Why the "NASA Tested Space Drive" Is Bad Science 315
StartsWithABang writes Just over a century ago, N rays were detected by over a hundred researchers and discussed in some three hundred publications, yet there were serious experimental flaws and experimenter biases that were exposed over time. Fast forward to last week, and NASA Tests Microwave Space Drive is front page news. But a quick analysis shows that it isn't theorists who'll need to struggle to explain this phenomenon, but rather the shoddy experimentalists who are making the exact same "bad science" mistakes all over again.
Skeptics. (Score:5, Funny)
Have they accounted for the presence of skeptics during the experiments? That is likely the cause of any anomalies.
The NASA experiment is nothing like N-rays (Score:5, Informative)
The NASA science is just fine: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-08/07/10-qs-about-nasa-impossible-drive
Re:The NASA experiment is nothing like N-rays (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you. The Fucking "Article" in the summary gets it so wrong I want to find the moron who wrote it and force him to actually read the paper that he gets almost completely wrong.
Error 1) The Cannae Drive and the EmDrive are not the same thing, at least according to the inventor of the Cannae Drive. Every result that the article talks about for the EmDrive was actually from NASA testing the Cannae Drive.
Error 2) The difference between the test and "null" devices was that one of them had slots on it (believed to be required for the Cannae Drive) and the other did not. According to Fetta (the inventor of the Cannae Drive, not just another person who built an EmDrive to test out), these slots are required. According to Shawyer (the guy who actually invented the EmDrive), they are not required. Looks like the EmDrive guy was right: they weren't required. This is addressed in Q2 of your fine link.
Error 3) TFA never mentions this, but NASA Eagleworks *ALSO* tested Shawyer's version of the drive. It was over 3 times as efficient, producing about 91 microNewtons of thrust from 17 Watts of power (the Cannae Drive got 40uN from 27W). They didn't have a "null" device for that one, aside from a resistive dummy load... which produced no thrust when energized. Also, the tested drives produced no thrust when *not* energized.
I really wish people would stop parroting the false claims in TFA.
Stupid errors in "refutation" (Score:5, Insightful)
The result from NASA may or may not be real. However, this refutation is bad science writing and bad science.
There are two glaring errors in it:
Apart from these two actual errors in description, the only "evidence" the author has is "This looks sort of similar to cases where science has gone wrong in the past".
That *is* clearly a warning sign, but it is not actually sufficient to say "This is wrong".
Re:Stupid errors in "refutation" (Score:4, Informative)
Bigger stupid one: the "null" device wasn't even supposed to be an EmDrive. It was supposed to be a Cannae Drive, which has a similar design but was invented by a completely different person and (supposedly) operates on different principles. The inventor of the Cannae Drive claimed that the difference between the null and actual test devices would mean there were different results. He was wrong, as shown experimentally.
The actual inventor of the EmDrive (whose device was also tested by NASA, months ago, and was produced twice the thrust on 60% as much power) says that the Cannae Drive is just an inefficient EmDrive in either null or "real" configuration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
Don't have to go back 100 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't have to go back 100 years (Score:5, Funny)
Not to mention that ColdFusion tended to exhibit a lot of remotely exploitable bugs.
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I dunno about this.
the article makes claims different to the news reports I read about the subject, like about the test environments and that they did use a dummy version which did not show thrust but this tfa claims the dummy version produced thrust, which of course would be a red flag, but as far as I can tell according to nasa from the news the dummy version did not produce thrust and this was brought up as a point about how precarious the experiment had to be... in those news articles most of the articl
A little behind the times (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought that this take was pretty appropriate when all we had to go on was the conference abstract. Now, however, the full paper [libertariannews.org] (still not peer reviewed) is out, and it is much better. I still think it is wrong, but I do not think it is bad science, and it will have to be refuted experimentally.
Comments
* the "null thruster" is something of a red herring from the abstract. Reading the paper, they have a true "null load," which shows no thrust, while the "null thruster" was a mod of a Cannae drive, and so more of a test of drive theory than the experimental setup, and, in any event, they tested several types of drives.
* they did pretty much all of the things you would like to see (such as reversing the direction and making sure the thrust reverses).
* they seem to have done a thoughtful and careful job, including testing in vacuum.
So, I still think they are likely wrong, but this ups the ante. In my opinion, you can't just say "this is obviously wrong." I bet there will be a bunch of attempts to replicate it in labs all over the place.
I find the theories here (and I have now read several in some depth) to be bad, either wrong, or handwavy, or both*. I would discount them entirely. In the unlikely event that this effect is real (and I mean, some non-standard physics effect), then the theory is likely to be something different than any of the proposals, The experiment's the thing, and the game now has to be disproving the Eagleworks results. Only once a bunch of people have failed to do that (or one person has done it) is there much else to say.
