Free energy, holla (reploid war is over)

You know, the only reasons I don't think it's weird for this thread to be here in General Discussion is because I'm fairly drunk.

There are so very many crackpots making various claims, yet every single one of those claims, either it be about free energy or the possibility of space travel using technology Tesla invented (I swear, this guy is some sort of god amongst crackpots) comes with a "Here's why I can't actually demonstrate this and become rich and famous because of THE MAN!" clause. Well, fuck you. If you had discovered a way to make "free energy", laws of thermodynamics be damned, then surely you'd be able to make some sort of doomsday device or something with it and threaten THE MAN with it to mark an end to its REIGN OF TERROR and be hailed as a hero the likes of which the world has never seen.

In conclusion, you're full of shit and I hope you die in a ditch somewhere.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Hot damn! They've even got a flywheel, the staple of all great perpetual motion machines!

Anyway, for those people saying we should actually pay attention to them, may I ask just why? Fine, science does not advance by immediately ignoring anything that challenges existing theories, but neither does it advance by listening to every crackpot that comes with his own theory he cooked up while under the influence of various substances. To quote; "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". There's NOTHING going on for that particular case, while, to take the quantitative alone, there's almost 150 years of experience since Maxwell formulated his equations on electromagnetism going against it, and just as much if you look only at the laws of thermodynamics. Ulysses makes a nice comparison when he mentions "Fleischman and Pons" but even then that's not the same; at least they weren't going as far as to claim free energy, "only" a way to achieve fusion never seen before.

Seriously, they have absolutely nothing. I've always been amazed how media and official looking press releases can suddently make people consider what they'd otherwise be clever enough not to bother with. If I had $100,000 buck, I too could put an ad in a major publication about something like that, and how my company, consisting of a desk and a phone in my mother's basement, discovered something so absolutely wonderful. Granted, this company existed before their "discovery", but from looking at their website there doesn't seem to be much about whatever other product or expertise they might offer.

If they really did have a free energy machine, then it would already have been published in serious peer-reviewed journals. If Einstein actually managed to get his theory of relativity published, which I find to be just as hard, if not harder to believe than this thing, then surely they'd be able. The difference here is that Einstein had actual quantitative, logical arguments. He didn't go "I've solved the problems we have with Maxwell's laws, but I'm not going to tell you how exactly. I will, however, have my theory examined by some people I deem to be worthy and will publish a full-page ad saying "TIME TRAVEL POSSIBLE" in the New York Time."

There's nowhere I can't reach.

The reason I've compared those guys with Einstein is that they're saying they have a working device but just can't get the attention of the scientific community. When Einstein first published his theory of Special Relativity, it predicted things so weird (time slowing down, length contractions, mass depending on energy...) that it could have easily been dismissed as the work of some random crackpot. Yet it got published anyway, because Einstein had actual quantitative, experimentally verified evidence. These guys don't.

Originally Posted by Dayvon

Playing those cards close to the chest makes good business sense.

They're saying they want the attention of the scientific community! They're essentially asking anyone with a Ph.D to look at their stuff, but no one even wants to. That kind of conflicts with the whole "keep things secret and make cash with it" idea, no?

Originally Posted by Dayvon

Which brings me to my second point, this is a company not a couple dudes with too much time on your hands. From what I've gathered, they are primarily a research company (which means they won't have many concrete products to sell). I would fully expect that they keep this underwraps just like 3M, IBM, or Intel would.

Yes, a "research company" with absolutely no info whatsoever about anything else than their miraculous energy source on their website. Oh, and that was an accident, so one should assume that they have something else they're doing, or at least were doing before. Yet there's nothing on that.

This company was a dot.com business, which then decided to become a R&D company. Don't compare it to 3M, IBM or Intel, please. Being incorporated doesn't mean anything. Take the fine company known as Infinium Labs (remember the Phantom?). Anyway, it happens to be pretty close to a publicly traded company, and yet it has a whole 5 employees last time I checked! How much more reputable is Steorn? Can you name a single thing they've ever done before. I've made a few quick checks, and haven't found anything.

