The statement that there has been no replication is simply false. The work by NASA/Eagleworks is, in fact, an independent replication of Shawyer's gizmo. Further, it is the second replication of the gizmo, the first having been done by Yang in China in 2010.
The claim of lack of peer-review is also false, because Yang's paper describing his version of the thruster
has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Further, please let me observe that if we had consistently applied the standard of proof described above, then we would have to reject the discovery of the Higgs boson because it has never been replicated outside of CERN.
Then there is a the whole
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof adage, which will probably go down in history as one of the most damaging ideas in science ever. Yes, indeed, the claim of space warping is an extraordinary one, but what can be the required
extraordinary proof? (*) By definition, it cannot be the proof from Michelson's interferometer, simply because Michelson's interferometer is an
ordinary device. There's absolutely no question that White should redo that in vacuum, and someone else should replicate, but beyond that point? Launch the experiment to Earth-Sun L1 to eliminate all outside influence?
That's going to be around $1B, kid, and no, we won't give you that $1B because you're making some extraordinary claims, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof first, you know.
If you think about it, Carl Sagan's adage allows you to artificially raise the standard of proof for ideas you do not like, thus ensuring that the proof challenging your beliefs will never be delivered. In the old times, to disprove an idea, one had to get up from their desk, run the experiment themselves, and obtain a null result. Now people just contend themselves by saying
Gimme moar proof!
(*) Actually, it is less extraordinary then Shawyer's original theory of operation. If the device is warping space it does not violate known physics, it uses currently undiscovered physics.
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