* On pushing on virtual particles or quantum spacetime or whatever. These are 1 GHz photons, more or less. Such pushing would cause a _vacuum_ dispersion. Vacuum dispersion limits are set by timing of high energy photons from Gamma ray bursts across cosmic distances [arxiv.org]. These tests use ~ 100 MeV photons over ~10^10 light years, and so are many orders of magnitude tighter than the NASA Eagleworks results. This in my opinion rules out any photon - vacuum interaction as the cause of these anomalous thrusts.
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In my opinion, you can't just say "this is obviously wrong."
Yes you can: it's obviously wrong. Read the paper from the inventors [emdrive.com] on how the engine is supposed to work. It's a series of novice-level mistakes about physical principles and mechanisms. The entire idea is completely fucking batshit from the very beginning. The very fact that somebody actually got funding to build one of these absurd snake-oil devices indicates very little except that something is very, very wrong with the funding process. NASA is infamous for this kind of loony bullshit, and they really
Re:A little behind the times (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion, you can't just say "this is obviously wrong."
Yes you can: it's obviously wrong. Read the paper from the inventors [emdrive.com] on how the engine is supposed to work. It's a series of novice-level mistakes about physical principles and mechanisms. The entire idea is completely fucking batshit from the very beginning. The very fact that somebody actually got funding to build one of these absurd snake-oil devices indicates very little except that something is very, very wrong with the funding process. NASA is infamous for this kind of loony bullshit, and they really need to stop. It makes them look like morons.
I agree that the theory (or, at least, that theory) is obviously wrong. Cool, but from experimentalist standpoint, irrelevant. This paper, and the chinese paper, do not appear to the written by charlatans, they claim positive results, and so this will have to confirmed or denied by experiment. I have seen some very bad experimental NASA studies of new physics (*cough*warp drive*cough*), but this one doesn't appear to be so. If you see an obvious flaw in the full paper, please post it and I will publicize it.
I would advise in general that you don't hyperventilate so much. This process will work out just as it should; I have no doubt that in a year there will be a dozen tests of this and we will likely know for sure one way or the other; in the meantime, I would take a $ 200 bet [xkcd.com] that the standard model will still prevail when this is over.
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If you see an obvious flaw in the full paper, please post it and I will publicize it.
I have a better idea: how about I ignore the whole sordid, over-hyped clusterfuck and go do something useful with my time? The Emfdrive company will go under like a submarine in short order, and we won't have to worry about them anyway.
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I agree. The theory can be rubbished in very simple terms: The inventors assume no new physics, and conclude their device will violate conservation of momentum. All the 'input' physics conserves momentum. Therefore their analysis is wrong.
If I give you a list of numbers which are all even and ask you to add them up, and you give me a sum which is odd, I know you've messed up. I don't need to check the details of your adding and point to exactly where you went wrong. This situation is analogous.
So if the dev
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Re:A little behind the times (Score:5, Informative)
* they did pretty much all of the things you would like to see (such as reversing the direction and making sure the thrust reverses).
* they seem to have done a thoughtful and careful job, including testing in vacuum.
So, I still think they are likely wrong, but this ups the ante. In my opinion, you can't just say "this is obviously wrong."
Sure I can. Was the apparatus temperature controlled during the vacuum test? Was it tested in all orientations (not just backwards) to remove any gyroscopic weirdness from the rotation of the earth (think Michelson-Morley experiment). Was there EM coupling between the cavity, the torsion balance, and the chamber that could manifest as an anomalous torque, not thrust (that is, did they just make a big brushless motor)? Does the instrument register a thrust when the cavity is radiating but is bolted to the chamber floor and not the balance? Is there no thrust when it's oriented orthogonally? Does it still work if the power supply is electrically isolated from the vacuum chamber without a common return (ie did they build an electron gun)?
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That your comment got modded 5:informative is hilarious. How about you RTFM and not phrase your comment in the form of questions?
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"* they did pretty much all of the things you would like to see (such as reversing the direction and making sure the thrust reverses).
* they seem to have done a thoughtful and careful job, including testing in vacuum."
Read the article carefully.
They did not actually test in vaccum. They tested at atmospheric pressure, because they did not have suitable vacuum rated amplifiers.
Spending half a page explaining how the vacuum system worked, only to have a throwaway line later in the paper (search on electrolyti
Hmm... (Score:2)
It is important and necessary to independently verify and reproduce these results, meaning that if you detail the setup and methods, anyone else can achieve these results for themselves with the proper equipment
Interesting. I wonder what other popular and controversial "science" is missing this particular step.
