Propulsion from Nothing is Still...Probably Nothing

Several months ago, I posted on this blog. Several months before that, I wrote about how there was supposedly some new means of propulsion that, well, wasn't actually propulsion. It seemed incredibly dubious then, so imagine my surprise when this story reared its ugly head once again in the past week or so. 

If you go through that, you might notice mention of the word "superluminary", or fancy science talk for faster than light. Yes, it wasn't enough for this theorized propulsion system to be highly implausible, we had to go a step further and make this thing a warp drive. Yes, that's basically what they're claiming, and of course, news sites ran with it. You can't come with 30 miles of mentioning warp drive and not expect people to go crazy.

There have certainly been voices of reason since the news broke. And that's good. While this new drive has apparently been subjected to slightly more rigorous experimentation, there are two very important facts that must be brought to the front. One, this news was basically self-published. There was no peer-review, nothing to stop them from basically fabricating their results. Two, science depends on repeatability. Once is a coincidence. Until at least one other independent organization can duplicate the results, we have to assume that this extraordinary claim is incorrect in some way. Again, don't get me wrong, I'd love it if this ended up all working out. I just don't think it will.