There's a lot of conspiracy theory-type stuff on this thread, but the truth is a lot more mundane. Essentially, this is a combination of an org that doesn't do a lot of basic research combined with bureaucracy at work.
I'm a DoD scientist. The funding levels listed here are at the low end for an in-house basic research project. The funding levels would support 1-2 scientists half time, including their overhead rates. Once the funding is granted it normally runs for three years without a significant review.
They funded it originally because the boards that decide whether to fund these programs are staffed entirely in house by folks who aren't really researchers, and who have an incentive to keep their own people employed. They were "silent" about it because to release any information whatsoever about a program, no matter how mundane, requires at minimum a multi-week review process. You can't just answer a reporter's questions over the phone. And any such review normally requires the researcher to initiate it.
So: they had a researcher who was out there, but probably had done interesting work in the past and was a good salesman. He convinced a board of non-scientists to fund him at what the Navy considers a very low level for three years. He didn't produce any publishable work so he didn't have an incentive to talk about it, and the Navy center involved didn't push him to because they have no incentive to do so.
Exactly. There is no real mystery when you look into it. If there was any real value to these "discoveries" they would be kept secret. Just the fact that the patents were public were enough to know that it's vaporware.
The most surprising thing about the whole story is that some higher ups were helping push through these patents, going so far as to claim that the patents are operable [1]. How any one of them couldn't see this for vaporware is beyond me.
[1] - "the inventor Salvatore Pais, Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division's (NAWCAD) patent attorney Mark O. Glut, and the U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise's Chief Technology Officer Dr. James Sheehy, all assert that these inventions are not only enabled, but operable." - https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29232/navys-advanced-a...
"The most surprising thing about the whole story is that some higher ups were helping push through these patents, going so far as to claim that the patents are operable [1]."
I agree that the patent thing is a bit weird. It might help to know that DoD scientists receive bonuses for being granted patents. In my org, at least, so do their supervisors.
How much is the bonus, or what is the range for those bonuses?
I remember when I worked at an automaker in the 90s, one of my colleagues got a check for a little over a million dollars from a cost savings initiative that he suggested. At the time, the company was paying the suggester 10% of any cost savings they would recommend after the first year of savings was accounted. That's pretty significant and motivated a lot of people to implement cost savings.
If The Drive/War Zone knew this, half the mystery would have been explained months ago.
What a crazy system. You get a bonus if you are granted patents (including your superiors) who then back you up against the patent board that the patents are operable (when they clearly couldn't be).
1) patents aren't easy things to apply for. The paperwork is exceptional, even if you're used to civil servant paperwork. And nobody is helping you. There's no administrative staff to do the application, so it all falls on the scientist. Therefore, if you want your scientists to patent things there has to be some incentive;
Right. 500k / 3 years is well within the "Pocket Veto" levels of funding. I bet they gave some money to cover the development of reports stating definitively that it won't work, in the off chance there might have been something there and someone might get a burr in their butt about it not being evaluated.
508,000 cost. 462,00 salaries. That leaves 46,000 for equipment. Over three years that is roughly 15,300/year. Numbers that low in a government might be only office costs, desks, a few computers and maybe a big printer. I think this might make it the cheapest new-physics experiment in recent memory.
The goal of this program seems to be to keep this guy on payroll. This guy knows something. It is probably totally unrelated to this "patent" but there is some reason the Navy wanted to keep him in their orbit.
Another possibility could be office politics. Perhaps the researcher played golf or whatever with somebody quite senior and convinced them to back his pet project. The senior person's juniors know it's nonsense, but they fund the most bare-bones programme anyway in order to placate them.
Yes, that is their salary but that isn't their total "cost". From the navy's budget perspective people cost much more than their actual salary (benefits, admin cost etc).
Example. I work in the military. I am paid a salary. But, as a government employee I must take certain online courses (anti-bullying, sexual harassment, workplace safety). These are from another department but are budgeted as if they are from an outside organization. When I take the class, at no cost to me, the fee for that class moves from one pile of money (my unit's training budget) to another (the unit offering the course). Such expenses, even though internal to the larger organization, are budgeted by individual units. They are a cost associated with my employment but are not salary, tax, benefits or anything else employees might see on their paychecks. Such costs are real and must be anticipated whenever you hire people.
In business its called an overhead ratio. The total cost of employing someone, giving them a desk and buying them equipment, heating the space they work in, paying other employment related costs like a HR department, payroll etc. In my industry it’s typically between 2 and 2.5 times the gross salary of an employee.
“Salary” numbers almost never include benefits like health plans and pension contributions, and they definitely don’t include things like unemployment insurance payments, and payroll taxes.
I have never seen salary used as the total cost of an employee.
