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.
Being a patent lawyer, I had to dig a little deeper because there is a record behind every patent.
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.
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)
I’m pretty sure that last quote is direct from the Alpha Centauri datalinks... Prokhor Zakharov, maybe?
“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.
I wouldn't read a ton into this. He also has a patent on a room-temperature superconductor.
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
The nuclear powered jet engine technically did work both the Russians and the US worked on it and had what you can call a functional prototype; however irradiating the sky wasn’t a good idea after all, it required a normal engine to take off and with the development of aerial refueling and much more efficient jet engines the loitering time you get form superheating air using a nuclear reactor instead of burning fuel just bring enough of an advantage to make up for the cost, complexity and the risk.
If you listen to the story I posted above, it's pretty clear that Feynman's patent was issued well before that--he basically rambled off a list of nuclear <things> to the patent officer, who then ran with it.
The US army (Air Force didn’t exist then) started the Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft program in May of 1946, Feynman was 28 at the time however he did work on the Manhattan Project and using nuclear propulsion for submarines, aircraft and surface vessels heck even trains were things that people at Los Alamos and other labs were actively working on since the late 30’s.
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.
Well that's going to shorten travel time to Mars! Now we just need a gravitational mass reduction device so we don't need so much fuel for take off and landing!
I am going to wait for CERN's research on measuring the gravitational interaction coefficient of antimatter to be published before I even try to understand this.
100% of other EmDrive-like claims haven't panned out. Short of substantial evidence why this time it's different, this time it's probably not different.
Eh, there was this weird guy back in the early 20th century that said he could get massive amounts of energy out of some rare metals - I think that one's worked out pretty well so far. Point being, just because something looks like it breaks reality or thermodynamics or whatever doesn't mean it actually does.
Of course, this is still probably BS. Unless the US really is flying [0] legit 'ignore gravity and inertia' UFOs...
The problem is a sort of Pascal's mugging. Yes, some breakthrough claims pan out. But if you take every claim equally seriously, you'll be absolutely snowed under amidst claims of breathtaking new discoveries. Extraordinary claims still require extraordinary evidence, because there are so many more extraordinary claims than actual breakthroughs.
I mean, how many claims of Revolutionary New Battery Technology (for instance) are we going to get before we get a truly revolutionary new battery tech? Probably many! And those don't even require new physics! Lots of patents turn out to be totally useless (practically speaking), even ones that don't make extraordinary claims. Ones that do probably require heightened scrutiny. A better toaster? Probably works! A cheap and portable mind-control device? Maybe not.
The Manhattan project had the benefit of most of the physics being at least fairly well understood. Everyone knew there was energy to be liberated from the atom, the question was whether a bomb would be practical: could it be small enough to fit in a plane? Could the material be enriched and mined practically? All of that stuff was engineering problems, absolutely massive ones. There were big uncertainties about the physics, but they were about the size of the effect, not about whether it existed at all.
But EmDrive ideas are putting the engineering before the horse, the physics supposedly underlying them are not mainstream at all. The Manhattan project got off the ground because all the heavyweights in nuclear physics at the time thought it was possible. Nuclear chain reactions were demonstrated first, before the Manhattan project was started. (Self-sustaining chain reactions did only come as part of the Manhattan project)
> how many claims of Revolutionary New Battery Technology (for instance) are we going to get before we get a truly revolutionary new battery tech
We've already got lots of revolutionary new battery technologies. Just, none of them are optimized for the consumer-electronics usage profile (and, in fact, the "revolutionary" part of them isn't that they're better in all ways than existing battery tech, but rather that they allow for trade-offs we weren't previously able to make.) Such advances are already revolutionizing cubesats, supercapacitors, etc.
there was this weird guy back in the early 20th century that said he could get massive amounts of energy out of some rare metals
That's a pretty good description of the opposite of what happened. It was new but mainstream physics and the potential was quickly and widely recognized, experiments designed, performed, reproduced, etc. And one of the central people wasn't even a guy.
This gives me a chance to blow the dust off a Carl Sagan classic:
> But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers.
1. They pretend the term "UFO" is on equal footing as "flying saucer", and that in the past the military was incredulous on this subject. Of course it was and should be skeptical about "flying saucers", but I don't believe it ever was incredulous on UFO reports, indeed I'd guess the abreviation Unidentified Flying Object was originally a military term to designate flying craft, not identified by the observer...
2. They mention that this was one of the first large-scale deployments of sensor fusion: if one sensor detects an object, then it is digitally gossiped to all other stations: boats, planes, ... so this is the simplest explanation for "independent" sightings by the Nimitz Carrier for example, also if this is one of the first deployments with sensor fusion then many members of different crews could easily mis-interpret the appearance of objects on their local screen as deriving from a local sensor..., only one sensor system needs to imagine an object, and all crews believe they independently witnessed the same object... For the article to explicitly mention this from source material without connecting the dots is just poor reporting.
3. They describe top down behaviour resembling a cover-up, if genuine this is not very surprising either: nation states try to keep secret not only the performance of their system in optimal conditions (knowing and bypassing this limit undetected would be valuable to an enemy), but they also try to keep secret failure modes (since the enemy can exploit failure modes, think chaff etc...). Another explanation is that the manufacturers are well connected with top brass, and they try to keep their reputation by covering up shoddy performance off their systems...
Well, yes, except that physicists were pretty confident that they nailed electromagnetism, except the pesky thing that the speed of light was c - but relative to what? Naturally there should have been some medium (the "ether") but when they looked for it they weren't there: the famous Michelson–Morley experiment.
So people had already known that there was some glaring gap in our knowledge, and something had to fill in the gap.
The most recent research suggests the thrust was real, sort of, but not a reactionless effect.
> And now it seems that the previously detected thrust was illusory, at least according to a team of researchers in Germany. They built their own EmDrive and tested it in a vacuum chamber, as the NASA researchers did.
> The German team picked something up as well. But follow-up analysis "clearly indicates that the 'thrust' is not coming from the EmDrive but from some electromagnetic interaction," the researchers wrote in their new study, which you can read here. That interaction is likely between EmDrive power cables and Earth's magnetic field, the team concluded.
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.