NASA Tests "Impossible" Perpetual Motion Drive; Says it Works

[caraher]

40. Frankly, I'm unimpressed by a lot of NASA bleeding-edge "science"

Has this been through any kind of peer review?

There's really not anything I've been able to find that lets me understand the experiments, the alleged principles behind the devices, etc. Just a lot of word salad. I just skimmed a paper (more like a lengthy abstract) called "Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum" and it's remarkably uninformative. It also includes this curious passage:

Thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust. Specifically, one test article contained internal physical modifications that were designed to produce thrust, while the other did not (with the latter being referred to as the “null” test article).

This really suggests to me a problem with their test procedure. And at these tiny thrust levels, there are so many things that could cause trouble.

The reporting itself is incredibly sloppy, which does not inspire confidence. Consider this gem on the MSN link:

The drive built by China managed 720mN, or 72g, of power. Not a great deal but enough to move a satellite about in space without the reliance on fuel.

Now I can sort through this hash, but believe me, any freshman writing this in my class on a lab will get hammered! What they claim to have measured was 720 mN of thrust, which is a force. That force equals the weight of an object whose mass is about 72 g. None of those quantities are power (energy transformed per unit time).

This sloppiness also makes me wonder whether they've also confused milli-Newtons and micro-Newtons (the NASA test pegged the force around 50 micro-Newtons).

For all my skepticism, I actually think there's nothing woo-like or even implausible about the existence of some quantum vacuum effect that could be exploited to created thrust without the need to lug a propellant. Since you need to supply some energy to the device it doesn't set off any "perpetual motion machine" BS detectors, and it's well-known that electromagnetic radiation carries momentum (though everyone seems to insist that classical EM theory cannot explain what they see). Even tiny thrusts can be game-changers if you don't need to lug reaction mass around!