Sturgeon's law : 90% of everything is crap.

I thought that this take was pretty appropriate when all we had to go on was the conference abstract. Now, however, the full paper (still not peer reviewed) is out, and it is much better. I still think it is wrong, but I do not think it is bad science, and it will have to be refuted experimentally.

Comments

* the "null thruster" is something of a red herring from the abstract. Reading the paper, they have a true "null load," which shows no thrust, while the "null thruster" was a mod of a Cannae drive, and so more of a test of drive theory than the experimental setup, and, in any event, they tested several types of drives.

* they did pretty much all of the things you would like to see (such as reversing the direction and making sure the thrust reverses).

* they seem to have done a thoughtful and careful job, including testing in vacuum.

So, I still think they are likely wrong, but this ups the ante. In my opinion, you can't just say "this is obviously wrong." I bet there will be a bunch of attempts to replicate it in labs all over the place.

I find the theories here (and I have now read several in some depth) to be bad, either wrong, or handwavy, or both*. I would discount them entirely. In the unlikely event that this effect is real (and I mean, some non-standard physics effect), then the theory is likely to be something different than any of the proposals, The experiment's the thing, and the game now has to be disproving the Eagleworks results. Only once a bunch of people have failed to do that (or one person has done it) is there much else to say.

* On pushing on virtual particles or quantum spacetime or whatever. These are 1 GHz photons, more or less. Such pushing would cause a _vacuum_ dispersion. Vacuum dispersion limits are set by timing of high energy photons from Gamma ray bursts across cosmic distances. These tests use ~ 100 MeV photons over ~10^10 light years, and so are many orders of magnitude tighter than the NASA Eagleworks results. This in my opinion rules out any photon - vacuum interaction as the cause of these anomalous thrusts.

Anyone who thinks that Russia would deport Edward Snowden does not know much about the long history of Russian spycraft.

Rosetta carries within it a lander called Philae, which is intended to land on the comet in November. DLR is already picking out candidate landing sites - this video shows the current set (each green dot is an error ellipse, which get stretched out over sloping terrain).

Philae will harpon itself onto the surface, and one task will be to serve as one end of a low frequency radar system with Rosetta - it should be possible to image more-or-less the complete inside of the comet with this system.

Eventually, but not now.

Right now the are spending a few 100 gm of propellant per day or so to maintain these triangular orbits, and each leg is hyperbolic (well, probably actually parabolic, but you get the idea).

This is something they are choosing to do. My understanding is this basically a safety thing. If the spacecraft went into a safe mode, in these slow flyby orbits it would keep moving slowly away from 67P, at maybe a km / hour or so, until the problem could be fixed. I heard that they didn't want to risk being in an unstable orbit, and maybe hitting the comet if they went into safe mode.

A 30 km orbit would take 8 - 25 days and have an orbital velocity of 0.1 - 0.3 m/sec, and would probably be stable.

Rosetta was originally supposed to launch in January 2003, to comet 46P/Wirtanen, and was all ready to go when problems with the Arianne 5 forced a delay its launch. That meant finding a new target and a total redesign of the mission, leading to a launch in March, 2003.

So, for the Rosetta team it has been the perils of Pauline since before the launch, and an 11 year mission to get to their comet.

One is believable. Lots would be believable. Two, and only two, not so much.

If they can do this for this cause, they can do this for any cause, or for no cause at all.

I can't say I am surprised.

There always ways - Sturgeon's law* and all of that. There just used to be these people called "editors" and "publishers" who kept much (but certainly not all) of the crap from the market.

* BTW, Sturgeon was an optimist.

What you don't realize is that "Dilbert' is now a word-smithing resource for upper level management.

In modern corporate thinking, the answer is two - the CEO, and a flunky to fetch coffee and do any actual work the CEO should be doing. Every other position should be either automated or outsourced.

It would be more likely to be the exit point of a miniature black hole. The entry point would likely be a very small hole.*

I call these exit wounds; the physics is that the exiting hypervelocity thing sets up a shock wave moving matter out of the way, and it's the shock wave excavates the material in the hole. (Even a black hole does this; a decent sized one (say 10^10 kg) is very small, so not much matter would be eaten during a transit of the Earth. It does, however, pull matter towards it and its wake sets up an explosive shock wave that fractures and evacuates material.)

* A black hole the mass of the Sun would have a radius of ~ 3 km, so one the mass of the Earth is a few mm, and a likely primordial black hole, with a mass of maybe 10^10 kg, would have a radius of 10^-17 m, or well below the size of an atomic nucleus. Such a small black hole would not "eat" much in its passage through the Earth, which might take 20 - 40 seconds or so, because not much would actually hit it. It's gravitational wake, however, would be another matter. Such a primordial black hole would leave a tiny entrance wound, but a large exit wound.

Patomskiy Crater is in solid rock, this new one is in soft sediment. Solid rock requires energy to fracture, and it is thus less likely to be removed from an excavation. By the way, these sorts of holes (assuming that they are explosive in origin) are similar to "bench-blasting" in explosives work; there is a huge literature on this.