Terry Blanton wrote:
Somehow Steorn must measure the torque or have the motor perform work, eg lift a weight, pump water, etc. But they seem to have a basic lack of understanding of this fact.
Or, they understand it perfectly well but they don't want to do that because they are in the business of obfuscation. Let's call that the Abd hypothesis, in honor of its most verbose advocate here.
In politics, business and consulting, many people make a good living by obfuscation and sewing confusion. It is less common in science and technology, but not unheard of. Academic rivals opposed to cold fusion have made a fine art of it.
Many people fail to perform definitive tests. I cannot be sure, but in most cases I get the impression this is because they are inept, not devious. Mike Carrell mentioned Newman and the Correas. Newman strikes me as inept. The Correas are a strange mixture. Carrell describe their PAGD tests which impressed many people, and which are legitimate as far as I can tell:
"The energy released in the discharge is much greater than that required to sustain the conditions for the discharge to occur. Correa used carefully calibrated batteries to absorb the energy lieu of capacitors which would have to have been enormous to operate in the experiment."
That's fine as far as it goes, but when I last heard from the Correas they were working with Gene Mallove on two experiments that struck me as absolutely looney, to the n'th degree. One was with a gold leaf electroscope which they claimed was producing energy when the leaf was extended out, like a person holding up his arms. A person does, in fact, expend energy to do this, but an electroscope emphatically does not. The second was with a device they claimed runs on energy from the sun that comes right through the earth, like neutrinos. That is at least plausible, but the method they chose to test it is perhaps the worst imaginable one. I would put the gadget in a sub-basement or a mine shaft to exclude other possible sources of energy. As I recall, they put it in bright sunlight outdoors and combined it with a Crookes radiometer or some other solar powered device (I don't recall). That's like trying to tune a piano in a boiler factory.
- Jed
