On Wed, 24 Jun 2009, John Berry wrote: > No, none of what I present is Absolute Proof but surely we should not fail > to investigate something simply because it MAY turn out to be wrong.
If you aren't sitting at your kitchen table building some simple circuits yourself ...then you yourself are "failing to investigate something." Back in the mid 1990s it was a common event on my FREENRG-L forum that new subscribers would refuse to test phenomena themselves, but would try to get others to do it for them. This makes sense if expensive machine shops and oscilloscopes were needed, but usually that wasn't the case. Those people were refusing to lift a finger to test anything ...and wouldn't buy a five dollar voltmeter and some alligator clips. They wanted to sit all day arguing about unverified alt-science claims. And they were angry that other people wouldn't do the work they wanted done. (Their skills seemed to be based entirely on unseemly debating tactics and persuasion. They had zero interest in amateur science.) If something interests you, then test it. For example, most of the stuff on REX RESEARCH has not been checked out by anyone besides the original inventor. RA Nelson put man-years into that collection, and there's man-years of work to be done in sorting out the few genuine discoveries from the majority of garbage (more like man-centuries of work.) And you won't know how much garbage there is until you start testing it, and encounter failure after failure. JL Naudin has another collection, so in that case at least one other experimenter has sorted through some stuff. But unfortunately Naudin is very, very biased, and he's not good at discovering the real stuff and rejecting the garbage. Arguing about untested discoveries doesn't help. Defending the reputation and character of the inventors doesn't help. The only thing that really helps is to build a quick and dirty version of the device, and see if it actually works. If it does, only then should you try convincing others to build it too. But usually it doesn't. Or if it does work, then it usually turns out to be some well-known effect that the inventor thought was anomalous (like Tesla's discovery that metal plates get charged up by sunlight. Einstein got the Nobel prize for explaining that same effect.) Here's something I've been meaning to test. I expect that it's real, and would get the experimenter some fame: Marinov's ball-bearing motor. http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/bbmotor.html. The othodox concensus is that it's driven by thermal humps in the steel. But this is debunkery, not experiment. Nobody bothered to test whether the phenomenon requires thermal humps! A fair test would be to use some loose bearings, and to immerse them in liquid mercury. No hot contact points, no thermal humps. Does the device still run? If so, then it's proved to be a Homopolar Motor, or perhaps some other unknown effect, and all the people who distainfully rejected Marinov's motor are shown to be dishonest idiots. (But man, it's mercury. Do you want that stuff all over your kitchen or garage? It's guaranteed to get spilled one or two times. Finally we can buy GALINSTAN gallium-based liquid metal from scitoys.com) PS One of the very few freenrg subscribers who actually did perform simple kitchen-table tests was JL Naudin. But then he left to start his own forum! :( (((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (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 206-762-3818 unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
