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?
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.