Science Focus
original post »What if I told you that recent experiments have revealed a revolutionary new method of propulsion that threatens to overthrow the laws of physics as we know them? That its inventor claims it could allow us to travel to the Moon in four hours without the use of fuel? What if I then told you we cannot explain exactly how it works and, in fact, there are some very good reasons why it shouldn’t work at all? I wouldn’t blame you for being sceptical.
The somewhat fantastical EMDrive (short for Electromagnetic Drive) recently returned to the public eye after an academic claimed to have recorded the drive producing measurable thrust. The experiments from Professor Martin Tajmar’s group at the Dresden University of Technology have spawned numerous overexcited headlines making claims that—let’s be very clear here—are not supported by the science.
The idea for the EMDrive was first proposed by Roger Shawyer in 1999 but, tellingly, he has only recently published any work on it in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and a rather obscure one at that. Shawyer claims his device works by bouncing microwaves around inside a conical cavity. According to him, the taper of the cavity creates a change in the group velocity of the microwaves as they move from one end to the other, which leads to an unbalanced force, which then translates into a thrust. If it worked, the EMDrive would be a propulsion method unlike any other, requiring no propellant to produce thrust.
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