# Does "EmDrive" quantum effect produce thrust, in violation of Newton's Third Law?



## tuxgeo (Sep 13, 2014)

An article on dailyreckoning says the following: 



> by Stephen Petranek.
> 
> Posted Sep 11, 2014
> 
> ...




So, does it do that? Does it violate Newton's Third Law? Any comments or elaboration welcome. (Just don't say "Impulse Drive," because that's part of the proprietary trade dress of a famous TV and movie franchise. A person might get sued.)


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## Morrus (Sep 13, 2014)

I don't understand it myself, but when this happened a few months back I seem to recall it got fairly widely debunked in various places. And the reports on NASA involvement were in some way misleading, though I don't recall the details.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Sep 13, 2014)

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/o...date-imposible-space-drive-word/#.VBSG-WK9KSM

http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/no-nasa-has-not-verified-an-impossible-space-drive.html

So, not looking the real thing.


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## freyar (Sep 14, 2014)

Well, this is the first I heard of it (though I did go on the radio this week to talk about Hawking's latest doomsday predictions).  But I read through the links here and some of the links in them.  My physicist's opinion is that this is just silly.  The Discover Magazine blog linked has quotes from a couple of well-known and very good physicists about why this doesn't look like well-performed or thought-out physics.  Just now, I looked at one of the EmDrive Inventor's papers, which looked pretty shoddy math-wise and certainly didn't have the appropriate math to talk about quantum mechanics (unless my eyes had glazed over by that point).  Of course,  it's worth noting that the EmDrive inventor doesn't think quantum mechanics is responsible for the effect --- that's an explanation from other scientists who know there's not a loophole to conservation of momentum in classical mechanics.

Then there's NASA's involvement.  That was through the Eagleworks lab, which came up in this forum a few months ago regarding Alcubierre-like warp drive.  As others in the links Dannyalcatraz posted note, Eagleworks' tests had some fatal flaws, including not running their tests in vacuum, which is absolutely critical if you're going to try to measure such a tiny effect.  It's ridiculous they even announced the results.

And it's sad this is in the media when there's so much other cool science to talk about.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Sep 14, 2014)

Hmm. Is Eagleworks job perhaps a kind of propaganda/media machine of science to convince people that something really cool is out there and we just need to give NASA some more money?

I don't really disagree with the goal, but the method seems questionable. (And could in the end stand int he way of the goal, if the money comes attached to :" Pursue this highly questionable line of experiments and hypothesis, rather than the one with reasonable expetations of working out", no one wins. Except perhaps the guys keeping their jobs thanks to the funds?)


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## Morrus (Sep 14, 2014)

Mustrum_Ridcully said:


> Hmm. Is Eagleworks job perhaps a kind of propaganda/media machine of science to convince people that something really cool is out there and we just need to give NASA some more money?




Nope. Interesting theory though!


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## Umbran (Sep 15, 2014)

Mustrum_Ridcully said:


> Hmm. Is Eagleworks job perhaps a kind of propaganda/media machine of science to convince people that something really cool is out there and we just need to give NASA some more money?




Not as I understand it.  Eagleworks is more, "Here is some small money (on NASA's standards).  Go look into some of the weirder stuff, just in case."  

They haven't generally followed what we'd call the strictest of scientific procedure.  I would guess (and it is only my guess) that is because they aren't a strict theoretical research group, or a practical development department.  They are just turning over rocks to see if there's anything under them.  They tend to operate on academic research budgets (equivalent to a couple of profs and grad students, working on borrowed or otherwise underutilized hardware) to build test devices for some of the edge concepts out there.


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## freyar (Sep 15, 2014)

Umbran said:


> Not as I understand it.  Eagleworks is more, "Here is some small money (on NASA's standards).  Go look into some of the weirder stuff, just in case."
> 
> They haven't generally followed what we'd call the strictest of scientific procedure.  I would guess (and it is only my guess) that is because they aren't a strict theoretical research group, or a practical development department.  They are just turning over rocks to see if there's anything under them.  They tend to operate on academic research budgets (equivalent to a couple of profs and grad students, working on borrowed or otherwise underutilized hardware) to build test devices for some of the edge concepts out there.




The problem is that, because they're not following a strict scientific procedure, what work they are doing is not helpful, except to generate excitement in a media that doesn't really know what it's talking about.


