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Comment by keldaris | Hacker News Reader

The only thing scary about this is that apparently this "U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise", whatever it is, is a den of crackpots. As a European physicist I'm not familiar enough with how research is managed in the U.S. military, so the fact that this kind of pseudo-science is tolerated is mind boggling to me. Anyone have any insight on what institutional factors might have led to this?

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My guess is that if we were actually pursuing such a program, we would first hear about it when those craft devastated an opponent in a war, or was accidentally shot down.

This is most likely pure indirection, IMO. They want the Chinese or Russia to think we are doing this for some reason. Maybe they want them to go down their own wild goose chase or they want them to think something of ours that they have seen recently is a result of this and not some more easily duplicable technology.

I tend to agree, but if the sightings are real and the activity is increasing. The US might want to inform the opponent that we know who is violating our airspace, we know it isn't alien technology, and we know how they are doing it.

Wouldn't you rather not give the opponent any information including the information that you know what they are doing?

If your "opponents" are a threat you wouldn't reveal any information other than what you want them to know. If they are a non-threat, it might be like warning a child about crossing a road.

> "U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise", whatever it is, is a den of crackpots

Isn't that a bit condescending way to address such organization?

Of all the possible justifications, you point to the weakest one imo: that it is ran by ignorant people who are detached from reality when it comes to these matters, to the point of coming out to publicly state they did/are/aim/want to work on something. It's like the eat anything crazy it's thrown at them.

I mean, you could say: "It's just propaganda - they either want to diverge attention so we don't focus on something else (like decrease the warmongering status), or get attention to try to get something (like support/resources)." - Which is believe is the most likely one.

It's a odd behavior, but I doubt it's a byproduct of ignorance and belief in pseudo-science.

> Isn't that a bit condescending way to address such organization?

It would be if their CTO hadn't personally endorsed the "scientific" content of this patent in his letter to the patent office. In light of that, it's hard for me to see a different explanation than either "incompetent scientists" or "incompetent propagandists" (because the patent is a blatant joke to anyone with a science education), hence my reaction. I'm open to a different explanation, hence my question to those better versed in the mysteries of the U.S. military-industrial-scientific complex.

I understand what you're saying.

For sure there's a lot of things wrong with this:

- the "scientific" content;

- the approval/publishing of the patent based on such content;

- the news reporting of such content without further research, just for the sake of being a patent and not questioning it's validity in the light of our current scientific knowledge;

- The propagation of such information;

If it's deliberate or fruit of a lot of layers of ignorance, we can't know for sure but there's a high probability of both.

I've heard so many programmers tell me categorically that x way of doing things is the right and true way. I've always been skeptical of these viewpoints because they so often are wrong/baseless. It's human nature to put walls around what we know and do not know based not upon what is actually known or possible but upon how it makes us feel. Many people are naturally inclined to dismiss ideas because it makes them feel good, others to accept them and almost everyone is susceptible to group think. Negative knee jerk reactions are so frequently driven by psychology, by them vs us, that I find it very difficult to see any truth, or take anyone's opinion at face value. The older I get and the more I know about my specialities the more I see that so many people who profess expertise are merely wearing a mask and using it to score social points without any real commitment to truth and so often they are just... wrong.

But on the other hand I have been involved with some utterly clueless organisations - where the group think is so profoundly wrong and backward that it's a wonder they can get anything done...

So I would ask, can you point out a couple of things that I can fact check which are wrong with the patent? I'm no physicist, but have an msc in maths

A physics degree is helpful if you want to analyze the theoretical claims made in the patent (which range from trivial, through ludicrous all the way to "not even wrong"), but you don't need to do any of that to understand just how far from reality (or even "hard" sci-fi) this patent is. Instead, just read the patent, accept the contents at face value and consider the numbers the patent itself claims. Quoting the article:

> The application was initially rejected by Patent Examiner Philip Bonzell on the grounds that "there is no such thing as a 'repulsive EM energy field,'" and that "when referring to the specifications as to ascertain about the microwave emitters needed in this system it is seen that for a high energy electromagnetic field to polarize a quantum vacuum as claimed it would take 10^9 [T]eslas and 10^18 V/m." That's roughly the equivalent to the magnetic strength generated by most magnetars and more electricity than what is produced by nuclear reactors.

The field values come straight from the patent itself, you can check that. So, apart from all the silly theory, the patent simply assumes, as a matter of fact, that you can easily obtain magnetic fields that are only found in the most extreme conditions in the universe (and are many orders of magnitude away from anything we can conceivably create), use utterly ludicrous amounts of energy and achieve all of this in a portable craft of some sort. How much fact checking and experience do you really need to see that this is not merely beyond our engineering capabilities, but rather beyond even the bounds of sane science fiction?

The Navy CTO explains in his follow-up letter [0] that the initial findings on generating these high intensity fields have been positive. Are you asserting that's an impossibility?

[0] https://i.imgur.com/ZTL1B5h.png

The CTO says they are trying things, not that they are achieving things. It's trivial to have positive preliminary results for an impossible task, by ignoring the crucial impossibility and playing with the side angles. He also adds that he wants the patent so that if someone else invents it first the DoD won't have to pay for it, clearly admitting it doesn't exist. Which by the way is nonsense because the government can take any license it wants for free by eminent domain.

Of course. The "initial findings" on what's eventually expected to become a huge multi-billion device capable of breaking field intensity records for a picosecond or two are completely irrelevant to the idea of a relatively compact mobile craft that requires even more intense fields for basic operation. That's barely a step away from saying "these values are perfectly fine - magnetars exist, don't they?".

