Gravity and vacuum are not mutually exclusive - you always have to deal with gravity forces, although they become negligible pretty quickly when you get into and then leave orbits.

As to the specific claim, I suspect that the experiments they are currently doing (in vacuum chambers on earth) have gotten to the point that they are measuring the propulsion system producing more thrust than it’s own weight (T/W >1), which would technically be enough thrust to overcome gravity. Even if it wasn’t practically useful for actually getting to orbit, that amount of thrust on a reactionless motor would be incredible, and would totally unlock the solar system for us.

When you say “university staff”, do you mean professors, or some other technical support staff?

If professors, then reaching out by email is probably a good way to start. They may get a lot of emails though, so your best chance to get a response might be timing the email right at the start of summer when they hopefully don’t have any ongoing classes.

In terms of payment - most professors would happily talk about their areas of study with interested people for a short time (for free). If you needed a significant time investment from them though, then you might start having issues.

If you’re mixing things up in the kitchen, typically you try to be somewhat precise with ratios.

The difference in this case being that because the actual ratio of the blend is unknown, you don’t actually know how it would crystallize. Technically they could even change up the ratio week to week based on the price of high-fructose corn syrup so you wouldn’t even get consistency from it.

Why is that weirder? The people writing scientific software are, by and large, less good at writing software than people who only specialize in software development. I’d expect there to tons of terrible engineering practices in an old code base like that

I agree with many of the other commenters that OP debating their husband might not be the best idea.

But if that’s what they want, “Decoding the gurus” did at least one Rogan specific episode, and I think they do a better job covering and dismantling Rogan’s rhetorical approach than the podcasts above.