When you wrote "Which parts of the patent were not valid?" I assumed you meant something like "could work as described."
As you've highlighted, you actually meant that the claims were enabled under US patent law, which does not generally require the patented idea to actually work.
I noticed your quoted text uses "it is possible to experimentally obtain". That's an odd way of saying "it is theoretically possible to obtain".
Clearly if the theory is wrong then it can make wrong predictions about feasibility. The patent office isn't tasked to determine if such theories are wrong.
For example, no one has demonstrated that "Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state" (see https://patents.google.com/patent/US6960975B1/en ) actually works. Very few expect that idea to work, and I expect that most who do are ill-informed of the science.
The same applies here.
One deep problem with the entire idea of extracting usable energy from the vacuum energy state is highlighted in this letter to a curious 19 year old, at https://van.physics.illinois.edu/ask/listing/1277 :
> The point, however, is that this is not the calculation of some energy that’s sitting around waiting to be used. It’s just the calculation of a natural unit in which to measure energy. If it has a physical significance, it may represent the amount of energy that has to be concentrated in a small scale (the Planck distance, about 10^-32 cm) in order to make weird quantum gravitational things happen.
> To get usable energy out of some process, there must be some way for things to fall to a lower energy state than they are now in. That’s possible for many nuclei- hence we can get nuclear power- but such nuclear reactions are known and have little to do with the Planck scale.
> The Planck distance-time scale is the scale on which our current theory of space and time is likely to break down. If there really is some process on that scale that could settle into a lower energy state, that would mean that the current vacuum is unstable. It could somehow start to collapse to the more stable state, which would destroy any sort of physical structure in the current universe. Something like that probably happened at least once in the early universe, ending the strongly inflationary period of the Big Bang.
> These are not processes which I would attempt to ’use’.
The materials you've pointed to assume the vacuum energy state is "energy that’s sitting around waiting to be used", without demonstrating that it's true.
Further, they make no mention of how that energy is transferred to a lower energy state than vacuum. We know of no such thing.
As an analogy, a bird sitting on an high power line - which isn't even insulated - is touching a huge amount of energy. It's not affected because there's no lower energy place for that energy to go. At best it could get power from AC power lines due to the fluctuating fields, but that's far less than the power going through the lines.
As you've highlighted, you actually meant that the claims were enabled under US patent law, which does not generally require the patented idea to actually work.
I noticed your quoted text uses "it is possible to experimentally obtain". That's an odd way of saying "it is theoretically possible to obtain".
Clearly if the theory is wrong then it can make wrong predictions about feasibility. The patent office isn't tasked to determine if such theories are wrong.
For example, no one has demonstrated that "Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state" (see https://patents.google.com/patent/US6960975B1/en ) actually works. Very few expect that idea to work, and I expect that most who do are ill-informed of the science.
The same applies here.
One deep problem with the entire idea of extracting usable energy from the vacuum energy state is highlighted in this letter to a curious 19 year old, at https://van.physics.illinois.edu/ask/listing/1277 :
> The point, however, is that this is not the calculation of some energy that’s sitting around waiting to be used. It’s just the calculation of a natural unit in which to measure energy. If it has a physical significance, it may represent the amount of energy that has to be concentrated in a small scale (the Planck distance, about 10^-32 cm) in order to make weird quantum gravitational things happen.
> To get usable energy out of some process, there must be some way for things to fall to a lower energy state than they are now in. That’s possible for many nuclei- hence we can get nuclear power- but such nuclear reactions are known and have little to do with the Planck scale.
> The Planck distance-time scale is the scale on which our current theory of space and time is likely to break down. If there really is some process on that scale that could settle into a lower energy state, that would mean that the current vacuum is unstable. It could somehow start to collapse to the more stable state, which would destroy any sort of physical structure in the current universe. Something like that probably happened at least once in the early universe, ending the strongly inflationary period of the Big Bang.
> These are not processes which I would attempt to ’use’.
The materials you've pointed to assume the vacuum energy state is "energy that’s sitting around waiting to be used", without demonstrating that it's true.
Further, they make no mention of how that energy is transferred to a lower energy state than vacuum. We know of no such thing.
As an analogy, a bird sitting on an high power line - which isn't even insulated - is touching a huge amount of energy. It's not affected because there's no lower energy place for that energy to go. At best it could get power from AC power lines due to the fluctuating fields, but that's far less than the power going through the lines.