Periodically, I write on here about the so-called EMDrive that supposedly produces thrust without propellant, in violation of at least one important law of physics. Well, you lucky people you, I have a cold and am very very tired, so here’s a supposedly “leaked” paper bearing Harold “Sonny” White’s name on it that finds that in a vacuum the thing produced an incredibly tiny but not actually zero amount of thrust, which they admit could have been thermal expansion even though they took steps to prevent that causing a false reading. The amount of thrust is 1.2 mN/kW, plus or minutes 0.1 mN/kW. That’s very, very small, but not small enough to avoid being really, really weird.
You can read the “leaked” paper (that I can in no way verify) here in its entirety.
I’m not saying it works, but at this point, I guess I’m not saying it doesn’t, either? I’m just going to have some DayQuil and go lie down.
Happy Monday, everyone.
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Richard Ford Burley is a human, writer, and doctoral candidate at Boston College, as well as an editor at Ledger, the first academic journal devoted to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In his spare time he writes about science, skepticism, feminism, and futurism here at This Week In Tomorrow.