US10144532B2 – Craft using an inertial mass reduction device
patents.google.com
patents.google.com
1. A lot of physics is about to be rewritten. Travel to other planets and stars is within our grasp. The entire world is about to change. We'll all remember this day for the rest of our lives.
2. The Navy has been paying a very convincing snake oil salesman to make patents for impossible devices.
This isn't the first time a physics-violating patent has been granted - anybody else remember the Orbo?
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2011110951A3/en?oq=WO201...
As you some of you already know, the patent office does not freely give patents for impossible devices. No perpetual motion machines, no magic invisibility cloaks, nothing that an ordinary person in the relevant art could not build after reading the patent. This is a doctrine called “enablement”—the patent, plus what is already known in the art, must be enough to enable one to build a working device without undue experimentation. This is the quid pro quo of the patent system: to get ownership of the invention for 20 years, you must tell everyone enough about it to build it themselves.
This patent almost suffered the fate of non-enablement at the patent office. What led to its issuance is the interesting part because patent examiner tried and tried to reject this patent as not “enabling” the invention. Yet it issued anyways.
I cannot link directly to the patent prosecution documents, but the files are public and you can find them at the USPTO database[0] by searching for the patent's application number 15/141,270.
The patent was filed in April 2016. The first action by the USPTO was in November 2017 with the usual delay and it rejected all claims as not enabling the invention. Simply put the examiner said: “You’re claiming a perpetual motion machine, good-bye.”
The patent examiner and the applicant held an interview in January 2018, which is an ordinary event to try to convince the examiner is wrong. The examiner pointed out “that he still felt there were enablement issues.” The applicant disagreed. No agreement was reached.
A few days later, the applicant filed his formal response to the rejection. He attached a published article under his authorship in AIAA Space Forum[1]. He also cited other publications on how to “generate extremely high EM flux intensities.” Basically, he's saying I'm peer-reviewed here is some other peer-reviewed articles, and it being peer-reviewed that's all you need to know.
But most interestingly, he attached a letter from Dr. James Sheehy, Chief Technical Officer of the Naval Systems Air Command, indicating that the amount of magnetic field and electricity described as being required by the patent “can be created, and thus the invention is enabled.” Dr. James Sheehy is a real dude, with that real title and corresponding resume.[2]
Dr. Sheehy’s letter is fascinating. It asserts that the applicant is currently one year into a project to demonstrate the feasibility of high EM field-energy and flux and has begun experimenting with associated propulsion systems. Dr. Sheehy says he believes the research shows the invention will be a reality. Then he says (seriously, he says) “China is already investing significantly in this area and I would prefer we hold the patent opposed to paying forever more to use this revolutionary technology.”
The examiner at the patent office (who is typically kind of knowledgeable in the field) nevertheless called B.S. Peer-reviewed, shmear-reviewed. He rejected the application again finally in March 2018. He pointed out "for a high energy electromagnetic field to polarize a quantum vacuum as claimed it would take 10^9 teslas and 10^18 V/m." He said "these levels are not feasible with current technology so how would someone of ordinary skill be able to know how to create this craft? The largest magnetic field ever created is 10^3 teslas and a neutron star is 10^ teslas so how are you using a microwave emitter that produces a magnetic field that is three orders of magnitude greater than a neutron star?" And so on... Basically, the examiner said this is bullshit.
As is often done in this situation, the applicant filed an appeal from the patent examiner’s rejection. This is usually a procedure that is next addressed by a board of patent judges, with more briefing, typically oral argument, and takes months to years. But the appeal was never picked up after it was lodged, and it is unclear why. Two months after the appeal was filed, on October 31, 2018, the examiner (for no reason apparent in the file) allowed the patent to issue without comment and on the same day the government paid the fees it owed. The patent was issued in due course.
Whether or not the named inventor was a crank, and whether or not the invention was equally frivolous, this was a patent prosecuted by a Navy attorney, vouched for by the Navy CTO, and pushed through under atypical circumstances, in a public forum.
What's even more intriguing is that, if the Navy wanted, it could obtain the patent under a secrecy order that would keep it from the public's eyes until it was declassified.
Knowing all this, now ask yourself why this impossible sounding patent issued in a public forum with high-level brass support under tax payer dollars.
[0] https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair
From the file wrapper (parent post reference [0]), the examiner's main point in the rejection was apparently that the generation of E-fields of 10^18 V/m and B-fields of 10^9 Tesla, as needed for the device, are impossible.
The 2018-10-31 Notice of Allowance states that the application was allowed for the reasons in the 2018-08-21 Appeal brief.
The first part of the appeal brief (in response to the 112a rejection) more or less states that the peer reviewed papers are sufficient to overcome the rejection by proving that electromagnetic flux values of 10^33 Watts/m^2 are possible, which are equivalent to the required E-field and B-field values.
The second part of the appeal brief (in response to the 112b rejection) gives a little more context on the situation with a quote from the AIA 2017-5343 paper (parent post reference [1]):
"It is a well-known facet of quantum field theory that everything can be described in quantum mechanical terms. The complex interactions between a physical system and its surroundings (environment), disrupt the quantum mechanical nature of a system and render it classical under ordinary observation. This process is known as decoherence. However, it is argued that we can retard (delay) decoherence (and possibly even suppress it – namely decouple a physical system from the environment) by accelerated spin and/or accelerated vibration of electrically charged matter under rapid acceleration transients. This may be the very condition to achieve a state of macroscopic quantum coherence, the idea being that we never let the system achieve thermodynamic equilibrium, by constantly delaying the onset of relaxation to equilibrium (hence the production of maximal entropy is delayed). The system may ‘violently’ react by generating ‘anomalous’ emergent phenomena, such as, but not limited to, inertial mass reduction."
The idea of "macroscopic quantum coherence" is fascinating. This could be the next major technological race outside of computing.
[0] https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair (search for application number 15/141,270, then click on "Image File Wrapper" tab, then click to select all and download PDF) (includes several other peer reviewed references to support the patent)
A few comments in previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19229584
> Matter is confined energy, bound within fields, frozen in a quantum of time.
> Polarization of the local vacuum is analogous to manipulation/modification of the local space tie topological lattice energy density.
> If we can engineer the structure of the local quantum vacuum state, we can engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level
If real physics sounded that cool, it would convince me I took the wrong major in college. :)
“Time dilates as the speed of light approaches. To the extent that light consists of particles, it is in its own way, timeless. Through simple perturbations of the temporal manifold, we can refract or repel photons most efficiently.”
I was about to dismiss as speculative woo woo (there is plenty of "may" passive language in the patent), until I noticed the assignee is the US Navy. Taxpayers are funding this.
In one of his autobiographies, Richard Feynman talks about ending up with some bizarre patents on nuclear-powered aircraft. In brief, the patent office at Los Alamos went around and solicited patent ideas, though he tells it better here: https://youtu.be/rc9gwPB78lk
That said at least for the US the nuclear jet was developed into the liquid metal cooled reactors that became the first submarine nuclear reactors to be deployed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor
The US navy stopped using sodium reactors once the small pressurized water reactors have been developed.
So it wasn’t that much of a crazy thing to work on, heck while looking back at it I’m sure Feynman was in jest but I’m not sure it was the case when he was in his mid 20’s.
Navy got took.