Originally Posted by Dayvon

To let you know, I don't think they succeeded. But hell, there is little reason not to see it get tested, especially as this does not appear to be coming from naive individuals. Yes, cold-fusion scientists were reputable at one time as well, but claims still need to be disproven.

Cold fusion is one thing. At least it doesn't break fundamental laws of science which have stood for a century and a half, more if you consider that perpetual motion machines have been imagined all the way back in the 13th century and likely before.

How ya doing, buddy?

It's not that I don't believe scientists shouldn't examine things which do not agree with our current theories, hell if we had done that physics would still be the same it was at the end of the 19th century when "eveything has been figured out, except for some minor details", it's just that they haven't provided anything whatsoever yet. That people even think about giving them any consideration until they provide some evidence is idiotic. It angers me to see that people are willing to consider things for which they'd otherwise ask for proof because of a "press release", a website with essentially nothing on it but a field to enter your email address and an ad anyone could get by forking out cash they got from some gullible investors, along with... with what? They haven't provided anything else! There's that photograph someone posted earlier of the device in question, but all it looks like is some large aluminum frame with various electric/mechanic components anyone could get from their local hardware/electronic/car parts store.

This is what bothers me. Of course if I'm wrong, then please correct me. I hate being wrong, and I'm usually more than willing to admit my mistakes. But first, please point out to me why I should believe anything they say. To me it looks exactly the same as any of those crackpot websites you can find on crank.net, except that those guys are actually more vocal about their stuff. And more likely to already have taken money from gullible investors for their ad, and thus more likely to do so again from other people.

How ya doing, buddy?

Of course laws will change! That's not something I doubt. Classical mechanics was always thought to be perfect until Einstein showed that what Newton found out is but an approximation of what really happens, but which is incredibly close to what really happens unless we're talking about incredible velocities. That's but one such event, and it will happen again, make no mistake, unless we live in an incredibly boring universe.

What I tend to dislike is laws simply being thrown out the window suddently even if they've stood perfectly well so far, and without any explanation. What these guys are saying is that using magnets, something which has been well understood for a long time, and for which we have laws that especially prohibit any possibility of getting free energy out of a magnetic field, namely one of Maxwell's law which states that the divergence of a magnetic field is always zero, they can suddently invalidate the laws of thermodynamics. It doesn't only have repercussion on energy generation, mind you, if you invalidate thermodynamics, a lot of other sciences will be affected. For example, information theory, since it's inception, has always been related to thermodynamics, and chances are you'd come upon strange results in information theory by allowing something seemingly unrelated to happen in thermodynamics.

If I take the example of cold fusion, this is not something I would have instantly rejected. Cold fusion never completely threw out of the window any basic laws such as thermodynamics; it attempted to explain a phenomenon that was observed, or thought to be observed, so that it would most fit with our current theories. The problem is that according to the scientific method, such hypothesis must be tested, then if found to be wrong, discarded or modified, and if found to be correct, kept and published so that others can improve upon it or spot flaws. Unfortunately, in the case of cold fusion, there might not even have been an unknown phenomenon to begin with, and even worse, the hypothesis made to explain it apparently fit with the results, so it was published. Mass media jumped on the opportunity, and the rest is history. But I'm not entirely sure why people are so keen to point at cold fusion as some sort of disaster. It seems to me as if the scientific method wasn't to blame, and that the scientific community did a fine job spotting the flaws in the theory, which is essentially the whole point. These things happen, but the main difference is that most people usually never learn about it, the would-be theory remains just one more hypothesis that didn't quite make it and is relagated to being one of the many in the history of science.

I have nothing against modifying laws when needed, indeed that's the whole point of science, but I demand strong evidence as to why it should be done. I know better than to file all those that came before me as dimwitted cretins by invalidating their work completely, because I seriously doubt those people where dimwitted cretins. Worse would be proposing my own entirely different theory as to how the universe works, placing myself above a large number of history's greatest. I suppose you could call it humility.

How ya doing, buddy?