Some comments as a fellow garage experimenter and physicist:
There are two experimental results which are presented. The first is the generation of fringe patterns with the laser beam sent through the crossed fields. The second is the force generated which is measured using a weight scale.
There is not enough detail available on the fringe patterns, which is too bad because it is the more interesting of the two results. First, there is no 'before and after' picture, to see how much change in fringing occurred. Second, nothing is mentioned about verification that the fringing effect was not coming from mechanical distortion of the display screen. It is not so easy to alter light beams using EM fields in free space, so if it could be shown that the light is actually being affected (with a better designed experiment), that would be cool.
The force effect is a mess, both in presentation and experimental design. First of all, it appears that they are mixing experimental values with modeled values in their graphs and tabulated forces, and they don't say which is which. I don't believe that they actually delivered 305 watts with their antennas and measured 559607.4 Newtons of force. That much force could lift a Abrahms battle tank, and is unlikely to be measured down to the tenth of a Newton. That appears to come from their exponential model. I do believe the 1.25 g up and 1.30 g down points at 5 watts were actually measured.
Static force measurement can be notoriously misleading. It is very easy to do (all you need is a scale) and it can be easily done wrong; wrong in the sense that the result may not be indicative of what you are trying to measure. It is just too easy in a world filled with small forces to end up measuring something other than what you think you are. I see no indication that they are not just measuring normal electromagnetic interactions, instead of a warp bubble. One way to fix this problem is to measure dynamic forces, where your effect must transfer a goodly amount of energy. With static forces, you can easily turn 0.0001 J into a large force.
There are significant issues with the exponential model of the force. Force x velocity = power, so if you find a way to generate exponential force from a power, at some velocity you will be generating more power than you use. Now, if you believe that your power is coming from the fabric of space, this might not be a problem, but it also means that your experiment should show this by operating at or above that velocity. Velocity relative to what, you ask? Hey, it's not my inconsistent hypothesis.
The biggest issue of course, is that the experiments are showing 'something', but there is no direct link to show that what they are showing is coming from the hypothesized warp bubble. More control experiments are needed. That is where you really learn where you are wrong, and hopefully where you are right.
I will say that for those of you who are focusing on the style of the presentation or how jury-rigged the experiments appear, you might see those things in poor science, but you also see that when someone doesn't focus on presentation. I doubt Pares expected this to end up on HN. I've done work that looked just as bad, and while I would want to clean it up before presenting it to the world, sometimes that is what simple experiments look like. When my friends ask me why I don't share more of my experiments on the web, I can point to this discussion.
But you're right, the pattern is super hard to figure out. I spent so many hours in laser physics labs in college, and those dots look brutal to make sense of. I think it would help him immensely if he cleaned up the beams a bit (we put the beam through a microscope objective with a calibrated pin hole at the focal point). But... I dunno if that would remove the modes he's looking for. Without cleaning that beam up, slight vibrations in beam speckle could cause that pixel to drop slightly in intensity. An unfiltered laser beam is just a gory mess to deal with, in general.
I suppose my complaint is there's a lot of fluff and noise.
Feynman said,
"I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen."
He may very well be legit, as there are some seriously weird things that happen in tortured EM fields, but without the frank openness of the data and setup (he only seems to have one angle shot of the apparatus), I can't help verify or make sense of it.
For measuring things so small such as fringe patterns, having this thing sitting in a non-temperature controlled room with a laser going through the room's air (which your breath and ambient humidity / dust can affect) and a webcam whose framerate may be variable, I'd say it's a whole lot of science with a not at all scientific control setup. Where's the beam splitter for the laser so he can get a reference value for the fringe pattern?
The Wright brothers did not break any barriers in basic science, they solved an engineering problem. The basics of fluid dynamics and prerequisites to flight were established in the late 19th/beginning of the 20th century. There were plenty of details to sort out and experiments to do, but the scientific foundation was there. The problem of flight had been reduced to the engineering problem of improving two ratios: Thrust/Weight and Lift/Drag.
