Slashdot Mirror
Did A US Navy Scientist Just Invent A Room-Temperature Superconductor? (phys.org)
"A scientist working for the U.S. Navy has filed for a patent on a room-temperature superconductor, representing a potential paradigm shift in energy transmission and computer systems," reports Phys.org:
Salvatore Cezar Pais is listed as the inventor on the Navy's patent application made public by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday. The application claims that a room-temperature superconductor can be built using a wire with an insulator core and an aluminum PZT (lead zirconate titanate) coating deposited by vacuum evaporation with a thickness of the London penetration depth and polarized after deposition.
An electromagnetic coil is circumferentially positioned around the coating such that when the coil is activated with a pulsed current, a non-linear vibration is induced, enabling room temperature superconductivity. "This concept enables the transmission of electrical power without any losses and exhibits optimal thermal management (no heat dissipation)," according to the patent document, "which leads to the design and development of novel energy generation and harvesting devices with enormous benefits to civilization."
Long-time Slashdot reader resistant writes: NextBigFuture says the same individual appears to have made other startling claims that arguably stretch the boundaries of belief, such as a "high-frequency gravitational wave generator" that could supposedly drive a spaceship without conventional propellants as well as an "inertial mass reduction device." Prudence would appear to dictate examining these and other claims by Mr. Salvatore Cezar Pais with great caution.
An electromagnetic coil is circumferentially positioned around the coating such that when the coil is activated with a pulsed current, a non-linear vibration is induced, enabling room temperature superconductivity. "This concept enables the transmission of electrical power without any losses and exhibits optimal thermal management (no heat dissipation)," according to the patent document, "which leads to the design and development of novel energy generation and harvesting devices with enormous benefits to civilization."
Long-time Slashdot reader resistant writes: NextBigFuture says the same individual appears to have made other startling claims that arguably stretch the boundaries of belief, such as a "high-frequency gravitational wave generator" that could supposedly drive a spaceship without conventional propellants as well as an "inertial mass reduction device." Prudence would appear to dictate examining these and other claims by Mr. Salvatore Cezar Pais with great caution.
"high-frequency gravitational wave generator"
So, basically, no. Sounds like a crank.
Nope. They invented it years ago and kept it a secret.
You can patent just about anything you want, and you do not need a working model to patent something. There is a good argument for making things easy to patent. The problem is that it does lead to patent trolls. Also patents are only supposed to last a limited amount of time, but of course patent holders always try to make them as long as possible. Maybe something like a software or medical patent shouldn't last as long as an aerospace patent. Anyway my problem isn't that someone patent something that is useless. Although I might have a problem with a government employee patenting useless stuff while at work. Patent useless stuff on your own time.
..they just take your money and vereify that you are the first to register and thus would own an invention or process
Until and unless there is a working demo shown or full whitepaper published, roll your eyes people.
The unofficial
If this guy wants to be taken seriously then he needs to publish a paper that describes the science and the methods thoroughly enough that other scientists can design (an) experiment(s) to confirm the validity. 'Patents' mean nothing. 'Demonstrations' don't mean shit either. Repeatable and explainable by others independently is the only thing that counts.
I agree, so the question is - does the patent give enough information for others to reproduce the result he claims?
Also you would think, if he does have this working is the Navy planning to make use of this in some way? Seems like a word from them on adoption (they don't have to be specific) would go a long way to back his claims.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Magsus railsystem & rolller coaster is possible?
I am 40++ & do not expect too much too see public space travel before my time...
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a patent application isn't proof of anything.
Ever had a patent? I've got 24 issued (and more pending), and in several cases I was denied for lack of proof of results - meaning I had to provide additional details in the disclosure including measurements to prove it actually worked. At least as rigorous as a scientific journal.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Description of his invention, and how to make one. A valid patent application must include enough information that someone "skilled in the art" (in this case, physics and materials science) can successfully replicate the invention. If it's not disclosed to that level you can challenge it and have it invalidated.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Not at all - he was an employee of the US DOD, and as with any typical tech employment, any inventions you have on the job are the property of your employer.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
that's not entirely true and it depends on what kind of patent you are filing. Look at the IBM's patent portfolio, there are tens of thousands of bogus obvious stuff patented in their portfolio. The key is to hire experienced patent lawyers to file the patent. They will make sure it will get granted. I used to work at IBM and they have 2 armies of expert patent firms doing this for them. I've read many IBM patents that were totally bogus. For mechanical inventions, I would agree with you. For software patents I would disagree.
