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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.
I've patented patenting bullshit. I'll take my royalties now!
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/me rushes off to get patent for inertial dampening
The real question is how can I, as an inventor, patent my time machine?
I mean, anyone can just go back in time with my intention and claim my patent!! WTF??
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
It's well-known that the only true anti-gravity device is a (Score:5, Funny)
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
...what I keep telling the scientists, this device has nothing to do with me!
Just like the patents for my cold fusion device and perpetual motion machine, plus convenient hair dryer.
If it's "complete malarky" then nobody has anything to worry about, but if the guy were to actually make something out of this then doesn't he deserve the patent?
This should probably have been put in the "Funny" category, if anything.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Prior art. It's called Cavorite.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
but the general consensus of the physics community seems to be that it is complete malarky.
Quick, patent malarky!
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Naw, its full of hot air..........hmmm
Table-ized A.I.
i'm working on a improbability drive...that's the next big thing... :P
anybody interested in investing? very improbable
Lots of bullshit gets patented.
Wrong. Lots of bullshit are the ones who PATENT stuff.
If an infinite improbability drive were possible, wouldn't it have already brought itself into existence?
Play Command HQ online
If you read the patent text he's basically describing the warp drive from star trek.
"whereby providing for the gravitational imbalance such that the lowered pressure of inflationary vacuum state is pulling said space vehicle forward in modified spacetime."
interesting i guess.
in normal fashion both slashdot and the reporting news outlet have got it all wrong. it's not a perpetual motion machine - becuase it requires input of a nuclear reactor to make it "go". It's no more a perpetual motion machine than a space probe launched from earth.
nor is this "anti gravity". the patent describes a device that will "modify" space time such that an area of "low pressure vacuum" and "high pressure vacuum" are created. the low pressure area is infront of the ship and the high pressure is behind the ship. the ship travels forward because it's caught in the middle. i guess.
not a physics major.
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sig fault
Two to the power of one hundred thousand to one against and falling.
*A million-gallon vat of custard upends itself over you without warning*
let's learn how to block gravity waves on one side, and let the mass of the universe pull on the other side.
Right after we know they exist.
We all know that the only real anti-gravity device is a (Score:5, Insightful)
With all the engineering breakthroughs we had in the last two weeks, the next headline better be: There's a company in Israel that is creating hover cars that run on water and their lift is from anti-gravity. These cars actually generate hydrogen as they travel, so if you're running low on money, you can pull into any gas station to be paid for your excess fuel since their primary fuel source is perpetual motion. These cars can also fly in case you need to make a transatlantic voyage. Combined with the fact they can drive themselves to the destination, they also can automatically park themselves in the air when you decide to get out. While space travel is not standard with this car, you can get it as an option for those people who want to take a vaction to their property on the moon.
God spoke to me.
If some guy in Indiana wants to pay hundreds of dollars to patent stuff that (regardless of being real physics or not) can't possibly be implemented before the patent expires, I'm all for it. That means that if/when technology finally catches up it'll be public domain. He should go ahead and slip in a broad patent on near-light travel, and something about wormholes. To tell the truth, I feel the same way about gene patents. If they want to patent them all, let them. As many incredible advances as have been made in genetics, I somehow feel they'll be much more useful in twenty years. The goverment is too dumb to figure out what's obvious and what's not, so if we just patent [i]everything[/i] now and check back in twenty years, the problem will be solved.
Sendou Wave Kick!!
Fact 1: cats always fall on four feet
Fact 2: bread slice always falls with the butter side down
So...put a bread with butter on top of a cat, and throw it through the window.
Antigravity device ready.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Yeah, well I have a timetravel device that already works. Its called "Alcohol" and every time you use it properly, you skip forward through time, bypassing several hours, or with extreme skill, days. Alas the side effects of time travel include headaches, nausea, pregnancy, and strange bruises. YMMV.
Waiting for ad.doubleclick.net...
Since when is it good practice for any Patent Office to issue patents based on conjecture? There should be a valid working prototype before any patent is issued. Software patents are bad enough, but speculative patents are total b.s.
