Boris Volfson. Remember that name, because it will go down in history. He is the inventor of the “space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state.” Translation: Anti-grav spaceship. And it looks an awful lot like that device from Stargate. I’ve read a lot of science-fiction in my day, and the abstract to this filing is some of the best in recent memory:
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.
The US Patent Office granted Volfson his patent on November 1. Since it is powered from a nuclear reactor, I don’t expect to see this competing in the next X-Prize Cup or anything.
Patent [via DefenseTech]
