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International Business Times writes:
A new peer-reviewed paper (open, DOI: 10.1063/1.4953807) on the EmDrive from Finland states that the controversial electromagnetic space propulsion technology does work due to microwaves fed into the device converting into photons that leak out of the closed cavity, producing an exhaust.
So how could something come out that you can't detect? Well, the photons bounce back and forth inside the metal cavity, and some of them end up going together in the same direction with the same speed, but they are 180 degrees out of phase. Invariably, when travelling together in this out-of-phase configuration, they cancel each other's electromagnetic field out completely.
That's the same as water waves travelling together so that the crest of one wave is exactly at the trough of the other and cancelling each other out. The water does not go away, it's still there, in the same way the pairs of photons are still there and carrying momentum even though you can't see them as light.
If you don't have electromagnetic properties on the waves as they have cancelled each other out, then they don't reflect from the cavity walls anymore. Instead they leak out of the cavity. So we have an exhaust – the photons are leaking out pair-wise.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday June 18 2016, @05:36PM
Hey, when has intelligence ever been a defense against your own stupidity?
Fact: Shawyers initial claims were that he generated 0.016N with 850W, or about 20uN/W
Fact: Nasa's tests found about 1/1000th the thrust, about 20nN/W
Fact: the theoretical upper limit for a perfectly collimated photon drive is about 2nN/W
So, even if this thing is in fact emitting photons in some new and interesting, virtually undetectable manner, which just happen to be perfectly collimated... it's still 10 times too weak to explain the even the weakest thrust we've measured. Maybe it actually does produce an exhaust in this manner, and the idea is certainly interesting, worthy of discussion, and may have serious implications both in other fields and in the practical considerations for EmDrive (if the EmDrive is proven to work).
It's just not a candidate to explain the thrust that's been measured.