NASA confirms ‘impossible’ thruster actually works

[Tanelorn]

NASA confirms ‘impossible’ thruster actually works, could revolutionize space travel


http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-t...lly-works-revolutionize-space-travel/#!btQgmZ


Is there any explanation for why this produces a thrust? Does it have to be microwaves? what frequency? If this is still crack pottery please accept my apologies and lock the thread.

 

[D H]

These articles are all over the place the last couple of days. Yours appears to be a near carbon copy of an article at gizmodo, which in turn got their article from the Spanish gizmodo site, which in turn got their article from The UK Wired site. This would be better as a study in poor scientific journalism than a question about fringe science.

Note very well: We don't discuss fringe science at this site.

All of these articles are based on a recently presented conference paper: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20140006052. This is just a conference paper; we can reject it just on that basis. Conference papers do not count as peer reviewed scientific literature. What's worse, from the paper, emphasis mine,

Integration of the two test articles and their supporting equipment was performed in an iterative fashion between the test bench and the vacuum chamber. In other words, the test article was tested on the bench, then moved to the chamber, then moved back as needed to resolve issues. Manual frequency control was required throughout the test. 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).

The authors couldn't reject the null hypothesis. This might we be just a null result, which is exactly what should be expected.


Thread closed pending moderation.