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## Umbran (Sep 15, 2014)

freyar said:


> The problem is that, because they're not following a strict scientific procedure, what work they are doing is not helpful, except to generate excitement in a media that doesn't really know what it's talking about.




I think of Eagleworks as the physical equivalent of Fermi estimation.  It is by no means a full calculation with four part harmony and feeling, but you can still use it as a guideline.

Let us note that Eagleworks is by no means the only people who claim to have gotten results from the setup.  A group in China, if I recall correctly, claimed to get a result orders of magnitude larger than Eagleworks did, if I recall correctly.  But, that result (r at least the reporting of it to the science community in the rest of the world) also lacked rigor.

So, say you are NASA.  You hear the Chinese claim a result.  They don't turn over data.  You have three choices:

1) Ignore the Chinese entirely.
2) Put theoreticians and thorough and expensive experimentalists on a deep analysis for years - and remember that Clarke's First Law applies*
3) Hand some chump change to someone to see if they can replicate the result, quick and dirty.  

In terms of risk analysis, tossing chump change at fast and dirty projects may make sense, as a cost-effective vetting process.  You don't actually expect any of these to turn out results, but if one does... the return on that investment will be *huge*.  Take it sort of as... NASA playing the lottery with pocket change.  

It does tend to churn up media attention.  I don't see that as a bad thing, really.  NASA has a problem that Congress won't back a solid mission plan.  But vision and inspiration for new STEM students is a major payoff of NASA - normally, this is accomplished with the big missions that they now don't have.  If they can't do it with the big money, they can try with the tiny money.  I'm okay with that.  Kids today won't care in five years if that result turned out to be nothing.  Their imaginations and passions will be stirred into study anyway!




* "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." - Arthur C. Clarke


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## Janx (Sep 15, 2014)

freyar said:


> The problem is that, because they're not following a strict scientific procedure, what work they are doing is not helpful, except to generate excitement in a media that doesn't really know what it's talking about.




Is anything the MythBusters doing helpful or useful?

The MB guys ain't doing real science either, but they do run tests that reveal interesting things.

In some ways, I don't get the feeling Tesla had scientific method-ful practices going on when he invented most of his stuff either.  He had some ideas, jiggered around with them, and got some amazing results.


So the real questions for this EmDrive are:
does it actually work (provide thrust)
is it efficient (or are we paying $100 for $1 worth of thrust)
how does it work?

If the answers to the first 2 questions are Yes! then the answer to the third is truly academic.


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## Jhaelen (Sep 16, 2014)

Janx said:


> In some ways, I don't get the feeling Tesla had scientific method-ful practices going on when he invented most of his stuff either.  He had some ideas, jiggered around with them, and got some amazing results.



I'm not sure about that. Having read a biography about him, I think the problem with his scientific approach was his photographic memory: He didn't bother to document much because he could keep everything in his head. He was also rather sceptical about any new theories that someone other than himself had come up with. Like most inventors his main interest was in finding practical applications for physical phenomena, make them work and optimize them and not in doing research just for the sake of it.


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## Umbran (Sep 16, 2014)

Jhaelen said:


> I'm not sure about that.




I am.



> Having read a biography about him, I think the problem with his scientific approach was his photographic memory: He didn't bother to document much because he could keep everything in his head. He was also rather sceptical about any new theories that someone other than himself had come up with.




Exactly.  As Janx said, not really in line with good scientific methodology.  Good documentation *outside* your own head is crucial to good science.  If you keep it in your head, you are dreadfully susceptible to personal biases, and nobody can check your work, or add to it.  Now, admittedly, he worked in an age that was more interested in patents than in the body of science knowledge, so he perhaps can't be blamed for it.  But this does not leave him a paragon of science as some folks might like.

Tesla was a brilliant man, and a testament to what you can do when you don't actually understand what you're dealing with - Tesla was a forerunner in electrical development, but didn't believe in the existence of electrons!


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## Scott DeWar (Sep 16, 2014)

Umbran said:


> . . . . . - Tesla was a forerunner in electrical development, . . . . . .




and as an electrician, I greatly appreciate his work ! !


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## Janx (Sep 16, 2014)

Umbran said:


> I am.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




and that more precisely puts a finger on it.

It felt like to me from watching some "about tesla" shows, that the guy just had visions of doo-hickeys.  I suspect he put more thought into how/why the AC motor worked than the Tesla Coil.


