Conditional constraints based on our lack of understanding according to Sarfatti, Pais and Puthoff (all PhD physicists).
Their "metric engineering warps space so no shockwave is formed" claim is A: without evidence and B: remains unchallenged.
One extraordinary claim from a PhD doesnt usually warrant a response but if you've got 3 all roughly saying the same thing - the lack of credentialled review/commentary by similar SME PhD's only serves to perpetuate a bad science scenario.
It's 3 guys.
The American Physical Society, a professional organization for Physicist and related fields has 50,000 members:
External Quote:
The
American Physical Society (
APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in
physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Physical_Society
That's just one organization in the US. As noted up-thread, Puthoff's PhD is in Electrical Engineering, and Pais' is in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, so maybe they can be members. Sarfatti's is in Physics.
Puthoff has been discussed at length on the forum. He has many fringe beliefs, including remote viewing, paranormal and an insistence that the US government and it's contractors have crashed alien UFOs in their possession. He was a big part of Skinwalker Ranch, both in Bigelows private NIDS program and the DOD sponsored AAWSAP program.
He and his sometimes employee, Eric Davis, wrote a number of highly speculative papers under the AAWSAP contract including subjects like zero-point/vacuum energy, warp drives and teleportation. As noted up-thread he believed Uri Geller could bend spoons with his mind, Joe McMoneagle could remote view distant locations and psychic Ingo Swann could effect a magnometer with his mind. As late as 2025 he appeared in the movie
The Age of Disclosure once again claiming the government has crashed alien UFOs.
Sarfatti at least met with Puthoff and his partner at SRI, Russel Targ during their Remote Viewing experiments:
External Quote:
Sarfatti claims to have been recruited in the 1970s by agents of the
CIA and
DOD to work on both the physics of consciousness and the propulsion of "flying saucers."
[citation needed] MIT professor David Kaiser mentions these connections in his book
How the Hippies Saved Physics. As proof, Sarfatti cites a recording of his 1973 meeting with
Harold E. Puthoff,
Russell Targ, and others during his visit to Stanford Research Institute.
[13]
Sarfatti's name appears in several released CIA documents, including a summary for the STARGATE project for remote viewing published June 1, 1979.
[14]
He seems to have been involved in New Age type endeavors at the Esalen Institute:
External Quote:
A longtime habitué of
Caffe Trieste, Sarfatti has been involved in the
Fundamental Fysiks Group, the
Esalen Institute-affiliated Physics–Consciousness Research Group, and the
100 Year Starship project.
[16][17]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Sarfatti
External Quote:
Over the next few years, Esalen became the center of practices and beliefs that made up the New Age movement, from Eastern religions/philosophy, to alternative medicine and mind-body interventions, from transpersonal to Gestalt practice.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esalen_Institute
And possibly more associations with Puthuff, SRI and the remote viewing stuff while he was part the Fundamental Fysiks Group:
External Quote:
Given quantum theory's perceived implications for the study of
parapsychology and
telepathy, the group cultivated patrons such as the
Central Intelligence Agency,
Defense Intelligence Agency, and the
human potential movement. In 1972, the CIA and DIA set up a research program, jokingly called ESPionage,
[11] which financed experiments into
remote viewing at the
Stanford Research Institute (SRI), where the Fundamental Fysiks Group became what Kaiser calls its house theorists.
[12] The group also attempted in mid-1975 to independently reproduce the experiments done by SRI in the field; in particular, an experiment featuring one subject in the laboratory attempting to draw or describe a scene, observed by a different individual from a remote location outside of the laboratory. An independent panel of judges was to then determine how close the produced images were to the target location. These experiments were determined not to be statistically significant, though Kaiser notes that one subject showed detailed descriptions of other targets than the one in question at the time.
[13]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_Fysiks_Group
Pais' famously filed a series of patents, most of which have since lapsed or been abandoned, on behalf of the US Navy. Much of these used variations on "The Pais Effect":
External Quote:
Central to all of Pais's inventions is a theoretical concept he calls the "Pais Effect," which he describes as the generation of extremely high electromagnetic energy fluxes through the controlled motion of electrically charged matter subjected to accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin.
