Posted on 11/09/2005 10:57:31 AM PST by aculeus
WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- The U.S. patent office has reportedly granted a patent for an anti-gravity device -- breaking its rule to reject inventions that defy the laws of physics.
The journal Nature said patent 6,960,975 was granted Nov. 1 to Boris Volfson of Huntington, Ind., for a space vehicle propelled by a superconducting shield that alters the curvature of space-time outside the craft in a way that counteracts gravity.
One of the main theoretical arguments against anti-gravity is that it implies the availability of unlimited energy.
"If you design an anti-gravity machine, you've got a perpetual-motion machine," Robert Park of the American Physical Society told Nature.
Park said the action shows patent examiners are being duped by false science.
Copyright 2005 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.
That's absolutely damned right. And THIS Saturday is the 50th anniversary of the famous Hill Valley lightning storm. There will be a nationwide moment of silence at exactly 10:04 P.M. God, I love this time of year.
-Dan
You did watch your BTTF DVD box-set last weekend, didn't you? ;)
"Jack Daniels can do that."
Jack created the "old seventh" dimension....;-)
Ha!
There's been an anti-gravity device that's been around for a long time...
You take a slice of buttered bread, then strap it, butter side up, to the belly of a cat.
Then drop the cat.
Since a cat will always land on it's feet, and a slice of buttered bread will always land buttered side down, the two forces cancel each other out, and the cat will just sort of hover there.
Mark
Hey, it's worked for WD-40!
Mark
Last weekend?! I look at these things almost every day. :)
-Dan
Gasp.
You actually want to DO THINGS!?! :-)
As usual its always the matter antimatter mix that is the tricky part to get right.
Volfson's Antigravity Patent
http://www.americanantigravity.com/articles/303/1/Volfson%26%2339%3Bs-Antigravity-Patent
By Tim Ventura
Published on 11/11/2005
On November 9th, Stephanie Olson posted an article on her CNET Science & Technology blog about the US Patent and Trademark Office granting an Antigravity patent for Boris Volfson, on a design incorporating a superconductor to modify time-space & create propulsion. Here's the inside story...
Patents & Skepticism
On November 9th, Stephanie Olson posted the following comment on her CNET Science & Technology blog about the US Patent and Trademark Office granting an Antigravity patent to Boris Volfson:
"The United States Patent and Trademark Office has given the nod to a patent design for an antigravity device, or a space vehicle, according to a report this week in Nature magazine.
That the office approved the patent application breaks its own resolution to reject inventions that defy the laws of physics, according to the report. Still, the patent, which was granted on Nov. 1 to Boris Volfson of Huntington, Indiana, describes a vehicle propelled by a superconducting shield. The shield can change the curvature of space-time outside the craft in a way that counteracts gravity.
Watchdogs called the science bogus, however. "This is not the first such patent to be granted, but it shows that patent examiners are being duped by false science," Robert Park of the American Physical Society in Washington DC said in the report."
Here's the inside story: Every now and then, the media picks up a story about Antigravity technology and gets excited about it for nearly 5 minutes, with the fanfare then subsiding when a critic like Bob Park writes something dismissive about it. In this particular case, the CNET story didn't contain links for people to follow up on, so they searched the web for "Antigravity" -- leading invariably to the American Antigravity website.
The situation is simple: contrary to what most people have heard, the USPTO grants Antigravity patents fairly often. There are a number of them referenced online -- a quick search at JLN Labs (http://www.jlnlabs.org) will turn up links to possibly hundreds of patents on the topic. Not all of them distinctly say Antigravity, but they all contain relevance to the idea of modifying gravity for propulsive use in one way or another.
This doesn't undermine Boris Volfson's achievement -- getting a patent these days is a time consuming & expensive process, and most inventors don't have the resources to undertake this. The situation is further complicated by some tricky issues in prior-art, which often hinder patents built closely around the ideas of other inventors.
A good example of another Antigravity patent is Mark Tomion's StarDrive Device (#6,404,089). This patent is for a design very close to the Searl Effect Generator, but never received the publicity that it could have -- probably as a result of poor luck or bad timing.
