[Steuard]

I honestly don't even know where to begin in responding to this. You've called me (or my words) "ignorant" and "pseudo-skeptic", you've suggested that I have relied on appeal to authority in making my arguments, and you've implied that I'm motivated by an ignorant "us vs. them" mentality. You've told me to "grow up". All of that seems like pure personal attack, rather than any sort of robust engagement with ideas.

The only actual point of science that I can find here is your claim that "No one of import is claiming" that these drives violate conservation of momentum. In my original comment, I explicitly addressed this: the EmDrive FAQ's own attempt to explain how their drive doesn't violate momentum conservation seems to imply a violation of momentum conservation. Maybe I'm mistaken about that somehow: if so, I'd very much appreciate knowing how! (At the very least, I find it perhaps telling that the site's authors don't understand that their attempted answer is no answer at all.)

As for the personal attacks, I'll just give one piece of context for the "ignorant" bit. I'm a tenured professor with a Ph.D. in theoretical high energy physics from the University of Chicago. That doesn't give me any special magical authority to declare truth about the universe, but it does mean that I've got a pretty solid base of knowledge for my statements and (I hope) decent judgement about how confident to be in my beliefs about questions in my area of expertise. I work on crazy theories that might or might not wind up describing our world at all, so I'm very aware of both the vastness of our ignorance and the importance of pushing at its boundaries in bold and unconventional ways. And with all that background, I think these drive ideas sound entirely unreasonable. If you've got equally solid reasons to believe otherwise, more power to you, and I'd love to hear them.

[jdjdps]

I was angry at a great deal of posts like yours over a range of topics. Perhaps in this instance the anger was missplaced. In a previous post I have worked out how to articulate my concerns: A lot of the time posts with an overtly negative tone that claim to come from a place of rationality, are in fact reactionary. They claim to be defending a core of rationality from encroaching confusion, when in fact they are a symptom of irrationality, a result of the innapropriate application of emotional reasoning to areas of life where it has no explicative power. I believe that the rigidity of the models to be found within the minds of certain kinds of folks has less to do with the defense of rationality and more to do with the defense of identity. I find it extremely irritating to deal with people who are irrationally certain in an uncertain world - especially when they justify themselves by claiming they are just being more reasoned than the next man. Having said that I can hardly claim my post was anything but an emotional outburst.