This one came across my desk last week:
Link: Patent issued for anti-gravity device.
…and I have seen the same article a couple of times since. I’m not sure what to make of the story. But I figured if you haven’t heard about it yet, you could hear it here first.
The thing I find curious about this article are these statements:
One of the main theoretical arguments against anti-gravity is that it implies the availability of unlimited energy.
“If you design an anti-gravity machine, you’ve got a perpetual-motion machine,” Robert Park of the American Physical Society told Nature.
Maybe I just have no comprehension of the topic (which would be furstrating considering how long I’ve been studying all this…), but for the life of me, I don’t understand how the concept of “anti-gravity” (however objectionable the term in some circles) necessarily translates into either a source of “unlimited energy” OR “perpetual motion.”
It seems to me that it would be possible to generate a gravitational field without drawing on a source of infinite energy (unless, perhaps, gravity itself is some manifestation of the energy residing in the quantum vacuum, aka “zero point energy”); And why is that whenever something that diverges from the norm comes along, it is immediately dismissed via the rubric of “perpetual motion” ?
Here’s a link to the actual patent.
Any discussion?