really know why this stuff works, only that it does."

[pmezard]

From Wikipedia Paracetamol article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol#Mechanism_of_actio...):

"To date, the mechanism of action of paracetamol is not completely understood."

and:

"It is the most commonly used medication for pain and fever in both the United States and Europe."

"Not completely understood" is not the same as "we have no idea why it works", but still I find it telling for such a popular product.

[tunap]

9 years ago I heard a NPR interview with the scientist(s) who cracked the code on exactly how chlorine bleach kills bacteria. Something I assumed was known longer than I've been around using bleach to disinfect.

edit: link

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9700789...

[gus_massa]

But they (hopefully) tested the drugs in a double blind experiment. So they may not understand the exact mechanism, but they have a strong proof that taking the drug is useful.

In this case, all the em-drive test only give a very weak force that is very difficult to measure and may be caused by other causes (probably thermal because the device gets hot or something equivalent to an electromagnet because it use a current).

[jlg23]

True. Before a surgery, never ask your anesthesiologist how exactly the anesthetic s/he'll give you works.. You might get an honest "we don't know" as an answer..

[xupybd]

Very true. I'd not considered the medical world.

[nonbel]

If people treated medical research with the same skepticism they treat this EM drive... the world would be a much healthier and safer place.

[speeder]

Medical research don't suffer from lack of skeptism, instead it suffers from unscientific thinking, shamanism, cargo cults, and so on...

For example: for 30 years we had research blasting cholesterol and saturated fats as evil, because predecessors had that result, some arguments were completely circular (saturated fats are bad because they raise blood cholesterol, and blood cholesterol is bad because a bad thing raises it... with no research trying to find how much any of the two really affect health).

Another example is thyroid diagnosis, after discovery of TSH test, medics started to use it exclusively, and accuse patients with normal results but with severe and advanced symptoms of having psychological issues, also many thyroid doctors never bother in ever asking for other relevant tests, like t3 and antibodies, and the TSH tests frequently use outright dated target ranges, with medics skeptical of new research because the old way is mostly working in their experience (since by their definition, people with symptoms but normal values aren't sick, thus their treatment is 100% effective, since it helps all sick people, and the "non-sick" are delusional and thus it is failure of other medical fields that they are sick)

Other example is any medic that saw patients improve under certain treatment, and then start to always use that treatment in a cargo cult manner, without paying attention to any research that proves that it is misguided, like all those kids forced to take ADHD medicine in their early life.

[Nomentatus]

That shamanism was really corruption:

November 2016 Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents Cristin E. Kearns, DDS, MBA1,2; Laura A. Schmidt, PhD, MSW, MPH1,3,4; Stanton A. Glantz, PhD JAMA Intern Med. 2016;176(11):1680-1685. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5394

The SRF sponsored its first CHD research project in 1965, a literature review published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which singled out fat and cholesterol as the dietary causes of CHD and downplayed evidence that sucrose consumption was also a risk factor. The SRF set the review’s objective, contributed articles for inclusion, and received drafts. The SRF’s funding and role was not disclosed. Together with other recent analyses of sugar industry documents, our findings suggest the industry sponsored a research program in the 1960s and 1970s that successfully cast doubt about the hazards of sucrose while promoting fat as the dietary culprit in CHD.

http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article...

(PS - I've known a Shaman or two, and they were quite sensible people, for the most part, except when they started mixing in miscellaneous white people's trashy magic.)

[greglindahl]

It is not unusual for a physics experiment to produce a weird result, and it turns out to be experimental error.

[Nomentatus]

True, it's but this has been replicated. It may yet be an error, but it's not a one-off by now.

[xupybd]

Yeah there is a very good chance that's still the case here. But would be cool if it's not experimental error.

[intrasight]

That's my sentiments here also - weird outcome would be cool, but I expect that we'll find experimental error. However, there is also the possibility of something in the middle - meaning no laws of physics are broken but the experimental error is itself an interesting engineering discovery.

[davrosthedalek]

There is also the possibility that the experiment itself is correct and the laws of physics are correct, but we applied them wrong, leading to a wrong prediction or experiment analysis. Many many calculations take short-cuts or make approximations. Or we apply a theory wrongly. In all these cases, we learn something new. Hitting the prediction (of the standard model) is boring.

[davros]

It would be cool. But I've done similar measurements and this bears all the hallmarks of bad experiments. There are plenty of other ways the experiment might have gone wrong than those mentioned in the article - one that leaps to mind is RF interference (if that doesn't sound plausible to you you've never worked with lab RF).