Em Drive - New Scientist Article

New Scientist Article

The EmDrive was featured on the cover of the 8 September 2006 issue of New Scientist, a weekly science magazine. The article portrayed the device as plausible, and emphasized the arguments of those who held that point of view, although it did quote one engineer as saying "it's a load of bloody rubbish." The article included the following arguments from proponents of the theory:

• With a grant from the UK government's Department of Trade and Industry of £250,000, (actually two grants; one a feasibility study of £45,000 and a second of £81,000 to build a demonstration engine - source SPR Ltd.) a commercial regulatory and support agency, Shawyer has built two prototypes that reportedly produce 16 mN and 300 mN of thrust respectively; each using 1 kW of electrical power. A condition of the funding was independent analysis, which was recently completed by John Spiller who says "The thruster's design is practical and could be adapted fairly easily to work in outer space". Shawyer claims that he has been visited by representatives from China and the US Air Force, but ESA has not yet shown much interest. He estimates that his design could save the aerospace community $15 billion over the next ten years.

• Engineers in Germany have created superconducting resonators (for use in particle accelerators) with Q values of several billion, which Shawyer claims would equate to a thrust of 30 kN per kilowatt, "enough to lift a large car". Shawyer states that the thrusters work best while stationary relative to their thrust.

New Scientist has drawn great criticism from the scientific community due to the uncritical treatment of EmDrive in its article. Science fiction writer Greg Egan distributed a public letter stating that "a sensationalist bent and a lack of basic knowledge by its writers" was making the magazine's coverage sufficiently unreliable "to constitute a real threat to the public understanding of science". In particular, Egan found himself "gobsmacked by the level of scientific illiteracy" in the magazine's coverage of the EmDrive, where New Scientist allowed the publication of "meaningless double-talk" designed to bypass a fatal objection to Shawyer's proposed space drive, namely that it violates the conservation of momentum. Egan urged those reading his letter to write to New Scientist and pressure the magazine to raise its standards, instead of "squandering the opportunity that the magazine's circulation and prestige provides" for genuine science education. The letter was endorsed by mathematical physicist John C. Baez and posted on his blog. Egan has also recommended that New Scientist publish Costella's refutation of Shawyer's theory paper.