Patentable device to destroy the universe?

Horatius said:
Well, I've done some searching on variations of "destroy the universe", and I can't find anything. So you wouldn't have too much prior art to overcome.
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Does fiction count as prior art? In this case the story Huntsman mentioned seems to have exactly the same idea, and I'm sure many things have been part of sci-fi that could be real in the future. Does this mean we can't patent things like warp-drives, or are only factual accounts counted?
 
Buckaroo said:
It sure does, surprisingly. It would be looked at very closely, but if it reads sufficiently on the claims of the patent it would be a perfectly proper reference.
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The key is if the story can be considered an "enabling disclosure", that is, are there enough details that someone "skilled in the art" could without difficulty produce the described device.

In the case of our Universe Destroyer, it probably would be. We're essentially saying, "Take this known PM device, and hook the input to the output, and stand back". Anyone familiar with basic PM device engineering would be expected to know how to make such a simple connection.

With a Warp Drive, it probably wouldn't be sufficient. "Just warp the fabric of Space and Time". Okay, so how do we do that? I dunno. Just do it! In this case, it would require additional inventiveness to implement the basic idea.

The hard part with citing such sources though, is finding them. There are lots of searchable databases for patents and technical writing, but not so many for cool sci-fi ideas. You're mostly relying on the geek cred of the examiners at that point.


ETA: Also, while a basic idea might not be patentable because it was discussed in a story, there may be some inventive material in how the idea was implemented. It would depend on the nature of the device, mosty. Say, a new type of power connection for our PM/Universe Destroyer.
 
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osmosis said:
Reading SWIFT got me thinking about perpetual motion machines.

If you could actually create a machine that outputs >100% of it's input, what would stop you from feeding the output back to the input and creating infinite energy instantly? The entire universe would be destroyed!

I wonder if such a device would be granted a US patent.. it would be a great joke on them if they let it slip through. Think of it: patent #XXXX - Universe Destroyer. :D
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Easy, the RPG Unknown Armies addressed this problem with perpetual motion machines. That is they are easy for mechanomancers to build but as they tend to run faster and faster eventually they suffer a mechanical failure as they exceed the material strength involved and sort of explode. But it would not necessarily be all that large of an explosion.
 
NobbyNobbs said:
I state the following knowing full well that the US Patent Office is often frowned upon by Randi and many others here. I am fully prepared to take the brunt of jokes at my expense.

I am a relatively new employee of the USPTO, currently training to be a patent examiner. There's a ton of information to be learned, but among it is this little tidbit: the patent office does its very best not to grant patent to ideas that break the laws of nature. There's a term for it, "judicial exception". The term refers to the fact that originally, the courts deemed as patentable "everything under the sun". Then they thought about it, said "oops", and created judicial exceptions. Judicial exceptions include:

-laws of nature (you can't patent gravity)
-abstract ideas (you can't patent the color blue)
-mathematical constructs (you can't patent pi)
-things that break the laws of nature (you can't patent PPMs)

When we see one of these, they come under 35 U.S.C. 101. They are unpatentable.

(By the way, Randi was incorrect. It is true that the one and only invention the USPTO requires a working model of before it grants a patent is a PPM. I could quote you chapter and verse, if anyone wants it.)

Mind you, sometimes it's difficult to tell. The patent attorneys that the applicants hire couch the invention in so much language that it's often tough to figure out just what they are claiming to have invented.

I think one of the reasons the USPTO comes under fire so much is that it grants patents for seemingly stupid stuff. The thing is, the PTO isn't charged with making sure that an invention works, or is marketable, or is a good idea. We're only charged with making sure it hasn't been done before (basically. That's actually a very simplified way of putting it.)

This is why you get patents for stuff like "nose bleed detectors" or whatever. It's not our job to make sure the invention isn't stupid, just that the application is proper.

My 2 cents. I now open my arms and embrace the flames.
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I don't know, I dislike some of what can be pattented, but of course that is a legal problem not one that the workers have any say over.

I just don't see the merit in pattenting things like tax shelters, and then pattent trolls and the like.

I think it is a bit like complaining about US drug laws and then having police take it personaly.
 
NobbyNobbs said:
I think one of the reasons the USPTO comes under fire so much is that it grants patents for seemingly stupid stuff. The thing is, the PTO isn't charged with making sure that an invention works, or is marketable, or is a good idea. We're only charged with making sure it hasn't been done before (basically. That's actually a very simplified way of putting it.)
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Not to rain on your parade, but in my experience, the reason (among the geek community, at least) that the USPTO comes under fire so much is primarily that they have no idea what constitutes "prior art" and/or "obvious." The infamous XOR patent (which I'm not going to look up right now) is a good example of both; not only was it mathematically obvious, but it had been used for years before someone filed the patent.
 
drkitten said:
Not to rain on your parade, but in my experience, the reason (among the geek community, at least) that the USPTO comes under fire so much is primarily that they have no idea what constitutes "prior art" and/or "obvious." The infamous XOR patent (which I'm not going to look up right now) is a good example of both; not only was it mathematically obvious, but it had been used for years before someone filed the patent.
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Can't really defend the prior art probelms here, but I think you'll find that on the question of "obvious", there's a lot more going on than most people realize.

