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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Randomly capitalizing words is another bad sign:

> 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:

(1) "Principia Mathematica" (Newton, 1687). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Pri...

(2) "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field" (Maxwell, 1865). http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/155/459.full....

(3) "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" (Einstein, 1905). https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/

(4) "Ricci flow with surgery on three-manifolds" (Perelman, 2003). http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0303109

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.

Take a look at his material on fusion, and in particular his design diagram for a fusion reactor: http://www.paresspacewarpresearch.org/WEFiles/Image/WEImage/... (from http://www.paresspacewarpresearch.org/Future/Fusion.htm). Here are some comments from another garage experimenter and physicist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815059

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.

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)

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.

Yep, going to leave this here again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Inquisition

Yeah, I'm not by any means the first.

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.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927952.900-scorn-ove...

http://news.techworld.com/personal-tech/3256631/dna-molecule...

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

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."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

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.

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