You might be under the impression that patents are supposed to be given only for things that might actually work. If Boris Volfson of Huntington had thought that way, he never would have been awarded Patent No. 6,960,975 for an interstellar spaceship that "will have flux modulators, a superconductive shield around it that bends space-time, and a 'space-time curvature anomaly' that escapes gravity and pushes the ship so fast it can carry a crew to distant stars." Stuart Shapiro, a physicist at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana and hence a real scientist, says with kindly understatement that "The inventor is vaguely conversant with a number of issues [words, really] in cosmology and relativity, but I am not at all convinced they are understood or combined in a meaningful, let alone practical, way." Gotta love that Hoosier initiative, though.