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Well, in this case, NASA's version of this experiment lacks exactly that. They deliberately used a different design from that used (with reproduceable results) by both the British and the Chinese.
Yes, Kudos to NASA for going to the trouble of setting up an actual "null" hypothesis test - Except, how about they try the experiment as documented before they go tweaking the conditions in unknown ways? Yes
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Sadly, you're actually wrong even though you're right. Shawyer never said that the "null" device wouldn't produce thrust. That was the claim of a guy named Guido Fetta, who invented something he calls the Cannae Drive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive#Cannae_drive). Shawyer just said that the Cannae Drive is an inefficient EmDrive, with or without the slots which distinguished the "null" device from the "real" one.
Oh, and when NASA tested the actual EmDrive (which was months ago), it actually produced m
Review != accept (Score:5, Insightful)
And just over two hundred years ago, the French Academy of Sciences steadfastly refused to believe that rocks could fall from space, with an abundance of supporting evidence to demonstrate that these "meteorites" had clearly come from weather conditions right here on Earth picking up rocks and flinging them about.
Funny thing about (good) science - It doesn't simply dismiss new ideas simply because they disagree with existing theories. Oh, but for the first time in human history we have it right? Yeah, about that unified theory of quantum gravity, Doctor...
Experiment not the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the reporting. This wasn't a peer reviewed scientific discovery, and it didn't claim to be. It was just a paper that laid out how the experiment was done, and what the results were, nothing more. Just because IFL Science, like every other tech/science site, picks up the story and hints at trips to Mars in a matter of weeks, doesn't mean that's what the experimenters were claiming.
This is how science works. You do experiments, you post your methods and results. Other scientists may do the same. If there is enough evidence that something may be at work, you do more. If you end up showing that everything we thought we knew about the universe was wrong, THEN YOU START CHANGING THE TEXTBOOKS.
The law of conservation of momentum, like all scientific laws, comes with the caveat that our understanding of how the universe works is correct. They are not immutable. Given reproduceability, predictability, and strong empirical evidence, it probably is correct; but that doesn't mean it may not need "tweaking" in the face of new evidence. It could also be that no scientific principles are being broken here, it's just there's something else at play we don't understand.
People who claim otherwise are really just religious zealots in a lab coat.
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Thank you. The hilarious thing is that this time, the zealots aren't even reading the report before "debunking" it. TFA (and, to be fair, lots of other sources) confused the recent NASA experiments on the Cannae Drive for experiments on the EmDrive. These are similar devices, but are invented by different people and their inventors claim different explanations for how they work. The actual inventor of the EmDrive (whose device was also tested, and produced more than twice as much thrust as the ~40 from the
what exactly is this "bad science"? (Score:5, Insightful)
What does that even mean? The Chinese reported some result, NASA tried to reproduce it, and didn't get very convincing results. Any halfway reasonable person looks at what was reported in the press and says "hey, nothing really to see here, they didn't really prove or disprove anything", to which one might add "how nice that people try some new and crazy stuff occasionally".
Which part of that chain of events is supposed to constitute "bad science"? Who exactly is supposed to have been fooled? Which step along the way does Siegel consider "bad science" and why?
Instead of making a rational argument for the cost/benefit of this particular experiment, Siegel goes off on some tangent about N-rays, supposedly illustrating the foolishness of some experiments. But there are many other cases where weird observations and experiments that most people thought never could work opened up entirely new areas in physics and biology. If one can learn anything from the history of science, it's that you should sometimes try crazy and foolish experiments because occasionally, they yield a big payoff.
Nobody knows whether reactionless drives are "impossible" or not; anybody who makes definitive statements one way or the other is a charlatan at this point, including Siegel.
The known laws of physics violate the known laws of physics, because they are not only incomplete but internally inconsistent. Somewhere along the line, you will have to do experiments whose results might violate the known laws of physics if you want to make progress.
I still don't know what that "this" is that Siegel is referring to. How do you know that the results aren't reproducible or robust if you don't try to reproduce them?
Siegel has the kind of dull mind that we don't want to teach our next generation of scientists or kids, and it is disturbing that guys like him are actually active in science education. Kids: try stupid things that violate known physics. Try things that sticks-in-the-mud like Siegel tell you don't work. And try to reproduce other people's experiments, both the ones that everybody believes and the ones nobody else could get to work.
Pretty easy to test (Score:2)
Just put a payload experiment in orbit and see if you can drive it around. If the scientists running the experiments accounted for the motion of waves on a beach five miles away, I'm pretty certain that makes it worth a payload slot. We could dick around down here for years arguing about whether the results are valid or not, or we could put one up there and try it.
Sounds like the perfect cubesat experiment.