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## Umbran (Sep 16, 2014)

I notice that this has gotten rather far afield from the original question....



tuxgeo said:


> So, does it do that? Does it violate Newton's Third Law?




As others have noted - probably not.  The supposedly observed effect was extremely small, making it very possible that the result is within experimental error for the setup.

The only vaguely appropriate description I've see for how the thing supposedly works requires a "virtual plasma" for the electromagnetic waves to interact with.  The problem with that is that our basic understanding of the virtual particles that pop into and out of existence for short periods (a real thing in quantum mechanics) *don't* work like a plasma.

So, lacking a reason for them to work at all, I am skeptical.  



> Any comments or elaboration welcome. (Just don't say "Impulse Drive," because that's part of the proprietary trade dress of a famous TV and movie franchise. A person might get sued.)




What they have here is in no way like a Star Trek impulse drive.  Those use a reaction mass, and are described basically as a form of ion drive in the Trek literature.


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## freyar (Sep 16, 2014)

Umbran said:


> I think of Eagleworks as the physical equivalent of Fermi estimation.  It is by no means a full calculation with four part harmony and feeling, but you can still use it as a guideline.




There is a massive difference between a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation and reporting a "non-null" result to an experiment when, in reality, you haven't set up the experiment in such a way that you have any idea of the systematic uncertainties, which are by reasonable estimates much larger than your result.  The first is a useful estimate, and the second is not.  In other words, from the reviews I've read of the Eagleworks experiment (which Dannyalcatraz posted), it's completely unreliable.  And these are reviews from sympathetic people (in their own words).



> Let us note that Eagleworks is by no means the only people who claim to have gotten results from the setup.  A group in China, if I recall correctly, claimed to get a result orders of magnitude larger than Eagleworks did, if I recall correctly.  But, that result (r at least the reporting of it to the science community in the rest of the world) also lacked rigor.
> 
> So, say you are NASA.  You hear the Chinese claim a result.  They don't turn over data.  You have three choices:
> 
> ...




As I've noted before, I don't have a problem with NASA's expenditures of tiny amounts of money on these ideas.  (Although it should be noted that playing the lottery has quite a negative expectation value.) What I have a problem with is the sloppiness of the research that comes out of Eagleworks.



> It does tend to churn up media attention.  I don't see that as a bad thing, really.  NASA has a problem that Congress won't back a solid mission plan.  But vision and inspiration for new STEM students is a major payoff of NASA - normally, this is accomplished with the big missions that they now don't have.  If they can't do it with the big money, they can try with the tiny money.  I'm okay with that.  Kids today won't care in five years if that result turned out to be nothing.  Their imaginations and passions will be stirred into study anyway!




There's no such thing as bad publicity...  I just think there are lots of cool things in science that actually _are_ happening right now that could be inspirational.


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## Umbran (Sep 16, 2014)

freyar said:


> There is a massive difference between a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation and reporting a "non-null" result to an experiment when, in reality, you haven't set up the experiment in such a way that you have any idea of the systematic uncertainties, which are by reasonable estimates much larger than your result.  The first is a useful estimate, and the second is not.  In other words, from the reviews I've read of the Eagleworks experiment (which Dannyalcatraz posted), it's completely unreliable.  And these are reviews from sympathetic people (in their own words).




Yes, but they do demonstrate something - if Eagleworks are, in fact, reproducing the Chinese results... they're pretty much showing that those results were likely bogus.  Do they show the effect exists or not?  No.  Do they show the Chinese didn't see something reliable?  Probably.



> As I've noted before, I don't have a problem with NASA's expenditures of tiny amounts of money on these ideas.  (Although it should be noted that playing the lottery has quite a negative expectation value.) What I have a problem with is the sloppiness of the research that comes out of Eagleworks.




As my first professor of thermodynamics said - there's no such a thing as a free lunch.  Good, Quick, Cheap: pick two.



> There's no such thing as bad publicity...  I just think there are lots of cool things in science that actually _are_ happening right now that could be inspirational.




Well, *right now*, (literally, as I type, I have NASA TV on in another tab) NASA's making an announcement about the commercial crew transport program...

Which amounts to:  
1) Boeing and SpaceX have contracts to move on to the next stage of certification:  manned test flights of their vehicles.  
2) In December, NASA's own Orion craft (designed for beyond Low Earth Orbit) will have it's own first flight.


