The journalists pursued a two prong strategy for this story. First one was verifying the cockpit videos released years ago via FOIA requests (that was a surprise) that only recently got released by the Navy (a bigger surprise.)
The second prong was their investigation of a supposed scientist working for NAWCAD, named "Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais." Think physicists have looked at the patents and called it word spaghetti. One of the patents literally starts defining how to control gravity.
The journalists are still not sure whether this is a real person doing fraud backed by ignorant leadership trying to save face desperately or a purposeful psyop operation headed by a made-up name and designed to drain foreign government research budgets.
There are a few explanations I can think of, and each of them is rather strange.
1. The whole thing is a dis-info campaign to hook a near adversary into thinking we have spooky next gen technology. This all being public makes me lean this way. Similarly perhaps this is being used as a cover story for some impressive but not physics defying drones, similarly to how "UFOs" were used as an diversion away from projects like Mogul or the f-117 and B-2.
2. Pais is a conman, scamming the military into funding his fraudulent tech.
3. Pais is a breakthrough genius. The Tech is real and in years it will be revealed to the public.
4. The "Bob Lazar" option. "UFOs" as in foreign objects exist and occasionally crash, and are studied and reverse engineered when they do.
It's interesting to note that Pais was recently transferred to submarine command.
This type of disinformation has a history; look at so-called "red mercury" during the Cold War.
An adversary does not need to actually believe everything you say, in order to decide that it's worth looking into what you're trying to hide. This distracts some amount of resources from other investigations, and potentially exposes some of their assets if you've built artificial channels for them to follow.
On the other hand, it's also potentially a great way to find the credible/gullible folks within your adversary, to which you could feed other misinformation later on.
An omission: I did not complete my Punnet square, but you cover it exhaustively. That #2 is a possibility, something far beyond my ability to flesh out. A chance discovery unable to be explained by the discoverer. It reminds me of a Harry Turtledove short story, "The Road Not Taken," about first contact where we accidentally skip over a common technological development. PDF: http://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
Also re: #4 - for what it's worth (and a great entertaining read), Harry Turtledove covers that one too in his "In the Balance" book, where alien invaders show up during WWII. Highly recommend it.
> Pais is a breakthrough genius. The Tech is real and in years it will be revealed to the public.
Or it's already installed on Nimitz-class carriers (with huge tires tucked into hidden underwater pods). The navy is just waiting for a serious war to warrant revealing land-carriers capable of driving hundreds of miles inland.
This explains the Theodore Roosevelt COVID outbreak. Sone sailers probably started blabbing about the giant tires and antigravity machinery and needed to be silenced. Captain Crozier was either also talking too much, or his removal is part of an elaborate double bluff coverup.
I didn't indulge in going too deep, but another article from the same series on The Drive explores China's filing of similar patents, imagining it could be a form of (low effort?) counter-propaganda.
Yeah I remember on the Bob Lazar Joe Rogan episode he kept saying it was not metal and made of some ceramic.
But within 2 hrs in he had to correct himself by saying there's no way you could communitcate via radio because of the supposed conditions keeping it aloft silently.
Another youtube video saying his car was powered by hydrogen, but not stored under pressure because apparently his diy particle accelerator can allow him to produce lithium-6 (not sure about isotope here, but not available public sale) which is the sponge like material in the tanks, metal hydride.
Honestly my intuition is more along the lines of something like the linked comment, but because I lack the technical acumen to for example read the patent and make sense of it my suspicion is I'm being taken for a ride.
That being said the amount of money that goes to SAPs and USAPs is mind boggling, so it also seems plausible it's real. Perhaps that's the desired effect?
Also I recall a comment chain on Fark between two seemingly knowledgeable commentors that claim to be involved researchers and discuss some of the things in your linked comment, I'll see if I can find them.
I dig into this a little bit recently and as far as I can tell, Dr. Pais is a real person and has given at least one interview. I suspect this is an elaborate disinformation hoax.
