Slashdot Mirror
News Media Scammed by 'Free Energy' Hoax
The General Electric corporate empire was scammed - they modified the story with a skeptical headline but otherwise left it alone. The AOL/TimeWarner corporate empire didn't have any problem with the story. The Environmental News Network, which probably should know better, didn't.
Now I know that wire stories are often run with minimal verification - each paper or website assumes that Reuters, or UPI, or AP has checked the story for veracity before it went out. And I know that reporters and editors can't be experts on every field of endeavor that they report on.
But this is Basic Science. The Three Laws (everyone loves the Second Law[1]) are not a new thing, and they're not going away any time soon. This should have been taught in junior high. There's a simple, well-known test that Reuters could have applied to this story: "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof". This claim is the most extraordinary of all - free energy, perpetual motion, whatever you want to call it, and it demands proof beyond question. Reuters is running this story based on an anonymous inventor. Is that extraordinary proof?
But wait, I said perpetual motion. The phrase "perpetual motion" is one which sets off alarm bells in people's heads, so the anonymous inventor was quick to head off that thought process:
"But he is keen to head off the notion that he has tapped into the age-old myth of perpetual motion. ``Perpetual motion is impossible. This is a self-sustaining unit which at the same time provides surplus electrical energy,'' he said."
This quote is simply embarassing. It parses to "Perpetual motion is impossible. This is a perpetual motion unit." The inventor must be snickering in his Guinness right now to have snuck that one past.
The story gets better when you read it several times. Three 100 Watt light bulbs created a drain of 4500 Watts, according to the nameless inventor. That would be an impressive feat all by itself, except that it's total nonsense.
The piece would have made a good humor article. A properly skeptical and properly educated Reuters reporter could have examined these claims, poked holes in them, and published a story that simultaneously reported on the claims and educated the public about why they are a load of hogwash. Too bad that's not what happened.
Maybe you'd like to take a crack at evaluating their claims? You think you can examine their device a little more critically than Reuters? Give them a call.
And I have a second task as well. Slashdot is occasionally criticized for getting a story wrong, even though we diligently correct ourselves when necessary. My theory is that the difference between Slashdot and other media is that they never correct themselves, no matter how inaccurate, so readers are left with a false picture of accuracy. To test this claim, I'll send a Thinkgeek t-shirt to the first person who finds a retraction of this 'free energy' story published by Reuters or any of the newspapers/media outlets that ran the original story. *Any* of them. I don't expect to pay out.
Update: 01/24 16:38 GMT by M : CNN has updated their story with a new headline and several new paragraphs at the end, which qualifies. A couple of people also noted that ZDNet appears to have taken their copy of the wire story down. Lucas Garsha was the first to email, so he gets a t-shirt. I wasn't clear whether the claim should be email or in the comments, so I'll also send a t-shirt to the first commenter noting this, which appears to be skia.
[1] This is a fine world that we live in, where I can find a website devoted to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
If you're going to draw the line, please finish it.
If you require "extraordinary proof" to refute science, why not define what you need? I agree that running a light bulb for three hours isn't that impressive, and this is probably a scam of some sort.
But on the same time, science demands that we ask "what if this is true?". If he really has a free energy device, what amazing thing could he do to prove that it works?
My own suggestion: go to an ivy-league school (heck, any college) and set the darn thing up powering something that causes a healthy drain. (*not* a lightbulb... well, maybe a strobe light or something that really sucks up the juice) and let it go until it stops.
Once the bulb stops, plug it into the wall and see if it starts. If it does, the invention's probably not free energy. If it doesn't, plug in another bulb and see how long THAT one lasts.
A year or so of healthy drain would be enough to prove free energy, don't you think? Or at least, enough to get the damn patent and immortalize the freakish invention.
A long while back the U.S Patent office got so many of these "perpetual energy" machines that the office head put down the policy that the inventor had to submit a working prototype. The office would then set it going and if it was still running a year later, they would consider the patent application. This cut down on the number of applications considerably.
A two hour test run is bullshit. Let's see it run for 2 years in an empty room, then we'll talk.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
I wouldn't say that Reuters was completely scammed. They did, after all, put this page not in the Science,or Tech categories, but in the "Lifestyle" category, note that the link directly after the title is to "Ann Landers."
Their view of the thing seems to be along the lines of "Hey, some guy claims he saw the Loch Ness Monster and he's building a submarine to search the lake."
How do "know* something is real that's never been demonstrated?
Zero-point energy has a very testable hypothesis: the Casimir effect. Which has been demonstrated. Check this article or this one .
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
There's another possibility. Lead-acid batteries exhibit a phenomenon called the "coup de Fouet" (French for "crack of the whip"). When you start to discharge a fully charged Pb-A battery, the terminal voltage initially drops and then recovers after a few percent of the battery's capacity has been discharged. The voltage then resumes a slow decline as the battery discharges further.
This is not necessarily what's going on, but I thought I'd mention it. It's even more likely that the external batteries were mostly discharged, and connecting them to the device simply allowed them to be topped off by some fully charged batteries hidden inside the device. The open-terminal voltage of a healthy, charged "48V" Pb-A pack at room temperature is typically 52-53V, and an external pack voltage of 48.9V would indicate a pack that was mostly discharged (or had some weak cells). Parallel it with a fully charged pack inside the device at 52-53V, and it would be entirely reasonable to expect enough charge to transfer from the internal pack to the external one to bring the latter's terminal voltage up to the 51V range.
Judging from the size and shape of the device and its reported performance, I think it quite reasonable to file this "invention" in the "hidden battery" subcategory of perpetual motion frauds.
...but, it's old news...
It's called the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR). It can run for years on a single supply of fisile material, augmented by uranium filtered from sea water. Not only is it, "an energy source that is unlimited," to quote its head of the project, Dr. Charles Till, but it is possibly the safest nuclear reactor ever designed. Unfortunately, anti-nuclear power activists bringing false claims before Congress in 1994 lead to the decommissioning of the project by then President Clinton.
The unofficial IFR site
A wonderful interview with Dr. Charles Till