Questions about Nasa's space drive answered

"Although several people are drawing that comparison, they're really not in the same class. OPERA did an extremely thorough analysis of the faster than light neutrino result before they published. In the end it turned out to be a very subtle experimental error that cause the problems.

In contrast, this is just junk science from start to finish. The initial claim was likely an outright lie to lure investors."

But even something we experience literally every moment of every day, like gravity or magnets, we haven't the foggiest idea of how it actually works. We can describe in great depth anything we wish about our models for these things and experiments can reproduce our theories with exquisite precision.

But these models are merely complex rituals, we don't actually know, at a deep fundamental level, what happens.

The Feynman answer to magnetism, for example, is deeply unsatisfying because he describes all the rituals we've discovered with science about magnetism, but never really answers the question. His answer, in 7.5 minutes are "all the electronics spin in the same direction in iron and that produces a magnified magnetic field large enough we can feel". But why do spinning electrons produce a magnetic field at all? And why does that field work the way it does?

We have built beautiful mathematical tools to describe this force, down to elementary particles, but why it exists at all is a completely mystery.

They think it works, but we don't know how. More tests will tell whether or not we have finally discovered the technology required to drive around easily in the solar system and propel skateboarding into the realm of Back to the Future.

Baez is right, of course. I've been checking the (Word-generated) "papers" from this guy's group at NASA, they're extremely shoddy: There's another report with their unstable calibration for the torsion pendulum which shows their complete lack of undergraduate lab report skills. And a poster from them where they say: "Q-thruster test articles are going to be tested in a vacuum to reduce possibility of air currents polluting the thrust signal during testing, but electrolytic capacitors in signal amplifier are not vacuum compatible"... Awesome.

I've also checked the Chinese Physics B paper. Their device is completely different from this one. It's an open cavity and they only use classical EM. I don't understand very well how their thrust measurement set-up works so I hold my judgement on their claims, but at least they're trying to be legit.

Violation of momentum is an extremely serious claim (in words of D.J. Griffiths, "there is no principle in Physics more sacred than that"). The Universe would look nothing like this if that were true and all the Physics that we've discovered consistent with thousands of experiments would be gone. The way they use the quantum vacuum has nothing to do with the formalism that made it possible. Several detailed QED calculations backed up by experiments to astounding precision would be completely wrong and we know that's not the case.

BTW, the fundamental principle is conservation of momentum, Newton's 3rd law of motion is a consequence that sometimes doesn't hold, for instance forces between charged particles in electrodynamics don't follow the 3rd law (but approximately at low speeds). If you take into account momentum carried by the fields you get conservation of momentum back, quite nicely as well.