I'd never understand how intelligent and educated people lose it completely when it comes to Physics. They've been exposed to some PopSci tales not meant to be accurate at all and then feel entitled to be right when they figure out some nonsensical consequences by themselves -no proper maths involved ever-. It's depressing.
Baez is right, of course. I've been checking the (Word-generated) "papers" from this guy's group at NASA, they're extremely shoddy: There's another report with their unstable calibration for the torsion pendulum which shows their complete lack of undergraduate lab report skills. And a poster from them where they say: "Q-thruster test articles are going to be tested in a vacuum to reduce possibility of air currents polluting the thrust signal during testing, but electrolytic capacitors in signal amplifier are not vacuum compatible"... Awesome.
I've also checked the Chinese Physics B paper. Their device is completely different from this one. It's an open cavity and they only use classical EM. I don't understand very well how their thrust measurement set-up works so I hold my judgement on their claims, but at least they're trying to be legit.
Violation of momentum is an extremely serious claim (in words of D.J. Griffiths, "there is no principle in Physics more sacred than that"). The Universe would look nothing like this if that were true and all the Physics that we've discovered consistent with thousands of experiments would be gone. The way they use the quantum vacuum has nothing to do with the formalism that made it possible. Several detailed QED calculations backed up by experiments to astounding precision would be completely wrong and we know that's not the case.
BTW, the fundamental principle is conservation of momentum, Newton's 3rd law of motion is a consequence that sometimes doesn't hold, for instance forces between charged particles in electrodynamics don't follow the 3rd law (but approximately at low speeds). If you take into account momentum carried by the fields you get conservation of momentum back, quite nicely as well.
Baez is right, of course. I've been checking the (Word-generated) "papers" from this guy's group at NASA, they're extremely shoddy: There's another report with their unstable calibration for the torsion pendulum which shows their complete lack of undergraduate lab report skills. And a poster from them where they say: "Q-thruster test articles are going to be tested in a vacuum to reduce possibility of air currents polluting the thrust signal during testing, but electrolytic capacitors in signal amplifier are not vacuum compatible"... Awesome.
I've also checked the Chinese Physics B paper. Their device is completely different from this one. It's an open cavity and they only use classical EM. I don't understand very well how their thrust measurement set-up works so I hold my judgement on their claims, but at least they're trying to be legit.
Violation of momentum is an extremely serious claim (in words of D.J. Griffiths, "there is no principle in Physics more sacred than that"). The Universe would look nothing like this if that were true and all the Physics that we've discovered consistent with thousands of experiments would be gone. The way they use the quantum vacuum has nothing to do with the formalism that made it possible. Several detailed QED calculations backed up by experiments to astounding precision would be completely wrong and we know that's not the case.
BTW, the fundamental principle is conservation of momentum, Newton's 3rd law of motion is a consequence that sometimes doesn't hold, for instance forces between charged particles in electrodynamics don't follow the 3rd law (but approximately at low speeds). If you take into account momentum carried by the fields you get conservation of momentum back, quite nicely as well.