The E-Cat has been replicated? • Hacker News Board

Re: The E-Cat has been replicated?

#71

Post by wcoenen » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 11:07 AM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #70

wcoenen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thrust doesn't need to be a linear function of input power for this argument to work. As long as you can get some constant thrust for some constant power input, kinetic energy will eventually exceed the energy put into the system.

True. But how do we know thrust doesn't go down as velocity increases? I feel like we don't have that information yet.

Maybe, but velocity is relative. So that would mean that the drive is pushing against something which has its own rest frame, relative to which velocity can be measured.

It's not clear what that rest frame would be. Virtual particles in the quantum vacuum are often mentioned together with the emDrive, but those particles are thought to be frameless.

I'll admit that it's not entirely implausible to have a special rest frame like that. We already know that the cosmic microwave background has a rest frame, and this is something that you would start to feel in the form of frontal radiation pressure as you gain speed relative to the CMB.

Re: The E-Cat has been replicated?

#72

Post by Oletros » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 1:34 PM UTC

pknight wrote: post #43

xenophonf wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted A/K/A the scientific process, which is why experimental scientists publishing results with 5-sigma confidence intervals also painstakingly account for all of the different ways they could have screwed up, e.g., the recent gravitational waves paper, the Higgs boson discovery, etc. It goes the other way, like thos…

There have been studies with over 5-sigma confidence intervals that are not taken seriously simply because it's controversial. It's just we're wired to the status quo and nobody likes to be tricked. And you can't keep say, a factory or a house running on snake oil, so it will be evident pretty quickly.

> There have been studies with over 5-sigma confidence intervals that are not taken seriously simply because it's controversial.

Can you link to some of them?

Re: The E-Cat has been replicated?

#73

Post by pknight » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 4:44 PM UTC

Oletros wrote: post #72

pknight wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been studies with over 5-sigma confidence intervals that are not taken seriously simply because it's controversial. It's just we're wired to the status quo and nobody likes to be tricked. And you can't keep say, a factory or a house running on snake oil, so it will be evident pretty quickly.

> There have been studies with over 5-sigma confidence intervals that are not taken seriously simply because it's controversial. Can you link to some of them?

Check out http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2423692

"We here report a meta-analysis of 90 experiments from 33 laboratories in 14 countries which yielded an overall effect greater than 6 sigma, z = 6.40, p = 1.2 × 10^-10 with an effect size (Hedges’ g) of 0.09."

Non-fringe scientist Daryl Bem published a very controversial study involving 9 experiments. Replications were encouraged and were done across the world in the years following. With failures and successes, resulting in this meta study.

Amount of critics persuaded? Not that many probably.

The parallel here is lamenting the lack of an accepted theory or no theory at all and concluding that thereby the results are fraudulent as well as the process involved in deriving the results, by definition.

Bystanders often say, well if it's true why isn't there a peer-reviewed study etc, as if it matters. You can publish papers up the wazoo it won't matter.

If there's something special happening, there's going to be this period where mainstream science denies or disproves of it, regardless of studies and papers. Especially when gatekeepers have vested into a position of rejecting the idea.

As far as LENR is concerned, I can't say Rossi inspires confidence, but the fact that many institutions are researching this area tells me there might be something special going on. Many people aren't comfortable with the feeling that something might turn out to be false, so they assume it's a hoax a priori.