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Comment by daotoad | Hacker News Reader

Disappointing, but not really surprising.

Yes the actual laws of physics can't be broken. We don't know those. We know an approximation of them based on centuries of careful observation and analysis. That approximation is incredibly good, too. It lets us make microchips with 7nm features, synthesize high atomic weight elements, and build spacecraft that have traversed the solar system. Even so, there are things we know we don't know and there are bound to be things we don't know we don't know.

It would be nice if the EmDrive turned out to be a ground breaking demonstration of a hole in our model. We could probably squeeze a century of amazing science out of it. Not to mention the potential practical applications.

But groundbreaking new discoveries that shake the foundations of a developed scientific theory are incredibly rare. So, as awesome as it could be if it were right, the odds were always against it.

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It is also much more likely for such a discovery to appear at the edge of our knowledge where our understanding of the rules is at least a bit fuzzy (like near black holes and whatnot). Something like EmDrive, which is in a regime that has been exhaustively tested, would be like discovering that Bin Laden was hiding in the Oval Office all along.

> It is also much more likely for such a discovery to appear at the edge of our knowledge

This instantly reminds me of the Casimir Effect. Yes, it's way more likely for problems to appear at the edges of our knowledge. But discoveries within the noise of experiments people run every day are not unheard of.

I would also expect any such discovery coming from public science made by somebody wondering why their instruments are off, not by for-profit research looking for patents. But that's not unheard of either.

> discoveries within the noise of experiments people run every day are not unheard of.

That's also at the edge of the parameter space we're familiar with.

This one is on the edge of low noise measurement of torque. In fact, the entire exercise pushed the edge way lower than it was.

Which is really hard to do, because there aren't any corners in it.

You need pull a Comey and hide in the drapes.

EDIT: Apologies for the incorrect wording, I want to point out that you should stand AMONG the drapes, not IN the drapes.

And then you found out about Operation Cyclone and your allusion gets some cracks!

And the reason you didn't notice him was you needed to stand on your head and close one eye while chanting "abracadabra" before he could be seen.

Yes the actual laws of physics can't be broken

Conservation laws should be considered more as powerful analysis tools than as foundations of reality. So more Newtonian gravity than Relativity. In fact, you can regard Newtonian orbital mechanics as elaborations on conservation of energy and momentum. Conservation laws themselves have an underlying principle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04ERSb06dOg

Another analogy: Conservation laws are like Euclidian geometry. On the scale of building a cabinet or an office building, Euclidian geometry rules! On intergalactic scales, it simply fails. So too, with the conservation of energy. If someone tries to sell you a perpetual motion or over unity machine, it is pretty rock solid. But if you're going to try to make some kind of cosmological argument using conservation of energy, that's just plain facepalm territory there. (Some HNer actually reported me for using <facepalm> in response to conservation of energy in a cosmological argument.)

> Conservation laws themselves have an underlying principle:

(before checking the link - "I bet it's Noether's theorem")

(checks link - yep)

I've always thought Noether's formulation and the conservation laws are more like equivalent shapes of the same features of reality.

Except that any particular conservation law might fly out the window, but so long as there was some sort of symmetry, Noether's theorem would still be there.

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