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The problem with that idea (much though I'd love to see it) is that the current experimental apparatus - the one that produce only-barely-detectable thrust - is already much too large for a cubesat, and that's ignoring the need to power it. The Chinese tested a much more powerful version, but they had to use kilowatts of power to get that much thrust; again, the whole thing is way too big for a cubesat. You're talking a moderate-sized (and priced, by satellite price standard) satellite here, and you'd need
Yep. (Score:3)
Cold fusion also. The palladium was soaking up hydrogen, which the original experimenters (Pons & Fleischmann?) misinterpreted as demonstrating room-temperature cold fusion.
The public needs understand that un-refereed reports are not fact. Further, even refereed journal articles are not fact. It is only after others reproduce experiments and find confirming results that we get closer to "fact." Even then, it's just "confirmed theory."
Why the popular press loves to breathlessly report on recent journal articles as "fact" only confuses the matter.
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Science needs experimental data (Score:2)
To scientifically prove/disprove something you need experimental data, which is exactly what NASA seems to be doing in this case. The results are less than stellar but as long as they are not burning any significant amount of money whats the issue? If we really want to know if this thing works or not just put it in a small cubesat and piggyback it on another satellite launch, if it can change its orbit then we know it works, if it can't we know its useless. Again no significant amount of resources shoul
Front page news huh? (Score:3)
I haven't seen any of the articles, but I'm guessing the news about it has been spread in this fashion:
Rocket companies hate this. NASA has built a new type of engine using a simple trick. You will NEVER believe what happened when they switched it on. When I saw it, my mind was blown!
(Photo with a couple of red circles around guys in lab coats)
Bit of a spelling error in the article. (Score:5, Funny)
The term that applies here is either "Bad Journalism" or "Bad Science Reporting". Calling it "Bad Science" and leaving it at that is giving the real charlatans a free pass.
Scientist: "Hey, this is weird... We just put together something that shouldn't work but it sort of looks like it did."
Headline: "NEW EXPERIMENT PROVES THAT EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT PHYSICS IS WRONG!"
Scientist: "It's not that... Look, here's a copy of a presentation we just gave to the rest of the department. There's a tiny and barely measurable bias in our results that we should be able to explain away but can't."
Headline: "SCIENTIST WITH TWO ASSES HAS RESEARCHERS BAFFLED!"
Scientist: "Um, that wasn't a press release, just a little paper we threw together to discuss our results. It's for other people familiar with what we're doing, and who know what words like 'bias' mean."
Headline: "LEAKED INTERNAL DOCUMENTS REVEAL NEW LAWS OF PHYSICS!"
Scientist: "I'm just going to back away slowly now and call some nice friends of mine who can show you out of the building. Try not to make any sudden moves..."
Headline: "SCIENTISTS INVOLVED IN COVERUP OF REVOLUTIONARY NEW SPACE DRIVE!"
Scientist: "Well, look at that. I just put a minus sign instead of a plus sign in one of the equations. If you do the math over again the results make a little bit more sense this way."
Headline: "REVOLUTIONARY SPACE DRIVE SCIENTIST WITH TWO ASSES IS A FRAUD! HOW WERE WE ALL FOOLED?"
Easier to be a skeptic (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA itself has committed the sin of not reading the fucking article. They and their cohort of skeptics read only the summary from NASA without even bothering to get the full paper before drawing exceedingly obvious yet wrong conclusions.
There is nothing wrong with dismissing something you assume is crap and don't want to waste your time with... as a practical matter there is only so much time we all have to make assumptions to operate. The problem arises when we forget or pretend we didn't make them.
When you go that extra step of actively debunking you should no longer be able to hide behind your own ignorance and laziness. All those "skeptics" who think they know something simply because they elect to operate under the safety of default position need a good checking from time to time.
Whatever ultimately happens at least NASA has the guts to go there and actually run experiments which is more than you'll ever get from the armchair skeptics.
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More like blinded TO science.
Any 2nd year physics student should be able to laugh this garbage right off a lab bench without even running an experiment. Its truly pathetic.
Re:BLINDED BY SCIENCE !! (Score:5, Insightful)
Any good science student should be aware that our understanding of physics changes over time. Clearly this device is unlikely because it requires a change to the "laws" of physics.
The article explains why any good scientist should be able to laugh this off based on the reported experimental results.
BLINDED BY ARROGANCE (Score:5, Informative)
It's sad how pathetic the pretenders on Slashdot are sometimes. So full of themselves and sure that they are smarter than the next guy.
I know it's appeal to authority, but NASA doesn't employ idiots. And if you had bothered to do even a simply Google search you would have found this [wired.co.uk] which sheds some more light on the situation.
