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Comment by EA-3167 | Hacker News Reader

Claims a world-changing breakthrough.

Doesn't publish.

Isn't reviewed.

Files patent and starts company to get money.

That's the classic pattern of a fraud, same as the cold fusion, "free energy" hacks and frauds. This is science, don't believe anything until it's peer reviewed and independently reproduced.

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On the other hand, just because it isn't peer reviewed yet, doesn't mean it is wrong. Peer reviews are laughable these days (well, at least I prefer laughing over crying). If it is truly new and ground breaking, there is a chance that you will get rejected into oblivion, and have to stand your ground and build your case for quite a while. Nothing wrong with trying to make money in the meantime.

Other experimental groups have failed to reproduce his results. There's good reason to be skeptical of this until we get multiple groups confirming it's real.

Ultimately if he had a peer reviewed paper, a patent disclosure could have been filed concurrently. Investors would much prefer to back the team that did X vs the inevitable folks who think X is easy.

The lack of peer review or replication makes this almost a guaranteed fraud.

What makes this a guaranteed fraud is that the guy is literally known in his field for faking data. This shouldn't even be a headline unless someone completely unrelated comes in and confirms it.

Investors are known to throw good money after bad ideas without DD so I guess some will try to see if they get lucky.

Reminds me of the e-cat:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer

Years and years of breathless "we've applied for a patent!" and "we're accepting investors NOW!" all based on hopium and snake-oil.

If you publish your idea before filing a patent, you will not be able to patent it, because your own publication will be held as prior art.

Last I checked, you have 18 months after publication to file the patent in the US.

12 months in the US. And many many foreign jurisdictions will use your publication to block your patent

Though I'm not an expert I find this hard to believe because even actual commercialized prior art seems to be no barrier to patenting something[1].

[1] https://homepages.cwi.nl/~paulk/patents/isnot/node9.html

The patent application you link to was never actually patented. The USPTO rejected the application and the applicant abandoned it.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20040230959A1/en

I'm a former patent examiner, and from that experience, I know that attorneys frequently write things in applications that they think probably won't be allowed. They're testing the limits of what will be allowed.

Absence of publication and peer review doesn’t imply anything. That’s only common in academia and a lot of theoretical and applied research happens outside of academia. And frankly peer review has a mixed track record even within academia, though the hard sciences are better than most.

This guy is probably delusional, and reproduction in controlled environments will be essential, but more unusual things have happened. I once worked on a program based on a theory breakthrough that came from a high school dropout with a colorful life history in a very rough part of town — obviously bright but unable to engage with any of the norms of academia.

His history of fraud suggests that he knows exactly what he's doing, and he's moving into the "monetize this shit" phase of his criminal lifestyle.

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