![]() ![]() As the more familiar refrain goes, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” It’s part of why we demand, as part of the scientific process, independent, robust confirmation of every result, as well as the scrutiny of our scientific peers to ensure we’re all doing our research properly and interpreting our results correctly. Similarly, if you’re an experimenter or observer who’s become enamored with a particular explanation or interpretation of the data, you have to fight against your own biases concerning what you expect (or, worse, hope) the outcome of your labors will indicate. If you’re the one proposing a new idea, you must avoid falling into the trap of becoming enamored with it if you do, you run the risk of choosing to emphasize only the results that support it, while discounting the evidence that contradicts or refutes it. It looks like perpetual motion, as it always has been, is still just an impossible dream of ours.In perhaps his most famous quip of all time, celebrated physicist Richard Feynman once remarked, when speaking about new discoveries, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself-and you are the easiest person to fool.” When you do science yourself, engaging in the process of research and inquiry, there are many ways you can become your own worst enemy. ![]() As humans, we may be easily fooled, but to fool nature is not so simple. EM DRIVE FASTER THAN LIGHT VERIFICATIONVerification is always required, as is the complete elimination of systematic errors. The EmDrive was billed as an "impossible" space drive, seeming too good to be true. Pushing against the electromagnetic fields generated by your own electrical wires isn't a violation of action-reaction, and cannot power a spaceship. It may yet be possible, under some hitherto undiscovered conditions, that the action-reaction law is violated at some level. Many will continue to research it, build prototypes, and search for thrust signatures without any exhaust: an action without a reaction. ![]() Science never ends, and this paper, as compelling as it is, will surely not be the last word on the topic. With electric and magnetic fields properly accounted for, the EmDrive no longer looks like a viable option. No matter what type or design of rocket has ever been proposed, propellant of some type is always. And when Shawyer announced the success of the EmDrive, the expectation is that he was fooling himself. When Pons and Fleischmann announced cold fusion, the default assumption was that their detection and measurement system was erroneous. ![]() When the OPERA collaboration claimed to detect faster-than-light neutrinos at the beginning of the decade, the default assumption was that there was a flaw with their experiment, not that Einstein's relativity was suddenly wrong. Laws of physics are not so easily broken, and laws that have been well established under a wide variety of tests and conditions are even more difficult to break. According to Shawyer and others, these devices did, indeed, produce a small but nonzero thrust, without any detectable form of exhaust.Īlthough there were many believers, the default scientific response is to be skeptical. The EmDrive, short for electromagnetic drive, claimed that by setting up a resonant cavity filled with photons, where one end of the cavity was narrower than the other, you would produce a net thrust, even without any exhaust. SPR LimitedĪ few years ago, an inventor named Roger Shawyer claimed to have invented a working prototype of exactly such a reactionless engine. The EmDrive device, as originally displayed by Roger Shawyer's company, SPR Limited. ![]()
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