Anti-Gravity Device Patented

October_30th writes "According to the United States Patent Office website, Boris Volfson has recently patented a "Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state", which is essentially an anti-gravity propulsion device." The validity of this patent remains to be seen, but the general consensus of the physics community seems to be that it is complete malarky.

Comments

What the other side has to say

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the "normal" scientific will dismiss this off the bat as usual, what does the "underground" scientific community, which tries to deal with this type of phenomena, have say about it? (Yes it does exist, break out the tin-foil hats etc..)

Well even they agree that the patent examiners have been duped and it would never fly. For a interesting compilation of discussions going within the community have a look at this article.

Though real science aside, it would be very cool if it worked.

Re:Star Trek Anyone?

[DavidTC]

You know, that raises another interesting question besides 'How'd he patent something in violation of physics?

Namely, how'd he patent something that'd been clearly explained in various 'Physics of Star Trek' books over the last decade?

Of course, Star Trek didn't invent the idea of bending space to go FTL. It's just the best known for a 'warp drive'.

There are basically only four basic ways to go faster than light that stand up to any physics scrutiny at all: Hyperspace(1), going into another dimension where C is higher or space is smaller; bending our space, via wormholes(2) or making space in front of you smaller and behind you bigger(3); and teleportation, by swapping out two chunks of spacetime(4), or by making all the particles in your body appear elsewhere via quantum teleportation(5); quantum entanglement, which doesn't actually move anything FTL, it destroys it in one place and instantly recreates it elsewhere(6) (This is actually what people are talking about when they speak of quantum teleportation)

Any of these might require you changing form, like to energy, first, but I'm talking about the actual 'FTL' part.

Those are really the only ways we've ever come up with. I'm sure we'll invent more forms of the ways, but anyone with a basic grounding physics could come up with the ones we have. Allowing someone to patent a form of the second is idiotic.

1) B5
2) Andromeda. Stargate, after turning you into energy. Note that Stargate also has (1) for ships
3) Star Trek (ST beaming, incidentally, is not FTL)
4) The new Battlestar Galactica
5) This one is Not Bloody Likely and hence nothing uses it. Quantum teleportation happens at the scale of electrons tunneling through atoms, not people leaping across lightyears.
6) The 'teleporter' in Andromeda's episode 'Banks of the Lethe'. Ironically only works in one region of space so functions more as a time machine than as an FTL drive.