Cornhusker building warp drive in his garage. More at the link. I don't know if I believe the guy, but its interesting.
I believe the visual data, but he is completely bonkers if he thinks he is bending space. What he is doing is making a draft that pulls the object closer. This is caused by a temperature differential created by the energy used in the motor.
Yeah, I'm sure there's any number of mundane explanations as to what could be happening. Even if he is doing something unusual, it doesn't mean that it'll lead to warp drive, but like I said, it bears watching. Some times these guys are right, and some times, even when they're wrong, they discover something interesting.
A Faraday cage doesn't block a magnet, or else magnets wouldn't work if you wrap them in aluminum foil. Second, if you're actually bending space, light would refract slightly and you could just see it.
Aluminum foil does not a faraday cage make. In order to block EM fields, the grid of the cage has to be some multiple of the frequency of the waves you're trying to block.
Yet if anything in the device acts like a diode or other non-linear device, you can get a residual DC signal - which can produce a static magnetic field, which can look like thrust. However, due to F=ma, the effect can be detected by measuring the force on objects outside the cage. Over on an aerospace blog that was discussing one of the NASA experiments, I suggested hanging the test equipment and everything else in the room from the ceiling, suspended by strings so that it all swings with the same natural pendular frequency, and then cycling the thruster under test on and off at the same period. The test equipment that starts swinging is acting as the stator, and the thruster is the rotor (or vice versa since the test equipment would be moving while the thruster is bolted to the test rig).
Huh? An ideal Faraday Cage is a solid sheet. Any holes in it will pass waves whose wavelength is smaller than the hole diameter. In your microwave oven, for instance, the mesh on the door has holes too small for microwaves to pass through (you aren't cooked standing near it), but plenty large enough for light (allowing you to see the contents). A Faraday Cage is only a mesh if you're either unconcerned about frequencies with shorter wavelengths (higher frequencies) or you want to pass them. And I expect the guy is either a crackpot or misinterpreting some other experimental effect.
