Who is Salvatore Pais?

Science fiction has been an abiding interest of mine (witness the plug for Arthur C. Clarke’s book earlier) ever since I started reading The Door Into Summer when I was about seven, and my brother took it away and said it was “too old for me.” In fairness, it was his library book, but telling me I couldn’t read something like that? He may as well have gold-plated it and hung it just out of my reach to make it utterly irresistible. (Not that I developed an eventual liking for Heinlein, but the first ‘adult’ book I ever bought was The Puppet Masters and I still have that book.)

Now we have a fella who sounds like a protagonist from a sci-fi novel – ostensibly alive today and walking amongst us. Meet Salvatore Cesar Pais.

The patent for Pais’ “Plasma Compression Fusion Device” was applied for on March 22, 2018, and was just published on September 26, 2019.

The U.S. Navy has filed a potentially revolutionary patent application for a radical new compact fusion reactor that claims to improve upon the shortcomings of the Skunk Works CFR, and judging from the identity of the reactor’s inventor, it’s sure to raise eyebrows in the scientific community.

The claim states, in part:“At present there are few envisioned fusion reactors/devices that come in a small, compact package (ranging from 0.3 to 2 meters in diameter) and typically they use different versions of plasma magnetic confinement. Three such devices are the Lockheed Martin (LM) Skunk Works Compact Fusion Reactor (LM-CFR) , the EMC2 Polywell fusion concept, and the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) machine. […] These devices feature short plasma confinement times, possible plasma instabilities with the scaling of size, and it is questionable whether they have the ability of achieving the break – even fusion condition, let alone a self-sustained plasma burn leading to ignition.”  TWZ

Mr. Pais is not a household name. But did you know the Navy has filed a patent for a room-temperature superconductor? A conductor for electricity with effectively no resistance – not at zero degrees Kelvin or anywhere close to it, but at normal ranges? Or a UFO-style propulsion system?

One of these patents describes a “hybrid aerospace-underwater craft” claimed to be capable of truly extraordinary feats of speed and maneuverability in air, water, and outer space alike thanks to a revolutionary electromagnetic propulsion system. TWZ II (that’s a two, not an eleven, Ilan)

Or high energy electromagnetic field generators? All credited to Mr. Pais.

Little information can be found about Salvatore Cezar Pais; he has virtually no web presence. What is known is that he received a PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 1999 and that he currently works as an aerospace engineer for NAWCAD at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland – the Navy’s top aircraft test base. Pais has published several articles and presented papers at American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics conferences over the years describing his work in electromagnetic propulsion, revolutionary room temperature superconductors, and topics like his PhD dissertation: “Bubble generation under reduced gravity conditions for both co-flow and cross-flow configurations.” TWZ

This latest patent? Claims to enable power generation in the billion to trillion watt range (gigawatt to terawatt for you technical guys) in a package potentially as small as 2 meters in size. By comparison, a Gerald-Ford class reactor produces about 700 megawatts and the largest reactor in the country barely edges 1 gigawatt.

Tell ME sci-fi level stuff doesn’t seem to be happening!

Category: None, Science and Technology