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## tomBitonti (Sep 16, 2014)

I think it's ... curious ... that we end up discussing the "EmDrive" and not any of these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_in_science

Also, having just listened to information about the discovery of the DNA structure, I am wondering: What recent discovery has the same level of importance?  Reading through the "2014 in science" review, I don't find anything that stands out anywhere close.

What's happening in science now-a-days?

Thx!

TomB


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## freyar (Sep 16, 2014)

Janx said:


> Is anything the MythBusters doing helpful or useful?
> 
> The MB guys ain't doing real science either, but they do run tests that reveal interesting things.




I haven't watched MythBusters, so I can't really answer that with personal experience.  My admittedly second- or third-hand understanding is that MythBusters is showing people that they can think about and test claims critically, even if in a non-rigorous way.  That's great!  It's an introduction to the scientific mindset.  That's vastly different than claiming to produce quantitative scientific research.



> In some ways, I don't get the feeling Tesla had scientific method-ful practices going on when he invented most of his stuff either. He had some ideas, jiggered around with them, and got some amazing results.




That's fine, but we'd be in bad shape if someone didn't come along behind him and do the work in a scientific way --- we'd end up like pakleds from TNG.



> So the real questions for this EmDrive are:
> does it actually work (provide thrust)
> is it efficient (or are we paying $100 for $1 worth of thrust)
> how does it work?
> ...




The answers to your questions are
a) We have no data from experiments that can be expected to provide results sensitive enough to tell.  If EmDrive worked, it would violate not just an empirical law of physics but a mathematical theorem, so it would be indeed amazing.
b) With extreme certainty, I would say we are paying $100 for 0 thrust.  This kind of machine comes up now and again --- it seems like you could make a perpetual motion machine out of one of these, and perpetual motion machines are a dime a dozen.  But none of them work (and the US Patent Office has a policy against granting patents to them, when it remembers to follow it).
c) Unless you want to be a pakled, this is not just an academic question....


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## Mishihari Lord (Sep 16, 2014)

I was kind of excited to read the story in CNN.  With a master's in electrical engineering I could see immediately that the initial premise about how the drive worked was nonsense, but measurable results are measurable results.  I'm still hopeful of seeing a cool, working discovery along these lines sometime in the future.  Yes it would contravene current scientific, but knowing something of the history of science, most major discoveries do.  Contradicting math is a bit harder, but math is only as good as the assumptions behind it.

If there's anyone to blame for the unjustified hubbub, it's the press.  NASA taking at least a brief look at out there ideas seems like a really good idea, and with the Freedom of Information Act, it's not like they could keep it a secret,


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## Umbran (Sep 17, 2014)

freyar said:


> That's vastly different than claiming to produce quantitative scientific research.




To be fair - Eagleworks' statement on this wasn't presented as an academic paper claiming to be scientific research.  The current interest is being generated by what is basically a progress report they gave to NASA.



> a) We have no data from experiments that can be expected to provide results sensitive enough to tell.  If EmDrive worked, it would violate not just an empirical law of physics but a mathematical theorem, so it would be indeed amazing.




Unless, of course, it operation was based on something we don't yet understand - interacting with a virtual plasma, for example, that hauls away the momentum in a way we don't quite grok yet.

As we noted - Tesla did his work without believing in or understanding electrons - you don't need full understanding to make something that functions.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Sep 17, 2014)

Similarly, Brahmins in India immunized people from smallpox by applying scabs from the surviving afflicted to minor scratches on the as-yet uninflected, many hundreds of years before anyone understood or Eden suspected the existence of viruses.

Causation and effectiveness can often be figured out long before true understanding is reached.


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## tuxgeo (Sep 17, 2014)

Thanks to all who have posted so far in this thread. There have been a lot of good links, insights, and comments.


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## Jhaelen (Sep 17, 2014)

Umbran said:


> Tesla was a brilliant man, and a testament to what you can do when you don't actually understand what you're dealing with - Tesla was a forerunner in electrical development, but didn't believe in the existence of electrons!



I know. He was a follower of the old theories about 'ether' stuff and didn't believe in the existence of subatomic particles.
Then again, Einstein believed quantum mechanics were hocus pocus, right?

Tesla did have his own theories (which he naturally never put into writing!), and apparently they were still sufficienty close to reality to allow him to create devices that worked just fine - even if they didn't work for the reasons he thought.


