Comment by plutonorm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plutonorm | Hacker News Reader

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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

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.

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?

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