EM Drive

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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ScottL
Posts: 1122
Joined: Thu Jun 02, 2011 11:26 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by ScottL »

Birch,

To be clear, I believe Paul's intentions are good. Unfortunately, I believe his actions have resulted or are resulting in terrible sensationalism. This happened to him back in June I believe and NASA told him to zip his lips. I don't want you to get me wrong, I like what Paul is doing at Eagleworks in general. I think he's qualified to do the engineering and that he'll get to the bottom of it, but I disagree with his insistance on being NASA's PR source on this topic. He states clearly that the work has not been peer-reviewed or published yet, which is my first problem. My second problem is that he leaves tantalizing inferences that there is thrust, which he shouldn't, and then says more work needs to be done to eliminate errors. What he's done is given fuel to the media fire and I suspect once NASA starts getting questions based on these articles like they did before, they'll shut him up again. NASA is at a delicate time in it's history and I don't think they can handle a controversy like the media making the public think NASA promised us warp engines and not delivering.

TLDR: I think his intentions are good and noble, but his actions could cost us.

birchoff
Posts: 200
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2014 7:11 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by birchoff »

ScottL wrote:Birch,

To be clear, I believe Paul's intentions are good. Unfortunately, I believe his actions have resulted or are resulting in terrible sensationalism. This happened to him back in June I believe and NASA told him to zip his lips. I don't want you to get me wrong, I like what Paul is doing at Eagleworks in general. I think he's qualified to do the engineering and that he'll get to the bottom of it, but I disagree with his insistance on being NASA's PR source on this topic. He states clearly that the work has not been peer-reviewed or published yet, which is my first problem. My second problem is that he leaves tantalizing inferences that there is thrust, which he shouldn't, and then says more work needs to be done to eliminate errors. What he's done is given fuel to the media fire and I suspect once NASA starts getting questions based on these articles like they did before, they'll shut him up again. NASA is at a delicate time in it's history and I don't think they can handle a controversy like the media making the public think NASA promised us warp engines and not delivering.

TLDR: I think his intentions are good and noble, but his actions could cost us.
Again I have to ask if both of us are reading the same comments on NSF. I just dumped all his comments from NSF and re read them to make sure I wasnt hallucinating but there is ZERO sensationalism in his comments since he started posting to the NSF Emdrive thread again on the 10/09/2015. Most of his comments contain either advice on how the experimenters in the forum can make their experiments better and his personal opinion on theory.

On 10/31/2015 he posted the following
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=38577.msg1440938#msg1440938 wrote: All:

I wish I could show you all the pictures I've taken on how we saluted and mitigated the issues raised by our EW Lab's Blue-Ribbon PhD panel and now Potomac-Neuron's paper, on the possible Lorentz force interactions. That being the Lorentz Interactions with the dc currents on the EW torque pendulum (TP) with the stray magnetic fields from the torque pendulum's first generation open-face magnetic damper and the Earth's geomagnetic field, but I can't due to the restrictive NASA press release rules now applied to the EW Lab.

However since I still can't show you this supporting data until the EW Lab gets our next peer-reviewed lab paper published, I will tell you that we first built and installed a 2nd generation, closed face magnetic damper that reduced the stray magnetic fields in the vacuum chamber by at least an order of magnitude and any Lorentz force interactions it could produce. I also changed up the torque pendulum's grounding wire scheme and single point ground location to minimize ground loop current interactions with the remaining stray magnetic fields and unbalanced dc currents from the RF amplifier when its turned on. This reduced the Lorentz force interaction to less than 2 micro-Newton (uN) for the dummy load test. Finally we rebuilt the copper frustum test article so that it is now fully integrated with the RF VCO, PLL, 100W RF amp, dual directional coupler, 3-stub tuner and connecting coax cables, then mounted this integrated test article at the opposite end of the torque pendulum, as far away as possible from the 2nd generation magnetic damper where only the required counterbalance weights now reside. Current null testing with both the 50 ohm dummy load and with the integrated test article rotated 90 degrees with respect to the TP sensitive axis now show less than one uN of Lorentz forces on the TP due to dc magnetic interactions with the local environment even when drawing the maximum RF amp dc current of 12 amps.

