This argument reminds me of the historical arguments made against heliocentrism vs geocentrism. Just because we have widespread belief of one thing to be true does not mean we should blindly accept it and not test things that appear to oppose it.

In my opinion, the tests that have happened with the EmDrive are exactly what _should_ happen to make sure that our knowledge is strong and that we do keep advancing the field.

"Velocities add" is also mechanics 101, and turned out to be incorrect at sufficiently large speeds. I think we have to go to Noether's theorem to show why we should be so sure the EM drive doesn't work: EM drive proponents must either tell us where the momentum goes, or explain why space isn't symmetric under translation.

(Actually, fun side note, in a gravitational field, space isn't symmetric under translation. IIRC, this was the original problem that caused Noether to prove her famous theorem. She found that while there was still a conserved quantity of a sort due to "translations" in space and time, it wasn't just the energy-momentum tensor, but also depended on the gravitational field. In any case, the EM drive is supposed to work in flat space, so that shouldn't become an issue.)

Yeah, those morons at NASA'S Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory sure have no idea what is a good use of their time.

This fellow (Eagleworks guy) was told in no uncertain terms by his PhD thesis committee at Rice that this was a bad idea and forced to rewrite his thesis. He clearly doesn’t know when to take a hint.

Yes there are commonly clever people that know how to play organizational ladders with minimum amount of work in every sufficiently large organization. Also a fair amount of "morons".

Arthur C Clark has addressed this general point in his first law:

“ When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

I have MSc in mathematics, I can follow the idea of conservation of momentum. I just know a little more than you and understand that things are not so simple.