The NASA team isn’t the first to find this result. This is actually the fifth time an independent research lab has tested this kind of device successfully. Not surprisingly, the NASA work, done by researchers David Brady, Harold White, and three other scientists, sparked breathless media coverage claiming the laws of physics has been broken.

Here’s the tricky part: The laws of physics are called laws for a reason. It’s exceedingly unlikely that shooting off radio waves inside a carefully constructed can is enough to break one of them. It’s much more likely there’s some error in the experiment, something extremely subtle that no one has noticed yet. It’s happened before. In 2011, Italian physicists thought they had discovered neutrinos that could travel faster than light, contradicting Einstein’s theory of relativity. After extensive testing, the team realized it had flawed data thanks to a loose fiber optic cable. It’s likely that the results of the NASA experiment have a similar explanation.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” says Professor Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard University, quoting Carl Sagan’s famous line. “It does no good to science and technology, in fact it hurts its credibility, to go public with such preliminary results that would have to be confirmed by many more experiments designed to convincingly rule out uncontrollable effects or interferences,” Capasso says.