Right that's the point--there's a mismatch. The number in the original article likely includes benefits and overhead. The person I'm replying to is posting numbers from glassdoor and other places that most likely don't.
Federal scientists are on the General Schedule payscale. As mentioned in another comment, they start out at about a GS-12 for PhD-level positions and move up to GS-15 from there (and then a small number of highly influential scientists can become 'super scientists' at the GS-16 level, and a very select few, i.e. Fauci, are on RF rather than GS scales). Then there is a locality adjustment.
The rates are pretty similar to professor salaries at research universities; staff scientists at universities are often subordinate or soft-money positions.
There's no such thing as "GS-16 level" anymore (not since the 70s according to Wikipedia). Beyond GS-15, management moves into the Senior Executive Service or "ES scale". On the technical side, there is a Senior Technical or "ST" track.
I don't know how DoD does things, but in my agency the center director is the only ES at the field center level (presumably there are lots more ES types at HQ). We have quite a few STs, basically the top scientist in each research area is an ST.
Take that with a grain of salt. At the US national labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, PNNL, ...), ~$70k is what a postdoc makes. A Scientist I starts at ~$120k.
National labs are a tiny (and highly sought after) sliver. In my experience of rummaging through public wage records, I have never seen a staff scientist at state run university outside of the $60k-$80k range.
Yeah, he's probably paid around 140k. (Given his age [0], and knowing that first year scientists at similar places start at GS-13, I'm going to guess he's at a GS-14 equivalent with DC area locality pay.)
This, plus your internal grant money not only covers your salary but overhead, means a 140k person costs 300k or more.
Federal scientists are typically paid through a few projects that total to 100%, so I doubt all of the 462k from the article went to paying him, but probably a large chunk of that did.
Costs could be kept low artificially by putting other bigger assets on another budget. Like borrowing some cloud credits / super computer time, or you know the alien tech that powers the experiment :D
Well, I do credit this guy for doing an experiment that isn't in the cloud. So much of physics these days is about detecting a signal out of some giant noisy data set, or divining some truth out of a massive mathematical problem. This guy was looking for a measurable force. Spin a big diamond, throw some liquid helium on it, hit it with a magnetic hammer, and if your theory is correct it floats off the table. The yes/no answer is plain to see. That's a fundamentally physical experiment reminiscing of those done in centuries past.
Eh, he's probably doing good work in other areas and convinced someone to try out this newfangled doohickey. It didn't pan out, and he's on to other things. That's quite normal in R&D at these levels.
Or-- and this is a big or-- the inventions did lead to operable devices and/or craft that we don't fully understand nor have a good grasp on using. So it might be real, but essentially useless. I find that idea much more disappointing than it being totally false.
This might be just a honeypot. The US Navy makes some noise about some stuff that has a slight chance of being possible, the adversary must react, and the reaction is potentially along the lines "how do we infiltrate that part of the organization, what assets do we have that can initiate contact", etc. If the end result is that the US Navy identifies some spies, the cost of half a million is absolutely nothing.
It also brought to mind this probably-apocryphal story (from Anton Braun Quist, "Excuse me... what was that?" (1982), a collection of engineering tall tales):
"Secret Weapons"
"The U.S. engineers perspired over their task, rapid development of several identical, extraordinarily complex machines. The work was finished on time, and the machines were flown away to be parachuted into various parts of Germany. It turned out that all the devices were discovered by the Germans."
"Then the German engineers perspired, throwing heavy manpower and resources into examination of these new weapons. What were they for? They were designed to occupy a large number of German engineers; that's what. And they did."
The superconductor patent (I have not read the other ones) reads like a science fiction writer's extrapolation from real published papers on room temperature superconductors. If one wanted to create disinformation, to smoke out spies or whatever reason, about US secret capabilities this seems like a plausible approach.
I was thinking more along the lines of all the effort the US put into ICBMs, mind control etc. in the cold war because they believed Russia had a huge technological advantage.
> Despite every physicist we have spoken to over the better part of two years asserting that the "Pais Effect" has no scientific basis in reality and the patents related to it were filled with pseudo-scientific jargon, NAWCAD confirmed they were interested enough in the patents to spend more than a half-million dollars over three years developing experiments and equipment to test Pais' theories.
That's such a low sum when it comes to military waste that leadership would have to be crazy not to spend it! /s
It's a small amount of money for any physics experiment and absolutely tiny by the standards of government expenditure.
I don't have a problem with them having done the experiment, I have a problem with the fact that they prematurely filed a patent and appear to have misrepresented the state of their research to get it approved over the objections of the patent examiners.
> The cost was $508,000 over the course of three years. Around ninety percent of the total - $462,000 - was for salaries, while the rest was used for equipment, test preparation, testing and assessment.