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## Umbran (Sep 17, 2014)

Jhaelen said:


> Then again, Einstein believed quantum mechanics were hocus pocus, right?




That's not a good representation of Einstein's position.  He saw and accepted that the math of quantum mechanics predicted results.  However, he felt the formulation was incomplete - if you interpret the math as reality, it suggested to Einstein that the real, hard, physical reality of his experience... wasn't really there.  Einstein had problems accepting any such interpretation.  So, he expected that Bohr and the rest were on to something, but that they were missing some understanding that would return that hard reality back to the picture.

Basically, all the spooky stuff (particle entanglement, Schrodinger's cat, and such) Einstein figured were artifacts of scientists missing something.


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## freyar (Sep 18, 2014)

Umbran said:


> To be fair - Eagleworks' statement on this wasn't presented as an academic paper claiming to be scientific research.  The current interest is being generated by what is basically a progress report they gave to NASA.



Eagleworks presented their results at a conference (no idea if there's any refereeing process at that conference) with the proceedings published here (full paper behind paywall).  That's a claim that they did serious scientific research.  



> Unless, of course, it operation was based on something we don't yet understand - interacting with a virtual plasma, for example, that hauls away the momentum in a way we don't quite grok yet.




While possible, this is all ridiculously unlikely.  First of all, Lorentz invariance --- special relativity --- have been tested extremely well here at earth.  That means the vacuum respects relativity and doesn't carry momentum.  Furthermore, unless you want to say that one part of the lab is somehow fundamentally different than another part of the lab, it's a _mathematical theorem_ that momentum is conserved.  So, to get thrust, that engine would have to be exhausting something, even if we don't know what it is.  So, we have three options: (1) The entire framework in which physics has been done for centuries has to be thrown out, and we understand nothing about how the world works, and all of our inventions are just lucky guesses, *or* (2) The engine is somehow generating a new type of fundamental particle, which carries off non-zero momentum, providing thrust (there are lots of reasons this is hard), *or* (3) The work that the original inventor and subsequent researchers have done is as poor as it looks on inspection and doesn't actually show anything besides systematic errors.  Given that I just read enough of the inventor's "theory paper" to see an exhibition of complete misunderstanding of basic equations of electrodynamics, I know how I weigh the odds.



> As we noted - Tesla did his work without believing in or understanding electrons - you don't need full understanding to make something that functions.




I want to make a clarification about Tesla, since he's come up a lot in this thread.  His professional life was well after the basic principles of electrodynamics were worked out by physicists including Ampere, Faraday, and especially Maxwell (among many others of course).  They didn't know about electrons, either, since they died before the discovery that matter is made of particles.  But that doesn't matter.  The classical theory of electrodynamics only needs the concept of charge to work perfectly well; Tesla knew this physics and had no problem believing in the concept of charge and current.  So, despite his eccentricities and conflicts with the scientific knowledge of his day (basically refusing to accept experimental data because he didn't like it), he did understand extremely well the parts of physics relevant to electrical engineering.  He wasn't just guessing and getting lucky.




Dannyalcatraz said:


> Similarly, Brahmins in India immunized people from smallpox by applying scabs from the surviving afflicted to minor scratches on the as-yet uninflected, many hundreds of years before anyone understood or Eden suspected the existence of viruses.
> 
> Causation and effectiveness can often be figured out long before true understanding is reached.




Absolutely true, and there are different levels of true understanding.  But it is a very different case.  No one in India had centuries of evidence suggesting that it's impossible to immunize oneself from smallpox in that manner.

I feel like I've been saying the same thing a lot, so I'm now going to refer you to someone else who puts it pretty nicely.  I urge you all to read the article that Dannyalcatraz posted near the top of the thread from the Discover magazine blog, especially the last section.  It's not about the money or the effort.  That's such a small cost that it's fine to chase off-the-wall ideas.  But there are other costs.  Here's the best quote: "I am personally a huge space enthusiast; I would love to see a new type of propulsion that would make it easier to explore the universe. But having your heart in the right place is no excuse to walk away from normal critical thinking. It is not materially different than the approach of people who reject science when they don’t like what it says about climate change, vaccines, or genetically modified organisms."

Now the exhaustless engine has exhausted me!


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## Umbran (Sep 18, 2014)

freyar said:


> Eagleworks presented their results at a conference (no idea if there's any refereeing process at that conference) with the proceedings published here (full paper behind paywall).  That's a claim that they did serious scientific research.