Just to save you the effort, the abstract sucks (most likely written by a public relations flunky), they were very careful in setting up the experiment, it WAS done in a vacuum, there is something there. Note that they didn't explain it, they just report their observations.
But you go ahead and stick with your second year physics student attitude.
Re: BLINDED BY ARROGANCE (Score:2, Informative)
Appeal to authority is only a fallacy in a deductive argument, so there's no need to qualify. If appeals to authority were all that bad, people wouldn't go to see doctors when they got sick or to mechanics when their cars broke down. We trust authorities because of a web of beliefs we have about education, certification or licensing, the incentives professionals face to render the best available guidance, etc.
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No. Fallacies are not automatically incorrect. They are, in most cases, only *potentially* incorrect.
In the case of Appeal to Authority, the phrasing itself is misleading, because the actually fallacy, the actual problem, using comes from citing a non-authority as an authority. IE, its really an Appeal to an Inappropriate Authority.
Re: BLINDED BY ARROGANCE (Score:4, Insightful)
then you misunderstand fallacies.
nearly every defined fallacy has a condition or conditions easily satisfied in which the original statement is correct and not fallacious.
"Correlation is not causation" is hte biggest one you see on slashdot. its a warning, a guide, but its not true 100% of the time. sometimes correlation IS causation. or really whats happening is its saying "hey, there might be something here, we need to look further...but careful, it could be coincidence"
Appeal to Authority is another that can easily have situations in which its not automatically wrong. and its exactly as I said: the fallacy usually arrives from citing a non-authority as an authority. "I'm not a scientist, but Bobby over there tells me GW is a hoax." Now unless Bobby-over-there is a phd in climatology and current in the field, and not funded by oil companies....he may not qualify. But if Bobby IS that current, established, and well regarded phd, then his opinion on the science and evidence ABSOLUTELY does carry more weight than a non-experts, and its not fallacious in nature, merely potentially so until you know his background and reasoning. we appeal to authority because we are not experts. but if we cant cite experts and automatically wrong for doing so, then either you're doing the work of the ignorant for them, or we must all become experts at everything.
Re: BLINDED BY ARROGANCE (Score:4, Insightful)
you just described what the other guy said about certifications, licenses and education.
you're saying the same thing, while disagreeing with him.
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The really dumb part is how they look at the "null device" showing a positive result, as somehow being evidence that there is no positive result.
What it really means they don't understand the effect enough. They had a hypothesis (from the Cannae inventor) that these carved grooves in the sides of the chamber were what caused the thrust. So they tested that hypothesis. The hypothesis turns out to be incorrect. That's how science works. It doesn't disprove the observed effect itself. It means we have to
Re:BLINDED BY ARROGANCE (Score:4, Insightful)
Science is a process.
If you execute the process badly, that's "Bad Science".
If you execute the process correctly, or at least as best you can given the known parameters, etc. then you can't call it "Bad Science", even though the results are unexpected and controversial. I would expect that even the most cynical observer would be curious as to what is happening here.
Since his article contained several factual errors related to how the experiment was conducted, it is obvious that he did not even read the full report but just the POS Abstract or even worse, various news accounts.
So actually, HE is the one engaging in Bad Science Reporting.
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Any good science student should be aware that our understanding of physics changes over time. Clearly this device is unlikely because it requires a change to the "laws" of physics.
The article explains why any good scientist should be able to laugh this off based on the reported experimental results.
The problem is that the article is saying this is bad science, when it's really bad science reporting
NASA did the right thing. They tested something, they got weird results, they published it. The article points out the results were no different than the null control, and that's true, so clearly the supposed design of the drive is bullshit. What the article doesn't point out is that the interesting part is that neither of them should have shown any thrust. So something is going on that the experimenter
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No, that's just not true. Conservation of Momentum is a symmetry of the laws of nature. The entire mathematical edifice is built on the fact that using these symmetries we can have been able to build explanations for basically everything beyond the simplest view of classical mechanics (which itself is fraught with issues which is why we did this all in the first place). So you can't destroy the fundamental conservation laws without ripping down the whole edifice. You have to provide an equally compelling ex
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Re:Space Drive or Global Warming? (Score:5, Informative)
Wait, is this guy talking about space drives or global warming skeptics?
FTA:
1. The magnitude of these effects varied tremendously from experiment to experiment. //endtroll
2. The threshold of measurement—the difference between a detection and a non-detection—was always extremely close to the actual claimed detection.
3. Many attempts at confirming the experiments by some of the leading scientists of the day, including Lord Kelvin, Heinrich Rubens and Robert Wood, all produced null results.
4. And finally, even if you restricted your data sets to the positive the experimental results, their claims were inconsistent with one another.