Obvious stuff patented? Why that would be real - as opposed to "does not check if anything works" which the GP claimed... You may think they are obvious or not - but they at least work.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I'll buy the invisible bridge with some virtual particles and dark matter.
And even if the system is well-characterized and repeatable, most researchers will still simply call it impossible and work on other things.
Just some schmo they are using to patent reverse engineered alien tech... Guy probably doesn't even exist, lol
Colin Furze, your planet needs you now!!
https://www.youtube.com/user/c...
(well worth a look for the giggles, he's got talent and is good at making strange gadgets, including rocket powered... 'vehicles').
Which product will his appear in first?
Railguns don't need superconductors now. Just expensive disposable rails of silver.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Don't be silly, everyone on Slashdot has PhDs in at least three "STEM" fields, 20+ patents, at least 8 figures in assets and speaks 5+ languages.
Ah, and a wife and a mistress or two who are successful fashion models.
Sort of at least. Depending on the agreements the company has in place they sometimes offer the inventor the patent still but the employer has rights in perpetuity. I think my employer does that for senior staff (one grade above me), but I haven't looked too deeply into it. My grandfather had a few navy patents too that he got the benefit from for a while, but I don't know the exact extent (he didn't go into much detail before he passed).
most researchers will still simply call it impossible and work on other things.
I don't think many researchers call room-temperature superconductors impossible, and many scientists are actually working on it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Patents are for fairly obvious, minimally useful inventions and/or junk. Real interesting discoveries are published as scientific papers for peer review. Money and control, the purpose of patents, are not what motivate the best minds. It's a passion for the science, the process of discovery, and possibly of fame for changing the world that seem to drive it. And you don't need patents for that.
As a consequence, I would say there's a 99% chance this guy has nothing.
That's not how this works. A patent is a legal document, it has nothing to do with establishing scientific credibility. There is no requirement to prove that a device functions in order to be patented. The required steps to "reduce to practice" (make reliably reproducible) some invention are typically not patent-able. The requirement is simply that that someone like me, a PhD Physicist with a background in materials, could build the device listed in the patent.
A peer reviewed paper is what would be required to actually show that this works, preferably from a second group...actually from any "group" as Mr. Pais seems to always work alone, a big red flag in science.
Apart from the fact that this is likely total BS: let's imagine it does actually work the way it is described here in the summary: You need to pulse an electromagnetic field around the wire to induce this effect. The coil is not going to be superconducting (how could it be, it's needed to induce the effect), but is going to be made of regular wires, so they will dissipate heat for the time this is in operation. And while superconductors don't have any resistance, they do have a maximum current they can carry before they stop becoming superconducting, and I have a hard time imagining that a wire this thin is going to be able to carry a current larger than the one needed to create the magnetic pulses - especially if this is a non-linear effect. (Non-linear non-trivial magnetic effects typically need quite a large magnetic field, hence a large current through the coil.)
Basically this means that you'd need a large current in the magnetic coil (which is dissipated) to be able to transmit a smaller current without dissipation. Congratulations, you've spent a lot more energy and money for energy transmission than just laying down a nice copper wire and sending the current through it directly.
Also, since magnetics are involved in creating this effect, this will be useless for one of the primary applications of superconductivity outside of current transport: creating very strong magnetic fields, for example in MRI machines. Because the magnetic fields required for creating the superconductivity would probably need to be much stronger than the fields the superconducting wire could create by itself - and if you already have a good magnet, why not use it directly?
The only useful thing that could come out of this, were it real, would be a better understanding of how superconductivity works, especially at high temperatures, so that in the long term we might be able to actually build a more useful room-temperature superconductor. But that'd be something you'd publish in a reputable condensed matter physics journal, where there is proper peer review, instead of filing for a patent where the reviewer is likely not an expert in the fields required to evaluate this. So, as a lot of other people have said, likely complete BS.
Does anyone else find themselves wishing that Robert A. Heinlein was still available to _run_ such an organization?
Not entirely true. The patent office wont entertain perpetual motion devices without a working model that has been operating for a year.
" The USPTO Manual of Patent Examining Practice states: With the exception of cases involving perpetual motion, a model is not ordinarily required by the Office to demonstrate the operability of a device"
Good-bye
Can you find a _single_ reputable physicist or chemist who thinks room temperature superconductors are feasible? Many speculate on the idea, but none has demonstrated a practical theory of how to do so.