Given all of the above TP wiring and test article modifications with respect to our 2014 AIAA/JPC paper design baseline needed to address these Lorentz force magnetic interaction issues, we are still seeing over 100uN of force with 80W of RF power going into the frustum running in the TM212 resonant mode, now in both directions, dependent on the direction of the mounted integrated test article on the TP. However these new plus and minus thrust signatures are still contaminated by thermally induced TP center of gravity (cg) zero-thrust baseline shifts brought on by the expansion of the copper frustum and aluminum RF amp and its heat sink when heated by the RF, even though these copper and aluminum cg shifts are now fighting each other. (Sadly these TP cg baseline shifts are ~3X larger in-vacuum than in-air due to the better insulating qualities of the vacuum, so the in-vacuum thrust runs look very thermally contaminated whereas the in-air run look very impulsive.) So we have now developed an analytical tool to help separate the EM-Drive thrust pulse waveform contributions from the thermal expansion cg induced baseline shifts of the TP. Not being satisfied with just this analytical impulsive vs thermal signal separation approach, we are now working on a new integrated test article subsystem mounting arrangement with a new phase-change thermal management subsystem that should mitigate this thermally induced TP cg baseline shift problem once and for-all.

And yet the anomalous thrust signals remain...

Best, Paul March
and
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=38577.msg1441094#msg1441094 wrote: Frobnicat:

I'm already pushing the permissible disclosure envelop I'm working under, but I think I can tell you that yes we are still using the slight down angle on the TP arm to stabilize the zero-force baseline. As to the origins of the torque pendulum's cg shift induced zero force baseline drift it's simply due to the thermal expansion driven mass movements of the 2.6 kg copper frustum with 2 PE discs in one direction, and the thermally driven expansion of the 6.7 kg aluminum PLL box, RF amplifier, its heat sink and dual directional coupler in the opposite direction because they are now mounted to each other back-to-back with the test article to TP mount in the middle. And since the ~30% efficient 100W RF amplifier is dumping 70% of its 28Vdc input power as heat into itself and its heat sink, verses the 30% going into the copper frustum via its RF output when optimally Z-matched, the aluminum bits expand more than the copper bits and have more affect on the TP system cg for a given delta T due to it being 2.57 times more massive, thus you get a NET cg induced zero force baseline drift in the aluminum's thermal expansion direction proportional to these NET thermal expansion induced mass movements over time even if we are only talking tens of microns cg mass movements. Past that, wait for the peer reviewed paper that should be out on the street sometime during the first half of next year.

As to testing a frustum without a dielectric, we have tested this configuration in an aluminum frustum on a new teeter-totter balance using hundreds of watts of 2.45 GHz RF power, and we MAY have observed a non-zero thrust results while in-air. Past that, you'll have to wait for the peer reviewed test report on this topic after the copper frustum test report is published.

Best, Paul M.
Now the only thing that sticks out to me in these two post is that he cannot release the data recorded in the experiment until the paper gets released. But this looks like a level headed summation of the results of their experiments which have already been completed. There is no sensationalism to be found in his comment. And I cannot agree that his comment has lead to ANY sensationalism. The sensationalism in the media doing a piss poor job of covering the issue comes from wanting to grab clicks and a poor understanding of the idea being worked on. Holding Paul/EW/NASA accountable for that is ignorant. The only way we don't get sensationalist articles in the media about the EmDrive is if all the anomalous thrust goes away or is reduced to that of a photon rocket (though I would ask how a sealed container can act as a photon rocket). So whether we know the results now or next year when he believes the paper will be published, has ZERO consequence. The only way I would be willing to agree that what Paul is doing is causing sensationalism is if he is deliberately leaving out information that shines an unfaltering light on the experiment being reported on.

