The EM Drive. Is it time? (Patreon)

The EM drive has been one of the internet's favourite fringe (pseudo?)technologies for years. It has been widely dismissed by the physics community because of its conservation-of-momentum-violating ways. On November 17 (two days ago as of this post), the results of vacuum tests were published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Propulsion and Power. The paper can be accessed by anyone, right here:

http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/1.B36120

First author is Harold "Sonny" White, director of Eagleworks Laboratories where the tests were performed. The paper details the tests, which, honestly, seem straightforward and go to some effort to eliminate or calibrate for spurious thrusts. The result is a consistent thrust that depends on input power. White et al. claim that thrust is directly proportional to input power, which you might expect if the resonating microwaves really are pushing on ... something. However that's a bit misleading. At the higher power tests  - 60W and 80W - produced statistically identical mean thrusts, The "correlation" is dependent on the results of the lower power test at 40W, which showed a significantly lower thrust than at higher powers. This is all clear in White et al.'s figure 9, which I've attached. 

If the EM drive really did produce a linear thrust, then I'd find it a lot more compelling. I don't think these results demonstrate that, and so there are still a lot of potential spurious sources that need to be addressed. The paper, to its credit, lists these in nice detail.

The paper also goes on to propose an explanation in terms of pilot wave theory. I think we can safely ignore that for now. If the effect proves real we might wanna let the quantum field theorists work on that. It's not rocket science, after all.

So, is it time to start talking seriously about the EM drive?