This stuff has been hovering (pun intended) at the edge of detection for some time: spinning superconductors, this thing, etc. all claiming to provide evidence of tiny amounts of thrust in apparent violation of standard conservation of momentum. Obviously skepticism is in order, but either something is very wrong with all these experiments or there's something here.
What's interesting about this one is that the original inventor has something resembling a theory. It may not be a complete theory, but it tries to explain it via relativity in a way that makes physical sense.
I'm always really skeptical of these things, but not in the knee-jerk total dismissal sense. I just say show me the replications. They're doing the right thing. Now we need more people to build these and test them under different conditions.
The ultimate test would be to launch one, since you can't really screw up detection of a big delta-V change in space.
Not sure this counts as a replication, yet. This is an un-refereed conference paper, I'd really want to see a proper publication.
The other strange thing in the paper, but not mentioned in the article, is that the 'null device' produced thrust:
Thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust. Specifically, one test article contained internal physical modifications that were designed to produce thrust, while the other did not (with the latter being referred to as the "null" test article).
I'm not a physicist and I can't debunk this theory point by point, but actually, you don't need to know much physics to see how this must be wrong. Special Relativity requires conservation of momentum, in every observer's frame of reference. If someone claims to explain supposed non-conservation of momentum by invoking "Special Relativity", they are just attempting to trick you.
(As far as crackpot theories go, I'm actually surprised they didn't throw in a "quantum" or two for good measure.)
(Edit: I'm not saying that the experiment itself is invalid. It might be, I don't know. What I'm saying is the supposed theory[1] is necessarily wrong, because you can't get non-conservation of momentum out of Special Relativity without suggesting new laws of physics, which is not at all discussed in the "paper" I linked below.)
Like I said, the best test would be to put one in space. If you fire the thing up an the satellite's orbit changes, that's kind of a hard measurement to screw up. (Let it orbit with the drive off for a while as a control.)
No idea why you're being downvoted for this. You're completely correct as to why this device's claimed physics are bunk (and why, as I note above, the way it always gets tested is highly suspect).
Not being very familiar with the the topic, what would it cost to build a usable version of this? How massive would it be?
Constant thrust using only solar power and no propellants says to me that one could certainly shut the skeptics up by flying a microsatellite to Mars and back.
Constant thrust using only solar power and no propellants is already possible. Just shine a light backwards, or better yet turn that solar panel into a mirror. What makes this so strange is that it is emission-less even counting photons.
I think most people think that by far the most likely thing is that they missed something and this isn't doing what they "claim". While quietly hoping it does :P
This stuff has been hovering (pun intended) at the edge of detection for some time: spinning superconductors, this thing, etc. all claiming to provide evidence of tiny amounts of thrust in apparent violation of standard conservation of momentum. Obviously skepticism is in order, but either something is very wrong with all these experiments or there's something here.
What's interesting about this one is that the original inventor has something resembling a theory. It may not be a complete theory, but it tries to explain it via relativity in a way that makes physical sense.
I'm always really skeptical of these things, but not in the knee-jerk total dismissal sense. I just say show me the replications. They're doing the right thing. Now we need more people to build these and test them under different conditions.
The ultimate test would be to launch one, since you can't really screw up detection of a big delta-V change in space.