If the criterion for patentability is describing a "future state of the possible" where "possible" just means "might, under a highly generous interpretation, not directly contradict the basic laws of physics... maybe", is there a patent for a Dyson sphere yet?

This Reddit post (from a few months ago, actually) lists several things in the patent that just sounds like gibberish to someone educated in physics:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EmDrive/comments/bgr3ex/comment/elp...

That said, you’ll always be able to find a way to explain away the weirdness if you speculate: Maybe they wanted the patent, but wanted to dissuade other people from reproducing the tech. One effective of doing this could be to actually patent a design that itself works, but is accompanied by a theoretical description that comes across as a joke / gibberish to any educated scientist. That would (and does, as you can see here) shut down most educated scientists interest in the topic immediately.

I’m not saying I believe that’s the case, just that we can always find a way to believe what we want to believe; belief is very dangerous in that way. (Generally, it’s best to just absorb evidence and withhold any “belief” until you absolutely have to make a binary decision.)

Therefore, I think speculation is pointless: Instead, we should just try to build what is described here, and see if it works or not.

I think it's possible crackpots have found a way to waste government money. The government (CIA and army) have previously worked on a psychic program, for example.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project

You appear to be operating under the assumption that reports about this do not constitute a PSYOPS operation against the American public.

Just because it is written down does not mean it happened. Just because public money was spent on such a line item does not mean that is where it went.

One theory that seems plausible to me is that there's deliberate confusion and misinformation created to combat or discredit leaks. Imagine that there's an adversary who has access to "open source" accounts that make it to popular or tabloid press, but you want to prevent them from making reliable inferences from that information.

One strategy would be to pollute that channel with misinformation, so that the adversary needs to go down a lot of different rabbit holes to have a chance of finding something real. Bonus: these could be really useful counter intel traps. You'd need just the right mix of plausible and outlandish, because you'll need to fool an adversary who (you should assume) can see through the strategy in general.

But it's just speculation.

And for all of us on the outside, it can be kind of a fun scifi thought experiment.

You could even work with Google and catch any keyword searches exclusive to the scheme.

I've found this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnNKC82wUmY

Which explains a mechanism that seems plausible by me. Described here by someone who appears to be a credible scientist. I even believe i have read a writeup of the theory in New Scientist. Skip to about 12 mins in, to see speculations about a propulsion system based on the ideas.

You can't defend against what you don't know about. The US invests time and money into a wide range of research topics simply to know what is possible. Military research is a bubbling cauldron of activity.

Well something like this is so clearly bullshit (I have studied quantum field theory and string theory to a degree that I am fairly confident of this assessment) that you have to worry about the sanity of the whole organisation involved. Or in other words before such a publication by someone almost certainly not qualified in QFT, I would expect to see a series of papers published which outline in detail the mechanisms by which this is supposed to work. Even QFT in curved spacetime (without perturbations or gravitational waves) is an extremely hard and well developed subject and I happen to have interacted with some of the worlds expert on it.

Well, I'm not saying it isn't totally BS; but I understand the motivation to overturn every stone when talking about defense. It isn't like the US didn't surprise a country with new physics during WWII.

It wasn't exactly 'new' physics, it was an application of a theory built on established physics. The surprise wasn't that it was possible, but that it was technically and economically feasible.

Well, yeah. The surprise was actually finding a way to build it (to the Germans); I don't know what Japan knew or didn't know about the science.

Japan apparently had their own atomic bomb project[0], but the military didn't consider it a priority so funding was scarce, and it was difficult to secure enough uranium.

[0]https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/japanese-atomic-bomb-...

The Germans also worked on an atomic bomb during the war. Heisenberg was in charge of the Science. They had an institute in Heidelberg dedicated to it and several other sites. The calculation for the order of magnitude of required fissible material was off by 1, which might or might not have been a deliberate error. Furthermore there was no good source of uranium as far as I know discovered in Germany at the time as far as I know.

The joke is that they had enough U if the different groups put it all together, but each wanted to work alone.

okay, it does sound like you know what you're on about...

I'm a skeptic as well, but I'm not a physicist (I am an engineer so I know the basics).

I however, cannot throw a convincing rebuttal to this.

All I know, is that a high ranking officer has requested a patent to go through for a seemingly "perpetual motion machine".

All the buzzwords for the UFO-logists are there to get them salivating about Area-51 and Bob Lazar.

But, imagine such UFO-logists are reasonable about their beliefs (hard, I know) and are open to other suggestions (they clearly are to many).

Given such UFO-logists, how would you tell them this is bullshit without getting emotionally frustrated at the ludicrousness of the article ?

edit: any papers that point me towards the possible edge of today's tech would be welcome as well

I wish you had left your other comment up. You had specific fundamental equations and good details about why the patent must be nonsense. Anyway, thank you for your other comments as well. Something is so odd with all of this and having qualified experts weight in is extremely valuable to those who are with good faith trying to uncover wtf is going on. Consider contacting the original author of the article series, I’m convinced he is determined to try and expose/solve what is behind all this recent attention to UFO/UAP/etc.

Thats how you get stuff like the Stargate Project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project

Ahem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_flying_saucer

> "A group of nuclear scientists examined the designs and declared them to be unworkable, expensive and very inefficient."

Which hits _all_ the selling points for a public transport project in the UK.

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