ScottL
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Joined: Thu Jun 02, 2011 11:26 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by ScottL »

That's just it Birch, he shouldn't be mentioning any results before they're published. It's not that he made sensationalist remarks, but that he fed the media exactly what they needed to blow this whole thing up. Look at it from the media's perspective:

1. Eliminated a bunch of noise, still see thrust....OMG CONFIRMED!
2. Data you can't release yet? OMG CONFIRMED!
3. Advice to others on potential replication....you know....because why replicate something that didn't work....OMG CONFIRMED!

Paul is a good engineer, but he speaks when he shouldn't. This same thing happened last time and he was asked to kindly stop commenting on the subject by his superiors. They should kindly do the same now as to not get the media hyped.

Axil
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Re: EM Drive

Post by Axil »

You can't blow up anything that is true. The truth will out in the end.

birchoff
Posts: 200
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2014 7:11 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by birchoff »

ScottL wrote:That's just it Birch, he shouldn't be mentioning any results before they're published. It's not that he made sensationalist remarks, but that he fed the media exactly what they needed to blow this whole thing up. Look at it from the media's perspective:

1. Eliminated a bunch of noise, still see thrust....OMG CONFIRMED!
2. Data you can't release yet? OMG CONFIRMED!
3. Advice to others on potential replication....you know....because why replicate something that didn't work....OMG CONFIRMED!

Paul is a good engineer, but he speaks when he shouldn't. This same thing happened last time and he was asked to kindly stop commenting on the subject by his superiors. They should kindly do the same now as to not get the media hyped.
I understand your perspective. But I can't say I agree. I cannot blame Paul for sharing results with a forum that is actively attempting to investigate the anomoly. I am personally a huge fan of technology research and development being done in the open. Sure it puts the responsibility of being level headed on the reader. But the responsibility should have always been with the reader. The fact that the reporter who wrote the article ignored the part where Paul said that they are still seeing a thermal effect and are building a new test article to mitigate it. Just shows how bad of a reporter the author of the article is.

Personally I think the only way I would side with your opinion is if Paul wrote a press release and sent it directly to these media outfits. At which point he would bear responsibility for his target audience not being literate enough in the scientific process.

However in this particular instance Paul is communicating primarily with people who are literate enough to not jump to the conclusions depicted in those article titles. In addition the comments he made are observations that would still exist in the final published paper, even if peer review forces them to go back to the drawing board. And since the reporters who wrote the article have shown their inability to accurately summarize a comment about ongoing research I would argue that there would be reporters out there that would still write sensationalist articles about the final paper. With that in mind, I would rather have Pauls accurate comments now versus waiting some unknown amount of time to get the paper.

birchoff
Posts: 200
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2014 7:11 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by birchoff »

Axil wrote:You can't blow up anything that is true. The truth will out in the end.
since I cannot like this comment.... DIDO

ScottL
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Joined: Thu Jun 02, 2011 11:26 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by ScottL »

Well the media is blowing up what he said and if it turns out there isn't actually an effect, I suspect NASA will hear about it.

birchoff
Posts: 200
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2014 7:11 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by birchoff »

ScottL wrote:Well the media is blowing up what he said and if it turns out there isn't actually an effect, I suspect NASA will hear about it.
I believe what axil meant that as long as what paul said is a completely accurate statement of where EW's research is at this point in time. The worst that NASA could reasonably do is chastize him about not waiting till the paper comes out. Which from my perspective is orders of magnitude less worse than what happened earlier this year.

ScottL
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Joined: Thu Jun 02, 2011 11:26 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by ScottL »

birchoff wrote:
ScottL wrote:Well the media is blowing up what he said and if it turns out there isn't actually an effect, I suspect NASA will hear about it.
I believe what axil meant that as long as what paul said is a completely accurate statement of where EW's research is at this point in time. The worst that NASA could reasonably do is chastize him about not waiting till the paper comes out. Which from my perspective is orders of magnitude less worse than what happened earlier this year.
Chastise him is all they did last time, so I don't see it as different. Matter of fact I'd think they'd view it as a strike 2 so to speak.NASA was upset that they were being inundated with questions about warp drives and now the same thing is starting again. I really think Paul should focus on the work and let the published works do the talking.

