Is that preposterous? The idea that "spacetime"(?) may have superconductive properties doesn't seem facially outlandish, but again I'm not a fancy scientist. He is an awarded US Navy scientist though, and these patents were specially requested by Navy brass, so I'm not inclined to think he's a scammer that slipped one by his attorneys.
I have met someone who got a stupid patent — IIRC it was a two bit binary adder — because the patent lawyer messed up what he sent to them.
He didn’t check before it was filled because he didn’t care (the point of the patent was “we needed a patent protected system to be granted a license to a codec”), and it was granted anyway.
If you look up the history of this patent, the first few times it was submitted it was denied, then some US general comments and basically rubber stamps it through.