I don't think so.  Serious science has referees, and is peer-reviewed, right?  You yourself say you don't know if there's a refereeing process for that conference and proceedings.  It isn't peer-reviewed.  So, how does attending and presenting that non-refereed and non-reviewed conference qualify as such a claim?  

They were allowed to make that presentation, by the rules and mores of the AIAA.  But you come down on them for failing to meet a standard for a presentation that did not ask them to meet such standards!  That's kind of like coming down on someone in the American League for using a pinch hitter - the rules allow it, so what is your gripe?

There must be venues where professionals can discuss things that are't yet ready for prime time - failing to have them would put a damper on communication in the scientific community.  If you have a gripe, it is with the science reporters who don't know (or don't care) about the difference between something in a peer-reviewed journal, and something that isn't.  Take it up with them.  



> While possible, this is all ridiculously unlikely.




I agree.  I personally think it is likely to be a junk result - probably minor heating of the air within the cavity leading to a small force, or an instrumentation issue that registered force when there was none.  

I also understand Clarke's First Law, noted above, and see no need for me to stick my foot in my mouth and chew vigorously 




> I want to make a clarification about Tesla, since he's come up a lot in this thread.  His professional life was well after the basic principles of electrodynamics were worked out by physicists including Ampere, Faraday, and especially Maxwell (among many others of course).




All true.  But Tesla went well beyond the basics of electrodynamics as his time understood them - if he hadn't, he'd have not been remarkable.  Virtually nothing Tesla did is something anyone of his time looked at and went, "Well, of course, we already know how that works!"

You know how the Tesla-Edison conflict first began?  In 1885 Tesla worked for Edison.  By (admittedly, sometimes questioned) reports, Tesla went to Edison, and said he could massively improve the efficiency of Edison's DC motors and generators with a new design.  Edison, not really believing Tesla's claim, said there was $50K in it for Tesla if he could accomplish what he said.  Tesla promptly went and did it.  Edison, however, didn't fork over the cash - he claimed he'd been joking, and offered Tesla a 50% raise, instead.  Tesla refused, and resigned, and the acrimony was born.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Sep 18, 2014)

Edison did NOT cover himself with glory in his disputes with Tesla.


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## Umbran (Sep 19, 2014)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Edison did NOT cover himself with glory in his disputes with Tesla.




Not that Edison was a paragon of modern ethics, but I could totally see how this was really just a misunderstanding.  Tesla was not a native English speaker, so subtleties of tone may have been lost on him.  Edison might well have honestly not meant the offer (really - it would be something like a million dollars in today's terms!), and Tesla might honestly have thought he was reneging on a deal.


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## Janx (Sep 19, 2014)

Umbran said:


> Not that Edison was a paragon of modern ethics, but I could totally see how this was really just a misunderstanding.  Tesla was not a native English speaker, so subtleties of tone may have been lost on him.  Edison might well have honestly not meant the offer (really - it would be something like a million dollars in today's terms!), and Tesla might honestly have thought he was reneging on a deal.




Edison's shenanigans in the War of the Currents further clinched it.  If he'd had his head on straight, he'd have seen he was over-committed to DC and that AC was superior in all ways for the business of supplying power to the country.

That and doing business with JP Morgan, who's dirty business took out George Westinghouse's AC operations so he could take it all over...

Edison and JP Morgan were also behind manipulating the patent office to screw Tesla out of his radio patents so Marconi's would take precedence.


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## freyar (Sep 19, 2014)

Umbran said:


> I don't think so.  Serious science has referees, and is peer-reviewed, right?  You yourself say you don't know if there's a refereeing process for that conference and proceedings.  It isn't peer-reviewed.  So, how does attending and presenting that non-refereed and non-reviewed conference qualify as such a claim?
> 
> They were allowed to make that presentation, by the rules and mores of the AIAA.  But you come down on them for failing to meet a standard for a presentation that did not ask them to meet such standards!  That's kind of like coming down on someone in the American League for using a pinch hitter - the rules allow it, so what is your gripe?
> 
> There must be venues where professionals can discuss things that are't yet ready for prime time - failing to have them would put a damper on communication in the scientific community.  If you have a gripe, it is with the science reporters who don't know (or don't care) about the difference between something in a peer-reviewed journal, and something that isn't.  Take it up with them.




