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The Inventor of the Navy's 'UFO Patents'

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Re: The Inventor of the Navy's 'UFO Patents'

#51

Post by Khelavaster »

willis936 wrote: post #9
ggm wrote: post #8

The problem I have in this, is that history is littered with things which without hindsight were crazy-batshit-ideas, and in a world of IPR and patents, definitely do get flagged as wierd. But.. then turn out to be useful. Liquid metal refrigerators using electromagnetics to send the fluid around instead of just pumping ammonia? Thats .. crazy. But also, What Szilard and Einstein patented: safer by far, no moving par…

In all of those cases the inventions sounded crazy And no one had really tried it before. A lot of smart people have been working on plasma physics with the goal of controlled fusion for 70 years. HTS research has been ongoing for nearly as long. Suddenly one guy who speaks like a crackpot has discovered things no one else has thought of? Occam’s Razor.

The fusion tractor's control system needs far more EM signal processing and optics than we understood util recently.

Re: The Inventor of the Navy's 'UFO Patents'

#53

Post by Gurathnaka »

Khelavaster wrote: post #50
tragomaskhalos wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "quintessence" bit was a bit of a red flag wasn't it

Not at all-- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintessence_(physics)

I would be careful with that one. 'Dark Energy' has been in this weird grey area for a while now, where we have this observation that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but we have no explanation. There have been a lot of hypothetical explanations. Seems like Quintessence is just one of them.

Recently there has been growing doubt that expansion of the universe is accelerating at all, favoring that it's constant. That would completely undermine this Quintessence thing.

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-evidence-key-assumption-discov...

Re: The Inventor of the Navy's 'UFO Patents'

#54

Post by willis936 »

Khelavaster wrote: post #51
willis936 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all of those cases the inventions sounded crazy And no one had really tried it before. A lot of smart people have been working on plasma physics with the goal of controlled fusion for 70 years. HTS research has been ongoing for nearly as long. Suddenly one guy who speaks like a crackpot has discovered things no one else has thought of? Occam’s Razor.

The fusion tractor's control system needs far more EM signal processing and optics than we understood util recently.

You don’t really need a serious amount of computation even for tokamak feedback systems. The computers of the 90s are adequate. Most other confinement machines (magnetic or otherwise) don’t even need feedback. It’s just bog standard industrial automation/control.

We’ve been on the ball for optics for a long time now. Where computation really comes in handy is in simulation and optimization. Plasma physics is still a very unfinished field and computation is a very valuable tool in speeding up the theory experiment loop.

Re: The Inventor of the Navy's 'UFO Patents'

#55

Post by scottlocklin »

sterlind wrote: post #46
cbanek wrote: post #15

I'd really love some world changing breakthrough technology now. I really would. But I don't really understand this stuff (not that I'm qualified). I guess you can actually patent a perpetual motion machine, so the fact that it is a patent, doesn't seem to require that it be real. I can't help but think back to the 80's SDI "Star Wars" programs. We said that we could do a lot of things that we couldn't, and that made…

SDI freaked out the Russians because it was possible, if not feasible. A number of research projects (e.g. Brilliant Pebbles, Project Excalibur, Shiva Star) were spec'd and tested to various degrees. It would have cost many trillions, but we could have built a missile shield. SDI lives on as the Missile Defense Agency, which has had some modest successes (though nothing like taking down ICBMs during midcourse.) Russi…

MIRVs had been around since the 1960s, and were probably a response to the first gen ABM systems, which were to light off a giant nuke in the path of incoming missiles. I think SDI really did freak out the Soviets; the Russians are still mad every time we field a new kind of ABM, and have been developing numerous obvious countermeasures to them, like "use something that isn't a standard ballistic missile." It's all so tiresome. Everyone should stop.

Of course SDI looked plausible like you said, and ultimately did materialize various ABM systems. This stuff is just insane gorp. Dr Pais has a history of this sort of thing; a quick look at his patent trail on google scholar nets nonsense like "laser augmented jet engines"[1] which are obvious nonsense.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7080504B2/en

Re: The Inventor of the Navy's 'UFO Patents'

#56

Post by nl »

killjoywashere wrote: post #39
ggm wrote: post #8

The problem I have in this, is that history is littered with things which without hindsight were crazy-batshit-ideas, and in a world of IPR and patents, definitely do get flagged as wierd. But.. then turn out to be useful. Liquid metal refrigerators using electromagnetics to send the fluid around instead of just pumping ammonia? Thats .. crazy. But also, What Szilard and Einstein patented: safer by far, no moving par…

So, there's this story that goes around at Office of Naval Research about Enrico Fermi walking in one day and saying he had a new method of powering ships. In retrospect we all realize nuclear power is in fact a great way to power submarines, but they shoo'd him out the door and regretted living to tell the tale. So there's the profound cultural mythos in the Navy around missing out on the next energy solution which…

This sounds like a story that has grown to cover some need.

They can't have shoo'd him away for too long, the Navy started working on it in the 1940s and had one in use by 1953.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Mi...

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