TechgnosisWeb Prime

Wow. It’s been damn near forever since I posted.. I blame Facebook. Most of my friends are on it, and so my blog falls into disrepair.. but I just finished writing a rant in response to a dear friend, and I thought it was worthy of being included here. So, here goes: My friend emails me with the following:

I’ve been keeping up with your blog, and wondered if you’d be interested in commenting on these videos concerning alternative energy sources. Apparently, we do have free energy technology, but the World Bank… wealthy oil shieks, and the government don’t want to share it with the people of the world. They are using it for deep space exploration, star wars, and military warfare such as tanks. Check it out. =)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6yRn4IAsrU

also Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8stApCmxYEM

also Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h75_TGiwg78

Other people inventing the same thing. Unbelievable!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVhXrvCCILw

Air Car - Australia & France
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-A3XHFT5qc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq8aZVLpf-c

India Air Car
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_i3aMz7q1w

My reply to her begins below, and continues after the jump:

I saw the videos and the material you sent, and, well.. you know me, I’m always the skeptical spoilsport. I hate to burst your bubble, but, don’t take this stuff at face value. Neither one of those things is the mythical ‘free energy’ that they’re billed as. Let’s start with the so-called ‘Water Car’.

WARNING: Lots and lots of ranting ahead. This is an old topic for me.

The inventor of the ‘Water Car’, Stan Meyer, was convicted of fraud in ‘96. He had been selling ‘dealerships’ to investors for the right to market his Water Engine technology for years, and while he seemed quite willing to demonstrate his device in his own home lab, he never actually *delivered* on the device to his investors, which is why he was sued. He was supposed to show his car to Michael Laughton, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Queen Mary, University of London and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, but when it came time to actually show up for the testing, he made excuses and never showed up. When his Water Fuel Cell was examined by 3 different experts in court, they all came to the same conclusion: it wasn’t what he claimed it was. It was a simple electrolysis device, no more or less efficient than any other. He was convicted of fraud and ordered to repay his investors they $25,000 dollars.

Basically, he was a con-artist, pure and simple. He had a sincere face and manner that made you want to believe him, and he was very good at fooling people at first glance: even scientists can be fooled by illusions. In fact, the best scientists know they can never simply trust their eyes and their first impressions, the human eye and mind are inherently fallible, and that’s one reason why properly designed experiments are so rigorous: we have to try and ensure that we can minimize the chance that we’re being fooled by our own senses.Stan Meyer was able to fool people like Professor Michael Laughton, Dean of Engineering at Queen Mary College, London, Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin, a former controller of the British Navy, and Dr. Keith Hindley, a UK research chemist, by showing them his water fuel cell device and claiming it produced much higher amounts of hydrogen than it really did. These people, however, never ran any proper tests, they simply viewed a controlled demonstration by the inventor, and that’s not really a proper setting. If I was in my own home and had plenty of time to prepare, I could ‘demonstrate’ all sorts of impossible things. The entire world of magicians and con artists is based on how easy it is to make something fake appear real, after all, when you can control the environment in which they take place.

The real test of his technology would have been if it could be replicated independently by other people. It hasn’t. Because there was nothing truly special there to replicate. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying his device didn’t *work*, it did: it was an electrolysis device that could, indeed, split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen. These devices are nothing new, and they’re used in all sorts of applications. Basically, you run a current through the water, the covalent bonds between the hydrogen and the oxygen are weakened and then broken, and, poof, you get Hydrogen and Oxygen gas. It works. The trick is that it’s not very efficient. It takes a lot of electricity to split those bonds: a *lot* more electricity than you can get by burning the Hydrogen again. The so-called Water-Fueled Car is not really fueled by water: it’s fueled by *electricity*, by the batteries that power the electrolysis reaction. And that electricity has to come from *somewhere*. The claims that it is so efficient that the battery can basically charge itself have been proven completely false time and again. Now, you might say, okay, fine, so it’s not as efficient as the guy claimed it is.. but it still runs only on electricity and only produces water as a byproduct, right? That’s gotta be better than what we have now? I’ll get back to that in a moment, but first I will address the ‘air cars’.

Again, it’s the same basic situation. The cars are not simply ‘fueled by air’, they’re fueled by *compressed* air, and that’s a very important difference. You see, it takes a lot of energy to compress air. The compressed air, therefore acts as an energy *carrier*, not as an energy *producer*. Yes, the cars do work. Yes, they only use compressed air. They produce fewer emissions, and may indeed be able to get decent mileage. *But*: they don’t solve the problem, not even close. Because, you see, the energy to compress the air in the first place has to come from *somewhere*, right? Again, our old friend, electricity. And electricity is not free, it does not come from the air or from magical electricity fairies that grant it to us as a boon for being so very nice. Electricity is, for the most part, produced by burning coal and oil (which are also energy carriers, by the way, the only difference is that the energy they carry has been stored inside them for a very long time, so we didn’t need to worry about putting the energy into them in the first place.. but once that energy’s been extracted, it’s gone). Let’s say that, tomorrow, everyone in the world switched to air-powered and water-fueled cars. We’ve already seen that they are not the magical ultra-efficient devices that one might think: instead of consuming gasoline, they’d be consuming electricity. And that electricity needs to come from somewhere. In order to meet the demand, more coal-burning and oil-burning plants would have to be constructed, enough to satisfy the sudden *huge* spike in electrical consumption that both of these methods would require. The oil would still be burned, just not by your car. And the problem of dependence on oil remains unsolved.

