On Fri, 22 Apr 2005, Keith Nagel wrote: > He's blaming Vortex in particular for misleading him into > trying to close the loop. Not to worry Greg, the reality based > community has long since vanished.
So he HASN'T closed the loop? Forget vortex, he can blame Bill Beaty for misleading him and leading the cry of "close the loop." Let me say it better: if he cannot close the loop and run it continuously, then there's very probably some mistake involved, and it's not OU. We humans love to fool ourselves. Therefore in our saner moments we have to set up some sort of mechanism that can burst our of self delusion. In the Free Energy biz, one such mechanism is this belief: Small amounts of measured OU cannot be trusted. To demonstrate that the OU is not illusory, just close the loop and run your device continuously for several closed cycles, for seconds or minutes (or better, for weeks.) If closing the loop always remains our goal, then perhaps we won't be led down the path of endless futzing with energy measurements. Sure, we measure the energy so we can tune the device and work towards closing the loop. But energy measurements won't convince a Disbeliever to come across with some funding. And history shows that the energy measurements can sometimes end up leading us into delusional beliefs; beliefs that we're seeing a true anomaly, when all we've really done is constructed dishonest *mental* structures which let us misinterpret what's going on. Never forget Feynman's advice, condensed from his Cargo Cult essay: the true essence of science is absolutely brutal self-honesty. We're always fooling ourselves, and we fool ourselves so easily. Our normal complement of psychological defenses keeps us happy through self-lies and perceptual distortion, so unless we actively fight against such warpings, we should assume that we've become their unsuspecting victims. Nature involves many bits of inconvient reality we cannot stand to face. To deal with Nature, we have to match its level of ruthless honesty. (((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))) William J. Beaty SCIENCE HOBBYIST website billb at amasci com http://amasci.com EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair Seattle, WA 206-789-0775 unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
