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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 approv
by brummm 6y ago
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.
- briffle 6y agoMy 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.
- wrkronmiller 6y agoIf the comments section of HN can figure that out then wouldn't an international superpower?
- jerf 6y agoYes, 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.
- philwelch 6y agoIf 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.
- zelon88 6y agoSometimes all it takes is convincing the one person who controls the rest.
- lisper 6y agoIt's easy to get a patent on just about anything. I have a patent for a faster-than-light communications device: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7126691B2/en 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.
- csours 6y agoAhem KNOWN laws of physics.
- lisper 6y agoIf 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.
- haneefmubarak 6y agoEh. 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.
- lisper 6y ago> 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.