How Physics Falls Apart If The EMdrive Works
“The problem isn’t that these laws couldn’t be overturned by experiment; of course they could. The problem is that physicists have performed so many experiments in so many different ways, so carefully and with such precision verifying them. These conservation laws have been confirmed for every gravitational, mechanical, electromagnetic and quantum interaction ever observed. And now, it’s claimed that an engine, one that relies on nothing more than a simple electromagnetic power source, overthrows all of physics.”
So it’s official: the NASA Eagleworks test of the EMdrive, an engine that claims to produce thrust with no reaction to correspond to its action, has passed peer review and is now published. If there’s truly no reaction at all, then a slew of laws of physics are violated, and our fundamental foundations of what we understand about the Universe are undercut. It’s potentially the biggest discovery in physics since Newton came along. But it’s also potentially no different than the faster-than-light neutrinos, the BICEP2 results, the new particle at 750 GeV at the LHC or other spurious results that turned out to have legitimate experimental causes that weren’t new physics.