Okay, I know I'm blogging a bunch this week, and this seems more like a Friday afternoon thing than a real workday item, but I can't resist this one. Courtesy of Dave Farber's Interesting People list, we have the discovery of a fascinating patent issued by the USPTO on Nov. 1, 2005 to Boris Volfson.
Topic of patent #6,960,975? "Space Vehicle Propelled by the Pressure of Inflationary Vacuum State". A warp drive. Use 10,000 Tesla magnets and a 5meter shell of superconducting material, and you, too, can warp space and time, and travel at "a speed possibly approaching a local light-speed, the local light-speed which may be substantially higher than the light-speed in the ambient space"!
I wonder if this is the first patent for H.G. Wells' cavorite, the anti-gravity material in his novel The First Men in the Moon? (Volfson calls out the comparison directly.)
PDF and HTML versions of the patent available.
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