What is good about that paper ? The calculated thrust values for 60 W and 80 W are completely inconsistent separately for each group . That alone should have lead to an instant rejection the measurements are obviously wrong andor the uncertainties are massively underestimated . If you don ' t understand your uncertainties , don ' t bother publishing . They should have let the yintercept float in their linear fit . Fixing it leads to a bias and makes the interpretation of the Rvalue and the significance questionable . It also hides potential sources of measurement errors indicated by a significant nonzero yintercept . Why just 18 data points ? Each measurement takes about 10 minutes , and they had months for their measurement campaign . They could not run on windy days , but you would expect that they find more than 3 hours of calm weather in a few months . How is the seismic contribution evaluated ? They say it is too strong to measure during some days , more than its uncertainty is smaller than small value X during other days could be expected . It is a torsion pendulum . Why don ' t they use it as such and induce oscillations , amplifying thrust if present while reducing thermal effects ? Of the discussed error sources in 8 , ust the photon rocket has any quantative estimate . If they think they know that all contributions are small , surely they could tell how small approximately ? The wild speculations about momentumcarrying pilot waves and so on are just weird . They should have done the same as OPERA did when their results indicated superluminal neutrinos Publish with the message we don ' t understand our measurement , please help figuring out what is going on instead of claiming that they overturned all of modern physics with their measurement . The Journal of Power and Propulsion is the wrong journal for a violation of the basics of all modern science . Nature or Science would be appropriate if the research would be credible . But there the paper would have gotten rejected or maybe they tried it there and it did get rejected ? .