Hacker News Reader

It is a really good question :-).

I came across his work because I noodle occasionally on a thread of questions that started with "is there a maximum RF frequency?" and the implications that leads to.

My hypothesis is that there must be such a limit, given that EM waves propagate at the speed of light, thus their wavelength is the c (ms)/ f(Hz) and I could not really imagine a wavelength that is shorter than the Planck constant. But a related question is the propagation of the E and B fields, which change with respect to frequency, and so what is the limit to their change rate (first derivative) with respect to the speed of light (or looked at another way, the ability of space-time to accommodate that change), all very interesting corner cases like looking at gravity on the event horizon of a black hole.

Anyway, you start going down this rat hole you find a lot of "interesting" ideas (and begin to wonder if maybe you're one of the crazies and you just don't know it yet :-)). There are a lot of easily composed questions in that space, like "Can you conduct a current in a wire that is thinner than an electron?" Which have simple answers like (there is no metal smaller than compressed hydrogen so you can't create such a wire so you can't get there from here,) And less simple answers, "What are the electrical properties of a wire made out of compressed hydrogen then?" (which was the focus of one of the room-temperature superconductor experiments).

You may find, as I have, you sometimes get math that "works" in that you've not violated any mathematical principles in deriving it, but doesn't represent a physically realizable system.

My guess, is that this guy ended up down one of those paths and has a nice, mathematically sound, derivation which, if realized into a system, would have some pretty interesting attributes. And yet the tricky bit is that last one. Sort of the mass-less pulley problem. So many interesting things are possible if you can precisely bend (or smooth!) spacetime, but how you get there from here is a still strictly in the realm of science fiction.

> "is there a maximum RF frequency?"

Isn't this already pretty well understood? For photons, E=h*f, so if you get high enough energy you will start to see pair production happening?

It is pretty well understood, but the answer is the opposite (following from special relativity). You can take an ordinary low frequency photon, and just observe it while moving arbitrarily close to the speed of light, and the frequency of the photon will appear arbitrarily large.

Pair production won't happen until two photons collide, with a large /relative/ momentum. So if they have the same frequency and are traveling in the same direction, no pair production.

But, you're absolutely correct in the case of /astrophysical/ photons. A high-energy astrophysical photon will have to pass through, among other things, the background of CMB radiation, and that gives plenty of opportunities to pair-produce, so there is in fact a cutoff to the spectrum of photons we expect from far-away events.

Would a high enough energy photon also turn into a black hole?

Precisely. That's what the Planck length is: the wavelength of a photon that would be its own black hole. We can't know what happens there without applying both general relativity and quantum mechanics simultaneously, but when you try, you get divide-by-zero errors (singularities).

So it's not a limit of the universe, exactly, but it is a limit to what we can know about the universe with our current theories.

What are some interesting things that could be done, if we could bend spacetime?

Depending on how you can bend it, construction of Alcubierre fields allows faster-than-light travel. If you can bend it really precisely, even wormhole construction might not be out of the question. On a lower scale, star trek like forcefields and "perfect" cloaking fields would be possible by bending all light/force carrying particles around an object.

If you looked at it head on and something was in a bubble deflecting light around it, could you tell that it's there because that light takes longer to get through/around relative to the immediate surrounding. Probably still not perceptible.

One of the fun ones would be communicating via gravity wave, also it make the Alcubierre "warp drive" possible.

If he hasn’t published any peer-reviewed material describing "The Pais Effect" then I default to kook. +1 kook points for declaring a new fundamental property of nature and naming it after oneself.

Sometimes known as the Crackpot Index, wherein naming a new effect after oneself is worth 20 points: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

If someone has the time, they should make a more general version of this and post it to HN.

Would any peer reviewed journals accept this? Does not mean that this is wrong, but it's a pretty good signal.

Judging from the above quotes, there wouldn't be anything substantial to peer-review. One does not propose a different set of principals governing the universe without both proving that the these principals reflect previous theories in all applicable energy regimes ( the correspondence principal ) and predicts new physics. The above quotes bear no practical relation to existing physics.

What's claimed here is that he developed such a physical theory, an experimental apparatus which detects affects from this theory and developed a workable device which leverages those affects to achieve ground breaking propulsive effects.

> Such high energy EM radiation can locally interact with the Vacuum Energy State (VES) - the VES being the Fifth State of Matter (Fifth Essence - Quintessence), in other words the fundamental structure (foundational framework), from which Everything else (Spacetime included) in our Quantum Reality, emerges.

Holy cow. This reads like the craziest, most psychotic r/IAmVerySmart post ever. Like that friend from high school who posts batshit stuff on Facebook but practically flunked out of school.

If it makes you feel any better, the US government seemingly can’t tell either.

The USG doesn’t have an opportunity cost the same way that you or I do. They probably see this as a form of insurance.

More likely? It’s a way to funnel money around.

To be fair, Tesla was pretty kooky. Brilliant and kooky. They aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

They are mutually exclusive. Tesla's ideas were grounded in real experiments and observations. Kooks live in a fantasy world. Pais is the latter. If you don't have a nose for physics psuedoscience, then ask yourself these questions:

   - Is it an outsider?
   - Is there a conspiracy to explain why their revolutionary ideas are not accepted by mainstream?
   - Do they operate outside of or attack the peer review process?
   - Is there one clear egomaniacal leader with a cult of personality?

There are some truly out there ideas in astrophysics and electromagnetics right now (look up magnetic monopoles, as an example). All the ones worth anything are published in peer reviewed journals.

Pais at least claims to have experimental evidence of a new physical effect. I've only got a background in undergraduate physics, but I'd say his description of his theory gives off huge kook vibes. I don't really care about that: plenty of non-kook theories are still not reflected in reality, and if he has found an actual physical effect, then his kookiness becomes brilliance. Or maybe not, but even if his theories are wildly off-base, if he has observed a new phenomenon, that's pretty big.

