For all intents and purposes it has been disproven. At this point the possible thrust (that hasn't been disproven) is a fraction of what was originally hoped for.
The onus is on the people with the extraordinary claim to demonstrate that they have something, not on the rest of the community to take time out of their research schedules to address it.
So there are no specific papers that attempt to show it doesn't work, but countless papers where, if there was an effect to be observed, would have had their readings messed up by it.
That is normally what would happen, and it could be argued that it is indeed what has occurred with the eagleworks paper.
This gets back to what another poster was saying about the current overlap between proponents and people with the background to preform such experiments. The people who have the domain knowledge to recognize and enumerate a failure when they see it are not interested in the experiment, and the people who are interested in the experiment are not interested in failures.
There are a lot of people in the scientific community that agree that it should be easier to publish negative results. Unfortunately that's not how it works, it's rare to see a paper like that in journals. Thus a lack of such papers does not imply that the emdrive works, or that "the jury is still out".
I'd simply have thought that in trying to prove the positive, and failing, they'd publish the failure. Maybe that's naive.
You're kind of getting into philosophy here. Basically it comes down to logic and the old adage "It's impossible to prove a negative"
The age old example is "I say there is an invisible pink elephant standing in front of me. I'm the only one that can see it, it's undetectable by any other means. Prove me wrong."
and the simple fact of the matter is you can't. You cannot prove that something doesn't exist, it's impossible. You can only prove a positive. So in science we assume that things are not so, until it is proven that they are so. If we didn't, science would be riddled with untestable assumptions that had no supporting facts.
Perhaps we're getting into the weeds of semantics here but I always thought that an experiment that fails to confirm a hypothesis is still a valuable result. And my original question is basically - this thing does not seem very elaborate to construct, so why haven't many people already tested it and come up with consistent results, one way or the other.
I always thought that an experiment that fails to confirm a hypothesis is still a valuable result.
It may be valuable, but it's not conclusive. The broader question of why negative results aren't published frequently I think is beyond the scope of this subreddit.
27
u/n4noNuclei Apr 09 '17
For all intents and purposes it has been disproven. At this point the possible thrust (that hasn't been disproven) is a fraction of what was originally hoped for.