Dr. John P. Costella said:
Now look back at Shawyer’s Figure 2.4. He has Fs1 and Fs2 pointing perpendicular to the axial direction, not perpendicular to the cone’s walls.
His arrows are wrong.
This is the fundamental blunder that renders Shawyer’s paper meaningless. If you remember your high school physics, it is simple enough to draw a diagram to prove to yourself that, when a particle bounces off the wall of the cone, the increase in the particle’s momentum in the axial direction is exactly balanced by the impulse imparted to the cone in the opposite direction.
This is what has already been argued by those who have bothered to wade through Shawyer’s pa-per. It is not affected by all the ‘wave-land’ equations that Shawyer throws in. It is the fundamental error in his analysis.
So what do we really find out from this analysis, when we do it correctly? Simply this: when a par-ticle bounces around elastically inside a closed container, neither of them go anywhere. If you start in the right reference frame, then when the particle is moving left, the container is moving right; when the particle is moving up, the container is moving down; and so on. When the particle and the container collide, the directions of motion change, but their momenta still add up to zero. Nothing accelerates.
There is no ‘drive’.