Of course, I suspect even his claim of observing a new phenomenon is a scam (a scam that he might have conned himself into believing), but someone should be able to reproduce it.

Tesla most likely had undiagnosed and untreated OCD: He was obsessed with the number three, compulsively walking three times around a building before entering it. When swimming he would do 33 laps, and if he lost count would have to stop over before being able to leave.

Tesla was disgusted by earrings. He had to calculate the volume of his food to enjoy it. Pretty clearly he had mental issues, which is usually what the more crude expression "being kooky" implies.

> They are mutually exclusive.

No they aren't. It's actually the opposite. Everything we accept as science started off as "kooky". Germ theory was started by a "kooks" who thought there were small invisible organism that made us sick. It wasn't until microscopes were invented that they were validated.

From mendel to copernicus, much of science was viewed as "kooky" and rejected initially by the educated elites. The idea of continental drift was ridiculed and mocked for decades until it was found to be correct.

> All the ones worth anything are published in peer reviewed journals.

Actually, all the ones worth anything aren't published in peer reviewed journals initially. The truly transformational ideas are almost always rejected because journals exist to maintain the status quo.

Also, you have a slavish reverence for "insiders" when they are flawed creatures as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man

All great science is "kooky". But not everything "kooky" is great science. So not mutually exclusive at all.

>Everything we accept as science started off as "kooky".

An excellent example of this from modern times:

>An Israeli scientist who suffered years of ridicule and even lost a research post for claiming to have found an entirely new class of solid material was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals.

“People just laughed at me,” Shechtman recalled in an interview this year with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, noting how Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening “crusade” against him, saying: “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.”

After telling Shechtman to go back and read the textbook, the head of his research group asked him to leave for “bringing disgrace” on the team. “I felt rejected,” Shachtman remembered.

https://www.reuters.com/article/nobel-chemistry/corrected-up...

"Paradigm-breaking" and "kooky" are different. Pais's language is gibberish, refers to yet-unsupported effects named after himself, and betrays a lack of understanding of basic principles in the field he seeks to revolutionize.

It is overwhelmingly likely that he's simply a crackpot.

Science requires tests for demonstration and refutation. Things that don't describe the real world are outside the realm of science.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, especially if they're as simple as imagining matter being built out of tiny blocks or disease being caused by tiny invisible things.

I see a lot of people arguing and not a lot of testing. He’s filed several patents all of which describe how to build each invention and all of which rely on the same basic principle. If you really consider yourself a qualified man of science then get building. As for simple ideas, they’re all obvious in hindsight once those tricky details have been worked out and equally obvious paradigms have been broken.

If you don't have one foot in a fantasy world, how does one know what experiments to pursue and how does one persevere to breakthrough past the conventional wisdom?

Jad: The version I know is that he was actually sitting at his desk looking out the window, and he was imagining window washers falling from their scaffolding, but it's the same exact idea.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91726...

> They are mutually exclusive.

Well, Newton had lots of very kooky ideas. And yet...

Sir Isaac Newton, President of the Royal Society, an outsider? The same guy who published laws of motion and helped develop calculus, yet did not publish any of his religious or alchemic studies is a kook? I'm not sure what point you're making here.

And notably also didn't publish his work on calculus until after Leibnitz, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu...

If someone really did have a revolutionary theory of physics, they would almost certainly be excluded by your criteria.

Tesla would never survive in modern academia or get tenure.

So you’re claiming that the physics community is driven by blind tribalism and is in fact, not scientific? That’s a big case condensed into a two sentence defense of psuedoscience.

That's a preposterous overreaction to what I said.

No, I'm not claiming that---but you're doing a good job of making it look that way!!!

It would be nice for you to respond thoughtfully and rationally to what I said instead of merely launching a defensive attack. I wasn't trying to put you on the defensive.

What is thoughtful about “don’t trust the experts”? I am helping readers coming across this by discrediting this tired and ridiculous notion.

I didn't say that. Can you read what I actually said, and consider it?

I've been in academia. Have you?

I have read and considered what you said. Would you restate it?

Not that it’s relevant, but I’ve been in academia for the past ten years. I’ve been working with physicists for the past two years.

It's fun to think about what this could mean. Can you defeat gravity by somehow energizing matter to affect its spin and acceleration? And if so, could this not only be a technology for space travel, but potentially be an explainer for something like dark matter - maybe there are parts of galaxies that are energized differently than we assume, thereby affecting their gravitational pull?

I'm sure this all sounds dumb, I'm not a physicist, but it's fun to think about.

>Can you defeat gravity by somehow energizing matter to affect its spin and acceleration

Except there is no mechanism through which this could work. That would be like me saying "if I flip these bits arranged in a pentagram fast enough surely this will create an AGI." It doesn't make a bit of sense.

> Except there is no mechanism

Have you considered the Higgs mechanism [0]?

Perhaps an adjacent theory? I am fascinated with such a concept but I am by no means an expert at all.

I would appreciate if you could expand more on your comment, thanks!

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism

Not sure about spacetime, but there's a similar effect mentioned on HN earlier: Earth's magnetic field has a vertical gradient that tiny spiders use to fly, even in absence of wind. It's plausible that those spiders figured how to alter their magnetic charge to "sail" in this "sea" of electricity.

Land your UFO in the middle of the Whitehouse lawn or it doesnt exist.

Believe it or not, that actually happened back in in '96. There's a documentary on it called 'Mars Attacks.'

Akakakakakakakakakak

> Quintessence

100% crank.

Full on "You're not even wrong..." territory.