You're absolutely right, but that's not the point I was making.  My point was that Eagleworks did not just make a "progress report to NASA."  They decided that their work was serious enough to take to other scientists, whether preliminary or not.  When experimental groups present their work, they are saying, "we believe we did this correctly."  They may go on and say that the results are preliminary, meaning "we haven't finished, so there might be some issue we haven't thought about, or the analysis we're still working on could change our conclusions" or whatever.  But the important issue is that they went public with it, which means they think it should be taken seriously even if it's not finished.  That's all.




> I agree.  I personally think it is likely to be a junk result - probably minor heating of the air within the cavity leading to a small force, or an instrumentation issue that registered force when there was none.
> 
> I also understand Clarke's First Law, noted above, and see no need for me to stick my foot in my mouth and chew vigorously



Clarke's Law is a sociological law, not inviolable.  In particular, old curmudgeonly scientists have been poo-poo-ing perpetual motion machines for ages (something essentially the same as this) without being wrong yet.  If I'm wrong on this, I'll happily chew my metaphorical foot.




> All true.  But Tesla went well beyond the basics of electrodynamics as his time understood them - if he hadn't, he'd have not been remarkable.  Virtually nothing Tesla did is something anyone of his time looked at and went, "Well, of course, we already know how that works!"




Tesla (and Edison as well) was notable not for his scientific discoveries but for his inventions (engineering).  He did in fact do some scientific research on X-rays, etc, but that's not what we remember him for.  He was a brilliant engineer, but he didn't discover new physical laws.  But, again, that's not the point I was making.  The discussion of Tesla in this thread sounded to me like people felt Tesla made great inventions (and they were great) that relied on science that he and others didn't understand (they did not).  And they certainly didn't contradict centuries' worth of data.


I feel like a downer in this thread and others, but it would be cooler to talk about science that actually has a hope of being right.  I guess I should think to start a thread sometime!


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## Umbran (Sep 19, 2014)

freyar said:


> You're absolutely right, but that's not the point I was making.  My point was that Eagleworks did not just make a "progress report to NASA."




It was, in essence, a progress report - we did such experiments, had these results.  It was at the AIAA - the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.  How many of the folks there do you figure don't work for NASA, or a company that works for NASA or a similar agency?  

I still say you're critiquing them for not meeting standards that they never claimed to meet.  Every scientist at the conference would have known the standards involved.  

There is nothing so dangerous that it can't be talked about.  I find your frowning upon converse between professionals... a little disconcerting, to be honest.  



> The discussion of Tesla in this thread sounded to me like people felt Tesla made great inventions (and they were great) that relied on science that he and others didn't understand (they did not).  And they certainly didn't contradict centuries' worth of data.




I think you may be incorrect on that.  I'm pretty sure his wireless transmission of power by atmospheric conduction was not easily explainable by electrodynamics and material sciences of his time.  If I recall correctly, to fully explain it requires some materials sciences you don't get until you reach quantum mechanics and the behavior of plasmas.  Tesla was working on such in Colorado Springs in 1899, But JJ Thompson had only started with Crooke's tubes in 1897, and the very term "plasma" wasn't coined until 1928.

And, since Tesla didn't believe in electrons, he'd have been ignoring Thompson and Langmuir, whose work depended on such!


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## Arduin's (Nov 8, 2017)

tuxgeo said:


> An article on dailyreckoning says the following:
> 
> 
> 
> So, does it do that? Does it violate Newton's Third Law? Any comments or elaboration welcome. (Just don't say "Impulse Drive," because that's part of the proprietary trade dress of a famous TV and movie franchise. A person might get sued.)





No it doesn't. If you read the test results from the INVENTOR'S website you will see that it doesn't violate that law.


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## RangerWickett (Nov 8, 2017)

Arduin's said:


> No it doesn't. If you read the test results from the INVENTOR'S website you will see that it doesn't violate that law.




I am curious the circumstances that led to you posting this in response to a 3 year old comment.


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## freyar (May 23, 2018)

Here's an update for this older thread: New Scientist

Basically, changing the power to the drive doesn't change the measured thrust, so it can't be the drive creating the thrust.  The drive also always pushed in the same direction, even if it was oriented to push another direction according to the design.  The best guess is the force of the earth's magnetic field on a tiny bit of unshielded wire providing current to the drive.  Anyway, more definitive results expected in the next year or so.


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