> Is that an anomaly or just an experimental error?
In my opinion any empirical data that has no currently obvious explanation should be called an "anomaly" until one is found. It doesn't matter how unlikely the Em Drive interacting with some ether or how low the thrust might be, the observed thrust is still an anomaly until you can find and confirm the actual cause. In the case of cold fusion, it was a mistake to (impolitely!) dismiss that anomaly without any obvious proof of the real cause. I have no idea about the current state of this research or whether it will ever pan out, but I am confident in saying that much.
And yes, this means we all need to have a much healthier, more skeptical, and less emotional response to reports of "anomalies" in the news.
If you work in experimental physics, you learn that "anomalies" are very common.
There's something in the data that you don't understand, and you don't know where it comes from. Sometimes you find it's a bug in the setup, and other times you realize it's already known physics. Part of the time you just don't pursue it further, because there's no time and money to do this for everything. Especially, if it's a small signal down at the noise floor and you are not in full control of the measurement so that it's likely to be a bug in any case, there's no point to pursue it further.
There's nothing to get excited about in emdrive. There's no theoretical reason to expect the device does anything. The experimental data is likely to be just systematic error. Other groups that published results (TU Dresden, NWPU) in the end failed to reproduce the effect, and concluded they found zero result within the bounds of measurement error. It is very plausible this is the case also for the eagleworks measurement, so saying there is "observed thrust" is likely scientifically misleading.
OK, thanks for the info. I was going off the "almost at the limit of experimental error" phrasing, and assuming that meant a small but reproducible effect.
In my opinion any empirical data that has no currently obvious explanation should be called an "anomaly" until one is found. It doesn't matter how unlikely the Em Drive interacting with some ether or how low the thrust might be, the observed thrust is still an anomaly until you can find and confirm the actual cause. In the case of cold fusion, it was a mistake to (impolitely!) dismiss that anomaly without any obvious proof of the real cause. I have no idea about the current state of this research or whether it will ever pan out, but I am confident in saying that much.
And yes, this means we all need to have a much healthier, more skeptical, and less emotional response to reports of "anomalies" in the news.