The approval of this patent (#6,960,975) is a testament to the stupidity of the USPTO, which certainly affects the rights of everyone. What's to stop someone from writing a program that strings words together in patent-application-ese and mass submitting them? Then find people who are violating your wonderful patent and sue them. Or just patent every single device ever seen or conceived of in Star Trek or other Sci Fi, and then sue as they become invented. Illustrating the stupidity (and absurdity) of the USPTO is definitely a rights-related topic.
rooooar
Like a lot of the patents that have been granted, this will just keep antigravity out of the general publics hands for a very long time. Just like that 100 mile per gallon carburator.
And it just goes to show that if you have the money you can get ANYTHING patented.
I do have a degree in physics, but I've forgotten so much it doesn't do me much good.
I do remember the Casimir Effect, however. This is a measurable phenomenon which is believed to be caused by vacuum fluctuations, the same mechanism responsible for Hawking Radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
Look it up.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
I submitted a story on this that was much more skeptical and it was rejected.
First, since when does Robert Park's view represent a consensus in the physics community. Second, I have read the patent, and while the theory is a bit flawed, I posit a theory that is more consitent with current theory:
Collapse the space between you and a gravitational body far away from you relative to one that is close. This puts you in the shared gravitational well between the two, and decreases the distance you have to travel, to boot.
A problem I see increasingly is that people build devices and come up with poor theories to describe the device's workings, then established scientists come in and say that the theory is unworkable, which it is, but then falsely conclude that the device isn't doing anything significant of study. Then there are the "testers" of devices that come in, find a part that doesn't work like they expect, falsely conclude the part is faulty, repace the part with a conforming part, and of course the device doesn't work like it would if they ran it as it was, and then they declare, "See, the device doesn't work!"
No. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy posits the possibility of a finite probability drive generating an infinite probability drive, but the math seems to indicate that the probability of a probability drive of greater range than a given probability drive is just out of range of a given drive.
First off, this guy prosecuted this application pro se, that is, without a patent attorney or agent.
Secondly, this guy had the case made special on the grounds it dealt with superconductivity, one of the areas for which you can get your case advanced in the queue.The original application was filed in 2003, but was refiled as a continuation in 2005 without ever having even been docketed to an examiner, for reasons I couldn't discern from the publicly available papers
But, most importantly, the application was issued on the first action; no rejections under 35 USC 101 (lack of utility for not working), 112, first paragraph (not adequately disclosed), or 102 or 103 (prior art). Just straight out the door with a minor Examiner's Amendment to correct some formal claim language. There's a bunch of prior art of record, cited by the applicant, including some papers from respected scientific journals (such as Physical Review). The only hint of any consideration of the art, other than the cited prior art, is the examiner's reasons for allowance, the substance of which reads "None of the prior art of record taught or dislosed the claimed superconducting shield and electromagnetic field generating means structure."
And, with payment of the issue fee, it issued.
This device would never work as a flying car.
A rapidly spinning superconductor does indeed cause an obect over it to levitate somewhat, and for the purpose of this argument we can assume that these are indeed gravitonic effects. Doesn't really matter
The biggest problem comes as your vehicle rises, the spinning disk would have to be lifted, and I assume you would use magnetics in the vehicle to lift the disk. Those magnetic forces would then pull down on the remainder of the vehicle's structure (every action has an equal and opposite reaction) eliminating the levitative forces. Trying to get this working would be like trying to grab yourself by the shirt collar and lift yourself off the ground.
This is not to say that there isn't usable tech provided by the phenomenon. A roadway of these could possibly be made that would allow vehicles to travel over them. Or more likely, a launch pad could be made which would reduce the amount of fuel that has to be loaded onto a rocket or aircraft to initially fight off gravity and launch. For these applications it's just a question of whether spinning the superconductors would be more energy efficient than just using traditional thrust.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
And what makes you think this violates the second law?
Read TFP instead of TF National Geographic article. There's no mention of any violation of the second law anywhere. Several other laws, sure, but not the second.
Actually, no it doesn't. If the sun were magically eliminated, it would still take 8 minutes for the earth to suddenly break orbit as space relaxed into the form of having no mass at that point. Till then, the earth would keep orbiting .
