
In his garage lab, Omahan aims to bend fabric of space - rmason
http://www.omaha.com/living/working-toward-a-warp-drive-in-his-garage-lab-omahan/article_b6489acf-5622-5419-ac18-0c44474da9c9.html?mode=jqm
======
FiatLuxDave
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.

~~~
HCIdivision17
I think there are fringe before/after images about halfway down

[http://www.paresspacewarpresearch.org/Projet_Space_Warp/Spac...](http://www.paresspacewarpresearch.org/Projet_Space_Warp/Space_Warp_3.htm)

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."

    
    
      -- Cargo Cult Science

[http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html](http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html)

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.

------
colechristensen
This is bollocks.

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.

~~~
jccooper
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.

------
colordrops
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](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.

~~~
colechristensen
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.

~~~
raverbashing
Yes, let's keep the Ad Hominem going.

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)

~~~
colechristensen
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.

~~~
dsfsdfd
[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927952.900-scorn-
ove...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927952.900-scorn-over-claim-
of-teleported-dna.html)

[http://news.techworld.com/personal-tech/3256631/dna-
molecule...](http://news.techworld.com/personal-tech/3256631/dna-molecules-
can-teleport-nobel-prize-winner-claims/)

I guess this guy should never have got his doctorate, let alone a Nobel prize?

------
mjfl
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.

~~~
lotsofmangos
We should try and debunk everything he is doing. It is the best way of finding
out if it might work.

~~~
raverbashing
Exactly

The best debunkings are the ones that were done carefully and failed

------
rmason
There were several well funded efforts to create the first airplane, Alexander
Graham Bell among them. Yet they got bested by two bicycle mechanics.

I truly believe if someone creates a warp drive it will indeed be someone like
this guy operating out of a garage and not NASA.

~~~
colechristensen
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.

~~~
logfromblammo
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.

~~~
colechristensen
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.

~~~
logfromblammo
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.

~~~
colechristensen
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.

1\.
[http://astronomyonline.org/Exoplanets/AmateurDetection.asp](http://astronomyonline.org/Exoplanets/AmateurDetection.asp)
2\. [http://diybio.org/](http://diybio.org/) 3\.
[https://www.youtube.com/user/bkraz333](https://www.youtube.com/user/bkraz333)

------
steventhedev
Here's his site, for those who want to start the analysis of his
data/methodology:

[http://www.paresspacewarpresearch.org/](http://www.paresspacewarpresearch.org/)

~~~
raverbashing
I can deal with the 90s website, but some numbers he's presenting are off with
what is mentioned from the micro-deflections of his experiments

I can buy a micro-deflection (after some independent replications are done,
surely)

------
DanielBMarkham
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.

~~~
flatline
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.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Not my money :)

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>

------
jcfrei
FiatLuxDave already did a great write up of his concerns:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815059](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.

------
japhyr
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?

~~~
daveloyall
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...
:)_

