Saturday, April 10, 2021
Increasingly infamous?
The controversy over the Em Drive continues.
I don't have a dog in the fight. Not convinced either way. I do think we'll eventually admit that an ether exists, that there is an absolute baseline or ground point for waves. Michelson-Morley didn't disprove an absolute baseline, it only disproved the idea that light waves are a distortion OF the ether in the same way that sound waves are motions OF air molecules. If there is an absolute baseline, devices like the Em Drive might be able to push against it.
The latest "final cancellation" of the Em Drive:
I thought the whole point of science was to upend existing theories. Mostly a myth, but in areas like atomic subparticles, the big grants do support attempts to upend those same theories. Upending Einstein is cool when the right people do it. I guess Shawyer isn't the right people.
Status is innate and permanent. Everything in the world, including science, is solely about status. Cool people win everything. Uncool people lose everything.
¶ 6:55 AM
The controversy over the Em Drive continues.
I don't have a dog in the fight. Not convinced either way. I do think we'll eventually admit that an ether exists, that there is an absolute baseline or ground point for waves. Michelson-Morley didn't disprove an absolute baseline, it only disproved the idea that light waves are a distortion OF the ether in the same way that sound waves are motions OF air molecules. If there is an absolute baseline, devices like the Em Drive might be able to push against it.
The latest "final cancellation" of the Em Drive:
Just four days after headlines announced that a team from Germany’s Dresden University led by researcher Martin Tajmar had seemingly proven once and for all that the increasingly infamous EmDrive fails to produce any measurable thrust, it’s inventor Robert Shawyer, took the stage at a virtual propulsion conference to not only refute those test results, but indicated that he told the team undertaking those tests years earlier that their flawed designs would guarantee failure.Increasingly infamous is political language, not scientific language.
This idea of thrust without an emitted propellant not only violates Newton’s 2nd and 3rd laws of motion governing the conservation of momentum, say skeptics, but would pretty much upend a century of mathematics and science that all seem to support those laws.
“The idea not only violates Newton’s third law of motion,” wrote Rochester Institute of Technology astrophysicist Brian Koberlein in a May 2017 Forbes piece, “it violates special relativity, general relativity, and Noether’s theorem. Since these are each well-tested theories that form the basis of countless other theories, their violation would completely overturn all of modern physics.”
I thought the whole point of science was to upend existing theories. Mostly a myth, but in areas like atomic subparticles, the big grants do support attempts to upend those same theories. Upending Einstein is cool when the right people do it. I guess Shawyer isn't the right people.
Status is innate and permanent. Everything in the world, including science, is solely about status. Cool people win everything. Uncool people lose everything.
¶ 6:55 AM
