[bicubic]

I don't expect the em-drive to work, but the parent post has a point. We've had repeated experiments yielding unexpected results. It's worth an inquiry; if nothing else, to thoroughly explain what went wrong so the same mistake is avoided in future experiments.

Outright dismissing new ideas, no matter how far-fetched, is very much the antithesis of the scientific principle. You mustn't forget that everything we take as indisputable fact today, was an outrageous far-fetched theory at some stage.

It was barely yesterday that Barry Marshall was ridiculed for proposing that stomach ulcers are bacterial, because everyone 'knew' that bacteria can't survive in such an environment.

[mhneu]

Many possibilities of what went wrong are well-explained in the parent article, drawing on experience of other scientists that make low-force measurements. (E.g. forces on rig due to electrical current flow, or liquid flow.)

Unfortunately it seems likely we won't learn much by finding the possible sources of error - the sources are already well understood by people doing low force experiments.

[freehunter]

Wouldn't it be worth repeating the experiment controlling for different factors at the very least to rule out some of the "many possibilities"? If there are "many possibilities" for why something is happening, by definition we don't know why it's happening. Science says repeat the experiment until we know why it's happening, or at least until we can't rule anything else out.