Are you retarded? Room temperature super conductors are the hottest research topic since decades. In my university dozens of people work on that, and I bet that is the same in nearly _every_ university that has a physics department.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It's up to the patent examiner to decide of proof that the invention works is needed before granting the patent. If this application goes to a competent examiner, he'll be required to prove it works. If it goes to a flaky examiner, well, I guess the USPTO will collect some filing fees, and this guy will get to mount his patent in a shiny frame which he can show off to prospective investors he's looking to con money out of.
Can you find a _single_ reputable physicist or chemist who thinks room temperature superconductors are feasible?
Well, there are these guys. It took 10 seconds of Googling to find that, and there are lots more. If no reputable chemists or physicists believe room temperature superconductors are feasible, there sure are a lot of them wasting their time. The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics was given to a group of mathematicians and physicists whose research may pave the way towards high-temperature superconductors (as well as a lot more).
Many speculate on the idea
Why do they bother if they all believe it's infeasible? And they clearly do a lot more than just speculate.
but none has demonstrated a practical theory of how to do so.
So your argument is that because no one has achieved it, no one even thinks it's possible? Really?
Given this Navy guy's other patents and the nature of how his invention supposedly works, I'm pretty skeptical that he's done it. I expect that if it's achieved it will be one with some pretty exotic materials and/or complex methods, because if it were easy it would have been done years ago. But assuming it's impossible just because no one has done it is silly.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"The President did just give orders to form a space force under the Navy.... It isn't crazy to think the military has technology under wraps"
I liked playing battlezone (the one where you fight russkies on the far side of the moon) too, but crazy Trump ordering up a space fantasy doesn't lend credence to the idea of secret technology, with or without aliens. It doesn't speak to it at all. Just because Putin explained to him that the USA bombs Iraq every four years doesn't mean that Trump knows anything of interest. He's been too busy golfing and ignoring briefings to have learned anything about secret tech. I could easily believe that he has demanded a space force because some general told him that the only way they'd continue to get big military funding was to expand into space, and made up some guff about room temp superconductors and antigravity, though.
I'd like nothing more than for both of those things to be real, except maybe for our leadership to develop a conscience, but those two things seem equally unlikely right now. For example, just look at who voted for SESTA. Even the liberals many hope will save us flushed their principles and voted for that stinker. It's easy to see why Trump's base supports him so faithfully, when he's the only one breaking ranks to call certain things what they are, repercussions be damned. It makes it easier for them to pretend he's telling them the truth on all of the other occasions.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have ten issued and not a single one of them was challenged.
it's in my head
> An electromagnetic coil is circumferentially positioned around the coating such that when the coil is activated
> with a pulsed current, a non-linear vibration is induced, enabling room temperature superconductivity.
So two circuits, which is super conductive? The inner London Scale layer I presume.
If the outer layer is not super conductive then heat leak will occur.
"as opposed to "does not check if anything works" which the GP claimed... You may think they are obvious or not - but they at least work."
Given that there have been patents granted to perpetual motion devices, the speculation that not all patent applications are properly grounded seems quite plausible.
Already have one it's made of something called "transparent." These too exist.
"Trump ordering up a space fantasy doesn't lend credence to the idea of secret technology"
Well I guess it depends. It certainly doesn't push it so far as credible or probable but as President he does have access to classified information we don't. As I said, there is almost certainly secret technology. The military performs research and more importantly the military funds a massive swath of research. The government pushes most of their science funding via the military and it a huge chunk of the defense budget. It isn't particularly credible to suggest the military wouldn't keep something under wraps of strategic value.
"I could easily believe that he has demanded a space force because some general told him that the only way they'd continue to get big military funding was to expand into space, and made up some guff about room temp superconductors and antigravity, though."
Now the probability this particular set of technologies is real, that is a different matter altogether. But there is a middle path here. A handful of those crazy conspiracies they love to cover on the history channel and nat geo do have roots in declassified material revealing the military researched crazy technology but didn't declassify results.
The whole space force thing might be about getting money to start exploring the crazy technology with the idea that eventually what is too radical for others to accept will one day be the real thing and making sure the military has it bottled up and owns it first. It doesn't make it real but they may well want to pursue it and it's worth remembering the generals (admirals in this case) making those recommendations aren't scientists or engineers either.
"It's easy to see why Trump's base supports him so faithfully, when he's the only one breaking ranks to call certain things what they are, repercussions be damned. It makes it easier for them to pretend he's telling them the truth on all of the other occasions."
