People don't like to see quack science take funding from legitimate science. I am not qualified to judge whether or not this is quack science, but it certainly reeks of the same claims as previously documented quack science.
Even more than the funding, I hate the perpetual fueling of the narrative that magic is just around the corner. Why bother learning actual, boring science when a revolution is going to make everything different tomorrow, bringing us flying cars and gorgeous green Martian girls in steel bikinis?
There's an enormous amount of science denial, at least in the United States. A lot of things go into that, but I don't think it helps that stories like this present scientists as wedded to orthodoxy and general killjoys who hate imaginative iconoclasts. Instead, people lurch from one self-styled Galileo to another, as they fade from view without even reading the confirmation that their work was wrong.
Meantime, science produces a steady stream of advances both fundamental and practical. And those are taken for granted, unless scientists something you don't want to believe, when they can be presented as scientists are in stories like this.
> the perpetual fueling of the narrative that magic is just around the corner
Do you know why humans went to the moon in 1969?
It wasn't just that people suddenly woke up one day and wanted to. The earliest known story of a voyage to the moon was written by Lucian of Samosata, CE 125. It wasn't that people woke up one day and were smart enough; the orbital mechanics were hard math, but the basics were understood since Newton.
It was that in 1935, the Aluminum Association was founded. Extraction of aluminum was only started in 1825, and we only had the array of necessary technologies to do it in mass quantities, reliably, with the development of massive power stations. Aluminum is useful for several things, but most importantly: it can be hammered into a thin but solid material that can form aerodynamic shells and contain pressures against vacuum. It was, basically, a miracle metal. It made the aviation age cheap and (coupled with other breakthroughs like radio, which is still only a 100-year-old-technology) the space age possible. One generation after the founding of the AA, humanity set foot on the moon.
I believe people think magic is just around the corner because the previous two or three generations have lived through one miraculous invention after another. And you're right; these inventions don't spring from nowhere. They come from people observing unexpected phenomena, dogging that phenomena until it can be understood and reliably manifested or controlled, and putting ingenuity on what could possibly be done now that the rules of the world have changed, because, in a sense, magic just happened. At least from the point of view of the average person living through the technological revolutions as they come one after another.
But it's a misunderstanding. I see things like this space drive as different, because they're supposed to be based on physics that hasn't been figured out.
Real revolutionary and amazing technology comes from physics that came way before, which in turn came from math that was even older.
Today people mostly can't imagine what the world was like, technologically and socially, a hundred years ago when relativity and quantum mechanics were on the cusp of being developed.
The things which will transform or devastate the world in the next few decades have been growing for the last 50 years even if most haven't noticed. It will look like coming out of nowhere, but it won't be in the way that this space drive is.
Where does quack science end and legitimate science begin? There's a real bottleneck in theory right now and I don't see how pushing the envelope in various directions could be a bad thing (especially given the relatively low cost this seems to have been). The surest way we can stagnate is by NOT funding this type of thing.
There are other kinds of quack science, but in this area, anything that seems to contradict the basic laws of motion and/or conservation of energy is recognizably quack science. Especially when doing so experimentally first (instead of first coming up with a theoretical/mathematical framework). Even especiallier when using electrical effects in Earth's magnetic field and measuring minute effects.
Where did quantum mechanics come from [1]? Where did general relativity come from [2]? They came from _experiments_ and _observations_ that couldn't be explained by the current theories. You don't just take theories to produce experiments (though this can happen to verify or to gain accuracy) - usually it works the other way around. Experiments are done to power new theory. Except a growing number of people are becoming content as you are in the existing theories because it is costlier now to probe the edges of our theories than it used to be. There are major problems though even in established theory [3].
I'm not an expert in general relativity, but there are some major unknowns (and in fact known problems) with it and to assume that our current interpretation (because as far as I can tell, the issue is mostly with the interpretation of inertia rather than the actual formalization of gravity itself) is 'correct' is just so arrogant and counter-productive. Does that mean all fringe ideas should have money poured into them? Certainly not. But if we have no funding going into experiments differing from the 'consensus', that's the surest possible approach to guaranteeing the consensus never improves.
I believe a total of $620,000 over a span of several decades. I am personally quite happy to fund one-off random projects like this. The amount of money is a trivial rounding error. Funding 100,000 failures at this level would be worth it if one, just one, worked.
I do understand that others might think differently. I like moonshots.
Put another way: modern chemistry is in many ways a descendant of alchemy. It's the outcome of people pursuing ultimately failing experiments but identifying other interesting things along the way. It laid the foundation for laboratory practices and uncovered a lot of the basics.
Even if all of these experiments fail, chances are some of them will come across findings that are useful in unexpected ways.
If nothing else falsifying these theories will help create a baseline of effects that needs to be accounted for in the investigation of future theories like this.
We spend about $150 billion per year on science funding in the US. I don't think we're being irrational by giving moonshots roughly 0.00003% of the funding. That's a generous percentage, too, considering the funding for Jim Woodward spans many decades.
The sense I get is NASA is tossing money at it because if it doesn't work, it falsifies some hypotheses that have been sitting around at the edge of relativistic physics for awhile.
Did the EMdrive have a solid understanding of why it would work, rather than just being a discovered curious effect?
What's interesting about this one is that there is a theory at least. Experiments aside, someone whould be able to either confirm or reject the theory on its own.
The EMdrive also had a "why." Note, if you investigate these sorts of devices, they typically have a why. It's just that the why tends to ignore a bunch of other things and it's a disappointment in the end.
Really, if you're curious, you should dig into the history of all kinds of devices like these, anything in the Impossible Class. The inventor spends decades grinding away at it, getting inconsistent, odd little results which are just tantalizing enough to keep them stumbling forward.
I have often considered a taxonomy of these sorts of enterprises, with three orthogonal systems of reckoning. The first, a type really, is what principle is being violated (Second Law of Thermodynamics, Newton's Third ...). The second is psychological: misunderstanding, self-deception, or duplicity (typically to bilk inventors), with the understanding that the inventor typically starts with misunderstanding and proceeds onward. The third would, finally, be the discovered actual source of the odd results, which could be bad experimental design, not accounting for oddly-radiating services, vibration, friction, and so forth.