When patent professionals use the term "obvious", it's being used in a very specialized manner, and it's definitely not what most people mean by "obvious". The term "obvious" has been rather heavily constrained by the jurisprudence, and there are several tests which must be applied to determine if an alleged invention is "obvious" for patent purposes or not. And these tests are exceeding stringent. In fact, if you were to follow the rules used in the USPTO, it's darn near impossible to claim that something is obvious. I'm glad I'm here in Canada, as our rules, while still more restrictive than regular folks expect, aren't nearly as bad as the US.

Of course, that doesn't stop US applicants from trying to push us closer to the US rules.
 
The over-unity device is not necessarily a universe destroyer. With any unbounded exponential increase in energy you will soon reach the energy density required to produce mass M=EC-2. Even if the mass is expanding at the speed of light it will eventually be confined by the Schwarzschild radius and form a black hole thereby isolating the over unity device from the rest of the universe.
 
Dan O. said:
The over-unity device is not necessarily a universe destroyer. With any unbounded exponential increase in energy you will soon reach the energy density required to produce mass M=EC-2. Even if the mass is expanding at the speed of light it will eventually be confined by the Schwarzschild radius and form a black hole thereby isolating the over unity device from the rest of the universe.
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Well, yeah, assuming you're blinkered enough to accept conventional science :rolleyes:

I mean, we're assuming a PM device, so regular science is right out the window, isn't it?
 
Hmmm.

What if you incorporated your PM device into a self-replicating robot that made more self-replicating PM devices? You'd end up with an exponential growth curve. Since you have, essentially, unlimited energy, you could (theoretically) produce matter from the abundant energy, thus removing the need for raw materials.

So, assuming a robot/PM the size of a breadbox, and that it takes, say, 1 year to make a copy of itself, how long would it take before the ends of the "production line" were "moving" apart faster than the speed of light? How long before the known universe was full of breadbox PMs?
 
Since the breadbox PM machines are moving apart faster that light speed, causality is violated so the universe would be full before you started and the breadboxes would appear to be moving together and disassembling themselves until the last unit is disassembled and the technology is lost forever.
 
Dan O.:

No, that's why I put "moving" in parenthesis. It's like the bookshelf analogy. If 1000 people are in a line, and each places a book on a bookshelf at exactly the same time (or a very minute fraction of a second after the one before it), then the "ends" of the line of books are moving apart faster than light speed, even though no actual object is moving FTL.

That was the idea I was getting at, I realize I wasn't clear. Sorry about that :)
 
Huntsman said:
Hmmm.

What if you incorporated your PM device into a self-replicating robot that made more self-replicating PM devices? You'd end up with an exponential growth curve. Since you have, essentially, unlimited energy, you could (theoretically) produce matter from the abundant energy, thus removing the need for raw materials.

So, assuming a robot/PM the size of a breadbox, and that it takes, say, 1 year to make a copy of itself, how long would it take before the ends of the "production line" were "moving" apart faster than the speed of light? How long before the known universe was full of breadbox PMs?
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You'd need a Laxian Key.
 
Horatius said:
Can't really defend the prior art probelms here, but I think you'll find that on the question of "obvious", there's a lot more going on than most people realize.

When patent professionals use the term "obvious", it's being used in a very specialized manner, and it's definitely not what most people mean by "obvious".

...snip
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Agreed. And as someone that decides which patents our company pursues, we have to watch out for this.

When we train engineers in filing disclosures, one phrase keeps coming up:

"To an engineer, everything is obvious. To a patent examiner, nothing is."
 
slyjoe said:
"To an engineer, everything is obvious. To a patent examiner agent, nothing is."
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Fixed it for ya!


Actually, most examiners would like to reject more applications as being obvious, but we're restricted by the courts. You'd be amazed at some of the arguments I've gotten from patent agents about why their gizmo isn't obvious.

As an example, I recently examined a case where the fellow was doing essentially the same thing as an earlier patent. The earlier patent showed a trackball device to control certain aspects of a machine. The new application was using a multi-function mouse in place of the trackball, with some added controls being operated by the mouse, since it had more controls. When I explained that that was an obvious change in a known device, his response could be summed up by a slight misquote of The Princess Bride: "Multi function mice? I doubt that they exist!"

I had to write a second report that demonstrated the evolution of the computer mouse through the 90's. I can't wait to see his reponse to that one!
 
I guess I didn't realize the term was "agent" instead of "examiner". Is that just Canadian?

Obviousness is the biggest thing we struggle with in evaluating disclosures. That and trying to get the inventor to say exactly what is novel.
 
Dark Jaguar said:
Infinite energy? Sure. Instantly? Even if those crazy models worked, it wouldn't be instant now would it? Also, once it ratcheted up to a certain point, the machine's going to break.
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Not if it were a solid-state perpetual-motion machine ;) C'mon, that's just as feasible!
 
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