Anti-Gravity Device Patented

October_30th writes "According to the United States Patent Office website, Boris Volfson has recently patented a "Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state", which is essentially an anti-gravity propulsion device." The validity of this patent remains to be seen, but the general consensus of the physics community seems to be that it is complete malarky.

In Context...

[lurch84]

When you look how absurd some of the intellectual property or business model patents have been recently, it was only a matter of time before the patent office started issuing absurd patents for (non-existant) physical products.

/me rushes off to get patent for inertial dampening

What does this have to do with my "Rights Online"?

[Digital Pizza]

How is this related to my rights, especially online?

If it's "complete malarky" then nobody has anything to worry about, but if the guy were to actually make something out of this then doesn't he deserve the patent?

This should probably have been put in the "Funny" category, if anything.

Re:The real question

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, apart from the fact you're not actually serious, money would become useless if a time machine were invented. Due to the chaos it would cause, governments would depreciate currecy as we know it and eventually replace it altogether with something even more megalomaniacal. Or maybe they'd see sense and do away with the whole notion of a currency, after all, if we can go anywhere in time, why would we need to buy anything? Take from when there's a surplus to when there's a deficit, or take from when there's nobody looking and take it to whenever else. Or if they really feel bright and sharp when they wake up after dreaming of more power and money and realise there's no real point when life becomes a trivial tedious manner after time travel has enlightened them, they might just do away with the idea of governments all together. Why try to control so many people's lives when something like time travel comes along, neither of us really want governments trying day-in, day-out to come up with new ways of restricting us, forcing us into other things, which the government then needs to restrict because a certain number of people get a little carried away, or a little crazy. No, forget about the people dealing with it, that's crazy, if we give them time to control the situation, we don't control them anymore. Let's spend all our free time we could use enjoying ourselves to come up with ways we can stop them and us doing things that people might enjoy.

Re:What about...

[Boronx]

If an infinite improbability drive were possible, wouldn't it have already brought itself into existence?

Star Trek Anyone?

[Zebra_X]

If you read the patent text he's basically describing the warp drive from star trek.

"whereby providing for the gravitational imbalance such that the lowered pressure of inflationary vacuum state is pulling said space vehicle forward in modified spacetime."

interesting i guess.

in normal fashion both slashdot and the reporting news outlet have got it all wrong. it's not a perpetual motion machine - becuase it requires input of a nuclear reactor to make it "go". It's no more a perpetual motion machine than a space probe launched from earth.

nor is this "anti gravity". the patent describes a device that will "modify" space time such that an area of "low pressure vacuum" and "high pressure vacuum" are created. the low pressure area is infront of the ship and the high pressure is behind the ship. the ship travels forward because it's caught in the middle. i guess.

not a physics major.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

One the plus side...

[kreyg]

...by the time anyone actually invents one, the patent will have expired.

Jabberwocky!

[The Amazing Fish Boy]

We all know that the only real anti-gravity device is a (Score:5, Insightful)

Re:In Context...

[ScrewMaster]

More like patents for non-existent physics.

Oh, and while you're at it don't forget to patent the verteron pulse generator.

Re:The real question

[Anonymous Coward]

what you have to do is go back in time to the very first day the US Patent Office opened and patent it

I'm all for it

[Kuukai]

If some guy in Indiana wants to pay hundreds of dollars to patent stuff that (regardless of being real physics or not) can't possibly be implemented before the patent expires, I'm all for it. That means that if/when technology finally catches up it'll be public domain. He should go ahead and slip in a broad patent on near-light travel, and something about wormholes. To tell the truth, I feel the same way about gene patents. If they want to patent them all, let them. As many incredible advances as have been made in genetics, I somehow feel they'll be much more useful in twenty years. The goverment is too dumb to figure out what's obvious and what's not, so if we just patent [i]everything[/i] now and check back in twenty years, the problem will be solved.

Re:The real question

[JulesLt]

Yeah, governments are EVIL. Let's do away with them all. Because, if you look around the world, the best states are those with no governments, like in central Africa - the rule of the gun is so much better than civilization.

Re:Star Trek Anyone?

[istewart]

Problem is that vacuum, by definition, does not contain any sort of matter that would exhibit an observable pressure. Vacuum is simply empty space. To metaphorically "compress" or "expand" vacuum (as in Star Trek) would require a deeper knowledge of the nature of space-time than we have now, if it was even possible then.

Re:In Context...

[Flyboy Connor]

There's nothing wrong with that. Perpetual motion machines have been patented for years. As long as you are giving a complete description of your invention, and it hasn't been patented by someone else, you can get a patent. It doesn't matter if it works. That's the problem of the person who wants the patent. If he wants to shell out lots of moolah for hogwash, why not let him?

Doesn't a physical patent need a working prototype

[rdean400]

Since when is it good practice for any Patent Office to issue patents based on conjecture? There should be a valid working prototype before any patent is issued. Software patents are bad enough, but speculative patents are total b.s.

Re:What does this have to do with my "Rights Onlin

[Evro]

The approval of this patent (#6,960,975) is a testament to the stupidity of the USPTO, which certainly affects the rights of everyone. What's to stop someone from writing a program that strings words together in patent-application-ese and mass submitting them? Then find people who are violating your wonderful patent and sue them. Or just patent every single device ever seen or conceived of in Star Trek or other Sci Fi, and then sue as they become invented. Illustrating the stupidity (and absurdity) of the USPTO is definitely a rights-related topic.

