Well, it is not clear how much "defeating CoE" - merely as an intellectual endeavor - is worth. A lot, for sure - but probably not in the billions... unless, that is, ultimate economics are favorable at some scale.
It's all about economics in the end, and that could be the
proper explanation for what they are doing. In Illinois, they call this
being "crazy as a fox". Heck - maybe this thing scales up exponentially at
some level, so that in the "next iteration"... say, the size of an aircraft
carrier, the output becomes a gigawatt... at least on paper :-)
What would the US Navy (or the Chinese) pay for a
self-powered aircraft carrier? Yup. Now we understand the wonder of scaling.
Anyway - if one wanted to project an optimistic outlook onto
the apparent craziness of these folks - to show that the builders are not
simply rich and vain industrialists (or desirous to show that the state of
South American science is above what US scientists believe) ... and/or that
they do in fact possess "special skills" and a high level of intellectual
sophistication (such as having an advanced theory which has been partially
proved) then there is a more believable scenario. It goes something like
this.
They originally built (or bought, from an impoverished
inventor) a small device - which showed a possible gravity anomaly (or
something like the Aspden effect) but did not self-power reliably. Then ...
in the way that rich industrialists often do, they hired the best engineers
they could find in Brazil and scaled it up to a larger size. Yet, they found
that even though the run-time was much longer, it was still gradually
running down (like any good pendulum).
But then, being persistent they built a room-sized device -
which would self-run for say 50 days with no input. However, it too was not
completely overunity... but ... here is where the guessing gets tricky...
they were able to deduce from computer modeling of these prior actual
prototypes, that the device was subject to a predictable scaling factor.
To cut to the chase: this is what they want to demonstrate
in Illinois - the accuracy of the model, and the scaling factor. The poor
economics of the present barn-sized device are not critical. Apparently,
giving them credit where none may be due - they may have actual Sim software
(perhaps an advanced add-on to Ansys) which models what they have found.
http://www.ansys.com/Products
If their model is correct, then the physical principle could
be worth billions, but if not, then we are back to "rich and vain" ...
From: Jed Rothwell
James Bowery wrote:
So why would anyone invest millions to build such a
monstrosity even if it worked? (We'll ignore the fact that it violates
violate known interpretations of physical theory out of respect for the
Enlightenment principle of evidence over theory.)
You would invest millions for the reason you just stated:
because it violates known interpretations of the conservation of energy. You
can't ignore that. That alone makes the machine worth a hundred billion
dollars. Or a hundred trillion, perhaps. However inefficient it may be,
surely there must be some physical principle that makes it work which could
be elucidated from the machine, and then built into a more practical
machine. In other words, it resembles a Newcomen steam engine.
I doubt that it actually works.
<<attachment: winmail.dat>>