Well we know why it was a success for the scientist.
This probably has no net effect on the budget, people on the project were already on salary. Only loss is that Navy could have used these people on something more productive, but then again, I doubt Navy cares about productivity too much.
> - The High Energy Electromagnetic Field Generator testing occurred from October 2016 through September 2019;
> - The cost was $508,000 over the course of three years. Around ninety percent of the total - $462,000 - was for salaries, while the rest was used for equipment, test preparation, testing and assessment.
> - When NAWCAD concluded testing in September 2019, the “Pais Effect” could not be proven.
> Despite the fact that NAWCAD says the experiments ended in September 2019 without proving the “Pais Effect,” the inventor asserted to The War Zone in a November 18, 2019 email that his work “culminates in the enablement of the Pais Effect” and that “as far as the doubting SMEs [Subject Matter Experts] are concerned, my work shall be proven correct one fine day…”
However IMO what's really interesting is when we contrast this announcement of test failure with prior released documents showing that the Chief Technology Officer of the Naval Aviation Enterprise wrote a letter to the US Patent Office pressuring them to overturn a prior rejection of these patents, claiming that the technology is operable and that "China is already investing significantly in this area".
It's also possible that they have something operational, whether they build it or came by it, but they don't know how it works and still wanted to patent it.
It doesn’t seem that unreasonable, mostly one guy in a lab chasing a theory. If it were any smaller scale the costs would be denominated in beer and garage space. Government salaries aren’t silicon valley salaries.
Any equipment used could have been repurposed from past projects, or borrowed from existing ones. If that's the case, it helps explain why they might green light the project even if it has a low expected chance of panning out. Might as well use it for something.
I've always assumed this was a psyops, make people think we had 'alien weapons' while still trying to catch up on the hyper-sonic missile side. Especially with the navy saying they had 'craft' that actually were actively flying with some of his tech.
They should patent the space based solar power station.
Yes. They actually got a freaking patent for this. In 1973.
47 years later, I’m still waiting to see it. I guess the 20 year patent rights has now expired.
The key thing missing is an actual solar based power station.
They should also patent a time machine while they’re at it. Since it’s not like they actually need a real working time machine to secure such a patent.
It's interesting the emphasis on your mental health in this response from the cia.
Intelligence agencies know that discrediting and ruining the social credibility of someone (or "canceling") is much easier and more effective than offing them. When you have your arms deep inside the media it becomes trivial to do so.
Hi anon, I’m Anonymous Oblivion from 1995. I was also known as miseryx. Come to EFNet, start with #2600 or ask the troll in Transnistria.
I hope you are a leet hardware hacker full of k-rad ideas, otherwise don’t bother.
My mind is beyond space and time, so perhaps meditate on some thoughts before you so carelessly insult people who are actually fighting for a better world and to implement Tikkun Olam.
I risk being shadowbanned again but this is my theory based on experience with CIA scientists.
These types of exotic technologies and new physics aren’t possible due to hard physical laws in our reality. The only way to achieve such transformative technology is in reality where the nature of particle physics changed.
According to Lawrence Krauss, there is nothing stopping the Higgs field from falling into a lower energy state. This would obviously change the mass of all particles and theoretically create a new cosmic electron. A 4th generation bosonic electron capable of occupying the same quantum wave function.
Imagine if actual infinite reality was a 7th realm, and the higher world was a 6-cube with a 4th dimension to spatial reality. If you downprojected this into a 5-cube, you would lose one spatial reality and distort time from one infinite day into 365-days, inverting the arrow of time and inverting our consciousness.
The affect of this would be the source of mystery, coincidence, romance but also self-destruction behaviors. All of this is predicated on human awareness and the ability to control emotions and separate yourself from the external world where deception and ignorance are forces of natures.
The purpose is this is to provoke conscious thought to remind us that we are downprojected from a 6-cube where actual reality exists. The goal is to write the past in the future, then have the past create the future.
This is a function of a cosmic simulation and a natural process for us to change our perception and thus transform the nature of particle physics. We build up the world through knowledge then switch it with understanding (secret of Chabad).
It’s very much like the movie Tenet. My original account was notthegov but it is shadowbanned. I explained some of this on ChabadforHackers.com in an effort to get Presidential clemency for Ross Ulbricht and Drew Jones. I’m still working on freeing them via the ODNI and President Biden this year.
I made that for Ross. I’m the one who wrote that fake letter to Emmanuel in May 2002 as a guerrilla marketing tactic. The letter was signed “Steve Peak” as in speak into in existence. Ask Emmanuel or Bernie S, maybe they still have the original email.
