[HN Gopher] Scientists pinpoint source of "impossible" EmDrive's...
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Scientists pinpoint source of "impossible" EmDrive's thrust
Author : dgudkov
Score : 23 points
Date : 2021-04-06 19:30 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newatlas.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newatlas.com)
| geoah wrote:
| Would have been more fun if they had proven it works hehe.
|
| > "When power flows into the EmDrive," he continued, "the engine
| warms up. This also causes the fastening elements on the scale to
| warp, causing the scale to move to a new zero point. We were able
| to prevent that in an improved structure.
| yoz-y wrote:
| I assume they always "knew" the drive was not working and the
| real exercise was to find why the measurements failed? Which
| makes this finding interesting because they can design for better
| experiment next time?
| jfengel wrote:
| What makes the finding interesting is that a lot of people
| really, really, really, _really_ wanted it to work. They wanted
| big wins for free. They wanted fundamental science laws to
| fall. They wanted a revolution. They wanted it to come from
| somebody just playing around, rather than more boring
| incremental results by somebody who dragged their ass through a
| PhD and postdoc.
|
| And several agencies, including NASA, threw money at it. Why?
| Honestly, I'm not sure. A combination of really, really wishing
| it was right, and wanting to be able to say they looked.
|
| So to scientists this isn't really interesting at all. Just
| like with the faster-than-light neutrinos, they knew all along
| that it was a measurement error. The specific source of the
| measurement error is mildly interesting, but not a billionth as
| interesting as New Physics would have been.
|
| Everybody wants New Physics, including scientists. The
| scientists are just extremely doubtful that we're going to just
| stumble on it, because all that stuff is well-worn territory,
| and it's unlikely that there's something really obvious that
| they've missed. But it's not impossible, which means that this
| isn't the first story we've gotten like this, and it won't be
| the last.
|
| (It's probably not even the end of this one, to be honest. I'm
| sure people will keep working on this. But the scientists can
| legitimately stop.)
| PeterisP wrote:
| Well, one way or another, once you get reproducible
| experimental results that conflict with known physics,
| someone has to do the due diligence in finding the flaw, it
| would be irresponsible to shrug and say "ah, must be a fluke,
| who cares why".
|
| Well, perhaps if we had a whole range of other promising
| avenues to explore for new phsyics (like natural scientists a
| century or two ago), then it would be different, but as of
| now it seems there's not much competition that's more
| promising than the EmDrive was.
| k__ wrote:
| Couldn't it just be that some scientists saw a problem with
| an experiment and used the hype to gather money to get that
| problem fixed?
| thoughtstheseus wrote:
| Not much money either.
| jakedata wrote:
| At least the Mach Effect thruster had a half-plausible
| mass/energy sort of hand-wavy theory behind it. Alas it too has
| slipped fully into the realm of wishful thinking... in this
| universe anyway.
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