At 11:08 AM 12/16/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
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.
Look, the demonstration device seems pretty simple. If all that had
existed wrt cold fusion in 1989 was something like you described
(after, say, a year), almost all of us would have remained very, very
skeptical. Sure, with fragile effects, trying to improve it can
quench it. That's why I not trying to improve it, at least not at
first. I want to set up a reliable replication, period. I can fiddle
with the observational techniques, look for different stuff, but I'm
being careful about what I vary in the experiment itself. If the
original experiment worked, mine should work as well, but I'm aware
that *any* variation, even something that seems harmless, could cause
a problem, and that is where I'll look first if I don't see radiation evidence.
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.
"Partially self-sustaining." Cool. But not over unity. Not what they
are claiming to know how to do.
This has happened again and again. They are *not* reporting their
experimental results, the results that would lead them to think they
have found an anomaly. "Partially self-sustaining" is not an anomaly,
that is normal, if the feedback is set up so that some of the
expended energy is fed back. The real question is the magnitudes, in
this case. Look. Make a device that uses an electric motor to pull a
weight up a pulley. Then run a generator from the weight falling back
down. Presto: "partially self-sustaining."
Sure, if you can show that there is some excess energy in some part
of the system, you'd have something that might be engineered into an
over-unity device, especially if the effect is scalable. Unless, of
course, you make some mistake in your measurements or your
understanding of theory.
But that capacitor bank would show it. Absolutely, feedback of energy
would lengthen the time of operation of the device. But measurements
of rotational velocity, combined with measurements of the capacitor
voltage, both monitored at the same time, would show what's
happening, unless fraud is involved.
I am not saying I believe that, but it is plausible.
Anything is possible, Jed, it's a consequence of quantum mechanics.
However, that doesn't make it likely enough to even discuss....
What's highly likely here, by this time, is fraud. The demonstration
characteristics can only be explained, at this point, by one of two
alternate theories. You proposed one, that they are stupid. The other
is that they are not stupid, they are quite clever, and they have
designed the demonstration for maximum desired effect, measured not
by voltage and power and such details, but by the amount of money
extracted from investors.
The deficiencies of the demonstration are entirely too obvious to
allow the simple explanation of self-deceived stupidity, and are
inconsistent with reports that real engineers are involved. They know
exactly what they are doing, and they are doing it brilliantly.
Really, you have to appreciate that.
You know very well that I won't reject experimental results based on
theory. But there are no experimental results here. Nothing. There is
a motor running. No variables. No controls. No data at all. Some
diagrams that are so vague that if you used them to attempt to
replicate, they would merely claim that you made this or that
mistake, and they have many of these rabbits to pull out of the hat.
There is no adequate specification of the device, and all that is
very, very deliberate. They have a cover story that sounds plausible
to some. It involves what they claim is patent necessity, but if they
are not disclosing how the device works, they are not gaining patent
priority and someone who beats them to that would gain priority, I
suspect. I don't think they have an actual over-unity device at all.
They may have a device that appears to run down slower than expected.
And then they toss in the Men in Black, the mysterious army that is
just waiting around looking for free energy devices to suppress.
But there is nothing there to suppress. There are no independent
replications that are adequate, and they are actively suppressing
such themselves, by only releasing data to those under NDA.
It looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck. Of
course, maybe it's a high-resolution hologram with audio. Possible.
But its not a demonstrated over-unity device, the promises of a
demonstration were deceptive. And that kind of deception is a very bad sign.
