I’m not sure that I’d cite Albert Einstein as even being his intellectual superior; Maxwell’s accomplishments across a variety of fields, both theoretical and practical, were extremely impressive, and the full extent of his work was not appreciated in his lifetime, or indeed, until the early 20th century. Another ten or twenty years might well have had him fleshing out statistical mechanics and developing basic relativity theory. His intuition about physical principles, combined with his extremely advanced grasp of mathematical methods that were not in wide use in his day show him as comparable to the greatest physicists of the succeeding generations; he was the first (and one of the very few) to appreciate Faraday’s description of magnetic lines of force as a permeating field, and although his full twenty equations for electrodynamics were long thought to be just confusing and incomplete, a more extensive reading of them shows very deep insight unequaled for the next twenty years. He was also a very charitable person and although not a great lectuer, an enthusiastic mentor to his students. I think the most comparable 20th century physicist is John Archibald Wheeler; a brilliant, creative thinker who just never quite achieved renown but fosted an entire generation of leading physicists.
In an earlier test (also without vacuum conditions because of their difficulty operating the amplifier in near vacuum conditions), yes. Which gives more question as to the precision and reliability of their test measurement setup.
Since no detailed paper or open data review has been made available (as far as I’m aware) it is difficult to say how the reported thrust level was developed or validated. For instance, if they’re just taking an the measured force and subtracting a runnning average in a crude attempt to debias the data, the result would be essentially meaningless from a trendwise perspective in terms of filtering out all of the other potential contributions. Realistically, the only way to discern a real trend at this level is to attempt to fit the data to a prediction and see how well the regression fits the actual data, then convince yourself that you haven’t forced a fit to the data, i.e. that the prediciton is so flat or the distribution is so relaxed that any trend encompassed by the data would appear to fit. And even showing a positive trend isn’t sufficient to demonstrate that the proposed mechanism is what is causing the anomalous thrust; there are all nature of biases that could be introduced into the measurement that have to be accounted for before you could conclude that the data is genuinely demonstrating the proposed phenomenon.
NASA Eagleworks is still only a very small subset of NASA, and I’d be happier if some other group with a slightly bigger budget were to have a crack at this.
They’ve ruled out one possible source of noise, but other possible sources of noise remain. And until all of those known sources of noise remain, that’s by far the explanation to be preferred (even after all the known sources are accounted for, unknown sources of noise are still a preferred option). Real science is a lot more slow and plodding than the media makes it out to be.
It isn’t proposed to violate conservation of energy, but conservation of momentum. In conventional rockets (or ion drives, or anything else of the like) the change in momentum of the rocket is exactly compensated for by the momentum in the opposite direction of whatever gets thrown out the back. EmDrive, if it works, would generate momentum without anything at all getting thrown out the back.
You can’t really separate the two, though. Photon drives exist–they don’t violate conservation of momentum. But the EmDrive can’t be a photon drive because if it were, it would violate conservation of energy (photon drives require much more energy for a given level of thrust).
The other possibility is that is that it violates relativity. That is, it could work if the laws of physics are different across inertial reference frames. This is the “quantum foam” explanation, where the EmDrive is actually pushing on some sort of neo-ether.
More precisely, one consequence of relativity is that conservation of energy implies conservation of momentum. If momentum isn’t conserved in one reference frame, and relativity is true, then there’s some other reference frame where energy isn’t conserved.
Seriously though, I for one thought that everything that would be relevant to “real life” and produce actual real world benefits had already been discovered, that my generation wouldn’t have the “computer age” moment where something that wasn’t possible before would suddenly be possible, that it was all incremental progress from now on.
IF this thing is real, and reactionless thrust is a thing, and space travel becomes a thing, in my lifetime… I will be stoked.
I’m really outa my wheelhouse here but don’t some of the proponents of this sort of drive claim that it IS actually consistent with the math of relativity and the like?
The popular press articles (which seem to be all we get on this) claim that there is mathematics, and that the maths has been checked over and found to be “OK”. Which is close to ridiculous for a number of reasons. One - if the maths is any good it should predict a precise thrust. Rather than looking for any thrust and trying to sort out if there is anything under the noise, there should be a clear prediction as to the numbers. Two. The machine contradicts relativity. What maths do they have that is “OK” and yet specifically contradicts accepted theory?