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
This is bad, because inventor was supposed to disclose the invention to obtain a patent and this implies using established terminology to describe it.
Allowing a patent with made up terms is equivalent to allowing wildcards "I patent a thing * that does * and is useful" - the owner of the patent can try to define these terms as legal opportunity presents itself.
The PTO does not require a working prototype because it does not want all the patents to belong to huge corporations. Pretend you create a nuclear fission reactor that's table-sized. (You're like the second coming of Albert Einstein or something.) If the PTO required a prototype, you would have to find someone with a lot of cash to build the prototype to submit to the PTO. The corporation might steal your idea and take the prototype to the PTO by itself.
So while this lack of a requirement looks ridiculous in this example, there may be other more realistic places where it has protected the small inventor.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Obviously the physics community has not been reading some of the Software Patents if they think this is malarky. :P
We all know that the only existing anti-gravity device is a (Score5, Informative)
You can't handle the truth.
"The design effectively creates a perpetual-motion machine, which physicists consider an impossible device."
Um, I call BS. Perpetual-motion isn't considered impossible. We have superconductors, vacuums, and...um..space? Anything moving in space is essentially a perpetual-motion machine.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
From MPEP 2111.01(III)
III. APPLICANT MAY BE OWN LEXICOGRAPHER
An applicant is entitled to be his or her own lexicographer and may rebut the presumption that claim terms are to be given their ordinary and customary meaning by clearly setting forth a definition of the term that is different from its ordinary and customary meaning(s). See In re Paulsen, 30 F.3d 1475, 1480, 31 USPQ2d 1671, 1674 (Fed. Cir. 1994) (inventor may define specific terms used to describe invention, but must do so "with reasonable clarity, deliberateness, and precision" and, if done, must "'set out his uncommon definition in some manner within the patent disclosure' so as to give one of ordinary skill in the art notice of the change" in meaning) (quoting Intellicall, Inc. v. Phonometrics, Inc., 952 F.2d 1384, 1387-88, 21 USPQ2d 1383, 1386 (Fed. Cir. 1992))
Make a (slowly) spinning disk of this "Gravitium", with holes in it, and spin it beneath an iron ball. Have the iron ball hang by a rope that goes over a wheel and connects to a spring on the other end. Connect the wheel into an electric generator, and have it feed the electric engine that spins the wheel.
Now, as the wheel spins, the gravity of the planet gets blocked (when there's Gravitium under the ball) and unblocked (when there's a hole under the ball). When it gets unblocked, the ball pulls down the rope, spinning the wheel and storing energy on the spring; when it gets blocked, the spring pulls the now-weightless ball back up, spinning the wheel in opposite direction (so you'd propably need some additional system to keep the electric output "clean", but that's not difficult to arrange - a mechanism similar to spring-powered hand watches will suffice just fine). The electricity produced by this should be more than enough to overcome any friction in the Gravitium wheel, and in fact there should be a surplus to feed to the electric grid.
Congratulations, you've just invented the missing piece of the Perpetual Motion Machine - or, since this thing actually produces an energy surplus, the very secrets of creation itself.
Or, to put it in other words, your idea won't work unless the first law of thermodynamics, the principle of Conservation of Energy, is untrue, and energy can actually be created from nothing.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
...you might have to wait a while. Things are a bit up-in-the-air at the moment.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Nope. Gravity propagating with infinite speed is violating relativity, because it allows to transmit information faster than light. In your example, scientists on Earth could notice that the planet moves differently before they see the Sun disappear. So, the information about disappearance of the Sun has travelled faster than light. In relativity no information can travel faster than light (or back in time), so if gravity is propagating faster than light, relativity must be wrong.
If they do come to discuss certain matters, possibly involving hostesses and undergarments, then just offer to demonstrate at the next party...If they get invited that is.
XP is basicly 98 with a lot more extra features to hunt down and disable. --Dram
um, space/time squashes you to the planet. Contrary to all the wonderful depictions of masses indenting the flat fabric of space time, it's actually 3d. Picture a marble in a stream of water.