{"id":996,"date":"2015-07-28T10:54:34","date_gmt":"2015-07-28T15:54:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/?p=996"},"modified":"2015-07-28T10:54:34","modified_gmt":"2015-07-28T15:54:34","slug":"its-still-not-rocket-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2015\/07\/28\/its-still-not-rocket-science\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s still not rocket science"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the last couple of days, I’ve seen a little flareup of interest on social media in the “reactionless drive” that supposedly generates thrust without expelling any sort of propellant. This was impossible a year ago,<\/a> and it’s still impossible.<\/p>\n

OK, it’s not literally impossible in the mathematical sense, but it’s close enough. Such a device would violate the law of conservation of momentum, which is an incredibly well-tested part of physics. Any reasonable application of reasoning (or as some people insist on calling it, Bayesian reasoning) says, with overwhelmingly high probability, that conservation of momentum is right and this result is wrong.<\/p>\n

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, never believe an experiment until it’s been confirmed by a theory, etc.<\/p>\n

The reason for the recent flareup seems to be that another group has replicated<\/a> the original group’s results. They actually do seem to have done a better job. In particular, they did the experiment in a vacuum. Bizarrely, the original experimenters went to great lengths to describe the vacuum chamber<\/em> in which they did their experiment, and then noted, in a way that was easy for a reader to miss, that the experiments were done “at ambient pressure.” That’s important, because stray air currents were a plausible source of error that could have explained the tiny thrust they found.<\/p>\n

The main thing to note about the new experiment is that they are appropriately circumspect in describing their results. In particular, they make clear that what they’re seeing is almost certainly some sort of undiagnosed effect of ordinary (momentum-conserving) physics, not a revolutionary reactionless drive.<\/p>\n

We identified the magnetic interaction of the power feeding lines going to and from the liquid metal contacts as the most important possible side-effect that is not fully characterized yet. Our test campaign can not confirm or refute the claims of the EMDrive …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just because I like it, let me repeat what\u00a0my old friend John Baez said<\/a> about the original claim a year ago. The original researchers speculated that they were seeing some sort of effect due to interactions with the “quantum vacuum virtual plasma.” As John put it,<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cQuantum vacuum virtual plasma\u201d is something you\u2019d say if you failed a course in quantum field theory and then smoked too much weed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the last couple of days, I’ve seen a little flareup of interest on social media in the “reactionless drive” that supposedly generates thrust without expelling any sort of propellant. This was impossible a year ago, and it’s still impossible. OK, it’s not literally impossible in the mathematical sense, but it’s close enough. Such a … Continue reading It’s still not rocket science<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}