But isn't a healthy dose of scepticism simply good Science? Peer reviewed results are hard to be sceptical about. My favorite thing about science is that you often have strongly opposing sides both with super intelligent scientists. When everything has been fleshed out, the best and brightest tends to come to the top (not always, but as a generalism it is true).

Virtually everyone was sceptical of the guy claiming to have developed a form of propulsion powered more or less only by light, but then NASA tested the "EmDrive" and sure enough, it seems like the fundamental idea works. (http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futu...)

> Peer reviewed results are hard to be sceptical about.

With rampant forging of data and results, you better be skeptical of peer-reviewed results too. Reproducibility is an important, oft-overlooked, and under-appreciated part of science.

And when I say peer review, perhaps I meant to say peer reproduced (which wasn't super obvious in the initial comment).

Good point; after all, how can a review be serious if the reviewer(s) don't even try to reproduce the results?

A peer review can identify a very large class of problems with research without actually replicating the experiment.

For example, problems with methodology and sampling, overlooked prior research, bad analysis of results, straight-up non-sequiturs and conclusions drawn from insufficient data.

All of these mean peer review is valuable without reproducing results.

For an extreme example: if somebody publishes a "Cheese found on moon" paper, do you expect the reviewer to mount an expedition to the moon to check?

Those are all excellent points, but even if you don't find any significant problems with the methodology or the math, or any of the other factors, that still doesn't make a complete review--not without replication.

For the 'Cheese found on moon' paper, I would expect the reviewer to clearly state that the results could not be replicated before mentioning anything else. Let readers draw informed conclusions based on a complete picture of the result, including whether or not it was a one-off.

The supposed thrust of the EmDrive is very small. But the device has a lot of wires with current that can be equivalent to an electromagnet, and very hot parts that can create air currents, and ...

If you have not done few physics labs, it's easy to underestimate the measurement problems and the level of noise in experiments.

Most of the Physics community thinks that this is an experimental error. One symptom is that at lunch in a Physics department nobody talks about this. If this were real it would be a groundbreaking result because it breaks some of the most fundamental Physics laws.

I don't think the scientists at NASA are bogus. They managed to calculate when a probe would reach pluto that was only off by a few seconds. There is still a lot of research that needs to be done on that, but there are those that say it isn't breaking the laws of physics.

We shall see I guess, but it has been replicated in 3 places now taht I'm aware of, two of which are serious science outfits.

The NASA is very big, they went to the Moon but they also published the infamous arsenic life paper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1#Biochemistry ).

In a "massless" thruster, the theoretical maximum Thrust/Power ratio is 1/c = 0.0033 mN/KW if you don't want to break the conservation of momentum, special relativity or quantum mechanics. You could get this value with an ideal perfectly efficient laser beam. The latest NASA version proclaims (50 uN / 50 W) = 1 mN/KW that is 300x the theoretical maximum, so if it's not an experimental error, it must be breaking some of the currently supposed physic laws.