cheezcake
Member
The paper shows that the drive consistently produces thrust, and importantly, much more than a light sail would be capable of.
While it's not the main subject of the paper they discuss a potential explanation for why the drive seems to work.
Pilot-wave theory is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that is deterministic. Which is pretty unlike the most commonly accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen interpretation, in which particles don't have well defined positions until they're observed.
They do note there's still some testing to be done to completely rule out potential error sources.
I was hugely skeptical of this at first, but I may be eating crow real soon
Link to paper.
The test campaign included a null thrust test effort to identify any mundane sources of impulsive thrust; however, none were identified. Thrust data from forward, reverse, and null suggested that the system was consistently performing with a thrust-to-power ratio of 1.2±0.1  mN/kW.
While it's not the main subject of the paper they discuss a potential explanation for why the drive seems to work.
In short, the supporting physics model used to derive a force based on operating conditions in the test article can be categorized as a nonlocal hidden-variable theory, or pilot-wave theory for short.
Pilot-wave theories are a family of realist interpretations of quantum mechanics that conjecture that the statistical nature of the formalism of quantum mechanics is due to an ignorance of an underlying more fundamental real dynamics, and that microscopic particles follow real trajectories over time just like larger classical bodies do.
Pilot-wave theory is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that is deterministic. Which is pretty unlike the most commonly accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen interpretation, in which particles don't have well defined positions until they're observed.
They do note there's still some testing to be done to completely rule out potential error sources.
Although thermal shift was addressed to a degree with this test campaign, future testing efforts should seek to develop testing approaches that are immune to CG shifts from thermal expansion. As indicated in Sec. II.C.8, a modified Cavendish balance approach could be employed to definitively rule out thermal.
I was hugely skeptical of this at first, but I may be eating crow real soon
Link to paper.