I missed this in Nature last week, but the US patent office has approved a patent for a spacecraft powered by antigravity. Here's the abstract of US Patent #6,960,975:
A space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state is provided comprising a hollow superconductive shield, an inner shield, a power source, a support structure, upper and lower means for generating an electromagnetic field, and a flux modulation controller. A cooled hollow superconductive shield is energized by an electromagnetic field resulting in the quantized vortices of lattice ions projecting a gravitomagnetic field that forms a spacetime curvature anomaly outside the space vehicle. The spacetime curvature imbalance, the spacetime curvature being the same as gravity, provides for the space vehicle's propulsion. The space vehicle, surrounded by the spacetime anomaly, may move at a speed approaching the light-speed characteristic for the modified locale. Link
Such a device apparently defies the laws of physics. From Nature:
This is not the first such patent to be granted, but it shows that patent examiners are being duped by false science, says physicist Robert Park, watchdog of junk science at the American Physical Society in Washington DC. Park tracks US patents on impossible inventions. "The patent office is in deep trouble," he says.
"If something doesn't work, it is rejected," insists Alan Cohan, an adviser at the patent office's Inventors Assistance Center in Alexandria, Virginia. And when something does slip through, he says, the consequences are not significant: "It doesn't cause any problems because the patent is useless."
But Park argues that patenting devices that so blatantly go against scientific understanding could give them undeserved respectability, and undermine the patent office's reputation. "When a patent is awarded for an idea that doesn't work, the door is opened for sham." Link (Thanks, Harvey Lehtman!)