FTFY
Re:Space Drive or Global Warming? (Score:5, Funny)
Just because you can't prove global warming is happening doesn't mean that it isn't. The science behind it is settled since over 90% of the scientists voted that it is happening. You can't disagree with it without being anti-science because of that.
Re:Space Drive or Global Warming? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry. Science doesn't work by votes.
Republic of science (Score:3)
Re:Space Drive or Global Warming? (Score:4, Insightful)
> It does though.
So the earth really was flat for awhile?
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So the earth really was flat for awhile?
Would you please list four or five scientists who claimed it was, more recently than about 500 BC when it was measured to 10% precision? Or did you buy that Columbus tale they taught you in fifth grade?
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So the earth really was flat for awhile?
Correct! And until the 1600's, the universe revolved around the Earth. And while politicians can't repeal the law of gravity, scientists can! Isn't that cool?
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One of Isaac Asimov's short stories told how a guy made a photon pause. It ended the universe as we know it.
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Wait, you're saying a photon pause somehow culminated in the PATRIOT act?
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It's been done. I don't know exactly how the physics works, but light has been halted in the lab. It involves a Bose-Einstein condensate.
The Relativity of Wrong (Score:2)
So the earth really was flat for awhile?
To the limits of measurement at the time, yes [tufts.edu] From the link - Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long
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All he really is pointing out is the ignorance of man. We believed it was flat for so long simply because we could not see a curve, but yet it still existed and its still a ball. You cannot have a flat ball. If you look at it from a distance you dont wonder if its a flat land or a round ball. It isnt nearly right, its completely wrong and only human ignorance would say it was 'nearly right'
No it was very much 100% wrong, nearly zero is not zero. Thats like saying 2+2 is nearly 5, its technically true, but u
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It isnt nearly right, its completely wrong and only human ignorance would say it was 'nearly right'
No it was very much 100% wrong, nearly zero is not zero.
I suppose you're also absolutely opposed to teaching Newtonian mechanics to intro physics students, too -- right? I mean, after all, we now know it "was very much 100% wrong." Sure, relativistic effects are basically irrelevant at normal speeds, but "nearly zero is not zero." So, we need to revamp our physics curriculum and introduce full-blown Einsteinian space-time to our students immediately on their first day... who cares if they won't have the math to do much with it, or if they'll never be able to
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Science works regardless of what you think, scientist try to figure out how it works by working together and following a very practiced method that, underneath it all, is developed to bypass human mistakes and its own ego. Therefore, when you get 90% of them to agree, there is a very good probability that it is in fact happening. What do you want 100%? you mean like the bible and god.
You know what, fuck it, i don't care...in the future, years from now, when everyone is dying off, at least your the one that
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The verification is crucial though. What happens when two scientists claim they can verify a hypothesis, and two thousand scientists say they cannot?
Either two thousand scientists have screwed up badly, or just two have. Which is more likely? Lacking the skills, time & equipment to verify it yourself, who are you going to believe?
A single person can come up with a major paradigm shift that overturns our old models - but not when their results can't be reliably verified, and certainly not when their clai
Re:Space Drive or Global Warming? (Score:5, Informative)
Except none of your points applies to climate change.
The effect is robust: there was a whole independent project to determine if the thermodynamically meaningless "global average temperature" is increasing. It is: http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc... [bbc.com]
The threshold of measurement is around 0.5 C for a single station, and we have an effect that is about 1 C over the past 100 years. Not as big a margin as one would like, but difficult to ignore. And growing.
No one has produced any results that show the instrumental temperature record in the past century is not real. There are debates about causes, but the reality of the phenomenon is not in doubt.
Everyone who has looked at the question agrees that there is about a 1.6 W/m**2 addition to the Earth's heat budget from anthropogenic CO2, so clearly when taking the "positive cases" there is still good agreement.
There are large and legitimate areas of disagreement with regard to climate change (far more than the moron, anti-science, "the science is settled crowd" would have you believe) but the basic phenomenon, unlike the EMDrive, is not just consistent with but actually required by the laws of physics.
Finally: the summary is terrible, even by /. standards. The article does not point out any errors in the experiments. Rather it points out that reporters have been lying about the experiments, pure and simple. That is not the fault of the scientists, who honestly reported their null results.
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Finally: the summary is terrible, even by /. standards.
samzenpus. i even bothered to find a way to hide him for my logged-in account, but unfortunately i can't just make him disappear for my anonymous visits, which is how i ended up here
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The threshold of measurement is around 0.5 C for a single station, and we have an effect that is about 1 C over the past 100 years. Not as big a margin as one would like, but difficult to ignore. And growing.
But... that's even smaller than the ratio versus the threshold of measurement the fellow in this article claims implied experimenter bias and bad science.
