Tag: em drive

In more or less order:

• No, the EM drive is not a warp drive.  Warp drives are called that because they, well, warp space-time; the EM drive simply appears to produce thrust without using reaction mass.  Which violates conventional physics, yes, but not in the same way that deforming space-time might.
• No, the EM drive is not going to get us to Mars in a month.  By all accounts the drive gives off less thrust than solar sails. If solar sails could get us to Mars in a month we’d have gone already.
• No, we don’t even know if the EM Drive really works. A paper describing the engine passed peer review. Lots of things pass peer review, and not all of them checked out.
• Finally: “I F*cking Love Science” is, generally speaking, a harmless enough religion. But it can grate, sometimes. Particularly when it comes to its adherents who don’t actually realize that they’re part of a religion.

That’s it. No links: I’m not entirely certain that the sites that set off this rant don’t have malware on them.

There have been rumors that this was coming, of course. But now it’s official: “After months of speculation and leaked documents, NASA’s long-awaited EM Drive paper has finally been peer-reviewed and published. And it shows that the ‘impossible’ propulsion system really does appear to work. ”

…Appears.  The next step is to get a few of these things up into orbit and see what happens.  Which is the plan, apparently.  And at that point the whole thing might very well prove to be vaporware after all. Still.  Mars in 70 days.  That’s viable.  We used to do sea voyages that lasted for far longer.

Via @DeltaGreenRPG.

Primarily because I rather badly want a reactionless drive.  I want one so badly that I suspect my own judgement when it comes to concluding whether something really can break Newton’s Third Law on an observable level. I’m not a scientist; I’m a science fiction fan and scientist enthusiast who is married to an engineer. I grasp my capabilities and limitations when it comes to assessing potential new tech.

And yet… they keep kicking at the EM Drive, and they keep failing to kick it apart. Bear in mind that trying to kick it apart is an absolutely vital part of the procedure, of course.  Robert Anton Wilson once described science as the process where we ‘try to find out what the Hell is really going on,’ and testing theories to destruction is part of that process.  The universe doesn’t care if I really, really want reactionless thrusters. Continue reading I am deeply reluctant to believe that we may have a reactionless drive.