Not that I'm disagreeing but you could have said "Newton mechanics has been the workhorse method for centuries and everyone has found that they work" then Einstein came along and dumped the apple cart.
Not saying there is anything to the EmDrive (personally I'm on the side of experimental error) but the correct way to do science imo when you have something you can't explain is to keep at it until you can.
You couldn't have said that. Einstein's contributions were solving real problems with Newtonian mechanics, where it was clearly inadequate to explain how things actually worked. The photoelectric effect was known for years before Einstein explained it with the first glimmer of quantum mechanics. The problem of a fixed reference frame for the motion of light was known for a long time before Einstein came up with relativity.
The situations aren't really comparable. Newtonian mechanics had major known flaws that people were trying to reconcile. They weren't tiny effects hiding near the noise.
I totally agree that investigations should continue until an explanation is found, it's just that people seem far too eager to assume that it must be something new, when with what's known so far it's overwhelmingly likely to be experimental error.
That's specious. I am talking about a well-studied physical system, not a theoretical framework.
The correct analogy in this case is that someone picked a system that is well-described by Newtonian mechanics—e.g., a pendulum—and then built a small, crappy pendulum, made a crappy measurement on said crappy pendulum, and then claimed the existence of new physics despite the fact that no new physics is required to explain the behavior of much bigger and better pendula that other people already built.
The big shock was of course the way he solved it, not that there was a problem to be solved.
Physicists are undertaking a wide range of experimental programs to look for more satisfying explanations of what underlies ΛCDM cosmology (which I guess is the "conjouring" [sic] that you are referring to). Such experiments could also show that ΛCDM cosmology is wrong or needs to be modified. But right now, ΛCDM cosmology does a pretty good job of explaining the data we have so far.
I'm not sure what else you would have physicists do—should they just not talk about the fact that there's a relatively parsimonious framework that explains the large-scale behavior of the universe?
The results are random. Sometimes nonzero thrust is observed in a direction opposite to what was expected [0]. Know what that sounds like? A null measurement dominated by statistical and systematic uncertainties.
> including NASA
I'll repeat what I said elsewhere: NASA is so big that that doesn't mean anything. Not everyone affiliated with NASA is a top-notch researcher. The word "NASA" is not automatic proof of good research.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster#Te...
Microwave cavities have been a workhorse technology in many fields for many decades, and everyone has found that existing physics (classical electrodynamics, superconductivity, and a few other things) is entirely sufficient to explain how they work.
There's a very simple explanation for why a small group of people would report an unphysical, novel effect in a well-studied physical system: sloppy experimentation.