Omaha World-Herald wants the world to know about this guy who’s building a warp drive in his garage:
[David] Pares’ garage is exactly as it sounds. This is not some converted hangar or temperature-controlled shed. Pares’ laboratory, the headquarters for his Space Warp Dynamics endeavor, is attached to the mid-size Aksarben-area home where he lives with his wife and their cat. It is split in halves, each side large enough to accommodate a not-very-large car. It is hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It is a garage.
On average, Pares spends a couple of hours a day here almost every day of the week. To bend the fabric of space, he sits in front of a tray of instruments, twisting knobs and glancing every now and then into a Faraday cage, where a 3.5-pound weight hangs inside an electrically isolated case. Outside the case hangs a strange instrument made up of V-shape panels with fractal arrays on the surfaces. The instrument is the latest version of what Pares believes is the world’s first low-power warp drive motor.
He turns around and points to the back of his garage door, where a red laser — beamed at the weight and reflected back against the door to demonstrate the movement happening in the case — drifts from its original spot. Slowly, in incremental amounts, the weight is drawn toward the V-shape motor.
“You’re not supposed to be able to do this,” Pares says.At just 100 watts of power, he claims an electrical field created by his arrays is ever so slightly condensing space in front of the motor, the way you’d squeeze coils on a Slinky.
…
“I don’t know if I’ve ever met somebody as dedicated in the way he is,” says Matt Judah, a doctoral candidate in physics at Colorado State University and Pares’ closest ally on the project. “He teaches, gosh, 11 or 12 courses a year, and yet he still finds time to do this research. He’s an amazing man.”
Judah understands others will be reluctant to believe any of it. But he’s a believer.
There’s video at the link.
[via Alexis Madrigal]