That calls for a rim shot 
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Thatās just silly. You donāt moon with Ur anus, you moon with the urn youāre Sat on.
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Iāve been seeing articles about this pop up in my news feeds over the last several days with hyperbolic titles about free lightspeed travel, and I havenāt even bothered getting the detailsā¦ just scrolled past with the old classic in mind:
This article at least goes into the why of it not working, but the ending really makes me glad I ignored all those other articlesā¦
Now, my issue with this idea is not that it doesnāt work. And my issue is not that NASA has people who spend time wondering about ideas like thisāthe authorās job title includes the word āmanager,ā so the more time he spends on this, the less damage he can do managing. My issue is that the last set of bullet points in the last slide tell the entire story.
ā¢ Basic concept is unproven
ā¢ Has not been reviewed by subject-matter experts
ā¢ Math errors may exist!
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The problem is that, even though the author does a very nice simulation, he has left out the fields that do the accelerating. When we accelerate ions using a magnetic or electric field, the ions push back on the field. There is an equal and opposite force exerted on the electrodes and coils that produce the fields, and those just happen to be in the spaceship, too.
Thatās a pretty fundamental thing to forget. Not to say I would thought of it, but the guy who came up with the concept should have.
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As noted at the endā¦
the authorās job title includes the word āmanager,ā so the more time he spends on this, the less damage he can do managing
Soā¦ perhaps more of an āidea manā. 
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Wait, how about Campbellās molecular motion drive? Or the Dean drive? orā¦
Some less implausible suggestions include:
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distorting space, such as warp drives, wormholes, subspace, hyperspace, etc.
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vacuum energy and reacting against space or the distant stars, like the e-m drive.
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changing place without acceleration, like stutterwarp.
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itās not magic, itās psionics-- the power of the mind! or another just-as-as-yet-undiscovered principle.
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magic.
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itās magic, but conservation laws require a closer-than-measurably equal mass teleportation in each direction.
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Bats? But I donāt know if thereās a species that eats mosquitoes only.
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So Iām not sure if there was a video with this, or if Iām just not an expert and so missed some of the stuff the authors picked up on. But in other federal agencies, the single author technical review type is less intended to present a working prototype, but to summarize where the field/literature is, and maybe present some novel synthesis or empirical component.
If thatās the case (again, donāt work for NASA), I wouldnāt necessarily expect all the problems to be worked out.
Iām pretty far down the open-access rabbit hole. But sometimes I do worry about archiving presentations in a really āofficialā looking way because it can lend credence to talks that amount to spitballing. If I had a dollar for every absurd simplification I made in a talk, I could have retired after my faculty position search. I interact a fair bit with paleontologists, and this is a perpetual problem for them - hobbyists and journalists sitting in the audience, reporting on talks where data collection and analysis is still underway. Thatās very different than my own home field of evolutionary biology, where meetings typically attract few outside the field.
Edit: And none of this is to excuse bad science, if thatās what is happening. But seeing the whole process from āDumb Ideaā to āactual paperā occurring in the capitalist hellscape of American 2019 has really changed my perception of what I think the steps in that pipeline are, their value, and the value of having them listened to by others. In my own work, for example, I share speculative things much more widely than I did as a grad student because I value feedback and community contributions earlier than I did then. That has a lot to do with the way the world has changed, but more to do with how I have changed.
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I think the biggest issue here is that this wasnāt just some obscure spitballing talk - thereās news articles all over the place about this āNASA Geniusā or āNASA Engineerā. A quick check for āhelical engineā on Googleās news search comes back with almost 26,000 articles, on a presentation that was published only two months ago. [Edit: Ok, refining my search drops that down to a few thousand, and some are clearly copy/paste sites. But itās also shown up on Newsweek, MSN news, Popular Mechanicsā¦]
Even then, Iād chalk it up to overeager reportersā¦ except that the original author is giving interview statements for these articles, where he a) says that the idea still hasnāt been reviewed by a single expert, but b) that the engine could take you up to 99% of the speed of light with no propellant!
Itās not as though thereās a shortage of experts within NASA who he could have asked for a quick look over before an interview. Even as a layperson, my brief read of the ideaās description had me wondering if heād just reinvented the āoverbalanced wheelā perpetual motion engine.
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I dunno ā¦ Looking at some of these quotes from him:
āI know that it risks being right up there with the EM drive and cold fusion,ā he told New Scientist .
āBut you have to be prepared to be embarrassed. It is very difficult to invent something that is new under the sun and actually works.ā
Thatās kind of a great attitude. And some of that is probably biased by my field, in which it is pretty common for great ideas and hypotheses to be adjacent to astronomically bad ones. And sometimes critical evaluation of the astronomically bad ideas gets us to think more clearly about what will eventually work. So, IMO, if heās willing to be wrong, and willing to supply the data and code for others to think about, being wrong isnāt a bad thing.