Re:The real question

[climb_no_fear]

then I go back in time and convince them to open the patent office a day earlier ...

Stupid question: What's the use of an expired patent anyway ?

Re:rather than power a craft by ANTI-GRAVITY

[Krach42]

It's persumed that Gravity like the other 3 known forces (Strong, Weak, and Electromagnetic) is transmitted through particles.

If that were true, then just like the three other known forces, gravity would be transmitted in waves.

The problem is that gravity is so weak that it's very difficult for us to build sensors sensitive enough to measure the wave effects of gravity, or even their absence to any level of certainty to say that gravity is simply a dent, and not a wave.

Until such time, it makes more sense to suppose that gravity behaves like the other three forces, and not like some special unique force, as much as that's how we fundamentally deal with it now.

Re:In Context...

[climb_no_fear]

Ok, how about this example:

I demonstrate by knocking out a gene in mice that I can cure cancer. Let's pretend that this gene encodes an enzyme and given the mechanism of action that an enzyme inhibitor would have the same result. Suppose I'm not a huge pharmaceuticals company but at a university so I don't have the resources to generate such an inhibitor. Assume, however, demonstrating the idea that an inhibitor of this particular enzyme would cure cancer is novel (non-obvious) and let's pretend that the proof in this case is airtight. Is this not worth a patent just because the poor guy/girl doesn't have the 200 million dollars needed to bring such a drug to the market. Even generating an inhibitor that works in a mouse without killing it generally costs about 5 million.

You are therefore suggesting that the price of an anti-cancer patent be $5 million...

P.S. There are other reasons that such patents shouldn't be (but unfortunately are) granted - they actually hinder progress for one.

Re:Jabberwocky!

[MarkRose]

And we all know the only unreal anti-gravity device is a (Score:5, Offtopic)


(Lets see the mods try and make that happen. Hah!

Re:In Context...

[budgenator]

The funny part is this patent started the 17 year clock running about 50 years before even a prototype could be built to test the theory in real-world scale! Even if the device actualy works, the patent will have expired long before the first ship could be tested.

Re:Patent Nonsense--Everyone's Rights are Eroded

[Ruie]

There is one more thing to worry about - the particular patent abounds with junk terms like "vacuum pressure".

This is bad, because inventor was supposed to disclose the invention to obtain a patent and this implies using established terminology to describe it.

Allowing a patent with made up terms is equivalent to allowing wildcards "I patent a thing * that does * and is useful" - the owner of the patent can try to define these terms as legal opportunity presents itself.

Re:Doesn't a physical patent need a working protot

[darkmeridian]

The PTO does not require a working prototype because it does not want all the patents to belong to huge corporations. Pretend you create a nuclear fission reactor that's table-sized. (You're like the second coming of Albert Einstein or something.) If the PTO required a prototype, you would have to find someone with a lot of cash to build the prototype to submit to the PTO. The corporation might steal your idea and take the prototype to the PTO by itself.

So while this lack of a requirement looks ridiculous in this example, there may be other more realistic places where it has protected the small inventor.

Re:rather than power a craft by ANTI-GRAVITY

[ultranova]

we should harness gravity thusly.
let's learn how to block gravity waves on one side, and let the mass of the universe pull on the other side.

with "GRAVITIUM" (either a substance or energy field) blocking the pull of the planet completely
(in the shape of a disc at the bottom of our craft) the rest of the universe will pull us out of the atmosphere pretty damn quickly.

Make a (slowly) spinning disk of this "Gravitium", with holes in it, and spin it beneath an iron ball. Have the iron ball hang by a rope that goes over a wheel and connects to a spring on the other end. Connect the wheel into an electric generator, and have it feed the electric engine that spins the wheel.

Now, as the wheel spins, the gravity of the planet gets blocked (when there's Gravitium under the ball) and unblocked (when there's a hole under the ball). When it gets unblocked, the ball pulls down the rope, spinning the wheel and storing energy on the spring; when it gets blocked, the spring pulls the now-weightless ball back up, spinning the wheel in opposite direction (so you'd propably need some additional system to keep the electric output "clean", but that's not difficult to arrange - a mechanism similar to spring-powered hand watches will suffice just fine). The electricity produced by this should be more than enough to overcome any friction in the Gravitium wheel, and in fact there should be a surplus to feed to the electric grid.

Congratulations, you've just invented the missing piece of the Perpetual Motion Machine - or, since this thing actually produces an energy surplus, the very secrets of creation itself.

Or, to put it in other words, your idea won't work unless the first law of thermodynamics, the principle of Conservation of Energy, is untrue, and energy can actually be created from nothing.

Re:rather than power a craft by ANTI-GRAVITY

[tilk]

Nope. Gravity propagating with infinite speed is violating relativity, because it allows to transmit information faster than light. In your example, scientists on Earth could notice that the planet moves differently before they see the Sun disappear. So, the information about disappearance of the Sun has travelled faster than light. In relativity no information can travel faster than light (or back in time), so if gravity is propagating faster than light, relativity must be wrong.

Re:rather than power a craft by ANTI-GRAVITY

[tabrnaker]

um, space/time squashes you to the planet. Contrary to all the wonderful depictions of masses indenting the flat fabric of space time, it's actually 3d. Picture a marble in a stream of water.