Both of these things don’t *solve* the problem of oil-dependence: they merely shift the burden around. Instead of having the cars burn the oil, we would have to make the electrical companies burn it to produce the electricity we’d need for these vehicles. And it turns out that this is not very efficient: delivering all that electricity to everyone in such huge amounts would cause its own problems. The most efficient solution right now is, unfortunately, to have the power-generating plant on the vehicle itself, that is: an internal combustion engine.

Now, this is not to say that it’s not worth our while to examine more *efficient* ways of extracting the energy from fuels, or finding alternate fuels: Hybrid engines can increase that efficiency by quite a bit, and properly designed cars and braking systems can harvest extra energy from the car’s own movement, this increasing the efficiency even more. But you can never really have 100% or higher efficiency. It simply doesn’t happen. It’s one of the most basic laws of physics for a reason: it’s been tested, over, and over, and *over* again, by much, much smarter people than any of us, and it always turns out the same: there is always some energy loss, the system is never perfectly efficient. Entropy always rises in a closed system. It’s one of the most fundamental rules of modern physics, and it underlies much of what we know today.

People immediately will start saying ‘Yeah, well, science doesn’t know everything!’, and that’s exactly correct. It doesn’t. It never will, and it *knows* that. Science may never be able to truly explain everything about the universe, but it *is* our best way to at least try to understand it all, and it *works*. The laws of physics were not decided upon by a committee, there’s no shadowy cabal of scientists who meet behind closed doors at the Nobel Prize Institute and decide which laws they like and which they don’t. It doesn’t work that way: the laws of the universe exist *independent* of what we think about them. You can whine all you like about how much it sucks to have gravity: gravity doesn’t care, it still exists. You can dream all you like about how nice it would be to have engines with higher than 100% efficiency and free energy, the universe doesn’t really care. The Fourth Law of Thermodynamics still holds true, trough test after test after test.

The usual comeback to that is something along the lines of ‘Yeah, well, scientists once thought the world was flat, and they were wrong.’, or ‘Scientists once thought people couldn’t fly, and they were wrong.’. Yes, that’s true. Science is not infallible. We currently believe it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. We currently beleive that entropy will always increase in a closed system. These things *may* turn out to be wrong… but so far, experiment after experiment, by hundreds and thousands of independent researchers, shows that it is highly unlikely that these things are wrong. The whole of modern physics is based on these laws, and these laws *work*. If the Laws of Thermodynamics, and the rest of physics didn’t hold true, a lot of things we take for granted wouldn’t even exist. The very computer that I’m typing this on is proof of that, as the micro-circuitry in it depends on the laws of physics being exactly what we already know them to be in order to work. And you honestly have to look at claims like those of the Water Fuel Cell and ask yourself: which is more likely: that everything we know about physics, the physics that has brought us computers, airplanes, television, all the modern conveniences of life, things that we use every single day and they *work*, is wrong? Or that, perhaps, we are simply being fooled by a con-man, or by our own senses? That second explanation is more likely, and thus, the burden of proof lies on the inventors of these so called free-energy devices to show that they work, that they can be replicated, and to show where the energy is coming from.

Time after time, these free energy crackpots pop up, and it’s telling that most of them are *not* scientists, and have no scientific background. Many of them are con-artists. They make big claims, run easily-faked ‘demonstrations’ (and this is nothing new, people have been faking ‘perpetual motion machines’ *forever*) and fool people into investing in their technology.. and then they never deliver. Most of the time, their devices are never even examined. And those that are, always turn out to be frauds. Another group of free energy proponents are not frauds: they really are sincere, and honestly think they have invented devices with higher than 100% efficiency. Without fail these devices never hold up to careful scrutiny. Either they ’stop working’ when they’re taken out of the lab (not that they ever really worked in the first place), or closer examination reveals a hidden source of energy that the inventor had not taken into account. Every single time.

So, in the end: yes, the world is an ugly place. It’s run by greed, and things aren’t as good as we wish they were. There is, indeed, a growing energy crisis: someday we’re going to run out of fossil fuels, and we need to find an alternative. But there is no such thing as ‘free energy’, and it has nothing to do with any supposed global conspiracies. It is simply a fact of basic physics that causes all these ‘free energy’ devices to disappear:not some shadowy group killing off crackpot inventors. The devices are never released not because they are being suppressed by oil sheiks or ‘the government’ (and really, anyone who has ever *dealt* with ‘the government’ can tell you how ridiculous the idea that such a conspiracy could even exist is.. the myth of the ultra-efficient and all-powerful government is exactly that: a myth. In reality, the government is extremely inefficient and barely able to keep itself running, much less secretly run huge conspiracies that would require hundreds of thousands of people *all around the world* to keep incredibly huge secrets for decade after decade.. I mean, anyone who’s ever worked at an office building and seen how the rumor mill works knows how goddamn hard it is to keep *anything* secret when you have more than 2-3 people involved. And the more people involved, the more unlikely it is that the secret can be kept. If people can’t even keep the fact that Bob made out with Marsha behind the copy machine a secret for more than a day, do you really and honestly believe that hundreds of thousands of people around the world could all be keeping something like a huge conspiracy to ‘keep down free energy’ a secret?). Deep space exploration is fueled by pretty mundane means: small nuclear energy cells, highly-efficient batteries, solar energy. ‘Star Wars’ is a fairy tale. Tanks run on diesel and gas turbines. And as much as I wish it was otherwise, free energy is a myth.