Or they just don't care so much about the other occasions. You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. People want the change Obama hinted at and nobody from the major parties was going to give it to them. They are prepared for some collateral damage in the process. I think you'll find Trump wasn't the first choice of most to be the agent but in at least 30 years you've only had two viable options and both came up in the same election. The D's conspired to cheat Bernie of the nomination, that left Trump. What is sad is that there are already noises trying to do the same again with 2020, hitting hard calling the arrested fighting for civil rights senator an "old white man." As if that isn't just things we aren't supposed to judge someone on strung together. His age is a great reason to pay attention to the VP choice, nothing more.
We don't have a complete understanding of superconductivity, for instance there are superconductors that work but really shouldn't according to the accepted theories.
We have an example of a high-temperature superconductor in hydrogen sulfide that's moving closer to room temperatures at -70 C however at extreme pressures.
There is a theory that metallic hydrogen will be a room temperature superconductor however while (if the theory is right) it is _possible_ it isn't _feasible_ as making metallic hydrogen is extremely hard with even higher pressures required. There have been some preliminary findings in that area however the pressures involved make reliable measurements very hard to do.
Doing science in an unexplored area is never a waste of time. If they discover room temperature superconductors - fine, if not they contributed to our understanding of the world and maybe explained why such superconductors can't exist.
"Don't want to sound like a dick or nothing, but ahh ... says on your chart that you're fucked up. Ahh, you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded."
#DeleteFacebook
This is absolutely correct. There have been many, many patents issued for inventions that do not and never could work. Most of them involve descriptions with technospeak gibberish that the patent examiner can't make heads or tails of. Case in point: I was hired to test Bill Fogal's "charged barrier transistor" many years ago, for which he has a patent (i.e. "High gain, low distortion, faster switching transistor": 5,196,809).
Fogal claimed that adding an emitter degeneration network to a transistor (something that circuit designers have been doing for decades) would cause a superconducting effect, resulting in a transistor that could switch infinitely fast with zero power dissipation. It was pure crank science, but Fogal did convince one company to pay to test it. He didn't care for my results that showed it did nothing special but generate a lot of 1/f noise, but that is another story entirely.
Patents are legal documents, not scientific documents. The USPTO's main concern is that your patent does not duplicate another patent. The inventor may be asked to provide additional documentation for the patent wrapper to prove that it doesn't. But there is absolutely no requirement to prove that the invention "works" in any real sense.
There are plenty of antigravity and "free energy" machines that have made it past patent examiners, and received patent protection. Of course, those patents are inherently invalid, as no one skilled in the art could ever make one work. But no one is going to bother to take the inventor to court to invalidate such a patent. What's the point? The patent has no value. It's not as if some company is worried that their antigravity machine or free energy generator is going to infringe on it.
Salvatore Cezar Pais may work for the U.S. Navy, but that doesn't mean anything. Pseudoscientists are not unknown in government laboratories. In fact, several people working for the U.S. Navy kept pushing cold fusion long after it had been debunked. Mr. Pais is simply another pseudoscientific inventor who happens to have a government job.
http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi...
So the trick is not to use the words "perpetual motion" in the description or abstract. Instead, the patent will (for example) describe a technique for extracting "energy from the vacuum". It's every bit as bogus, but it won't trigger any red flags with most patent examiners.
Yeah, but he would be a complete idiot if he had done that before patenting it ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm sure everyone here knows what that means......
Of all the things that deserve a link, here ya go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The military always has lots of research going on that is not public, but while it is often technically impressive to people in the relevant fields, it is almost always pretty mundane sounding compared to public imagination.
I would not be surprised if they had some new launch vehicles and better communications/observation equipment than the civilian sector, I would not even be surprised if some department had something like a functional linear aerospike based launch system or some other incremental improvement like that.
But in general, people working in research tend to have a good idea of what the current possibility space is, and secret military projects that come out later are rarely more than 'oh wow,they got that thing we all knew could be done but was engineering hell to actually work?'
I would put it at 'crap shoot'. Journals and patents have the same basic problem of 'depends on who you get', with wildly inconsistent standards, and in both cases they become trivial to handle when you hire on people who's domain is dealing with patents/publications. Same with research grants.
I love your sig but you need to put that statement in the body of you message as cowards can't see signatures.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
Audiophiles can finally have their perfect speaker cables.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Now this is cool!
So, go to PublicPair.com and enter 15/678,672 to see the Office's response to the invention. The Examiner has rejection the claims because they no known room temperature super-conductivity is known. The Inventor's filed an affidavit with their research paper regarding the invention. It's all public.
Successful fashion models are too skinny. Meh.
There are lots of rules about operability at the patent office with different metrics for success based on field. Most of this is not statutory, but through case law, which makes it insanely complex.
