I think at this point, I'm resigned to waiting for an emdrive cubesat to just prove it once and for all: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a22678/em-dri...
Argument #1: it violates Newton's Third Law of Motion.
Argument #2: every time they improve the test apparatus, the measured force declines and is "coincidentally" close to the measurement limits of the apparatus.
Argument #3: It was originally designed based on a misunderstanding certain principles of Physics. Now they are trying to find a new explanation for why it works. What are the odds that you misunderstand physics, design something based on that misunderstanding, and that it then works in a barely-detectable way due to "unknown mechanism"?
Every so often, something comes along that overturns an established law, like the photoelectric effect or the Michelson–Morley experiment. But the vast majority of the time, the laws remain intact and it's the claim which is somehow flawed. (See the Pioneer anomaly for a recent example where new physics was long considered as a potential explanation, but it ended up being a completely mundane effect.)
I totally agree it requires drastic evidence, but it could be explained by another physical action not necessarily the violation of Newton's laws or effects that supersede those laws like quantum effects
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7kgKijo-p0idV9tcmVIVzZrdTQ...
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/emdrive-exclusive-roger-shawyer-con...
http://www.slideshare.net/KurtZeller/investigation-of-a-part...
I'm not sure what makes you think this. There's no failure in science when an effect is observed and it's explainable within the frame of current theory. If that was the case every experiment I've done would have been a 'failure.'
Doesn't that make it an EM Drive?
Why the cone apparatus? What is preventing the intentional design of a spacecraft that uses thermal radiation (or Thermal Recoil Force) similar to the Pioneer spacecraft?
e: The replies indicate the answer is that this could be built but the effect is to weak to be practical. Which I find to be a completely acceptable answer, thanks.
The device under consideration is special because if it works it is a reactionless drive. Nothing is coming out of it.
What's interesting about the EmDrive's claims is that it supposedly produces far more thrust for the power that goes into it than would be possible from a photon rocket.
(The Pioneer anomaly wasn't because nobody realized that thermal radiation would act as a photon rocket, but rather that the effect wasn't correctly calculated. The theory is pretty simple, but it gets complex when you apply it to a real spacecraft with complex shapes, non-blackbody materials, and temperature gradients.)
So, because this thing would change basically all Physics books, there's a huge burden on them to prove it beyond any shade of doubt. Forget about flirting with detection error; it should be as clear as the sun rising in the morning.
Please note that relativity, big as is was, was only at a low-to-medium level of "oompf". It didn't change quite everything, far from it.
I would argue relativity was a tectonic shift in how we understand physics. These ideas existed before Einstein in mathematics/ geometry (Grassmann & Reimann). But they were just ideas and not a full-fledged theory.
https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/themes/NewtonsThird.ht...
I'm really not sure what the argument against impossibility is, apart from a fervent longing for something of the sort to be real. (A longing that I share, for what it's worth.) They claim to have some data showing that something really is generating thrust, but as I recall some experiments have shown comparably large results in both the "actual test" and "control" conditions, so I'm not sure what to make of that evidence.
But if it is, then literally every discovery in (say)
particle physics in your lifetime has been a fluke: just
dumb luck.
Note that I'm not grasping at straws wrt the EmDrive. The distinctions between incompleteness and error is far more interesting to me, especially in the context of science. And I'm curious if your statement was more than a rhetorical assertion.
It's humility. It's admitting that there are things we don't know, and that some of them could give exceptions to the things that we do know.
I think that "willing to be proven wrong, but requiring proof" is the correct stance.
As that suggests, the drive would violate conservation of momentum as we currently understand it. It would also violate conservation of energy. Because of relativity, there's no such thing as absolute velocity, so the thrust can't vary by velocity. Since kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity, but the acceleration is constant for a constant energy input, there's some velocity at which you're gaining more energy than you're putting in.
So if it does work, it'd be radically new physics. But there are various ideas for how it might work, like Woodward's, which is derived from general relativity and involves an explanation of inertia; he's been working for decades on reactionless drive experiments based on that idea. We don't currently have a generally-accepted explanation of inertia, so who knows.