![]() In 2006, after Shawyer had received £250,000 from the British government to build the machine, the EM drive ended up on the front cover of New Scientist. Appealing to it to help explain dodgy experimental results is just a bit of technobabble." "The quantum vacuum has no inertia of its own. "It’s a complete misunderstanding of quantum field theory," he says. This, says Carroll, is entirely meaningless. One of the theories states that the drive is somehow gaining traction by interacting with the "quantum vacuum" - a base layer of reality predicted by quantum mechanics to be full of tiny fluctuations giving rise to energy and matter. He adds that none of the explanations for why the EM drive might function make any sense. "It’s like saying you could get your car moving by sitting inside and pushing on the steering wheel," says Sean Carroll, a physicist and cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology. "Like moving your car by pushing on the steering wheel." And yet, say those involved, the drive is creating thrust. There’s no gas coming out the end (as with regular rockets), nor anything as insubstantial as ions (which is what makes very weak but very real ion thrusters work). The EM drive - if it works - is like a dog straining at the leash, but with no dog. Scientists who have backed the EM drive over the years are claiming to have created thrust from nothing, therefore breaking both laws at once. The first of these states that you can’t simply create energy out of nothing, while the second says that to create movement (which is only a type of energy), you have to have some sort of equal and opposite movement. If the EM drive did actually work, it would be breaking some of the most fundamental and thoroughly tested laws of the universe: the conservation of energy and momentum. ( NASA)Įxcept, of course, for the physics. Ion drives may sound like science fiction, but they're very real. With a working EM drive we could get to Mars in just 70 days, some have claimed, fulfilling that secular version of salvation - turning humanity into a multi-planetary species. Such an engine would be a godsend for space travel, allowing scientists to build spacecraft without all that stupidly heavy, finite rocket fuel and instead launch something simply with enough solar panels to keep the engine functioning. No moving parts, no propulsion, just thrust. The drive was originally created by a British inventor named Roger Shawyer, who claimed if that if you bounced microwaves around a sealed metal container just so, you could create thrust at one end. It’s cool, it’s exciting, and it’s ludicrously optimistic. People want the EM drive to be real for obvious reasons. "While conceptual research into novel propulsion methods by a team at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston has created headlines, this is a small effort that has not yet shown any tangible results," a spokesperson told Space. A spate of articles earlier this month suggested that NASA itself had tested the drive and found it to work, something that the space agency refuted this week. Like the machine itself, the coverage of the EM drive just keeps going and going, propelled, apparently, by nothing at all. "A small effort that has not yet shown any tangible results." This is the unbelievable premise behind the "EM drive" - a hypothetical space drive that we’ve been promised might one day take us to Mars, but that experts say is likely the result of nothing more than wishful thinking and scientific error. There are no moving parts, nothing appears to be coming out the back, and when you look inside, there’s nothing there either. ![]() Imagine an engine with nothing powering it.
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