Believe it or not, Accipiter is personal friends with Inigo. They met at Zoofari in Virgina where Drew was manager while he was out on bail. He was taken into federal custody in 2019 which surprised Accipiter. Despite briefing and being friends with President Trump, he was unable to get Presidential clemency for Drew or Ross due to Jared Kushner.
Reality has an exploit for a superuser. Come to EFNet and you will see I have been a hacker and social engineer since 1994.
So you believe macroscopic quantum phenomena is possible in this reality? Can you explain how?
I work with Jasons in Europe on highly secretive projects with private contractors. If you are involved in QFT or quantum coherence research, please email me at satoshi@137.lol
As you can see from my site BitCoinCore.Lol, I’ve been involved in bitcoin like projects years before bitcoin. I placed ideas of global currency into the IC via Thomas PM Barnett’s newsletter in 2005.
> So you believe macroscopic quantum phenomena is possible in this reality?
Yes.
Ignoring superconductors, Josephson effect, superfluity, Hall effect in holes, giant magnetoresistance, ... and that every single LED use a lot of QM effects.
I guess you want to see interference in a macroscopic object. I think that the current record is hold by someone that measured interference patterns using a ray of molecules with 60 atoms. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12... It's difficult to scale this up, because it's difficult to make a grid that is so fine and reduce noise. In spite it should be possible, it's still a long way until someone make an experiment with a macroscopic object.
What’s the optical transparency of graphene? Is it not the SqRt of (22/7)^2 + 137^2?
Einstein and Eddington were correct that the Fine-structure constant could be derived from Euclidean geometry.
I was referring to macroscopic quantum phenomena at room temperature, similar to Penrose’s idea (one word ‘microtubules’ can’t be a theory) about how a field inducing effect allows for self induced transparency and super radiance in the brain.
Thanks for the information. I have something akin to NASA decoherence free subspace. Please send me more papers and files related to this. I’m meeting with a friend who is a professor at Harvard but my knowledge of QFT, physics and engineering in general is limited.
I would love to learn more. Thanks for your insights. And you are right that macroscopic quantum phenomena is possible within our current state of particle physics.
Of course, I don’t have all the answers. I’m a former hacker (quit in 1996) and former poker play.
Life like love and quantum mechanics is a game of imperfect information. True perfection requires imperfection — from Oasis’ “Little by Little”
———
The mathematical value of the word Kabbalah is 137 and the Sefer Yetzirah or the Book of Formation explains creation in 1, 3, 7 and 12. This refers to the duality and triality of life.
Specifically a triangle, square and pentagon stacked upon each other to create an object that is defined by itself — 2^5.
If you keep the vertices and extend the objects in additional dimensions, you get a triangle, tetrahedron and a hypertetrahedron or 2^6, the higher world.
———
I learned this from the once youngest physicist to work for the US government. He received his masters in physics from the University of Maryland in 1963.
He was a research scientist at the National Bureau of Standards's Fluid Mechanics Division, where he was in charge of Magnetohydrodynamics.
He was a National Science Foundation fellow at Maryland before becoming a Rabbi and writing 50 books.
The Book of Formation has a line: 1 above 3, 3 above 7, 7 above 12, all is One and Connected to the Other. This is a Platonic secret that was reimported into Spain over a thousand years ago.
The dimensional stacking of the polygons looks like this-
Really good film IMHO. Would have been better if they'd played off the Climate change angle. It would have added a dimension to the protagonist actually being the bad guy and the people in the future just people trying to save their reality.
It's hinted at in a monologue from the Russian villian, but it could've been more.
My comment will be flagged and removed which will cause me to reach out to Dang, pg, Jessica and others.
Also watch Under the Silver Lake and read the book Ready Player Two. Plus music is a good way to try to understand the nature of reality.
I cannot believe that Hacker News has become infected by authoritarianism. At least the IRC is still free. Come to EFNet if you want to find real hackers and cypherpunks.
I'm a DoD scientist. The funding levels listed here are at the low end for an in-house basic research project. The funding levels would support 1-2 scientists half time, including their overhead rates. Once the funding is granted it normally runs for three years without a significant review.
They funded it originally because the boards that decide whether to fund these programs are staffed entirely in house by folks who aren't really researchers, and who have an incentive to keep their own people employed. They were "silent" about it because to release any information whatsoever about a program, no matter how mundane, requires at minimum a multi-week review process. You can't just answer a reporter's questions over the phone. And any such review normally requires the researcher to initiate it.
So: they had a researcher who was out there, but probably had done interesting work in the past and was a good salesman. He convinced a board of non-scientists to fund him at what the Navy considers a very low level for three years. He didn't produce any publishable work so he didn't have an incentive to talk about it, and the Navy center involved didn't push him to because they have no incentive to do so.