If this were true (I doubt it), that's an insanely short patent (6 pages) with barely any information about the device. How would something like this get approved. That's insane.
My guess, it, along with the released 'UFO' video's that were leaked a while ago, and released last week, are some sort of an attempt to either make other countries think we have that tech, or waste a TON of money and time trying to do it themselves, while we focus on other things.
Yes, absolutely, an international superpower will realize it's a possibility. However, they may have about as much luck as the comments section of HN in being sure.
It's an asymmetrical thing; you spend a drop in the bucket putting out this sort of disinformation, and if they spend $10 million in black ops research following up on it, you win in relative terms.
There's other possibilities you can come up with, too; throw the conspiracy theorists a bit of what seems to be red meat every once in a while and they'll maintain a smokescreen of radical disinformation and a thick patina of disbelievability over everything that even remotely resembles this sort of thing for almost free. The truth may well be in that mess somewhere but good luck picking it out.
If international superpowers consistently put technical expertise over the whims of bureaucrats, the Challenger disaster and Chernobyl would have never happened. The US wasted a lot of effort during the Cold War investigating parapsychology and remote viewing.
If you can communicate faster than light then you can send information backwards in time. That's not just a violation of the known laws of physics, that's a causal paradox, which is much, much worse. It's actually conceivable that the Navy's gadget could work (though I will give you incredibly long odds against). It's not even conceivable that mine would even under alternate laws of physics. The universe would have to be logically incoherent to allow that.
Eh. Suppose our current theory of relativity was wrong in some specific way or someone came up with something that sidestepped our current understanding - you could still have a logically coherent universe in those scenarios, because it'd just mean that our current understanding and theories of how the universe works were wrong.
> Suppose our current theory of relativity was wrong in some specific way
There aren't many ways in which relativity can be wrong. Relativity follows logically from the assumption that the laws of electrodynamics are independent of the observer's state of motion. The evidence that this is true is overwhelming. To overturn this part of physics would be comparable to showing that the earth is in fact flat.
I'm not saying that it is wrong - experiments and data to date seem to mostly validate our current theories etc - I'm just trying to point out that it's not inconceivable that we might not have a 100% correct theory and that that the parts that we're incorrect on could lead to possibilities that we would otherwise consider inconsistent (within our current understanding).
I'm sure that historically, scientifically minded folks who believed in whatever they thought they knew at the time considered some aspects of their "knowledge" to be incontrovertible given how overwhelmingly the evidence until then seemed to support their theories - until it didn't.
There's not a reasonable reason to expect that we have arrived at the ultimate understanding of most things such that most if not all new discoveries will only be refinements; the evidence until now has shown that that approach to science has been incorrect for basically most of history.
I'm saying that it could be wrong (as any and all things could be), not that it currently is.
Im also aware of Asimov's essay on the topic of how wrong something can be. That being said, his point about getting less wrong really addresses one thing: theories are largely formed on predictive power and we improve over time as we collect more observations and attempt to address the inconsistencies between our theories and our observations to the contrary. As a result, since newer theories should have greater predictive power, they should be less wrong, and thus should have a higher probability of being correct. None of that, however, necessitates that the current theories should have a 100% probability of being correct.
Keeping that in mind, it is worthwhile to realize that there are questions that can be asked today given our current level of understanding and observation that are simply nonsensical to ask in a prior time frame (easy example: asking "what is the band gap voltage of InGaAs?" in 1600 AD). This means that results that seem impossible at a given time frame (real time displays that render imagined worlds) become a simple question of how to in a different time frame.
Putting this all together: we could definitely be wrong about anything. Sure, theories that seem consistent and have consistently provided good predictive power across most of not all current observations are useful, but they don't preclude new discoveries that could be even more correct and allow for things that we couldn't have previously considered possible.