The traditional view is that getting a patent will open the door to make investors feel comfortable putting money into developing the idea -- however, the problem has been that most investors are highly risk-averse, meaning that funding is either wholly-inadequate, or doesn't exist at all. Thus, while I wish Boris Volfson the best of luck in developing his invention, his path to financing it is about the same as for most inventors: finding a good friend who can spare the cash.
Don't be surprised to see Bob Park's name as the chief-critic on this story. He's typically been critical of any idea that he perceives as "not being good science", but he's marginalized himself lately by not staying current with the actual research.What's this mean? Simply put, Park is unfortunately a modern equivalent of the highly-educated naysayers who claimed that the Wright-Brothers were actually faking their flight in 1902.
In fact, Park lost the remainder of his skeptical credibility in 2003, when he published a derogatory article about the gravity-wave research of Dr. Ning Li's AC-Gravity corporation in Huntsville. He'd thought that it would be an easy target -- some mushy new tech-startup led by kooks. Unfortunately, since he didn't actually research the topic, he missed the fact that Li was a professor of physics who'd done her work based upon conventional physics theories, and with the blessing of the Army Aviation & Missile Command, who were financing her project. Thus, it wasn't the establishment marginalizing kooks -- it was the establishment biting its own tail, which led to a flurry of hate-mail for Park and a petition list to have him removed from the APS, which rumor has it nearly worked.
Most alt-science researchers have complained about Park's brand of skepticism, which is peppered with demeaning, humiliating ad hominem attacks on the latest scientific fad. My impression over time has been that he doesn't do this because he actually cares -- it's become an intellectual game that he plays to make himself feel better about "being right". Park's not the only skeptic out there -- there are lots of self-righteous skeptics, who feel like they're standing on that "last line of defense" to make sure the public doesn't get swindled. There's a subtle-premise to this type of skepticism, which simply put is that "they know better than the public, so they must protect the public". In other words, they think we're all idiots.
Ultimately, this type of skepticism doesn't matter: there's only one way to prove or disprove ideas like Volfson's, which is simply to build the device and see if it works. If so, then great -- now we can reach the stars. If not, then back to the drawing board with a lesson learned.
There's another view to this as well, which is that these technologies threaten to displace funding for mainstream projects. Park is scared because he doesn't understand these technologies -- and if they catch on, it means that he'll have to retrain, just like his colleagues wasting billions working on increasingly larger particle-accelerators. Is this research valuable? You tell me -- ask yourself if these colliders produce usable results, or more appropriately, if they have the potential to ever achieve usable results?
Mainstream physics very nearly found the solution to gravity-modification during World War II. Depending on whom you talk to, you might hear claims that this technology actually was discovered in that era (ie: the Nazi Bell Device or the Philadelphia Experiment). This was during the emergence of research in the 30's into Unified Field Theory physics -- from Einstein, Heim, and several other physicists.
However, the emergence of Quantum Mechanics in the 30's rapidly overwhelmed research into theoretical models dealing with space-time geometries in favor of high-energy experiments on the single-particle level. Where did gravity-research go in the QM Model? As physicist Richard Feinman said in the 1960's, "At the scales we work with in Quantum Mechanics, gravity is simply too weak to be detectable". In other words, Quantum Mechanics assumes a flat space-time, and quite literally doesn't include gravity as a part of the model.
The confusion was worsened by the fact that the only way to learn more about single-particle interactions was to add energy to them in greater and greater amounts. Particle accelerators gradually swelled in size to the 20-mile diameter rings that we know today, and yet with all of these trillions of electron-volts being spent accelerating particles, nobody found a decent gravitational coupling. Thus, having not found a way to modify gravity using all of that energy, adherents to Quantum Mechanics gradually began to assume that it simply required too much energy to manipulate, without stopping to consider if they were approaching the problem in the wrong way.
Basically, science drove right on past gravity-research in the 30's, and hasn't come back to it since. Oh, they've built experiments to test Relativity Theory, but that's based on the assumption that gravity can interact with electromagnetism -- and the basis of Einstein's work in Unified Field Research was the opposite: that electromagnetism can interact with gravity.
Gabriel Kron, the onetime Chief Scientist for General Electric, was a self-taught genius who took this debate to heart back in the 30's, and he approached it from an applied-science perspective. He wasn't looking to manipulate gravity; his goal was to solve issues like unpredicted phase-shifting in complex rotating electrical systems. You see, for the last several decades, while mainstream science has complained about there "not being any anomalies to suggest AG-Effects", they've overlooked a major piece of evidence: these anomalies have been here all along, chugging away in our electrical equipment.
