Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
If they are claiming to have working all-permanent-magnet motors,
then either they're lying, or it's the Dawn of a New Era. You can't
be confused about whether you have something or not, and a motor
with *no* internal power source is not something you can "sort of"
have, subject to interpretation -- you've either got it or you don't.
Well . . . as the Devil's advocate I would say you might have it for
a while and then not have it later on. The motor might break
inexplicably, after someone tries to improve it. Things like that
often happen in cold fusion. The best known example is Mizuno's heat
after death experiment. Granted, that is a very different phenomenon.
It seems likely that it is much harder to make Mizuno's even happen a
second time than it would be to make a second magnetic motor.
Mizuno's 100 g cathode was cut up and destructively tested years ago.
People building revolutionary gadgets of this nature have a bad habit
of destroying their prototypes, sometimes to re-use the parts, or
sometimes just to make a bonfire to keep warm. (The Wright brothers
used to burn their old gliders at Kitty Hawk, or give them to a women
who used the cloth to make underwear. They almost burned the first
powered airplane on December 17, 1903.)
Hoyt Stearns reports here that the people at Steorn find it easier to
work with a machine that combines permanent magnets with
electromagnets, because this makes modifying the prototype a snap. I
gather that is what he means. That sounds plausible. They don't want
to bother making a fully self-sustaining one after you have
established they can do that, because by making partially
self-sustaining prototypes they make more rapid progress, and learn
more about the phenomenon.
I am not saying I believe that, but it is plausible.
It reminds me a little of the situation with airplanes from 1905 to
1908. The standard set by most wannabe aviators was that you had to
get off the ground unassisted. This was spelled out in detail by
Wilbur Wright in a paper: the airplane had to leave the ground on its
own power, fly under control, and land at a spot at the same level or
higher than the place where it took off. That was a reasonable
standard, but the fact is, after the summer 1904 the Wrights did not
bother to meet it. They used a catapult to launch the airplanes. You
might say that was cheating, but it was safer and more convenient.
The airplanes were severely underpowered and took a long mono-rail
runway to get airborne. They had already proved they did not need a
catapult, so they stopped worrying about that standard.
In August 1908, when Orville Wright got ready to fly in the first
public demonstration in France, he and his assistants rolled out the
airplane, and started to prepare the catapult to launch it. Some of
the French aviators watching were angry and indignant, saying this is
cheating. They kvetched and mocked him until he took off some minutes
later. He leapt into the air and flew at high speed straight toward
some trees. This would have killed any other aviator in the world,
because no one else could control the aircraft. They could barely
change course, by side-slipping in a dangerous and
all-but-uncontrolled maneuver. They had no idea you have to change
the shape of the wing and bank an airplane in order to turn. So the
crowd gasped in horror, expecting to see Orville smash to smithereens
at 40 mph in a moment. But Orville banked and flew neatly around the
trees, came back to the starting point, and landed under perfect
control. No aviator in Europe had ever done anything remotely like
that. None even imagined it was possible. They instantly forgot about
the catapult. The next day Orville was the most famous celebrity in Europe.
Along the same lines, suppose several people independently test the
Steorn gadgets. They measure input and output by rigorous methods,
and find out it really is over unity, but it turns out the D cell is
contributing slightly by varying the magnet configuration on fly. It
turns out that method is a lot easier and more reliable than using
only permanent magnets. People will quickly overlook that. It will be
a trivial matter. It will be obvious that a more complicated version
of the gadget can eliminate the D cell by adding a generator, just as
it was obvious in 1908 that Orville Wright could have used a longer
monorail to take off without the catapult.
- Jed