> it could be wrong (as any and all things could be), not that it currently is
Unless you think the laws of physics can change over time, this is false. Unless the actual underlying laws of physics change with time, Einsteinian relativity at this moment is either correct or it is not. More to the point, the principle of relativity, i.e. that the laws of physics are the same in all reference frames, is either correct or it is not, and Maxwell's equations are either correct or they are not. My money is on all of these things being correct, which logically entails the impossibility of FTL signaling.
Yes, any of these things could be wrong. And it might be possible to violate the second law of thermodynamics, and the earth could be flat, and Bigfoot might be real. Personally I put all of these things in the same category: the odds of any of them being true are indistinguishable from zero. But if you're feeling lucky, by all means, feel free to pursue any of them. I won't stand in your way.
BTW...
> theories are largely formed on predictive power
No, scientific theories are selected according to their explanatory power, not their predictive power. Ptolemaic epicycles are a perfectly good predictive theory of planetary motion to within the margin of error of observation for several thousand years of human history. It is nonetheless absolutely without merit as a scientific theory because it purely descriptive, not explanatory.
>Ptolemaic epicycles are a perfectly good predictive theory of planetary motion to within the margin of error of observation for several thousand years of human history.
Except for Mercury. The math for Mercury's orbit didn't add up until general relativity came along and frame dragging could be taken into account[0].
This doesn't contradict your point, because Pluto's orbit was a sign of something that observable physics couldn't explain, pointing towards a more complete explanation. As far as I'm aware, there's no "hole" in physics that can only be explained by the existence of antigravity, and models in which it exists don't have the same or better explanatory power as current models.
The fallacy here lies in looking back at the advance of science and assuming that because models were inaccurate before, they must always be arbitrarily inaccurate. Rather, the more we learn, the less likely it becomes that everything we know is entirely wrong, because any new models have to explain every observable facet of reality that the current one does as well as fill in gaps.
"The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong."
always a great read. this bad logic he describes is also one of the most frustrating things about politics
Does general relativity explicitly rule out causal paradoxes?
It's my understanding that causality is more of a fundamental axiom of the scientific method than a direct product of general relativity theory specifically.
That's right. The impossibility of causal paradoxes has nothing to do with relativity, it's a consequence of basic logic. ((P AND (NOT P)) IMPLIES Q) is a tautology of propositional logic, so if there were ever a physical situation in with P and (NOT P) were simultaneously true then there would remain only two possibilities: either 1) propositional logic is not an accurate model of reality or 2) no proposition is false. Either way, all of science and math instantly go poof.
I think it's certainly possible that a model built on propositional logic does not cover the whole of reality. I struggle to think of how a system of thinking built on propositional logic could completely exclude the possibility of information that it can't prove. This feels like we're getting into Godel territory.
I don't see how that would necessarily mean that all science and math go poof; if some phenomena satisfy our axioms, they would continue to satisfy analysis based on those axioms. If some phenomena do not, they would be excluded from our analysis.
We already hypothesize at least one such event: the Big Bang. Scientifically, it's nonsensical to reason about what happened "before" it to cause it; but we also seem to have a ton of evidence that it actually happened.
I'm not trying to be woo-woo new-agey here BTW. I don't think it's wrong to consider the limits of scientific analysis.
> I think it's certainly possible that a model built on propositional logic does not cover the whole of reality.
Not only is it possible, this is the normal state of affairs. Until we have a theory-of-everything, none of our models cover the whole of reality.
But all of our models rest on a foundation of certain basic assumptions. Among these are that (some) statements about reality can be classified as true or false, and that these are mutually exclusive possibilities. Not all statements can be classified as true or false (e.g. Euclid's fifth postulate) but for the ones that can, if it is true then it is not false, and if it is false then it is not true.
If you deny that, then the entire edifice of human intellectual achievement really does crumble into dust.
You're saying that, in principle, new physics could allow for FTL travel that nevertheless does not permit time travel and the grandfather paradox etc, right?
Yep! Alternatively, perhaps new physics would allow for what appears to be "time travel" but in reality is not (travel between the present here and a different "time" in a remarkably similar but parallel universe).