In fact, Kron's research focused on eliminating these anomalies from the electrical systems of his day, and in doing so, he realized that the only way he could do this was to create a model for Electrical Engineering based on Einstein's Unified Field Theory. These are "non-linear effects", which means that they're undetectable at small scales, but in larger equipment -- such as our national power grid -- they become readily apparent. Kron saw them as losses in efficiency, and realized that these losses resulted from the equipment's tendency to modify space-time around itself while it operated....these ideas on improving efficiency are now required reading for all electrical engineers.
This brings us full circle back to Volfson's patent, which describes bending time space with a superconductor. You might ask why -- and I'd have to reference you back to the bulk-matter effects. In short, these UFT couplings between gravity & electromagnetism are only visible with large objects using lots of energy in a confined space. A superconductive disk certainly fits the bill for this...
There's a lot more to this story, because one aspect that I haven't addressed is Eugene Podkletnov's substantial contribution to it -- nor the fact that there are a variety of proposed methods for getting a superconductor to modify gravity. However, the basis for the idea is certainly worth testing -- and who knows, maybe if we can get a few more of these ideas tested, the general public will start to like what they see.
As for Bob Park, what he doesn't know won't hurt him. For instance, if seeing Podkletnov's work make it through the patent office is annoying, then seeing it published in the prestigious AIAA & AIP journals must be just like a stake through the heart (see the link below)...
Boris Volfson's Website: Click Here
Podkletnov Interview: Part 1 & Part 2
Podkletnov Journal Pubs: AIAA & AIP
UFT AG Effects: Einstein's Antigravity
I approach this stuff
like science fiction. There's not
a whole lot of good
nuts & bolts SF
published these days. But this stuff
fills that niche. Listen:
"The obvious question is how a laser-physicist like John Dering gets interested in Antigravity in the first place. ... Hed gone to a company to work on mercury-sputtering deposition tool that utilized a flow of mercury-ions from a high-voltage, RF-driven emitter. Dering was called in because of what theyd described as a device malfunction. The company indicated that when they shut the device down, the pool of waste-mercury in the bottom of the chamber spontaneously rocketed up to the top of the chamber 4 or 5 pounds worth and splattered with enough force to destroy the sample being etched. They thought it was an anomaly, and after testing the device for pinhole leaks and electrical failures, so did John. What changed his mind was being called in to repair this same anomaly over 3 months at 3 different companies, leading him to realize that it was a repeatable effect creating an Antigravity force on the mercury, but one that only occurred under rare conditions when the devices fields collapsed during shutdown. It was repeatable, but not intentionally " [The New Nazi-Bell, p. 2]"Device malfunction"
The AG experiments I have done produced a complicated field, writes Dering, A torsion field induced by a rotating EM wave creates the curvature. The problem is that these fields are manifestations of the underlying unified fields that manifest as the five modes we call the fundamental forces.This stuff would sound good
To induce torsion and make curvature the system is driven at several RF frequencies with the appropriate modulation -- there are lots of time derivatives flying around. The result is that the time varying AG field back induces an EM field that attempts to react against the input pump wave and that back EM is intense, too! And there are those bloody cross terms this component linked to that one what a soup. [Einsteins Antigravity, p. 8]
bump
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=0002B59B-5B5C-1359-9B5C83414B7F0119
November 2005 issue
PHYSICS
The Illusion of Gravity
The force of gravity and one of the dimensions of space might be generated out of the peculiar interactions of particles and fields existing in a lower-dimensional realm
By Juan Maldacena
Three spatial dimensions are visible all around us--up/down, left/right, forward/backward. Add time to the mix, and the result is a four-dimensional blending of space and time known as spacetime. Thus, we live in a four-dimensional universe. Or do we?
Amazingly, some new theories of physics predict that one of the three dimensions of space could be a kind of an illusion--that in actuality all the particles and fields that make up reality are moving about in a two-dimensional realm like the Flatland of Edwin A. Abbott. Gravity, too, would be part of the illusion: a force that is not present in the two-dimensional world but that materializes along with the emergence of the illusory third dimension....continued at Scientific American Digital
Would be nice if they figured that out.
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