At 03:14 PM 3/17/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
So, get rid of the battery -- I mean, *really* get rid of it, disconnect
the wires at the battery terminals, and carry it a good distance away
from the experiment -- and show the capacitor still charging itself up.
Well, something has to drive the circuit. The whole thing will stop
dead otherwise. That would be like expecting a Fleischmann Pons cell
work without first doing electrolysis.
It's different, actually. Electrolysis in a Fleischmann cell probably
has very little to do with the nuclear reaction, it's just a way of
generating deuterium gas right at the surface of the electrode.
The point of Stephen's suggestion is to set things up so that the
circuitry is driven by power from the capacitor. Sure, get the thing
started with a battery, then, once it's up to operating voltages,
disconnect the battery. If it's over unity, and with an efficient
circuit, if the capacitor continues to charge for any significant
time, you have proven over unity. (You could, I suppose, set up some
system where a lot of power gets stored somewhere, that then
transfers back to the capacitor charge slowly, but that would need to
be pretty complex, probably. If the circuitry is simple, and you can
keep the thing running, the capacitor isn't running down, which is
much easier to measure than battery charge, you've got over unity.
What ususally happens is that no, it isn't enough to increase the
capacitor charge "but that's just because our circuitry isn't
efficient enough, we are working on that." What they are really doing
is recycling power, and some of it is lost in each cycle, but they
just look at what's coming in and not what's going out...
