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Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

I feel like these patente are a red herring to throw off Chinese and Russian scientists. If this research was real, it would probably be classified and the Navy would've used the mechanisms that exist for keeping patents secret.

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That doesn't make sense unless one assumes Chinese and Russian scientists are idiots who can't tell real science from BS... in which case there would be no reason to throw them off to begin with.

That's my thought too. Someone else mentioned the math being basically nonsense, but surely if it was there to misdirect other scientists there must be some grain of sense to it - otherwise it'd just be an exercise in futility?

The misdirection would only work until someone actually read it and pointed the nonsense out, though. If it were actually intended to fool someone, it would probably be less obviously wrong. A patent for something feasibly advanced but not too out of the ordinary, or something hidden as a red herring in an actual classified document intended to be intercepted. I have a hard time believing a foreign government would waste a significant amount of time and money on American patents on woo-woo antigravity and things.

In another thread, I thought it could just be someone trolling the patent office, but I don't know.

I think I'll just file this one under "interesting but probably not worth thinking about"

It sounds like the Patent Examiner's issue is not necessarily with the fundamental science so much as with the enormous amount of energy required to make use of the ideas. Though this doesn't mean the science is sound (I'm definitely not one to judge!), if the patents are combined with leaked (fabricated) videos of Navy pilots encountering exotic craft then maybe this is enough to send rival states down some rabbit hole.

Agreed. In the military world, there is just too much cloak and dagger stuff going on to take everything at face value.

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