NASA says EM drive works

NASA peer-reviewed paper: EM drive works! For you science dilettantes, a bizarre, exciting, and controversial conclusion that suggests we do not have a proper understanding of the physical design of our universe. Cool stuff.

J.P. Travis: Born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1976 graduate of University of Michigan, father, grandfather, husband, founder and CEO of Travelyn Publishing (http://www.travelynpublishing.com/), and passionate anti-government believer in individual liberty.

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    • Oh I like that guy. My favorite part:

      "If someone is able to figure out what is the cause of the force they measure, it may be interesting. But I can't find enough motivation to spend a minute with this stuff because I am confident that whatever will be the actual reason why they think that they're seeing a reactionless force, it will be dumb."

      This is clearly a guy who doesn't mince words and I can see now that the claimed NASA affiliation is bullshit. So I guess we don't really have a magic starship engine... sigh.

  • I have been following such theories for many years. At one time I was applying for a job as an engineering technician in superconductor research. I didn't get the job, but can't help but wonder if they ever did manage to produce a room temperature superconductor, how far would it advance the EM drive! But then, since outer space is relatively cold, a superconductor wouldn't have to be able to work at room temperature to be effective in space.

  • Don't get too excited. There were plenty of "peer reviewed" papers "proving" cold fusion worked as well.

    • There is that as well. Although this pre-dates NASA's new desire to outreach the Muslim world (during the Obama years), the gaia worship is real.

    • I thought about that too. The gist of the thing here is that supposedly NASA has credibility and those cold fusion papers were from people who did not... but NASA's descent into the Global Warming cult kind of makes me wonder if their stellar (pun intended) reputation is still warranted.

      • I worked 30 years in aerospace and excepting a handful of cases, have never found NASA science and technology all that impressive. In fact, quite the reverse. If you're talking revising the basis of modern physics you want to go with the Cal Tech, Lawence Livermore, Los Alamos or MIT folks. They were the ones who disproved cold fusion when the researchers from universities that had good football teams were claiming that it worked.

        • I worked for a company for a short time that did calibration for NASA test equipment. I wasn't very impressed with them, because they had a habit of using very old and outdated test equipment. How accurate did they think they would be with old equipment?

  • This is cool... I am still mourning the lost of the Concorde, but this could make for a better and hopefully more affordable traveling experience and not just for space but obviously Earth travel. Safer even perhaps...

    • This is true, but let us not limit it to travel alone.
      If, according to the article, you can indeed create power from "nothing", the possibilities are endless.

      Imagine, if you will, making these available at some point for commercial purposes. One of the greatest costs for production is energy, and being able to install such a device in your home would allow virtually unlimited power,
      thus making metered power obsolete.

      A prospect that I am sure the local power company will attempt to prevent at any and all costs.

      • Wait a minute, wait a minute! You're talking about unlimited energy and Kimmy is talking about flying Concordes. WTF? This is a drive for a spaceship, not an energy source--it does require energy, specifically electrical energy. And it's not a particularly powerful drive so you won't be pushing a Concorde off the ground. What it DOES allow is a spaceship drive that doesn't require shoving something out the back to make it move forward. As you can imagine, loading enough mass into a spaceship that you can shove out the back is problematic when you're traveling to another star, or even to Mars. You run out of shit to shove pretty fast. We already have solar sails that are deployed and allow a spacecraft to get a push from the Sun, but those are really weak drives and if you want to come back toward the Sun, you're pretty much screwed.

        • lol it was more about mourning the lost of tech and looking forward to more tech and seeing opportunities for Earth travel not just space.

      • I could be wrong but Tesla may have been working on something similar or else he was looking into unlimited power. It seems it was look badly by the powers that be. His story is very interesting.

        1999 I mean that is like a long ass time, so it does sound to me like suppression. All this time politicians are talking about ways to improve our energy situation and the Left side of things is all about gaia worship (while hypocritically personally investing in current methods of energy, while greedily investing tax payer money in crap), and the Right side of things is to keep status quo and the energy lobbyists happy. So something like this being out there and not being discussed or put into a testing situation, which will help this situation greatly, is weird to me. Fascinating timing too now that I think about it.

        The only question to me as a Christian is if this is something that G-D will allow and if He does what the end game will be. You don't have to read this part if you don't want to, but the possibilities vis a vis eternity are indeed quite exciting. Something like that can always be used for bad, but even if that happens for a little while, I have to think that MAYBE this is a PRACTICAL way for G-D's creatures to move about His universe economically and productively (in order to do the work that we are assigned to do whatever that may be).

        Eternal life is, well... eternal there has to be SOME KIND of renewable and unlimited abilities that maybe within ourselves as gifted by the Lord and/or PRACTICAL and technological tools that we can use. I do believe that G-D is real and that we live in a real universe. The knowledge of that tells me that there ARE real ways for us to do what we need to do and that the Kingdom of G-D may very well be a vastly ever expanding technologically advance place.

        Do Angels just fly (in an out of Earth's atmosphere) faster than the speed of sound with white robes on only or do they have tools/machinery that is equipped to handle the massive changes in atmosphere including pressure and no breathable air? G-D being the ultimate power where He can TRULY create something out of nothing, it is not unimaginable that he could mechanize that ability somehow for His creatures to use.

        Sorry I think about these things a lot and every time we advance in technology I wonder if once the world is over that is it, it was just a tool for us to use in this space or if this is something that is part of the eternal plan...

  • I'm not going to pretend to understand most of this, but it would seem basic physics is not 'settled' science; in that case, how can climate theory be considered 'settled'?

  • If you are new to the controversy surrounding the EM drive, it seems to violate the law of conservation of momentum. In the body of the linked article are these words:

    "If the vacuum is indeed mutable and degradable as was explored, then it might be possible to do/extract work on/from the vacuum, and thereby be possible to push off of the quantum vacuum and preserve the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of momentum."

    My interpretation of those words is that the ether, which science discarded after Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, actually does exist.

    • It seems to me, and my memory is faulty at the best of times, that Einstein was once asked how he would feel if his theories were proven wrong.
      His reply was akin to he would be delighted, as it proved that science was still being studied.

      He was wise enough to know that his theories were just that, THEORIES!

      • I'm not sure but I don't think the existence of the ether would prove Einstein wrong. It wasn't like he said the ether didn't exist but more like his theories seemed to imply it was no longer a necessary abstraction to understand how the universe works. It's comparable to how we think of Newton after Einstein: Newton wasn't so much wrong as incomplete in his understanding... and Newton couldn't be too "wrong" because here we are three and a half centuries later with NASA trying to explain the EM drive in terms of Newton's Law of Conservation of Momentum.