Carl White
Posts: 476
Joined: Mon Aug 24, 2009 10:44 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by Carl White »

Cannae drive resurfaces with a little information and a promise of a news release regarding demonstration results:

http://cannae.com/cannaes-superconducti ... d-running/

ladajo
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Location: North East Coast

Re: EM Drive

Post by ladajo »

Love to see the validation! Thanks for the link.
The development of atomic power, though it could confer unimaginable blessings on mankind, is something that is dreaded by the owners of coal mines and oil wells. (Hazlitt)
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ScottL
Posts: 1122
Joined: Thu Jun 02, 2011 11:26 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by ScottL »

I've been following the emDrive via NSF and /r/emDrive but honestly the longer I look into it, the more it looks like people are just deluding themselves. Every experimenter or DIYer is doing their own variant, so no replication is being done. Shawyer refuses to give up specifics (secret sauce/Rossi-style). There are no protocols in place and people are throwing out techno-babble laced explanations for why it must work before any evidence is provided that it has worked. The lone possible shining light was EagleWorks, but as I read their experimental protocols and results on previous tests, I'm not impressed. Who shoves non-vacuum rated gear into a vacuum, watches it blow, and still accepts any readings from said test?!

Axil
Posts: 935
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 6:34 am

Re: EM Drive

Post by Axil »

ScottL wrote:I've been following the emDrive via NSF and /r/emDrive but honestly the longer I look into it, the more it looks like people are just deluding themselves. Every experimenter or DIYer is doing their own variant, so no replication is being done. Shawyer refuses to give up specifics (secret sauce/Rossi-style). There are no protocols in place and people are throwing out techno-babble laced explanations for why it must work before any evidence is provided that it has worked. The lone possible shining light was EagleWorks, but as I read their experimental protocols and results on previous tests, I'm not impressed. Who shoves non-vacuum rated gear into a vacuum, watches it blow, and still accepts any readings from said test?!

If it is like what Rossi is doing then it must be a SCAM. Follow the money.

ScottL
Posts: 1122
Joined: Thu Jun 02, 2011 11:26 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by ScottL »

Axil wrote:
ScottL wrote:I've been following the emDrive via NSF and /r/emDrive but honestly the longer I look into it, the more it looks like people are just deluding themselves. Every experimenter or DIYer is doing their own variant, so no replication is being done. Shawyer refuses to give up specifics (secret sauce/Rossi-style). There are no protocols in place and people are throwing out techno-babble laced explanations for why it must work before any evidence is provided that it has worked. The lone possible shining light was EagleWorks, but as I read their experimental protocols and results on previous tests, I'm not impressed. Who shoves non-vacuum rated gear into a vacuum, watches it blow, and still accepts any readings from said test?!

If it is like what Rossi is doing then it must be a SCAM. Follow the money.
Axil, I don't know how you even function in life with the way you jump to conclusions. I said Shawyer is keeping his setup a secret like Rossi keeps his fuel a secret. The difference here is that Shawyer, as far as I know, isn't going after a bunch of money nor claiming he has a warp-capable spaceship for some unknown customer. In this case it is not a scam, Shawyer is just delusional.

Giorgio
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Re: EM Drive

Post by Giorgio »

ScottL wrote:Axil, I don't know how you even function in life with the way you jump to conclusions. I said Shawyer is keeping his setup a secret like Rossi keeps his fuel a secret. The difference here is that Shawyer, as far as I know, isn't going after a bunch of money nor claiming he has a warp-capable spaceship for some unknown customer. In this case it is not a scam, Shawyer is just delusional.
Too complicated logic for him I am afraid....
A society of dogmas is a dead society.

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