Yes the actual laws of physics can't be broken. We don't know those. We know an approximation of them based on centuries of careful observation and analysis. That approximation is incredibly good, too. It lets us make microchips with 7nm features, synthesize high atomic weight elements, and build spacecraft that have traversed the solar system. Even so, there are things we know we don't know and there are bound to be things we don't know we don't know.
It would be nice if the EmDrive turned out to be a ground breaking demonstration of a hole in our model. We could probably squeeze a century of amazing science out of it. Not to mention the potential practical applications.
But groundbreaking new discoveries that shake the foundations of a developed scientific theory are incredibly rare. So, as awesome as it could be if it were right, the odds were always against it.
It is also much more likely for such a discovery to appear at the edge of our knowledge where our understanding of the rules is at least a bit fuzzy (like near black holes and whatnot). Something like EmDrive, which is in a regime that has been exhaustively tested, would be like discovering that Bin Laden was hiding in the Oval Office all along.
> It is also much more likely for such a discovery to appear at the edge of our knowledge
This instantly reminds me of the Casimir Effect. Yes, it's way more likely for problems to appear at the edges of our knowledge. But discoveries within the noise of experiments people run every day are not unheard of.
I would also expect any such discovery coming from public science made by somebody wondering why their instruments are off, not by for-profit research looking for patents. But that's not unheard of either.
Conservation laws should be considered more as powerful analysis tools than as foundations of reality. So more Newtonian gravity than Relativity. In fact, you can regard Newtonian orbital mechanics as elaborations on conservation of energy and momentum. Conservation laws themselves have an underlying principle:
Another analogy: Conservation laws are like Euclidian geometry. On the scale of building a cabinet or an office building, Euclidian geometry rules! On intergalactic scales, it simply fails. So too, with the conservation of energy. If someone tries to sell you a perpetual motion or over unity machine, it is pretty rock solid. But if you're going to try to make some kind of cosmological argument using conservation of energy, that's just plain facepalm territory there. (Some HNer actually reported me for using <facepalm> in response to conservation of energy
in a cosmological argument.)
Except that any particular conservation law might fly out the window, but so long as there was some sort of symmetry, Noether's theorem would still be there.
Yes the actual laws of physics can't be broken. We don't know those. We know an approximation of them based on centuries of careful observation and analysis. That approximation is incredibly good, too. It lets us make microchips with 7nm features, synthesize high atomic weight elements, and build spacecraft that have traversed the solar system. Even so, there are things we know we don't know and there are bound to be things we don't know we don't know.
It would be nice if the EmDrive turned out to be a ground breaking demonstration of a hole in our model. We could probably squeeze a century of amazing science out of it. Not to mention the potential practical applications.
But groundbreaking new discoveries that shake the foundations of a developed scientific theory are incredibly rare. So, as awesome as it could be if it were right, the odds were always against it.