7 ms·

Interesting quote. > Every one of Pais' recent inventions depends on what the inventor calls “the Pais Effect,” described in numerous publications by the inven

Interesting quote. > Every one of Pais' recent inventions depends on what the inventor calls “the Pais Effect,” described in numerous publications by the inventor as the “controlled motion of electrically charged matter (from solid to plasma) via accelerated spin and/or accelerated vibration under rapid (yet smooth) acceleration-deceleration-acceleration transients.” Since it all seems to boil down to that Pais Effect, I wonder what details there are to analyze what it actually is. Rather than critiquing the designs, that effect seems to be the thing to look at. Edit: found another article, which quoted Pais on what that effect is. > Mr. Tingley, do realize that my work culminates in the enablement of the Pais Effect (original physical concept). The Pais Effect comprises the generation of extremely high electromagnetic energy fluxes (and hence high local energy densities) generated by controlled motion of electrically charged matter (from solid to plasma states) subjected to accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin, via rapid acceleration transients. > 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. > The Engineering of the Pais Effect can give rise to the Enablement of Macroscopic Quantum Coherence, which if you have closely been following my work, you understand the importance of. I don't know enough to figure out if this guy is some modern Tesla or another kook.

beaner 6y ago
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.
- deeeeplearning 6y ago
  >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.
  - behindsight 6y ago
    > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism
sonotathrowaway 6y ago
If it makes you feel any better, the US government seemingly can’t tell either.
- zaroth 6y ago
  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.
pbourke 6y ago
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.
- TrainedMonkey 6y ago
  Would any peer reviewed journals accept this? Does not mean that this is wrong, but it's a pretty good signal.
  - lumost 6y ago
    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.
- Tossrock 6y ago
  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 https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
  - de_nied 6y ago
    If someone has the time, they should make a more general version of this and post it to HN.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
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.
- seiferteric 6y ago
  > "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?
  - srl 6y ago
    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.
intrepidhero 6y ago
To be fair, Tesla was pretty kooky. Brilliant and kooky. They aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
- willis936 6y ago
  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.
  - scarmig 6y ago
    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.
  - adolph 6y ago
    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-falling https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91726...
2bitencryption 6y ago
> 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.
deeeeplearning 6y ago
> Quintessence 100% crank. Full on "You're not even wrong..." territory.
boznz 6y ago
Land your UFO in the middle of the Whitehouse lawn or it doesnt exist.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  Believe it or not, that actually happened back in in '96. There's a documentary on it called 'Mars Attacks.' Akakakakakakakakakak
gbh444g 6y ago
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.

beaner 6y ago

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.

deeeeplearning 6y ago
>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.
- behindsight 6y ago
  > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism

sonotathrowaway 6y ago

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

zaroth 6y ago
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.

pbourke 6y ago

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.

TrainedMonkey 6y ago
Would any peer reviewed journals accept this? Does not mean that this is wrong, but it's a pretty good signal.
- lumost 6y ago
  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.
Tossrock 6y ago
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 https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
- de_nied 6y ago
  If someone has the time, they should make a more general version of this and post it to HN.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

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.

seiferteric 6y ago
> "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?
- srl 6y ago
  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.

intrepidhero 6y ago

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

willis936 6y ago
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.
- scarmig 6y ago
  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.
- adolph 6y ago
  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-falling https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91726...

2bitencryption 6y ago

> 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.

deeeeplearning 6y ago

> Quintessence 100% crank. Full on "You're not even wrong..." territory.

boznz 6y ago

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

phobosanomaly 6y ago
Believe it or not, that actually happened back in in '96. There's a documentary on it called 'Mars Attacks.' Akakakakakakakakakak

gbh444g 6y ago

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.