I caught this interesting post making a parallel between Emdrive critics today and Nuclear Fission critics at time of Fermi.
The parallell with LENR critics, is clear.
This article attack the critics based on "it is impossible".
http://pages.csam.montclair.ed…lski/cf/293wikipedia.html
Display More==Cold fusion as a violation of theory==
Most leading skeptics dismissed cold fusion because it appeared to violate the laws that govern high energy plasma physics. In a plasma reaction, copious neutrons "commensurate" with helium are produced, whereas with cold fusion the number of neutrons per helium atom is roughly 11 million times smaller. Skeptics say this means cold fusion is impossible. As Prof. H. Feshbach (MIT) put it in 1991:
"I have had 50 years of experience in nuclear physics and I know what's possible and what's not. . . . I don't want to see any more evidence! I think it's a bunch of junk and I don't want to have anything further to do with it." [1]
The books by F. Close [2] and J. Huizenga [3] are mainly devoted to proving that cold fusion violates theory and is therefore impossible. Huizenga, who was the head of the DoE ERAB panel that dismissed cold fusion in 1989, concluded his book with a 6-point summation. Point number six states that we know a priori that all positive cold fusion excess heat results must be wrong:
"Furthermore, if the claimed excess heat exceeds that possible by other conventional processes (chemical, mechanical, etc.), one must conclude that an error has been made in measuring the excess heat."
Cold Fusion researchers feel that they subscribe to the traditional view, that experiments are the standard by which all claims must be judged. [4] [25] They believe this is fundamental to the scientific method. When a phenomenon has been replicated many times at a high signal to noise ratio, that proves it does exist, and if theory predicts it cannot exist, the theory must be wrong. Cold fusion theorists believe that cold fusion does not violate conventional theory. The number of neutrons produced by cold fusion is much smaller than plasma fusion because a metal lattice at room temperature is very different from the center of the sun. As cold fusion theorist Julian Schwinger put it, "The defense [of cold fusion] is simply stated: The circumstances of cold fusion are not those of hot fusion". [5]
The reddit article is
https://www.reddit.com/r/EmDri…y_of_theoretical_physics/
Display MoreI do not claim the EMDrive works but this is a critic on the unscientific logic by many commenters here claiming the EMDrive is impossible instead of improbable.
Science and Physics isn't a crime mystery where you eliminate all impossibilities until the one remaining is undeniably the right one ... This is not a proof and in many cases plain wrong.
Neither is something 100% impossible because current theories predict it along with some observations. But neither is it a proof everything is possible.
I understand that some of you here are theoreticians which trust our current observations but please do not make the same mistakes as the scientific community did 1938 ...
Fission was theoretically declared impossible and Fermi received a Nobel Prize for the wrong reason due to incorrect theories and observations...
Below some historic details:
‘The natural radioactivity of thorium and uranium made it hard to determine what was happening when these elements were bombarded with neutrons but, after correctly eliminating the presence of elements lighter than uranium but heavier than lead, Fermi concluded that they had created new elements, which he called hesperium and ausonium. The chemist Ida Noddack criticised this work, suggesting that some of the experiments could have produced lighter elements than lead rather than new, heavier elements. Her suggestion was not taken seriously at the time because her team had not carried out any experiments with uranium, and its claim to have discovered masurium (technetium) was disputed.’
'At that time, fission was thought to be improbable if not impossible on theoretical grounds. While physicists expected elements with higher atomic numbers to form from neutron bombardment of lighter elements, nobody expected neutrons to have enough energy to split a heavier atom into two light element fragments in the manner that Noddack suggested.'
‘She suggested the possibility that "it is conceivable that the nucleus breaks up into several large fragments, which would of course be isotopes of known elements but would not be neighbors of the irradiated element." In so doing she presaged what would become known a few years later as nuclear fission. However Noddack offered no experimental proof or theoretical basis for this possibility, which defied the understanding at the time. The paper was generally ignored.’
'Noddack was proven right after all. Fermi had dismissed the possibility of fission on the basis of his calculations, but he had not taken into account the binding energy that would appear when a nuclide with an odd number of neutrons absorbed an extra neutron. For Fermi, the news came as a profound embarrassment, as the transuranic elements that he had partly been awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering had not been transuranic elements at all, but fission products.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Noddack
There were other similar past instances and this was not an exception …
For those knowing Thomas Kuhn work, it is just boring usual situation.
