First, a quote from Bob Park's March 5, 2010 "What's New" e-newsletter:
|3. PATENT NONSENSE: CASE LAW ON PERPETUAL MOTION |MACHINES. |When Joseph Newman was refused a patent for his Energy Machine he |sued the US patent office. Legendary US District Court Judge Robert Penfield |Jackson ordered Newman to turn his machine over to the National Bureau |of Standards for testing. It was found to be a motor/generator of a design |vastly inferior to those on the market. The case, Newman v. Quigg (Quigg |was the patent Commissioner) is cited as case-law giving the patent office |authority to reject perpetual-motion claims out of hand. The only effect is |that they are no longer called "perpetual motion machines." They are |called over-unity devices, or zero-point-energy machines. ***Coverage of |the Joe Newman case in Wikipedia is terrible. It's a remarkably useful |encyclopedia, but you need to verify.*** [Emphasis *** added] So, read/use but verify Wikipedia entries. For more on Bob Park, see: http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/bob.html Second, unless you are an expert or very familiar with an area being covered in a Wikipedia entry, one will not be able to determine whether the information being provided distinguishes facts from opinions, provides all relevant facts or are only selected facts/perspectives provided, and so on. This is true of all printed materials but in the 21st century most of us have electronic access to a variety of sources of information that allows one (a) to confirm or disconfirm the information provided in a Wikipedia entry, (b) whether a Wikipedia entry promotes one interpretation or viewpoint over others, or (c) because of the limited amount of information that is easily available on a topic or person or event, the entry is incomplete. For point (c), consider the case of the sociologist Daniel "Danny" Foss. He has an entry in Wikipedia but, on the basis of the few years I knew him, I expect that he howls with laughter when he sees the level of "respectibility" he has achieved (it is quite possible that people who were the object of his scorn and ridicule would also laugh though most likely curse him for the treatment they received from him). One gets no sense of how remarkable he was (as well as completely irritating) from the entry. These are not unimportant points because they influenced what he was able to do and what he was allowed to accomplish. I think that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Danny was something of a net.legend, prior to the Great Opening of the Internet circa 1995, and was a presence on a number of Bitnet mailing lists. People who knew Danny probably can only shake their head at the Wikipedia entry even though it is pretty much factual. Returning to the issue of perpetual motion, I am not a physicist but if Bob Parks, a professor of physics and former chair of the physics department at the U of Maryland, says that there's something wrong with the Wikipedia entry on the Joe Newman case, I'm willing to take his word on it and access other sources to better understand what the case is about and how the Wikipedia entry is deficient. Finally, one might want to take a look at some words of caution provided by the Philantrophy Roundtable to people who run philantrophies and need to be aware of how their enterprise is being portrayed in places like Wikipedia: http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/article.asp?article=1619&cat=148 -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=1216 or send a blank email to leave-1216-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