Which is sort of separate from the media circus. Obviously, if this is a meeting that attracts a lot of media attention usually, itās probably better to be more careful. Iāve certainly sat in presentations where I saw things that I thought should have been run past an expert, and Iāve sat in sessions where the session chair should have bounced the abstract. This seems like the former, maybe even the latter, but the peer review comments on the session paper arenāt published alongside it, so itās hard to know.
I dunno. Biology often does come at things from the āassume a spherical cowā angle. But that is facilitated by the lack of attention paid to us in the media. Iām really defensive of that space and that freedom, though, because I do find the tactic of starting from āutterly wrongā productive.
But also, I donāt run up against Newtonās third law often, so.
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Well, this is the thing, itās ok to be wrong but itās pointless not to consider why you might be wrong. For a biology comparison, imagine someone had a new phylogeny where they proposed that birds are not dinosaurs but lizards. āInteresting!ā you say, āSo what about all the feathered dinosaur intermediates and close homologies between them? How did they address those?ā And then the answer is they didnāt so much as look at them; all the main evidence on whether or not such an approach would make sense went untouched.
Is that science daring to be wrong, or a pointless revisit of an old idea without actually trying to make it work? Because this is, I would say, much worse. That something could just violate conservation laws is a very old notion, and it isnāt one advanced by simply ignoring how theyād apply.
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This is sort of an interesting choice for comparison, because what weight any particular homologous character has is a primary contention between different approaches to building a phylogeny. I donāt actually consider it to be a problem if, say, a likelihood tree contradicts the suspected apomorphy of a group. So if they didnāt bother to explain my favorite synapomorphy, I wouldnāt actually be offended by that? But thatās, again, perspective: Iām not a classicly-trained morphological systematist, but I am a fairly classicly-trained molecular systematist. Do I think people should engage with the characters? Hell yeah. Do I think presenting a contradictory tree on its own is inherently a problem? Not really, though it might rub up against deficient scholarship, depending on the focus and context.
I didnāt see the talk, and my institution doesnāt provide full access to the paper. But I definitely think wrong wrong vs. constructively wrong hinges on how it was presented, the culture of the conference, etc.
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Sure, but this is in more of a didnāt bother including any of the many known synapomorphies or even include any dinosaurs in their new tree kind of way. Because leaving out the reaction from the fields is ignoring the whole crux of the issue. There are extremely good reasons physicists generally donāt think you can get momentum out of nothing ā ultimately supported by Noetherās theorem, which is a mathematical rather than physical result ā and itās just not looked at.
Whatever benefits there are to imagining perpetual motion machines and their kin without paying attention to the key reason they shouldnāt work, I suspect we probably exhausted them a century ago. We know it canāt happen from purely classical physics; if someone wants to advance our understanding, they should say engage with why Noetherās theorem wouldnāt apply, not simply pretend otherwise.
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Itās probably difficult to really get a good analogy for this.
Think of the most outlandish, pie-in-the-sky idea that might be possible in your field. Something that would make everything so much easier, but that everyone in your field knows a simple problem that prevents it from being possible. Imagine this idea repeatedly showing up since at least the 8th century, put forward by people who are steadfastly ignoring that simple problem.
Then imagine someone in your field being called a āgeniusā in your field for presenting an updated version of that pie in the sky idea, not saying a thing about the simple problem, and blithely saying things like āthere may be some math errorsā, āno experts have looked at this yetā, and āIf someone says it doesnāt work, Iāll be the first to say, it was worth a shot.ā
Would this be a problem? Would that way of responding to ācontroversyā about the idea actually be constructive?
In a different context, Iād say the āyou have to be prepared to be embarrassedā statement is great. But the other assertions and statements kind of blunt that.
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OK, fine, itās just wrong wrong. You guys are the physics researchers, not me.
Biblical geneologies reveal the full and true history of humankind!
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They do have a long history of having been imagined before. Iām guessing this oneās getting attention because someone at NASA is imagining it. Typically they come from sci-fi authors or crackpot inventors who donāt have NASA rep behind them.
Nothing wrong with imagining a new take on it, itās nice to have jump gates, wormholes, warp drives, etc. to choose from for FTL or generation ships and cryoships for non-FTL. Likewise we can choose between ansibles or subspace for FTL communications, or just use courier ships if FTL comm is impossible.
Still seems like sci-fi, and Iām not sure what this helical drive idea brings that other reactionless/inertialess drive concepts donāt already provide.
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Look, all Iām saying is that new take should involve more than just special relativity, or else we already know the math doesnāt work for extremely straightforward reasons. I stand by what I said above:
Iām not against considering weird new ideas. Iām against pretending that maybe this time the clever guy can square the circle, all prior mathematics showing why all the attempts fail somehow notwithstanding.
The reason people are so down on this is press treated it like the former when itās plainly the latter. Like the new mystery organism thing, itās just false advertising. And at least that seems to have been a translation mistake:
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