What this man in his garage is proposing he's done would be earth shattering if the demo he's impressed upon a rather impressionable reporter (and several HN commenters) were real. More impressive than anything the $10 billion LHC could hope for, but he hasn't, let's be clear.
What's actually happened is a guy tinkering in his garage with electromagnets has gotten himself and a few people surrounding him caught up with grandiose ideas. Electromagnets aren't blocked by faraday cages, which easily explains away any warping he thinks he's accomplished.
You shouldn't need technical knowledge to figure this out though, because the top half of that article isn't about what he's doing, it's about the underdog ignored maverick thinker making revolutions in his garage. It's in an online newspaper hosted at omaha.com. It's written by someone with obviously little scientific training.
Personal bollocks filters are important to develop.
The Wrights did novel and indispensable practical research on airfoils and what can actually generate lift. The "theoretical" understanding of fluid dynamics and lift before them was quite wrong... because no one had tested it. So too they solved the problems of aerodynamic stability and how to effect control through numerous experiments.
They also had plenty of engineering challenges, such as structure and power and skin and how to activate control surfaces. But to consider what they did to be a mere "engineering problem" is bollocks.
I don't know what to make of this. It has a lot of the same idiosyncrasies of a lot of other pseudo-scientific endeavors, with the 90's style website design, several spelling errors, a disproportionate amount of media coverage, poorly designed charts, jerry rigged lab setup, etc.
They always include a model of their "spacecraft" in every shot. In this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TKTsAa4sSs, they already have a pilot, random equations on the blackboard, and a spread of meters in front of the person speaking.
Their lead scientist is a physics student, who is the president UNO Paranormal Society.
It all seems rather fishy, but I'll withhold my judgement until someone comes and reproduces or falsifies their claims.
> With all the different courses that I teach, I began to see many common threads between the subject material of Astronomy, Physics, Meteorology and the Earth Sun relationship. I wondered about the energy flow from the Solar Winds and initially how does this influence the development of Thunderstorm activity on land and over the Ocean. http://www.paresspacewarpresearch.org/Background.htm
When actual geniuses make breakthroughs in mathematics and physics, they usually do it with a well-written paper or book, such as:
It's difficult to understand why a person who is teaching and in touch with academia would not publish his theory and results thus far in a style accessible to other researchers and academics. There has been an established style and convention for how to share such ideas for over 300 years.
> I have a MS in Geography, BGS Geography, AS Engineering Science and a multi-disciplinary background in Science and Engineering, design, integration and fabrication. Currently I serve as an Adjunct Professor at, the University of Nebraska at Omaha [and others]. I teach over 65 semester hours per year, in eight different subjects: [...]
The ideas would be significantly more credible if expressed in a conventional, comprehensive, academic way.
Pares has submitted papers to journals and proposals to conventions. When he does get a response at all, he’s told his discovery is "premature."
“It is so far out there, he’s not going to get funding to do it,” says Jack Kasher, a retired physics professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. “If it’s going to be done, it’s going to be done in his garage.”
Before he read Pares’ paper, Kasher thought the idea was “ridiculously impossible.”
Perhaps he is doing something remarkable, but I'll reserve judgement until he demonstrates something remarkable.
That sounds like an excuse to me. He can post his paper on his website or on Arxiv.
If the content of the paper is like his design drawings for his fusion reactor, though, "premature" is not an unfair word. I'd guess the submission contains a lot of informally-described material that is not rigorous, and does not meet the reader's expectations of a scientific paper.
Perhaps he has discovered something interesting. Not all scientists in history have known what they discovered, or known how to explain what they found. I will reserve final judgment until I see more details, but preliminary judgment does not look good.
Agreed, I don't hold any hope for this, but I also don't have the expertise to honestly judge it. Makes for a nice local news story though, I just wish they'd have taken a slightly more critical look.
His ideas are that familiar mix of a few catchy pop-science ideas (fractals and Alcubierre drives) and pseduo-science (Bermuda Triangle), that's typically a dead giveaway for a crackpot.
Someone should find that student's advisor and inform him of his student's dealings...
To put it bluntly, any university willing to give a PhD to a physics student who actually believes this is real should lose it's accreditation based on this fact alone.