Critically, the legal responsibility for demonstrating lack of operability officially falls to people challenging a patent instead of the patent office.
This is something I've had to deal with in my patents: if someone describes how to do something in a way that does not work, they still own the rights to the functioning version of the final device. In my field, the requirements for operability are very loose, it's not at all necessary that an inventor describe something that could be done or has been done to be given a patent. The thought is that inventors in materials and electronics research should be able to anticipate advances in manufacturing technology, which sounds reasonable until actual people and lawyers are involved. I've had discussions with patent examiners along the lines of "well, obviously you would take this abandoned junk-science disclosure and apply new techniques to make it actually function, so your patent is rejected because it's obvious." Hugely frustrating (and expensive...).
Patents are weird. We romanticize them too much. The reality is you are carving out a chunk of mental real estate in the hopes of being able to license to 7 billion+ minds for 20 years. When i looked into getting some patents for my ideas, it became clear the object of the exercise was to essentially build find an unoccupied piece of mental real estate and shoehorn your property lines into it. Like most areas of law, its passionless and cold.
Good-bye
You're not wrong. Corporations will patent things all the time just so no one else can beat them to it.
Considering the overall atmosphere of Slashdot and my history with it, I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or being nice. :-(
Nonsense. 'Repeatable' is one thing, but I can't see any scientist worth his (or her) salt stopping there, they'll want to know WHY it works, even if that turns out to be a lifetime pursuit. In the case of something like this, if it's not bullshit, then discovering why it works might well be Nobel Prize-worthy.
Bullshit. There have been plenty of 'over unity' swindlers that did 'live demonstrations' that were complete and utter hoaxes, basically stage magic shows, intended to impress and fool investors. That's the sort of 'demonstration' I'm referring to in this context. If an army of scientists can do repeatable experiments showing that this actually works and they (several 'theys') want to demonstrate their findings for, say, The Press, then that's a different animal entirely.
Absurd because it pushes God to the sidelines? Or a better caliber of absurd than this absurd absurdity? Once you start with God as your hypothesis, that pretty much renders all true progress absurd, in one fell swoop. It has taken us basically 400 years so far to peel God's cold dead fingers off the physical universe, and even now—miraculously—it remains a work in progress.
I can think up absurd observations which turned the world upside down far more readily than "seemingly" absurd theories: Michelson Morley, the photoelectric effect, neutron scattering, the double slit, cosmic background radiation, cosmic red-shift.
All these combined into a picture of the universe weirder than any crackpot could possibly have invented from whole cloth.
Of course, there's always an exception to prove the rule:
But generally the moral of the story goes like this: abandon all hope of normal increments, if God is your Bayesian prior.
———
[*] Weirdly, in the case of gravitational lensing, the absurd theory preceded the absurd observation, but this was an exceptional act of genius, off to the side of another discovered that earned an actual Nobel Prize, and yet another one that was also in frame; I suspect many physicists would gladly trade in their Nobel Prize for the ultimate honour of having invented GR out of whole cloth while seated in a comfy chair with your eyes closed.
If this guy works for the Navy and it is the Navy submitting the patent application and paying for it, I'd like to think that the Navy has evaluated his research carefully. This isn't a case of an isolated crank. Doesn't the Navy have an internal process for vetting patent applications?
"But in general, people working in research tend to have a good idea of what the current possibility space is, and secret military projects that come out later are rarely more than 'oh wow,they got that thing we all knew could be done but was engineering hell to actually work?'"
Fair enough but they do fund some pretty out there stuff if previous declassified work is evidence. Just because some generals who definitely are not scientists thought it was plausible and Trump bought it doesn't make it real but it might mean it makes the grade for a closer look. His room temperature semi-conductor doesn't look that hard to attempt to replicate. It won't be as exact as replicating a scientific paper explaining exact methodology but it should be an easy publish if you spent 72hrs in a decently equipped lab and can't make it work. On the flip side if it seems to work well that just becomes more impressive when you publish.
Just trying seems like a shoe in for DARPA funding.
I've been informed that a physicist I used to know has taken up rail guns in his retirement. Personally, I don't think that's necessarily a good hobby for the suburbs. Anyway, he didn't need any sort of superconductor to make that hole in his garage.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If the examiner is rejecting patents because they're novel, something is wrong with the system.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
To be taken seriously you have to tell your competitors how they can rip off your discovery?
Selling the stuff will get him taken seriously real fast.
Sounds like a hi-tech version of the classic potato gun, just more expensive and arguably more dangerous.