The "test" performed at NASA was sensitive to a minimum thrust threshold of about 10-to-15 microNewtons, and the "positive result" claimed detection of somewhere between 30-to-50 microNewtons of thrust.
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Not to mention that there is a tonne more datasources than just weather stations.
But more to the point climate science has tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of scientists , most post-doctoral, most physics trained, so not just "opiniated geology undergrad" or "crusading economist" trained, and all are in pretty broad agreement that theres a lot of thermal and kinetic energy coming from anthropological sources and that energy has to go *somewhere*.
Quite different to a handful of optimistic experimentalist
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And this is what pisses me off with the climate "skeptics". If you don't know how the system will react when you're increasing the concentration of CO2 then why not err on the side of mitigating the CO2 concentrations instead of "business as usual".
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Economic reasons. The big CO2 emitter is the use of fossil fuels, which are really cheap and really convenient - that's why we use them in such quantity. Cheap energy helps all industry. Restrict CO2 and you raise the cost of energy and the cost of transport, which will have a negative economic impact.
Millions of displaced people fleeing the rapidly expanding desert that used to be their home is going to have an economic impact too.
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Millions of displaced people fleeing the rapidly expanding desert that used to be their home is going to have an economic impact too.
Nonsense. The war in Syria is all about the power of social media and the "arab spring", nothing to do with the abandoned farms. Nothing to do with mass internal migration away from the rural areas (10% of the population in Syria), nothing to do with skyrocketing food prices, nothing to do with food riots in cities such as Cairo. It's just coincidence these events immediately preceded the uprising(s).
Surely the worst drought ever recorded in the "fertile crescent" (AKA - the birthplace of agriculture) co
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Erring on the side of caution has great financial costs at the business level and great emotional costs at the citizen level.
Financially, whomever goes first on that carousel is going to lose a lot of money, unless every country on the planet agrees to jump in at the same time. Emotionally, just by looking at the aggression that pops up when someone suggests the very minute lifestyle change of having one vegetarian-food day per week... Well, you get the point.
Multiply that by three (USA, Russia, and China
Re:Space Drive or Global Warming? (Score:4, Funny)
a Triceratops riding John Wilkes Boothe.
I can't decide whether this is funnier with or without a hyphen between "Triceratops" and "riding."
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The difference is that the space drive hypothesis is still falsifiable. NASA needs to adjust the hypothesis description so that both the presence or absence of any quantum thrust is proof of it.
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The difference is that the space drive hypothesis is still falsifiable.
More than falsifiable. The NASA experiment demonstrated that the hypothesis was false: the control experiment got the same results.
We're left with either an experimental error which, if corrected, would move the result into the error band or we're left with a real effect for which we don't yet have a satisfactory explanation.
N-rays started this way but so did relativity: the Michelson Morley experiments and their predecessors found a real effect of light which had a lot of quack theories explaining it until
The article is flat-out wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh for fuck's sake... Time to debunk this shit, again.
TFA got it wrong as well, so I suppose I can't blame you people for getting it wrong too, but please try doing a little more research?
A little background: The EmDrive was invented by a guy named Shawyer. It was tested by NASA, among others, and found to produce about 91 microNewtons. (I'll address the 30-50 that TFA talks about too.) That's way less than the Chinese found, but NASA was also testing it at much lower power and say they are planning to test a higher-power version.
The article mentions "... and a third person, Guido Fetta, have built three separate versions of the EmDrive". This is wrong, at least according to Fetta. Fetta invented what he calls a "Cannae Drive" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive#Cannae_drive) which resembles an EmDrive but supposedly works on a different principle. In particular, Fetta believes that his drive requires radial slots in the chamber to operate. To test this, two versions of the Cannae Drive were (also, separately from the EmDrive test) tested by NASA: one with and one without the slots. Those tests both produced the same thrust (30-50 microN, about half what the EmDrive produced), which disproves Fetta's theory as to how the Cannae Drive is supposed to work.... and nothing else.
The null test device that everybody is so dismissedly claiming claiming disproves the EmDrive wasn't even supposed to be an EmDrive! Fetta, inventor of the Cannae Drive, was disproven. Shawyer, inventor of the EmDrive, was actually vindicated because according to his theory, the Cannae Drive (slots or no) is basically an inefficiently-shaped EmDrive.
I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand.
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Unfortunately, it could only get you to one star in your lifetime, and we have a pretty decent view of it from here.
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Read TFA and this [discovermagazine.com] one. If you believe that "science" has become altruistic and above corruption, you simply have not been paying attention to science. Sure, there is some good science, but there are always crap programs as well. Many of which are performed at the direction of our Government. You know, the same people that won't fund NASA but can waste money trying to figure out if you are a sociopath by your tweets (and that's not the worst waste of science funding, just an easy target).
