Antigravity craft slips past patent officers
By Philip Ball, in Nature 438, 139 (10 November 2005)
‘Impossible’ device gets seal of approval.
The US patent office has granted a patent on a design for an antigravity device — breaking its own resolution to reject inventions that clearly defy the laws of physics.
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.”
Full story over at Nature