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For the past several years, a few corners of the Internet have sporadically lit up with excitement about a new propulsion system, which I’ll call the WTF-thruster. The zombie incarnation of the EM-drive has all the best features of a new technology: it generally violates well-established physical principles, there is a badly outlined suggestion for how it might work, and the data that ostensibly demonstrates that it does work is both sparse and inadequately explained.

The buzz returned this week, as the group behind the EM-drive has published a paper describing tests of its operation.

Before getting into the paper, let me step back a bit to set the scene. I am not automatically rejecting the authors’ results. I am not even rejecting the possibility that this study may hint at a new physics. I am saying that before I will take that possibility seriously, I have to be convinced that the data cannot be explained by the current laws of physics. And currently, I am not convinced. In fact I am very frustrated by the lack of detail.