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Sturgeon's law : 90% of everything is crap.
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Sturgeon's law : 90% of everything is crap.
Does that apply to Sturgeon's Law itself too?
Some great quotes on statistics... (Score:3)
"In earlier times, they had no statistics, and so they had to fall back on lies". -- Stephen Leacock
"Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance." -- Morris Kline
"Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable." - Mark Twain
"Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything." - Gregg Easterbrook
And of course..
"42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot." -- Steven Wright
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"People can come up with statistics to prove anything. Forfty percent of all people know that." - Homer Simpson
Re:BullShit (Score:4, Funny)
Re:BullShit (Score:4, Insightful)
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But think of all the untapped political and economic talent this program could find!
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Re:Is it really "impossible"? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it is perfectly possible (and well understood) that you can produce thrust using pure energy with no mass. Just put a lightbulb and a reflector on your ship; as long as you can power the lightbulb you will produce thrust. The problem with this is that it is ridiculously inefficient, and since your power generation is not massless, this is roughly equivalent to using pathetically bad fuel.
Also, don't confuse energy and momentum. They are separate things, and both are conserved independently of each other.
The trick to making a good spaceship engine is converting energy efficiently into ship momentum. As far as we know this means creating high-momentum exhaust; conservation of momentum then means your ship gains momentum in the opposite direction. However, the problem is that to create high-momentum exhaust you either need high mass (and this means your ship carries, and has to accelerate, tones of fuel), or you create high-velocity exhaust (which due to the kinetic energy formula means you use a lot more energy).
If you could find a way to skip the whole exhaust thing and transfer momentum directly into something not on your ship, you would have a space engine far superior to any we know of. The idea with this research was to transfer it into the quantum vacuum something-or-other. This would be analogous to how an airplane transfers momentum to the atmosphere or a boat to the water or a car to the land. In theory this could work and even be more efficient than using light as your exhaust.
Another case, perhaps? (Score:2)
If one considers gravity in our nominal 3d space, isn't it correct to say that gravity imparts momentum without anything comparable to "high momentum exhaust"?
Serious question -- the physics are beyond me, but the curiosity isn't. :)
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A little background (good question): To the best of our knowledge, there's no such thing as gravity "on" something; all gravity is *between* things. Think of it like magnetism (in fact, if you change the constants and swap charge and mass, the formulae for computing magnetic attraction and gravitational attraction are the same). When the Earth's gravity imparts momentum to an object (an apple you drop, say), the apple's gravity imparts the same momentum on the Earth. Of course, since momentum is mass times
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So I think the answer to what I was thinking is in the "the apple imparts the same momentum to the earth" bit.
Although... I'm having a lot of trouble seeing the apple pulling on the earth as hard as the earth is pulling on the apple. How could it?
The thrust (ah ha ha) of my question was observing there is, viewed in 3D terms, a force that acts across a vacuum without intermediary "thrown" particles. So the implication is, at least to me, that another such force might be possible. No?
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If one considers gravity in our nominal 3d space, isn't it correct to say that gravity imparts momentum without anything comparable to "high momentum exhaust"?
This is the principle behind the "slingshot" maneuver, which allows you to transfer momentum to a planet without using fuel. It can be used to speed up your ship or slow it down, depending on whether you pass behind or in front of the trajectory of the planet. (I suppose you could count the planet as being a portion of your exhaust) However, you have to be much less picky about where and when you're going, because this maneuver requires a planet. However, it is sufficiently worthwhile that scientists are wi
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ok, but that's not really what I was asking, or at least, if it was, I'm confused.
Let me try again: Gravity acts across a vacuum without having imparted momentum to intermediary particles.
Could there not, conceptually at least, be another force that can act across a vacuum, perhaps to a local mass or a distant one, or to something else entirely, that does not require spitting particles out the spaceship's tail?
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So short answer, Yes. However no such force has been fo
Re:Is it really "impossible"? (Score:5, Interesting)
You are mistaken. Energy is converted to waste heat (which is a form of energy, so total energy is unchanged). Momentum is unchanged - some of it is simply transferred to Earth.
Conservation of momentum is just as fundamental a principle as conservation of energy. That doesn't mean that a drive that requires no fuel is impossible - because you can convert energy to matter - it just means that it has to dump the counterforce somewhere to keep momentum accounts balanced.
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nonsense, the ground is too elastic.
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What's that watermelon doing there?
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The thrust from these drives is far too low to launch with. You still need the big rocket to make orbit. Then you can switch to the new maybe-it-works drive. The acceleration is minuscule, but times that by a few months and you can still make a pretty good delta-V from it.
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