What someone believes or not should not disqualify their work or published results. Period. The work should be evaluated on its own merits.
Unless the idea is really to form a cabal and only allow research on topics that don't question anything, which seems to be what several aim for (and of course, it's easier to get a grant for those)
I've been wondering if fundamentalist positivism might not be the "Vatican dogma" of the next dark age.
I'm skeptical of this claim, but I don't fault them for trying. I also don't fault them for having strange beliefs. All sorts of geniuses have had very odd beliefs, from Newton onward. Seems to go hand in hand with the kind of bravely inquisitive mind that does such things.
Note that I do not mean science. Fundamentalist positivism is really a religious fundamentalist movement built around scientific nomenclature and academic orthodoxy. I consider it a form of cargo cult pseudoscience.
A cranky old man who makes racist remarks shouldn't have his earlier works in biology questioned.
A mathematicians beliefs on God should have no bearings on the quality of her theorems.
A physics student in training unable to recognize (much less participating with and encouraging) a crackpot's physics theories which should be obvious to any undergrad, should not attain a degree in physics. It's not about persecuting beliefs, but a disturbing lack of basic understanding.
A world dominated by the dogma of the fundamental materialists is quite scary indeed. Geniuses such as Ramanujan would never see their gifts blossom.
``...and claimed to dream of blood drops that symbolised her male consort, Narasimha, after which he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes. He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God."
Crazy smart people often believe crazy things. I'll let you into a little secret - it's because they are very smart. They have the mental horsepower to ignore the wisdom of the crowd and look at the facts for themselves. Sometimes this means they are persuaded by non-sense, but sometimes it means they see what others do not.
Also, personally I think it is entirely possible that we have been visited by aliens. Why is it so difficult to believe, you think we are the only life in the universe? Of course the idea is mixed up in a whole lot of mythology, it's a magnet for crackpots. But underneath all that, the central position that we may have been visited by aliens and we may have observed them, is not really crazy, when you think about it coolly and logically. I haven't seen any evidence in my life that can convince me either way and I am comfortable with that ambiguity.
There is a vast difference between life out there somewhere and life out there, that's intelligent, can travel in space, is close enough to visit, and can visit without being obvious about it.
Suppose there were 1 trillion intelligent civilizations spanning 2,000,000 light years wide civilizations in the observable universe right now. Observable universe has a radius of ed: ~78 billion light years. 4/3 pi * r ^3 = ~2 * 10 ^ 33 cubic light years. Where those 1 billion civilizations would cover 4/3 * pi * (2,000,000/2) ^3 * 1 trillion = 4.19 * 10 ^ 30 cubic light years. End result we would have (2e33/4.19e30) = less than 1% chance of being in the area of even one of them.
PS: Sure it's a silly example, but space is ridiculously huge. If assume there was 1 billion billion billion civilisations as advanced as us (as in radio at current power levels) and chances are we would not detect any of them.
Inspiring. I'm sure there's more then a few members of this community content to knock down and debunk everything that he's doing. I'm not going to do that, instead I'm going to upvote and hope more people take on similar crazy ventures.
They were successful because they _were_ bicycle mechanics. They were particularly suited (and lucky in a few ways) to reducing the weight of a powered aircraft enough while being structurally sound to a point where it could sustain flight.
If they didn't succeed somebody else would have in a very short time. Increasingly light internal combustion engines and increasingly strong and light materials and manufacturing techniques made powered flight inevitable in the early 20th century. Who got there first is memorable, but the breakthoughs they made were going to happen with or without them.
If someone creates a warp drive it will require the energy density, funding, and high technology materials fabrication of a nation state behind it sitting on the foundation of theoretical physics well established. You might as well suggest the first nuclear bomb was more likely to be created by a tinkerer than the Manhattan project.
In hindsight, it is obvious that bicycle mechanics had a good chance because they succeeded and their design was more like a flying bicycle than a modern aircraft. However I am sure most other people thought it was only possible from groups with significant funding before the Wright brothers succeeded.