Closed timelike curves (i.e. causal loops) are exotic but not altogether outside of mainstream physics. The basic fact of continuity that's inherent in QM means that no logical paradox arises; consistency is always possible. FTL is more problematic for other, less directly-related reasons.
Pick some example of a "causal paradox" of the sort that might introduced by FTL signaling. If the underlying system is a quantum one (hence with continuous amplitudes, albeit the reasoning also extends to simple probabilities) no logical paradox actually arises because the underlying values are continuous. This would imply that there's no difference between that and a CTC.
Of course larger-scale physics appears classical to us but that's a consequence of quantum decoherence and ultimately of the "law" of increasing entropy (2nd law of thermodynamics). Which is just as much of an obstacle to classical CTC's.
The word "signaling" necessarily implies the transfer of classical information (because of the no-cloning theorem) and that in turn implies some model of the transition between quantum and classical. Whether that transition is (meta)physically real (i.e. collapse) or just an arbitrary threshold applied to a continuous process (decoherence) doesn't matter. What matters is that FTL leads to a logical contradiction with respect to the characterization of the state with respect to whatever model you choose to apply. The underlying metaphysical reality is irrelevant.
Eh, that model might still allow you to probabilistically send information back in time, in a way that saves the universe from an outright causal paradox (a weird "chronology-protection" principle of sorts). You can't send your patent back in time and generate prior art that destroys it, but you can end up with a 50:50 probability of doing so, and that description is logically self-consistent. Probability is still "classical".
All communication is probabilistic. There is no such thing as a noiseless communications channel. But per Claude Shannon you can always tilt the odds in your favor as much as you like given enough time and energy.
Ah, it's not the laws of physics you care about! It's causal paradoxes!
In other words, you want the patent office to not only know the laws of physics (reasonable), but also have a deep knowledge including where there is future potential for change in understanding (maybe less reasonable).
I would expect someone at the patent office to be familiar with the basics of modern physics, including the "cosmic speed limit" imposed by the speed of light. I would not necessarily expect them to know why nothing can move faster than c, but I would expect them to know that nothing can and to reject a patent for something that moves faster than c on those grounds.
There is actually a specific rule for this sort of thing:
It is indicative to me of a certain level of intellectual laziness on the part of the patent office. This laziness has consequences. For example, everyone who wants to go into business making something that involves quantum entanglement has to at least consider the possibility that my patent is valid and that this might be a threat to their business model.
Even if my patent is not valid, I can still use it to extort money from them simply by asserting that it is valid and that they are infringing on it. Once the patent has issued, the burden of proof is on them to show that I'm wrong and it may well be cheaper for them to buy me off than pay a lawyer to defend themselves against my lawsuit. This is what makes patent trolling profitable.
From 2016 already. Note from the wikipedia page of the filer of this patent: "His patent applications on behalf of his employers have attracted international attention for their potential military and energy-producing applications, but also doubt about their feasibility, and speculation that they may be misinformation intended to mislead the United States' strategic adversaries about the direction of United States defense research."
In particular it's pretty wild that:
- this effect does not seem to have been replicated in outside laboratories
- the US military would willingly share details about how it works through the patent system while they can also just not tell anyone.
I don't know anything about quantum vacuum but from reading this I assume that the entire mechanism follows trivially from the underlying physical properties. Or in other words, wasn't this application apparent when physicists theorized these properties in the first place? And shouldn't the IP belong to the public which subsidized the research?
IF the patent were not a fraud or disinformation (it certainly is one of these), then it would not "follow trivially", it would be the biggest discovery in physics in 50-100 years. It would be monumental.
Unfortunately, it is either fraud or some kind of disinformation.
Appears the scientist [1] that filed this patent has a history of filing patents that “stretch the limits of science” — which to me increases the odds the only thing being stretched is the truth:
Right, and among them are more[0] patents held by the US Navy for high-temperature superconductors and "high frequency gravity wave generators." It's clear he has at least one patron within the DoD; it's a shame that the technical oversight over this program is so credulous.