[4][8] Pais claims that this effect can interact with the
quantum vacuum energy state to produce phenomena such as inertial mass reduction and
room-temperature superconductivity.
[8]
Some of these patents seemed to have been pushed through due to FOMO (my bold):
External Quote:
The patent was initially rejected, but was granted after James Sheehy, the Naval Aviation Enterprise's chief technology officer, wrote to the
United States Patent and Trademark Office asserting that the invention was operable and warning that
the Chinese military were developing similar technology.
[6][18]
This is similar to the creation of Project Stargate because it was feared the Soviets were using Psy or one of the reasons for the proposed KONA BLUE project to reverse engineer UFOs, because of fear that the Chinese were doing it. Note that the antagonists change, but the FOMO remains.
In any event, "The Pais Effect" has never been demonstrated:
External Quote:
According to Timothy Boulay, NAWCAD's Communications Director, testing occurred from October 2016 to September 2019 at a total cost of $508,000, with the vast majority of expenditure going to personnel salaries.
[4][25]
Pais said those experiments had not yet produced the 1 Coulomb charge he considered necessary for the Pais Effect to work.
[5]
At the conclusion of the testing period, NAWCAD determined that the "Pais Effect" could not be demonstrated, and stated that no further research was conducted.
[4]
And no other physicists consider it real:
External Quote:
The patents have been met with widespread skepticism from the physics community.
The Drive reported that every physicist its journalists consulted over a two-year period asserted that the "Pais Effect" had no scientific basis in reality and that the patent language was filled with pseudoscientific jargon.
[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvatore_Pais
So, 2 guys that are heavily into esoterica, Psy, New Age and other fringe subjects and 1 guy that claims to have created a new effect that their is yet any evidence for.
And when these guys do publish fringe stuff, like Puthoff's paper on zero-point energy, they are critiqued and shown to be problematic (my bold):
External Quote:
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Puthoff co-authored papers
[28][29] using the model of
stochastic electrodynamics that leads to a model of inertia as an
electromagnetic drag force on accelerating particles produced by interaction with the
zero-point field.
[30] This concept built on
Andrei Sakharov's proposal in 1968 that the gravitational constant was a consequence of zero-point fluctuations in the vacuum.
[31]: 162 Steve Carlip disputed one of Puthoff's 1989 papers
for containing a serious computational error which makes the effect negligible;
[32] Puthoff responded that a different parameter value in the model would restore its usefulness.
[31] The 1994 paper was the subject of a news article in
Science.
[33] Subsequent analysis by Yefim S. Levin
raising numerous questions concerning the mathematical correctness of the formula and the use of non-relativistic treatments of magnetic effects,
concluding that model does not show inertia as a result of zero-point-field effects.
[34] The cosmological implications of a different 1989 paper by Puthoff
[35] on the origin electromagnetic zero-point energy was examined by
Paul S. Wesson[36] Among numerous difficulties,
general relativity requires that such energy not gravitate, so it cannot be similar to electromagnetic radiation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_E._Puthoff
That was 30 years ago, but Puthoff and Davis were still selling Zero-Point Energy papers to the DOD in 2009. Same with his papers on Remote Viewing:
External Quote:
Psychologists
David Marks and Richard Kammann attempted to replicate Puthoff and Targ's
remote viewing experiments. In a series of thirty-five studies, they could not replicate the results.
That was back in the '70s using psychics like Swann, Geller and McMoneagle. But in 2009, Puthoff was back doing Remote Viewing experiments with McMoneagle at Skinwalker Ranch for the AAWSAP program.
Just because he keeps repeating something doesn't make it true or unchallenged. Many of his claims have been challenged, he just ignores the critiques. Pais never published anything about his Pais effect in a journal, so there is no rebuttal. As noted, when he did publish stuff in the patents, it was referred to as "pseudoscientific jargon".
I'm not sure what you're getting at.