We don't know if a warp drive is practically possible, nor do we know how one would work. It may turn out that it is so easy that it can be done with a modest budget in a garage. To be clear, I am not saying this guy is on to something (probably isn't but I would be pleasantly surprised if he is). I simply object to the assumption that this type of discovery must come from a well-funded entity.
The "nuclear boy scout" was well on his way to something before he was shut down due to public safety concerns. I'm not certain what that something would have been, but Mr. Entropy suggests that a destructive device was more likely than a constructive one.
Granted, he was working off of principles already explored and established by Manhattan and other nuclear physics research, but it is still possible that he would have created something novel before killing himself, and possibly others, simply because externally funded researchers must necessarily be prudent and rational to secure external research funding, and therefore don't intentionally try anything too far beyond the ordinary.
Crackpots, on the other hand, can do whatever crazy thing they can imagine with their own money. The only thing really stopping a tinkerer's nuke is poor availability of appropriate isotopes. And David Hahn began construction of a breeder reactor in his own backyard. At age 17.
The "demon core" accidentally went critical twice, killing the person closest to it within a month, both times. In both cases, that person had the presence of mind to remove the neutron reflectors as quickly as they were able. An amateur, acting alone, might have accidentally caused a criticality event large enough to qualify as "the first nuclear bomb".
Manhattan was more about adapting nuclear bombs for military use. It's really easy to create a bomb if you don't care about blowing yourself up (see also: "Things I Won't Work With" blog), but much more difficult to destroy only what you want to destroy, without dying yourself or going bankrupt.
David Hahn used knowledge and materials which were the product of the nuclear age (many of the materials he used were created with industrial nuclear reactions). The most impressive thing he could have accomplished would be a device generously named a low grade dirty bomb, which is to say, a device capable of generating enough hydrogen to explode in a confined space distributing enough already-radioactive material to poison a few of his neighbors. Nothing he did came close to or could have come close to any significant advancement in science or engineering.
The Manhattan project was not about adapting existing bombs for military use, that's just a gross misunderstanding of history. The Manhattan project was about the basic science and engineering of creating a stable nuclear reaction and a runaway reaction in a weapon. Neither of these things existed or came close to existing outside the project. Both required the industrial scale purification and transmutation of nuclear elements only achievable in meaningful quantities by a nation state. The first bomb was the simple gun-type which only required purity of a U^235. The second bomb required the similarly difficult transmutation of uranium to plutonium, but also extremely precise mechanisms to trigger the bomb. Neither could ever be possible by a wonk of any education in his garage.
There seems to be a misguided romanticism about a lone hacker making revolutions in applied high energy physics here that doesn't have any connection at all with reality. Revolutions aren't made by a few people in a vacuum, but are iterative processes by thousands. Sometimes people outside the establishment do contribute, but like everybody else they stand on the shoulders of giants and reach a tiny bit higher.
Many times those that are able to reach just high enough to get over an easily understood hurdle are revered and understood to have made a much larger contribution than they actually did. The reality is that most of the time hurdles are jumped when there time is ripe, someone clever and lucky often takes the lion's share of the glory, but truly if they hadn't been there a hundred others would have made the same hurdle in short order.
A bomb that only kills a dozen people is still a bomb. And there are a lot of nuclear reactions that can run away and release a lot of fission energy very quickly.
The challenge in weaponizing those reactions is to make the device safe enough to be handled before you make it explode on command.
An amateur is not going to produce a tunable-yield warhead. They're going to make a little boom with a bright neutron+gamma flash and then take their Darwin Award.
Producing the basic science to perform transmutation and isotopic separation was certainly part of Manhattan, but the project could not end until an actual weapon was in hand. The explosive shockwave lensing required for a compact implosion-type device is not necessary, as you can much more easily reproduce the gun-type device by slapping together two subcritical masses with your bare hands, or using neutron reflectors, hence my mention of the "demon core".
If an amateur produced enough pure fissile material, accidentally making a bomb out of it could be as simple as putting it away on the wrong shelf of a cabinet and then going to bed. There is a huge gulf between "bomb" and "bomb with practical military application". The Manhattan scientists had to both come up with bomb ideas and narrow those down to practical weaponized designs.
