Robert Cook
Robert Cook | |
|---|---|
| Residence | Vallejo, California, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | The CIP (Cook Inertial Propulsion) engine; US patents 3,683,707 and 4,238,968 |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Inertial propulsion, mechanics |
Robert Cook is an American self-taught inventor and the originator of the CIP engine — Cook Inertial Propulsion — a rotating-mass machine which he claims converts centrifugal and Coriolis forces into a net linear thrust without expelling any reaction mass. He pursued the device from 1968 onward, obtained two United States patents on it, and presented it to the independent-research community, including a talk at the 1994 International Tesla Symposium. Because a self-contained thruster of this kind appears to conflict with the conventional reading of Newton's third law, the CIP engine has been argued over for decades; the claims described below are Cook's own and those of his supporters.
Not to be confused with other researchers of the same surname on this wiki, who are unrelated to the CIP engine.
Biography
Cook grew up in the Concord and Vallejo area of California. His father was a civil and mining engineer who taught him mathematics and machinery from childhood; after high school Cook briefly attended engineering school but left, reportedly finding the coursework largely a repetition of what he had already been taught at home. He then worked for roughly seventeen or eighteen years as a printing pressman in the East Bay, during which he was granted several patents on printing-press improvements.
By his own account he encountered the propulsion effect by accident on 8 February 1968, while experimenting with a perpetual-motion mechanism: a design error left the mechanism unbalanced, and it appeared to translate itself rather than merely spin. He left the printing trade to develop the effect and spent years and a substantial sum of his own money building prototypes. He became known locally as Vallejo's resident inventor and lectured on the device to engineering and naval audiences in the region.
Scientific contributions
The CIP engine
The CIP engine consists of counter-rotating arms carrying movable masses. The masses are shifted between radial positions in step with the rotation so that, on Cook's account, they travel at a large radius through one half of each revolution and at a small radius through the other, and are never carried around the rear half of the machine at full extension. The centrifugal reaction of the moving masses is therefore, he argues, unbalanced over the cycle, and the time-average of the internal forces has a component along the axis of the machine rather than summing to zero. Coriolis forces arising from the radial transfer of the masses while the arms are turning contribute to the same asymmetry.
Cook has been careful to distinguish this from a free-energy claim. In his presentation of it, the CIP engine is not a source of energy at all: it is driven by an ordinary motor and consumes ordinary fuel or electricity. The claim is about the mode of propulsion — that thrust is produced by internal mass motion rather than by throwing propellant overboard. Proponents of the device state efficiencies in the range of 80–85 per cent when perfected, contrasted with the very low propellant efficiency of a chemical rocket, and one academic assessment cited in the literature around the engine estimated an energy efficiency near 53 per cent with a propulsive efficiency near 98 per cent. These figures are the proponents' and have not been independently established.
Patents and demonstrations
Cook holds US Patent 3,683,707, "Propulsion System" (1972), and US Patent 4,238,968, "Device for Conversion of Centrifugal Force to Linear Force and Motion" (1980). Test episodes reported in accounts of the work include observation of a running unit by engineers at the United Airlines test centre near San Francisco in 1971, accelerometer measurements there in 1972 intended to show that the machine generated internal force, and a February 1974 demonstration in which a unit was placed on the low-friction surface of an ice rink in Stockton, California and was seen to move. Models were also shown at NASA Ames Research Center and at the University of Arizona. Reported reactions were consistently divided: observers agreed that the machines moved, and disagreed about whether the motion could be explained by friction, stick-slip against the supporting surface, or vibration rather than by a genuine reactionless thrust. No demonstration has been accepted by mainstream engineering as establishing reactionless propulsion.
Context
Inertial propulsion of this kind has a long history among independent inventors, and the 1994 symposium at which Cook spoke also carried a paper on the Thornson Inertial Propulsion engine, a comparable device by another inventor. The interest of the field, as its participants present it, is that Newton's third law is a statement about the forces between bodies, and that the question of whether a closed mechanical system can develop a sustained net translation is ultimately experimental rather than settled by definition. Cook's talk title at the symposium, "The Emerging Physics Paradigm and the CIP Engine", places his machine explicitly within that argument. Work on the family of designs has been continued by his son, Robert Cook Jr., under the names cForce Drive and Cook Inertial Drive (CID).
Conference appearances
Cook presented at the International Tesla Society symposia in Colorado Springs, the annual gathering whose proceedings were edited by Steven R Elswick and whose successor event is the ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference run by Tesla Tech:
- "The Emerging Physics Paradigm and the CIP Engine" — 1994 International Tesla Symposium
Works
- "The Emerging Physics Paradigm and the CIP Engine", 1994 International Tesla Symposium
- US Patent 4,238,968, "Device for Conversion of Centrifugal Force to Linear Force and Motion", 1980
- US Patent 3,683,707, "Propulsion System", 1972