Ben (narrator/author of the LessWrong post)

That's the end of the list.

My opinion.

For my own position, I want any answer to the problem to offer me the tools needed to answer my original question about weird photon rockets, and any a resolution that fails to offer an answer to questions of that type isn't really a resolution at all.

At the moment, if I had to pick, I would take either option 3 or possibly 2.

The mirrors in fluid experiments appear to falsify 1, 3, 5, and 7.

Although the proponents of 3 believe that we need to repeat these experiments with a range of mirrors with different reflection phases, but it is unfalsifiable, makes no predictions, and therefore worse than wrong.

6 is slain by the fiber experiment and fails to engage with the fact that there surely is some distinction between the momentum in the EM field and in the full propagating wave.

I have a vague sense that having separate momenta for kinetic and uncertainty-related things as in, one, break something important somewhere.

Perhaps it allows some scheme to beat Heisenberg uncertainty on a particle's momentum by bouncing a photon in glass of it somehow.

An important point against Theory 2 is that, despite being the most obvious resolution, it was proposed most recently, 2017, which strongly implies that the first few times anyone had the idea they thought there was something wrong with it.

For example, despite looking like a modified version of 2, Proposal 3 actually predates it by 13 years, 2004, 2.

It's also unfortunate that the paper advocating most strongly for proposal 2.1 is, in my opinion, using a model at widely the wrong level of detail.

For a disagreement on a fundamental issue like this you want simple, cartoon models, frictionless, spherical cows in a perfect vacuum.

If some contingent detail, the fuzziness of the cows, is changing the answer, then the answer isn't getting to the root of the disagreement.

So a minimum of fuzz is good.

Mikko Partanen doesn't agree with my philosophy on this and they have a kitchen sink theory overflowing with, possibly extraneous, detail.

Pushing me more towards, three, are two recent, 2023, papers that both have supporting evidence for it.

Final thoughts.

From the list of options above I have actually left out what appears to be a fairly common position.

I have left it out because it is poisonous and unhealthy.