Will JSC's Quack Physics Send NASA On Its #JourneyToMars?
EmDrive: Nasa Eagleworks confirms paper on controversial space propulsion is under peer review, International Business Times
“The Eagleworks Lab is NOT dead and we continue down the path set by our NASA management. Past that I can’t say more other than to listen to Dr Rodal on this topic, and please have patience about when our next EW paper is going to be published. Peer reviews are glacially slow,” Eagleworks engineer Paul March wrote on the Nasa Spaceflight forum on 17 March. … The finished product would also be subjected to independent verification and validation at Glenn Research Center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.”
Report: The EmDrive Finally Will Undergo Peer Review, Popular Mechanics
“Now, the International Business Times (no stranger to hyperbole and claims NASA is covering up UFOs) claims that the EmDrive is under peer review as we speak. IBT pulls this news from the NASA Spaceflight forum, where one member of the EmDrive team, Paul March, also says that the claims that Eagleworks (an experimental lab at Johnson Space Center) is dead are quite exaggerated.”
NASA designs Enterprise-inspired warp-speed ship, San Francisco Chronicle
“But NASA engineer and physicist Harold White apparently didn’t get the memo. He is now actively working on the mathematics behind building a space ship that would allow travel faster than the speed of light or what countless fans of the voyages of the Starship Enterprise know as warp speed without having to prove Einstein wrong.”
Keith’s note: Here we go again. NASA is building a warp drive. This time media is picking up on it because of NASA’s supposed secrecy about the results of this oh-so-secret and revolutionary research – as if there actually are any “results”. Who is paying for this research – and why? As you can see from earlier posts 3 years ago, all I ever got (at best) from NASA JSC was an evasive set of responses from one of the researchers (Sonny White) several years ago. NASA JSC PAO is too embarrassed to go on the record. They refuse to say how much has been spent on it. And who is going to pay these other NASA center personnel at GRC, JPL, and JHUAPL to “verify” what these JSC people cut and paste into Powerpoint?
If Ellen Ochoa and NASA Johnson Space Center management had any credibility whatsoever they’d debunk this goofy research once and for all. But they won’t. Instead they allow these people to overtly use the agency’s name and assert official NASA sponsorship as they seek credibility by posting cryptic comments on Internet discussion boards that inevitably find their way into news reports. If anyone else did this NASA HQ lawyers would be all over them.
According to people.nasa.gov Paul March can be reached at [email protected] +1.281.483.0484. Harold “Sonny” White can be reached at [email protected] +1.281.483.0178. Perhaps some enterprising journalist can squeeze a little more detail out of them.
Quack physics is not how NASA is going to make the #JourneyToMars – or is it?
– Clarifying NASA’s Warp Drive Program, earlier post
– Hooray – JSC Warp Drive Confirmed !!!!, earlier post
– Ellen Ochoa’s Warp Drive: Smoke and Mirrors, earlier post
– JSC’s Warp Drive: Fact or Fluff?, earlier post
– NASA: We’re Not Working on Warp Drive, earlier post
– JSC’s Strange Thruster Violates The Laws of Physics, earlier post
– NASA’s Super Secret Warp Drive Program, earlier post
This sort of nonsense does nothing at all for the credibility of NASA or other researchers – sadly, however, there’s a long history of qualified people going off the rails with regard to this sort of thing. Like the Cold Fusion flap it also seems to attract a following of opinionated online true believers whose attitudes are closer to cultists than scientists. The internet sometimes does us no favours!
Cold fusion clearly exists and can be demonstrated to produce neutrons; there is just no way to produce a useful amount of energy, at least as yet. CF may never be practical, but at least it is possible and therefore may be worth investigating. The idea that a frustum-shaped microwave resonator produces a reactionless force, OTOH, appears to me to be a misinterpretation of the concepts of phase and group velocity. It does not achieve anything to do experiments without a valid theory because any observed effect may be due to error.
If it is in peer review, I’d love to know which journal. Everything about this reminds me of the crap that Sonny White has been pulling off every few years to protect his funding (as you pointed out).
Much as I approve of taking long shots, I can’t help thinking that this lab is rather aptly named (Eddie the Eagle)
As a lifelong Trek fan, I wish to reiterate that this thing, if it’s legitimate, is an Impulse Drive, not a Warp Drive.
Nitpicking aside, I’m glad to hear it is in peer review and is being treated sensibly. Hopefully all the claims, counter-claims and defensiveness on all sides will be settled. I just hope that the results of the assessment are clear and that people are able to accept it instead of scream ‘conspiracy’.
Apparently Sonny White thinks the EMDrive will turn out to be the same mechanism as his space-warp theory.
(But then again, it’s not the like the “impulse drive” made any sense as a conventional propulsion system, as depicted in the series and movies.)
The impulse drive, IIRC, could get the Enterprise from Earth to Jupiter within a few hours. So sustained 150 g acceleration or more. Must have good inertial dampers or other handwave.
I wonder if this is a “hobby job” the kind of thing many start-ups do where the founder has no intention of taking it to larger scale (production and implementation). And I wonder how many phone calls and emails Paul and Harold have received as result of this posting.
Well at least they can claim that their is an increase in interest in their project and justify additional funding. Thanks Keith for sharing their contact info
We’ll see what happens if and when the peer review happens. It should be noted that these days, there’s “peer review” available that is not like the peer review that most of us are thinking about. These are salad days for people looking for peer review for their quack science ideas.
I’d love to see the journal it appears in – and not one where the warp drive guys review each other and print it as a vanity journal.
I try to keep an open mind upon everything. It would be a great result if something was to come of this emdrive. But, for that to be the case, even after a positive peer review, it would have to be tested well away from the Earth’s gravitational and electromagnetic field, i.e. in deep space and still show a nett thrust.
Apparently this is a real thing with real papers published.
“More than eight tests in four independent labs have shown that when
microwaves resonate within an asymmetric cavity, an anomalous thrust is
generated pushing the cavity towards its narrow end,”
Please see article at:
http://www.spacedaily.com/r…
and paper at:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.0…