I’m glad to see this again. This patent is the first thing I thought of when the “UFO” admission news hit last week. I’m guessing what we’re seeing is probably some experimental stuff. Hopefully it’s our stuff.
"As [Baron Vladimir Harkonnen] emerged from the shadows, his figure took on dimension — grossly and immensely fat. And with subtle bulges beneath folds of his dark robes to reveal that all this fat was sustained partly by portable suspensors harnessed to his flesh. He might weigh two hundred Standard kilos in actuality, but his feet would carry no more than fifty of them."
As I've gotten older and fatter this seems like a better idea. I'm ready for my portable suspensors now please. This may help to solve the Navy's problem with obesity among recruits.
Your comment reminds me of a news service reporting on some previous levitation/antigrav tech. The application they suggested was "floating burn victims in hospitals".
That's the best you can think of for a floating-things technology???
The "background" section of this particular patent [0] starts pretty sane (if obviously a little grandiose--enough to get one's guard up) but rapidly and suddenly dips off the rails. The trouble is that the mostly unintelligible details about "hyper-frequency" rotational and vibrational coupled modes are interspersed in a bunch of technically correct--if vapid--physical statements about quantum fields pervading all of spacetime, and other phenomena being emergent of excitations in these fields. (Notwithstanding the fact that uniting QFT with gravity is the biggest open problem in Physics today...)
I think this is an illustrating case in how much easier it is to create high-falutin' nonsense than it is to debunk it. Most of the claims are somewhat vague but they touch on areas where someone needs a lot of knowledge and precision to coherently dispute them.
I highly recommend reading a patent lawyer's research into the history of this particular patent from the last time it was posted here[1]. Apparently the examiner tried to reject the patent claim several times on technical bases, against the protest of some Navy brass, before finally admitting it without comment months later.
>> I think this is an illustrating case in how much easier it is to create high-falutin' nonsense than it is to debunk it.
Are there jobs around as debunkers? Sometime I think I'd be good at that. It seems like someone should have a vested interest in having accurate models of reality and being able to spot BS.
Ironically, in the DoD contracting world there are roles like this; SETA (systems engineering and technical assurance) and SME (subject matter expert) contracting roles from disinterested third parties are usually a required function in DoD acquisition programs. These folks are basically paid skeptics of the work being done by the prime contractors, which is a good failsafe to build in for >$100MM tax-funded programs and for weapons and vehicles that can kill people. In this particular case, though, the hokum is coming internally from a government lab, and the work is early research, so it doesn't have to meet the same validation standards.
"polarized vacuum" I'm sure those two words could be elaborated upon, certainly does seem to be a couple of nice words when put together make you go - errrm
Build a craft with a cold fusion power plant, an EM-Drive propulsion system, one of these babies for lift, and an Alcubierre drive for once it breaks orbit you'd really have something.
Let's be clear about one thing, it is far more likely that this object is terrestrial. Going off of this, thee country most likely to pull this off would the the United States.
The USN has been watching too much Macross in their free time. And couple this with fuzzy deep fake videos, media complicity, and high-ranking "reliable authorities" behaving as actors must be getting a good kick out of trolling the public for "natsec" "reasons." Without independently-verifiable evidence, big claims are most likely big yarns.
The tech behind is sound. There do exist similar "antigravity" devices. And patents.
The problem is to make gravitomagnetic fields efficient. Currently it's barely measurable.
Pais' idea does look good, esp. the idea to hook up two such spinning superconductors and twist their axis a bit. That's the UFO patent. AFAIK he is trying to build such a thing with the navy right now. In the lab in my city they tried similar things, but their lab is very small, and they cannot verify Pais' idea. The navy should be good enough. Interesting moonshot, but probably nothing will come out of it.