If you can produce a breeder reactor in a garden shed, you can eventually obtain a critical mass of fissile materials. And if you have a critical mass of fissile materials, you can create a nuclear bomb. If you are careless or reckless, you can even do so accidentally. It wouldn't necessarily advance science or engineering, but it is possible for a sufficiently-motivated amateur to do it--not very likely, but possible.
It is that inkling of a possibility of accomplishing something great that motivates crackpot hobbyists to try to create antigravity devices or free energy collectors in their garage from old television antennas and refrigerator compressors. Not a single one of them has a snowball's chance in Hell of producing useful incremental advances in the useful sciences, so the only chance they have at success or recognition is to go for the big score.
You can't find the Higgs boson in your garage on a hobbyist budget. You can't find exoplanets with your dinky little telescope. You can't make B-E condensate with a laser pointer. You can't even build a Honda Civic replica from scratch. All the amateur scientists have nowhere to apply their energies, because the low-hanging fruit is taken. The smarter ones focus on applying existing science to real-world problems, like designing hexayurts or open-source hardware. The rest attempt the impossible, and delude themselves into thinking they are creating reproducible results.
I want them to succeed in the same way that I want the Avengers to defeat Thanos. It would be a really cool story, but deep down, I know it's just science fiction.
There are plenty of things that _are_ within the reach of garage scientists, and exoplanet detection is one of them [1] as well as lots of other astronomy, as well as Biology [2] a surprising amount of advanced materials / electronics / etc [3] and more.
What is utterly fascinating is that the Wright Brothers two well funded competitors, Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel Pierpont Langley, both quit after the first flight. Both of them wanted to be first and when they couldn't do that they walked away from what they both surely should have seen would be the birth of a huge high growth industry.
They definitely could have gone back to the lab and with the map the Wright's provided have gone on to build a better plane. In fact Alexander Graham Bell's chief assistant Glenn Curtiss did exactly that creating what ultimately became the larger company Curtiss-Wright corporation.
> What is utterly fascinating is that the Wright Brothers two well funded competitors, Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel Pierpont Langley
I've seen this conclusion drawn about Langley before. And it seems like a great anecdote for underscoring the idea that motivation is key.
At least, until you consider some other facts:
- Langley had a long and pretty distinguished career in physics before looking at aviation, indicating some innate dedication. And he did research in flight (and had success with models) for 12 years before he ever became a well-funded competitor to the Wrights.
- Langley was almost 70 years old at that point and he died three years later. I'm not sure why that isn't the go-to explanation for why he didn't keep going and participate in industry.
- Langley also apparently is recorded to have remarked to Rudyard Kipling that he didn't think he'd live to see the airplane happen, but that he was certain that it would happen. This is not exactly the mark of someone whose only motivation in participating was an attachment to personally being first.
I'm always a sucker for these kinds of stories. It's the science version of watching somebody play the lottery -- terrifically long odds, and probably not a good investment of time or money, but sooner or later somebody is going to hit on something.
If the guy can build an artifact that floats? I think it's game over; we have a new natural law to add to the list. If not? There's still something to be said for using scientific principles to explore things, even if those things are long shots.
I'm a sucker for these kinds of stories too, but after a little reflection I'm usually just left disappointed. I don't think he's really using scientific principles, unfortunately. Science would require a constant attempt to falsify his results, at least enough to ensure he's not fooling himself. This capacity for genuine self reflection is exceedingly rare. The guy has the academic background to carefully test and verify his own conclusions, and lay people typically assume those credentials in themselves are sufficient when really they are worthless by themselves. I understand being driven by something like this. When you work alone on a long shot, you've got to go through periods of speculation, exploration, driving ahead somewhat heedlessly. But you also have to go through periods of withdrawal, reflection, checking the assumptions that you made in your wild flight forward, and making course corrections as required. What happens when you find you've reached a dead-end? Some people change course or give up. Others just keep plodding ahead as though it weren't the case. This has the feeling of the latter, and it makes me sad. I wish all the best for the guy, but I'd put my money on a lotto ticket.
