https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en
This was in one of the replies but I am not a physics major or anything so I couldn’t understand anything. Wanted to know what this was for fun.
In: 2
Experts agree that it’s a hoax. Something the US government patented to deliberately deceive about what their military research is about.
They claim it’s some kind of antigravity propulsion. But
A: experts agree that’s impossible and
B: the government doesn’t publish patents for military research projects for everyone to look into.
Also the patent itself doesn’t fulfill the minimum requirements for granting a patent, wich includes fully describing how the mechanism works. (So that a “person skilled in the art” can reproduce it)
The person who patented it handed in a whole bunch of unrealistic futuristic technology and got it unexpectedly granted for unknown reasons despite.
The US Military patents tons of wild ideas that are almost certainly impossible but they want dibs on it
The US patent system doesn’t require that you demonstrate that the thing you’re patenting actually works, just that you detail what it is and how it would work. There are tons and tons of patents out there for systems and ideas that can’t work, or that no one would bother implementing
Anything really good is just classified not patented. Patents have the disadvantage of needing to be published so most important things in industry are held as trade secrets, and in the government they’re classified. The really really good stuff is classified top secret with compartmentalized access so even if you have clearance, unless it directly applies to the work you do you can’t know
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Its an EM drive. The idea behind it is that if you pump a bunch of microwaves into it, they’ll be reflected around inside of the chamber until they escape. More will end up escaping from the large side than the small one, so you get a net force towards the small side. Its essentially an attempt to create an analogue of a solar sail that uses a small, attached microwave emitter as a substitute for the sun.
NASA has built a few of them and in 2016 found a very small net thrust in the direction of the small side. The timing of that experiment lines up with when the patent was filed. The fact that the Navy filed it, rather than NASA, is indicative of the fact that it was actually the military – and not NASA – that was funding that experiment.
There have been a few more experiments since that have found a slight net thrust. In all of the experiments, the amount of thrust found was extremely, extremely small. Right now the consensus is that the apparent thrust being generated isn’t actually thrust, but rather is due to the effect of heat on the shape of the cylinder. The cylinder gets really hot while the microwave is running. Due to its shape, when it gets hot, some of the weight of the cylinder shifts towards its small end, which will result in a very slight reading on the equipment that is being used to measure net thrust.
IE, the current consensus is that it doesn’t actually work and it doesn’t appear as though either NASA or the Navy is funding ongoing experiments into it anymore.
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