noi siamo noi

You misunderstand - which is your stock in trade. We wouldn't have any problem with a reactionless drive, if your experiments could persuade us that it worked.

Our problem is that your experiments are ill-constructed and the results that you claim are consistent with a few side effects that don't involve any kind of reactionless drive.

You waste your time on high-flown rhetoric, when what you should be doing is constructing more persuasive experiments, whose results are less easy to explain by your failure to rule out less exciting - if more plausible - side effects.

Einstein didn't have much trouble getting his post-Newtonian theories accepted, but he didn't run the experiments that showed that his approach generated better predictions than Newtonian physics did.

The people who did run them were skilled experimentalists who knew how to construct experiments that tested the theory and didn't leave room for alternative ways of explaining the results.

People who are good at theory (and you aren't) aren't necessarily good experimentalists. Wolfgang Pauli was famously bad, and the Pauli Effect is a famous - if not all that serious - commemoration of a time when he seemed to wreck an experiment in Munich, when the train he was on stopped there for a few hours on the way to some other city.

When he's trying to raise 24 million dollars, ostensibly to build a large scale version of his ill-constructed experiments, it isn't fun any more.

If he wanted to spend a lot less money on setting up more convincing experiments than the ones he has told us about so far, it might be more amusing, but 24 million dollars looks rather more like serious fraud.

If he really wanted to test his potty ideas in space, you can launch a cube-sat for about $100,000 - and I know of people who have done it.

$24 million implies a serious disconnection from reality.

True enough. He does amazingly have a patent application filed with WIPO.

They must use the same algorithm as USPTO - if your dollars are green and supplied in sufficient quantity then the application goes onto the books and then waits for someone to bother to shoot it down.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to the OP that once published anyone with the right gear can reproduce his experiment and see for themselves.

I recall the Fleischmann & Pons heavy water and palladium incident when for months afterwards it was impossible to buy any of either material. They were very reputable electrochemists but lousy at calorimetry.

That’s not how it works at all. At least over here, the fees aren’t unreasonable, and there are lots of discounts for small and “micro” entities. I’m in the process of filing one, and it looks like it’ll be around $5k including the patent agent.

I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been involved with over 80 patent cases, roughly half prosecuting and half litigating. The system isn’t perfect, but IME the problems are mostly inherent in a system that tries to give small inventors a chance.

Specifically, the range of expertise required to make really expert examination of all the applications is impossible for a smallish government department, and farming them out is infeasible for a lot of reasons, especially cost and liability.

Most patents never go anywhere. The introduction of maintenance fees means that a lot of low-value patents quietly disappear in a few years.

So I have a few stories, but in general I think the US system works pretty well in practice.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

There you go, then. Don't be mean. The poor guy only needs a paltry

Milli dollars?

Jeroen Belleman

A significant proportion of these sort of investment opportunities turn out to be scams. The inventor may be sincere, but they may have acquaintances who aren't.

Actually, I'm horrified by the ineptitude. Badly designed experiments don't terrify me. People who misunderstand the results they generate are horribly inept, but terror doesn't come into it.

There's a risk that the lack of skill and insight might be concealing a real effect, but that's pretty unlikely. Modern physics works pretty well and any odd effect that could be turned into a reactionless drive would almost certainly have corrupted the results of more conventional experiments testing other propositions.

The most exciting words in experimental science are "that's odd" but they are mostly generated by routine mistakes - like the Italian faster-than light neutrinos from a few years ago.

There are a lot of them in the Maine museum, reportedly the largest collection anywhere. He also has ones that originated from the moon.

The fellow who founded the museum allows visitors to handle them and take photos holding them.

They look and feel like ordinary rocks. But they have been studied extensively, and some have been found to contain some rudimentary genetic materials.