Image: TheDrive
Over the course of U.S history, it has been a well-established tradition for the military to fund the sciences in the hopes of obtaining revolutionary technology that may afford the country an edge in its offensive and defensive capabilities. Although many proposed projects never come to fruition or find practical applications in the battlefield, some of them end-up enriching our understanding of the world and help us gain a deeper insight into the laws of nature. One such historical example of a discovery funded by a USAF grant, was the Kerr metric. This extraordinary piece of mathematical ingenuity - discovered by New Zealander Roy Kerr in the '60s - revolutionized our understanding of astrophysical black holes by predicting their rotation long before it was confirmed.
As we fast-forward in time in search of modern examples of projects anointed by the defense apparatus, we stumbled upon a cache of bizarre patents belonging to the US. Navy which contractions purport to “engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level.” The controversial blueprints, all of them credited to an even more mysterious personage by the name of Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais, contain depictions of propulsion systems, high-temperature superconductors, gravitational wave generators, compact fusion reactors, and other eyebrow-raising high-tech only realized in science fiction films. Despite the recent controversy generated when these patents were uncovered by the media, official records show that the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise is not only vouching for the validity of patents, but even hinting that some of the far-fetched technology described in them is already being tested.
Google Patents
Search and read the full text of patents from around the world with Google Patents, and find prior art in our index of non-patent literature.
patents.google.com