98 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadThe journalists pursued a two prong strategy for this story. First one was verifying the cockpit videos released years ago via FOIA requests (that was a surprise) that only recently got released by the Navy (a bigger surprise.)
The second prong was their investigation of a supposed scientist working for NAWCAD, named "Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais." Think physicists have looked at the patents and called it word spaghetti. One of the patents literally starts defining how to control gravity.
The journalists are still not sure whether this is a real person doing fraud backed by ignorant leadership trying to save face desperately or a purposeful psyop operation headed by a made-up name and designed to drain foreign government research budgets.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31798/the-secretive-in...
It's a fascinating story, I hope someone gets to the bottom of this.
1. The whole thing is a dis-info campaign to hook a near adversary into thinking we have spooky next gen technology. This all being public makes me lean this way. Similarly perhaps this is being used as a cover story for some impressive but not physics defying drones, similarly to how "UFOs" were used as an diversion away from projects like Mogul or the f-117 and B-2.
2. Pais is a conman, scamming the military into funding his fraudulent tech.
3. Pais is a breakthrough genius. The Tech is real and in years it will be revealed to the public.
4. The "Bob Lazar" option. "UFOs" as in foreign objects exist and occasionally crash, and are studied and reverse engineered when they do.
It's interesting to note that Pais was recently transferred to submarine command.
An adversary does not need to actually believe everything you say, in order to decide that it's worth looking into what you're trying to hide. This distracts some amount of resources from other investigations, and potentially exposes some of their assets if you've built artificial channels for them to follow.
On the other hand, it's also potentially a great way to find the credible/gullible folks within your adversary, to which you could feed other misinformation later on.
Also re: #4 - for what it's worth (and a great entertaining read), Harry Turtledove covers that one too in his "In the Balance" book, where alien invaders show up during WWII. Highly recommend it.
That benthic treaty ain't gonna write itself, mr. howard.
Or it's already installed on Nimitz-class carriers (with huge tires tucked into hidden underwater pods). The navy is just waiting for a serious war to warrant revealing land-carriers capable of driving hundreds of miles inland.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28729/docs-show-navy-g...
But within 2 hrs in he had to correct himself by saying there's no way you could communitcate via radio because of the supposed conditions keeping it aloft silently.
Another youtube video saying his car was powered by hydrogen, but not stored under pressure because apparently his diy particle accelerator can allow him to produce lithium-6 (not sure about isotope here, but not available public sale) which is the sponge like material in the tanks, metal hydride.
Part of the ongoing Psy-Op, "beliver", or what?
Made me think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury :-)
Who knows?
Also I recall a comment chain on Fark between two seemingly knowledgeable commentors that claim to be involved researchers and discuss some of the things in your linked comment, I'll see if I can find them.
The comments of "erewhon" (I think the same guy goes by "Tom Bedlam" on other sites) and "jvoight0205" are particularly interesting. https://m.fark.com/comments/1386759/11863499 https://m.fark.com/comments/1203844/9730116 https://m.fark.com/comments/4371964/50871026
Thx
It's an asymmetrical thing; you spend a drop in the bucket putting out this sort of disinformation, and if they spend $10 million in black ops research following up on it, you win in relative terms.
There's other possibilities you can come up with, too; throw the conspiracy theorists a bit of what seems to be red meat every once in a while and they'll maintain a smokescreen of radical disinformation and a thick patina of disbelievability over everything that even remotely resembles this sort of thing for almost free. The truth may well be in that mess somewhere but good luck picking it out.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7126691B2/en
I filed it as an exercise to see if you can get a patent on a device that violates the laws of physics. Turns out you can.
There aren't many ways in which relativity can be wrong. Relativity follows logically from the assumption that the laws of electrodynamics are independent of the observer's state of motion. The evidence that this is true is overwhelming. To overturn this part of physics would be comparable to showing that the earth is in fact flat.
I'm sure that historically, scientifically minded folks who believed in whatever they thought they knew at the time considered some aspects of their "knowledge" to be incontrovertible given how overwhelmingly the evidence until then seemed to support their theories - until it didn't.