Look, it's very easy. Just like those Steorn guys, you either produce something that's big and does something really strange -- or you don't. What usually happens, as you know, is that the experimenter creates something that is basically reproducible lab error. So it's there, but it's small, and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to make it macro-sized. They run out of money, still convinced they're on to something. At that point you have the newspaper articles, the full-page ads, and so on.
It's a well-trodden path, no doubt. But I don't see any of these guys appealing to mysticism or supernatural forces. All of them think that either they'll make something of wonder or it will fail. So both the people in question and the audience share some common framework. Just like watching people argue politics, it makes for a nice example of how really smart people can fool themselves. That's something we all can learn from.
Plus I have unshakable faith that some sort of field propulsion possible, although I have no idea how far away it might be. I base this on many years of watching science fiction shows on TV <g>
FiatLuxDave already did a great write up of his concerns: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815059 . I won't/can't criticize any physics mentioned on their website - but I would argue that there is a pattern in the (perceivably) recent surge of experimental space drives. I believe it's a simple economical cause: Finer and more precise measuring instruments become more and more affordable. And as FiatLuxDave points out, measuring any (small) amount of force or disturbance in a regular workplace is just more likely than not. So you get lots and lots of people with these hyper sensitive devices, which then come up with some crazy explanation for the unexplained force rather than changing the setup of their experiment.
His work sounds easy enough to test: hang a weight in an electric field, and the weight moves farther than it should. Has there been any effort to independently test what he claims to have discovered?
I am frequently in Omaha. If he will let me, I'll stick my hand in the region of the supposedly warped space. How should I approach him? Secretly I hope he's actually warped space. I'll stick a dowel rod in there before my hand... :)
There are two experimental results which are presented. The first is the generation of fringe patterns with the laser beam sent through the crossed fields. The second is the force generated which is measured using a weight scale.
There is not enough detail available on the fringe patterns, which is too bad because it is the more interesting of the two results. First, there is no 'before and after' picture, to see how much change in fringing occurred. Second, nothing is mentioned about verification that the fringing effect was not coming from mechanical distortion of the display screen. It is not so easy to alter light beams using EM fields in free space, so if it could be shown that the light is actually being affected (with a better designed experiment), that would be cool.
The force effect is a mess, both in presentation and experimental design. First of all, it appears that they are mixing experimental values with modeled values in their graphs and tabulated forces, and they don't say which is which. I don't believe that they actually delivered 305 watts with their antennas and measured 559607.4 Newtons of force. That much force could lift a Abrahms battle tank, and is unlikely to be measured down to the tenth of a Newton. That appears to come from their exponential model. I do believe the 1.25 g up and 1.30 g down points at 5 watts were actually measured.
Static force measurement can be notoriously misleading. It is very easy to do (all you need is a scale) and it can be easily done wrong; wrong in the sense that the result may not be indicative of what you are trying to measure. It is just too easy in a world filled with small forces to end up measuring something other than what you think you are. I see no indication that they are not just measuring normal electromagnetic interactions, instead of a warp bubble. One way to fix this problem is to measure dynamic forces, where your effect must transfer a goodly amount of energy. With static forces, you can easily turn 0.0001 J into a large force.
There are significant issues with the exponential model of the force. Force x velocity = power, so if you find a way to generate exponential force from a power, at some velocity you will be generating more power than you use. Now, if you believe that your power is coming from the fabric of space, this might not be a problem, but it also means that your experiment should show this by operating at or above that velocity. Velocity relative to what, you ask? Hey, it's not my inconsistent hypothesis.
The biggest issue of course, is that the experiments are showing 'something', but there is no direct link to show that what they are showing is coming from the hypothesized warp bubble. More control experiments are needed. That is where you really learn where you are wrong, and hopefully where you are right.
I will say that for those of you who are focusing on the style of the presentation or how jury-rigged the experiments appear, you might see those things in poor science, but you also see that when someone doesn't focus on presentation. I doubt Pares expected this to end up on HN. I've done work that looked just as bad, and while I would want to clean it up before presenting it to the world, sometimes that is what simple experiments look like. When my friends ask me why I don't share more of my experiments on the web, I can point to this discussion.