Time To Eat Crow

The prospects for a reactionless drive are plummeting. Granted I had laid long odds that this discovery would pan out, but I hadn't expected such a fast response in accessing Roger Shawyer's claims. Reaction to the recent "New Scientist" article was swiftest at Wikipedia.org where I have been following the story as chronicled in the Wikipedia entry for EmDrive. The discussion section is particularly illuminating in how bad science is stripped bare.

For me the death knell for Roger Shawyer's claims is related to the very thing that initially gave me hope it was real -- the claimed energy drain of allowing the device to actually accelerate. A claim that seemed at first blush to be the thing that indicated that the conservation laws of nature were not being violated. As was pointed out in the discussion thread however the device is already under the thrust of Earth's gravity. To distinguish its own thrust from the gravity field of Earth's would be a violation of one of Einstein's General Relativity's most famous assertions that one cannot tell the difference between acceleration from increasing speed from that of being in a gravity field, they are equivalent in ALL effects.

I had hoped the EmDrive would be a real breakthrough, but it seems the "EmDrive" joins the ranks of everything else that sounds too good to be true.