There's not a reasonable reason to expect that we have arrived at the ultimate understanding of most things such that most if not all new discoveries will only be refinements; the evidence until now has shown that that approach to science has been incorrect for basically most of history.
This is exactly what you said:
> Suppose our current theory of relativity was wrong
You should read this:
https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht...
Im also aware of Asimov's essay on the topic of how wrong something can be. That being said, his point about getting less wrong really addresses one thing: theories are largely formed on predictive power and we improve over time as we collect more observations and attempt to address the inconsistencies between our theories and our observations to the contrary. As a result, since newer theories should have greater predictive power, they should be less wrong, and thus should have a higher probability of being correct. None of that, however, necessitates that the current theories should have a 100% probability of being correct.
Keeping that in mind, it is worthwhile to realize that there are questions that can be asked today given our current level of understanding and observation that are simply nonsensical to ask in a prior time frame (easy example: asking "what is the band gap voltage of InGaAs?" in 1600 AD). This means that results that seem impossible at a given time frame (real time displays that render imagined worlds) become a simple question of how to in a different time frame.
Putting this all together: we could definitely be wrong about anything. Sure, theories that seem consistent and have consistently provided good predictive power across most of not all current observations are useful, but they don't preclude new discoveries that could be even more correct and allow for things that we couldn't have previously considered possible.
Unless you think the laws of physics can change over time, this is false. Unless the actual underlying laws of physics change with time, Einsteinian relativity at this moment is either correct or it is not. More to the point, the principle of relativity, i.e. that the laws of physics are the same in all reference frames, is either correct or it is not, and Maxwell's equations are either correct or they are not. My money is on all of these things being correct, which logically entails the impossibility of FTL signaling.
Yes, any of these things could be wrong. And it might be possible to violate the second law of thermodynamics, and the earth could be flat, and Bigfoot might be real. Personally I put all of these things in the same category: the odds of any of them being true are indistinguishable from zero. But if you're feeling lucky, by all means, feel free to pursue any of them. I won't stand in your way.
BTW...
> theories are largely formed on predictive power
No, scientific theories are selected according to their explanatory power, not their predictive power. Ptolemaic epicycles are a perfectly good predictive theory of planetary motion to within the margin of error of observation for several thousand years of human history. It is nonetheless absolutely without merit as a scientific theory because it purely descriptive, not explanatory.
Except for Mercury. The math for Mercury's orbit didn't add up until general relativity came along and frame dragging could be taken into account[0].
This doesn't contradict your point, because Pluto's orbit was a sign of something that observable physics couldn't explain, pointing towards a more complete explanation. As far as I'm aware, there's no "hole" in physics that can only be explained by the existence of antigravity, and models in which it exists don't have the same or better explanatory power as current models.
The fallacy here lies in looking back at the advance of science and assuming that because models were inaccurate before, they must always be arbitrarily inaccurate. Rather, the more we learn, the less likely it becomes that everything we know is entirely wrong, because any new models have to explain every observable facet of reality that the current one does as well as fill in gaps.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2015/11/25/how-...
Edit: I meant Mercury, not Pluto, and the other relativity. Oops.
You mean Mercury.
> The math for Pluto's orbit didn't add up until special relativity came along and frame dragging could be taken into account[0].
You mean general relativity.
> the more we learn, the less likely it becomes that everything we know is entirely wrong
Exactly.
always a great read. this bad logic he describes is also one of the most frustrating things about politics
It's my understanding that causality is more of a fundamental axiom of the scientific method than a direct product of general relativity theory specifically.
I don't see how that would necessarily mean that all science and math go poof; if some phenomena satisfy our axioms, they would continue to satisfy analysis based on those axioms. If some phenomena do not, they would be excluded from our analysis.
We already hypothesize at least one such event: the Big Bang. Scientifically, it's nonsensical to reason about what happened "before" it to cause it; but we also seem to have a ton of evidence that it actually happened.
