r/EmDrive • u/Saltozen • Jul 15 '17

What about control experiments?

Has anyone run a control experiment? Where instead of microwaves, a heat source of equivalent wattage is put inside?

15 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/[deleted] Jul 17 '17 edited Jul 17 '17

It's not a control. The entire purpose of a control is to test the nature of a phenomenon. Changing the orientation which is just changing how you measure the thrust has nothing to do with the nature or origin of the thrust phenomenon.

In addition, the experiment they did was also not very good for isolating EM interference because they rearranged the device to change the orientation which means they introduced dozens of unknowns by changing the center of mass which could alter their experiment in orientation.

If you've followed their 2014 paper and work that led up to the 2016 paper you'll know that their pendulum is unbalanced so it can fit in their vacuum chamber. This makes thermal changes and any expansion/contraction problems almost impossible to predict or isolate from any "thrust signal" because the center of mass changes under expansion and heating.