New Scientist Reacts!

Posted by John Baez

You may recall Greg Egan’s plea to save the magazine New Scientist from a rising tide of crackpottery after it published a glowing article about a propulsion system called the EmDrive. According to its inventor, Roger Shawyer, this drive can push a rocket forwards by bouncing microwaves back and forth in a box. The article didn’t mention that this violates conservation of momentum.

A bunch of us wrote emails to the magazine, with no apparent reaction.

Now they’ve reacted! New Scientist now has a blog thread on the Shawyer article. It starts with a statement by the editor defending the article - see below.

I urge folks who sent email to New Scientist or comments on this blog to post them on the New Scientist blog. That way, your opinions will be publicly visible. But please: be polite, rational, and crystal-clear. There’s nothing to be gained by rudeness.

The New Scientist’s blog thread on the Shawyer article starts with this statement by the editor: Editor’s note It is a fair criticism that New Scientist did not make clear enough how controversial Roger Shawyer’s engine is. We should have made more explicit where it apparently contravenes the laws of nature and reported that several physicists declined to comment on the device because they thought it too contentious. But should New Scientist should have covered this story at all? The answer is a resounding yes: it is, after all, an ideas magazine. That means writing about hypotheses as well as theories. And let’s not forget that Shawyer has experimental data that has convinced peer reviewers that he is onto something. He believes he can explain his machine’s behaviour in terms of existing physical laws, which is what the theorists contest. The great thing is that Shawyer’s ideas are testable. If he succeeds in getting his machine flown in space, we will know soon enough if it is ground-breaking device or a mere flight of fancy. Jeremy Webb, Editor, New Scientist

Posted at October 5, 2006 4:15 PM UTC