I'm not trying to be woo-woo new-agey here BTW. I don't think it's wrong to consider the limits of scientific analysis.
Not only is it possible, this is the normal state of affairs. Until we have a theory-of-everything, none of our models cover the whole of reality.
But all of our models rest on a foundation of certain basic assumptions. Among these are that (some) statements about reality can be classified as true or false, and that these are mutually exclusive possibilities. Not all statements can be classified as true or false (e.g. Euclid's fifth postulate) but for the ones that can, if it is true then it is not false, and if it is false then it is not true.
If you deny that, then the entire edifice of human intellectual achievement really does crumble into dust.
Those are not the same as FTL signaling. CTCs don't by themselves produce causal paradoxes. FTL signaling does.
Pick some example of a "causal paradox" of the sort that might introduced by FTL signaling. If the underlying system is a quantum one (hence with continuous amplitudes, albeit the reasoning also extends to simple probabilities) no logical paradox actually arises because the underlying values are continuous. This would imply that there's no difference between that and a CTC.
Of course larger-scale physics appears classical to us but that's a consequence of quantum decoherence and ultimately of the "law" of increasing entropy (2nd law of thermodynamics). Which is just as much of an obstacle to classical CTC's.
In other words, you want the patent office to not only know the laws of physics (reasonable), but also have a deep knowledge including where there is future potential for change in understanding (maybe less reasonable).
There is actually a specific rule for this sort of thing:
https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2011/10/11/the-patent-law-of-perp...
It is generally applied to perpetual motion machines.
Even if my patent is not valid, I can still use it to extort money from them simply by asserting that it is valid and that they are infringing on it. Once the patent has issued, the burden of proof is on them to show that I'm wrong and it may well be cheaper for them to buy me off than pay a lawyer to defend themselves against my lawsuit. This is what makes patent trolling profitable.
In particular it's pretty wild that:
- this effect does not seem to have been replicated in outside laboratories
- the US military would willingly share details about how it works through the patent system while they can also just not tell anyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act
It is a pretty good example of how the patent system is broken. Like for example someone patenting dropdowns...
https://patents.justia.com/patent/10078623
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)
Unfortunately, it is either fraud or some kind of disinformation.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvatore_Pais
[0] https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Salvatore+Cezar+Pais
As I've gotten older and fatter this seems like a better idea. I'm ready for my portable suspensors now please. This may help to solve the Navy's problem with obesity among recruits.
That's the best you can think of for a floating-things technology???
I think this is an illustrating case in how much easier it is to create high-falutin' nonsense than it is to debunk it. Most of the claims are somewhat vague but they touch on areas where someone needs a lot of knowledge and precision to coherently dispute them.
I highly recommend reading a patent lawyer's research into the history of this particular patent from the last time it was posted here[1]. Apparently the examiner tried to reject the patent claim several times on technical bases, against the protest of some Navy brass, before finally admitting it without comment months later.
[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763445
Are there jobs around as debunkers? Sometime I think I'd be good at that. It seems like someone should have a vested interest in having accurate models of reality and being able to spot BS.
Or, with respect to classical music, substitute Mozart or Beethoven for Elvis...
With respect to this kind of stuff, there was John Ernst Worrell Keely:
Hans von Lieven: KeelyTech: Paper on John Ernst Worrell Keely
https://merlib.org/node/5064
"Before the Navy did anything, Keely did everything..."
Also, if you're going to study Keely, watch out -- there's a lot of fake news and disinformation...
The problem is to make gravitomagnetic fields efficient. Currently it's barely measurable. Pais' idea does look good, esp. the idea to hook up two such spinning superconductors and twist their axis a bit. That's the UFO patent. AFAIK he is trying to build such a thing with the navy right now. In the lab in my city they tried similar things, but their lab is very small, and they cannot verify Pais' idea. The navy should be good enough. Interesting moonshot, but probably nothing will come out of it.