Hollis Varga, Who Spent Forty Years Proving Nothing, Dies At 91
He built the same experiment eleven times, got a null result eleven times, published all eleven, and considered the last one his best work. Somebody, he said, has to hold the bar.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — Hollis Varga died on 24 July at a nursing home in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He was 91. The cause, according to the Anderson County coroner's office, was pneumonia.
Between 1961 and 2001 he built the same experiment eleven times, in four countries, on three grants and a great deal of his own money, and each time it returned a null result.
He published every one.
The experiment
He was looking for a thrust that should not have been there — the small, stubborn, endlessly reported force produced by a certain class of asymmetric capacitor, and specifically for whether any of it survived in vacuum.
It does not. It did not in 1961, and it did not in 2001, and Varga's eleven papers say so at increasing levels of precision, from a bound of 10⁻³ newtons in the first to 10⁻¹¹ in the last.
The eleventh paper has been cited four times.
Why he kept doing it
His daughter, Nell Varga-Ostrowski, said the question came up at every family dinner for fifty years and that he always gave the same answer.
"He'd say: somebody has to hold the bar," she said. "He meant the upper bound. He said every few years someone would announce they'd measured a thrust, and there had to be a number on a shelf that said no, not above this much, and that the number had to be a real number that somebody had actually gone and got."
The last one
In 2019, aged 84 and no longer able to run a laboratory, he wrote to Dr. Priyanka Ramaswamy-Ohlsson in Bengaluru and asked her to run his apparatus in her chamber.
She did. It returned nothing, to 10⁻¹¹ newtons, and she published it with his name first and hers second, which he objected to twice in writing.
"He was extremely annoyed," she said. "He said he had contributed a box and an opinion. I told him he had contributed fifty-eight years and a method, and he said that was not a scientific argument, which it wasn't."
She has kept the box. It is in her chamber and it is the calibration reference she uses for everything else.
What he refused
He was offered money four times by people who wanted him to stop publishing, and by people who wanted him to publish something else, and he described all four offers in a footnote to his seventh paper — a footnote that is the only interesting thing in the paper and is the reason anybody has ever read it.
He is survived by his daughter, three grandchildren, an upper bound, and a box in Bengaluru that is still doing its job.
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Sources & Method
An obituary. Cause of death from the public coroner's record, stated plainly. This series records the manner of death and declines to infer from it.
Who we spoke to
- Dr. Priyanka Ramaswamy-Ohlsson, Experimental physicist. Interviewed by video call 1 August 2026 Ran Varga's eleventh apparatus in her own chamber in 2019, at his request, and published the result he expected.
- Nell Varga-Ostrowski, His daughter. Interviewed by telephone 31 July 2026
- Anderson County coroner's office, Public record. Written record request 31 July 2026 Cause of death recorded as pneumonia.
Documents
- PX-1560 — Patent application 4,112,889 — 'Apparatus for Asymmetric Capacitive Displacement' — with examiner correspondence accepted
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