News Media Scammed by 'Free Energy' Hoax

Dozens of submitters, some of them quite credulous, have written in pointing to this Reuters story about an anonymous inventor who claims to have solved the universe's energy woes. It's amazing that Reuters ran this story. It's even more amazing that news media across the country are running it too. Check your local newspaper, see if they were taken in. Update: 01/24 16:38 GMT by M : Contest is over; see below.

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.

Comments

Give the author credit.

[eAndroid]

Not only did he scam most news agencies, he drinks Guinness.

Re:Give the author credit.

[redcup]

In other news...
In a trailer park on the shores of the Mississippi, a local man has claimed to have invented a perpetual motion human.

To prove his claim, he hooked a car battery up his wife/cousin for 10 minutes while she held a 100 watt light bulb in each hand. After removing the car battery, she proceeded to twitch for more than 37 hours.

Aleady companies are clammoring for the device, known as the "shockway," claiming it will revolutionize the world. "We could have our employees work 24 hours a day," said one business owner. "This could be the most important invention to come out of Mississippi since... since... paternity tests"

Laws

[gandalf_grey]

Young Lady, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

-- Homer Simpson

Re:Laws

[Raetsel]

In Stephen Hawking's Cambridge Lectures , he points out that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a statistical, rather than absolute, law. It applies in most cases that we have observed, yet we can not prove it applies to all cases.

The relevant part; tape 2, side 2:

"...The Second Law of Thermodynamics. It states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases with time. Moreover, when two systems are joined together, the entropy of the combined system is greater than the sum of the entropies of the individual systems."

(He gives an example)

" The Second Law of Thermodynamics has a rather different status to that of other laws of science. Other laws, such as Newton's Law of Gravity, for example, are absolute laws. That is, they always hold.

On the other hand, the Second Law is a statistical law. That is, it does not hold always, just in the vast majority of cases."

Damn those black holes. Or gravastars. Whatever you want to call them.

Zero-point energy probably does exist. There certainly is something there, we have managed to prove that much. I just don't believe that a single person, working alone, with a mechanical background, is going to 'suddenly uncover' the secret. I believe we are, unfortunately, beyond that point in our scientific development.

Almost all of these supposed 'perpetual motion' devices have some mechanical component. Something moving, some clockworks, something. There was even one instance where the reporter noticed the speed of the device was rather random. Upon closer inspection, a small cable was found, leading to the next room. The device was, in fact, powered by an elderly man in a rocking chair!

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain", huh?

Re:Laws

[alfredw]

100 years ago if you would have told me there were going to be atomic bombs, microwave ovens,...

While you're certainly correct about these things, I believe that this case is different.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, as pointed out by the the parent's poster, is a statistical law. However, it is not only a statistical law derived from experiment (such as, say, "General Relativity agrees with 100.0% of experiments done to date"), but it is also a mathematical theorem (such as, say, "a + b = b + a"). I can believe that a given law of science could be proven wrong. For a theorem which is as deeply rooted as the 2nd law (which is a result of combinatronics), though... This would require mathematics as we know it to topple.

To be honest, I think it is beyond possibility. This, incidentally, also means that the First Law (conservation of energy) is true as well. If energy is perfectly conserved in an ideal system, the change in entropy is zero. If the 2nd law were false and the change in entropy could be less than zero, energy conservation would also have failed.

So, like any theorem, there are conditions that must be met before it is true. What are the 2nd law's conditions?

Answer: Your system must consist of discrete particles that can be in any one of several states. The states do not have to be equally probable. The more particles you have, the more statistically insignificant any deviations from the mean become. Ergo, when you're looking at something macroscopic (like, say, a "free energy machine"), you'll be looking at ~10^(24 or 25) particles... WHICH IS PLENTY.

Sure, it is possible for the entropy in such a system to spontaneously decrease, but it unimaginably, overwhelmingly unlikely. It is very likely that the entropy will increase up to a certain maximum. Therefore, even if you got extraordinarily lucky and saw the entropy drop, it would soon bounce back up again.

That's the 2nd law in a nutshell...

As far as the Zero Point energy goes, I'm a little more fuzzy. Didn't Guth predict that if the energy in empty space fell to absolute zero it would undergo inflationary expansion? I remember reading that somewhere... Anyone?

Re:Laws

[doug363]

The second law of thermodynamics is statistical (or maybe probabilistic) because, when you look at the microscopic motions particles, it is possible for the second law to be broken, but incredibly unlikely. The classic example is: I have a sealed box of an odorous gas. I take it into a large room and open the box. The gas obviously will disperse and fill the room; this is predicted by the 2nd law of thermodynamics. If you look at the random motions of just one of these gas particles, it would look perfectly OK if you watched the movie "in reverse". However, it wouldn't look ok for the entire process to go in reverse. The reason is that it is incredibly unlikely that if a room is full of gas, then all the gas particles will, by chance, all move into the box in the corner. It is possible, but so incredibly unlikely you'd be waiting for many many times the age of the universe before it probably would happen. In more technical terms, there are many more states that the gas can be in if it "evenly" fills the room, but comparitively few if the gas is all in one corner. If each "state" of the particles on a microscopic level is equally likely (i.e. if the gas has been in the room for a long enough time that it has reached equilibrium), then the probability that the gas will fill the room instead of all being in the box is very close to 1.

So the cases where you'd see the 2nd Law not holding are where the probabilities of observing it are much more favorable than 1 in 10^80 or something. This means that you need to be looking at small numbers of particles (maybe 5 or 10 instead of ~10^23 particles for macroscopic objects) for long times. Certainly you wouldn't see it being violated constantly in a 40 pound lump of metal that some guy put together in his backyard.

Gravity, in contrast (according to theory anyway) always works. Full stop. It's not like that it's just an incredibly likely that objects will attract each other, it's a "certainty". It's the same with most of the other physical laws out there. Quantum mechanics is "probabilistic", but in another somewhat different sense, and theromodynamics doesn't really apply on the scale of quantum mechanics anyway. (Thermodynamics deals with the study of "macroscopic" systems with large numbers of particles, where general properties of the set of particles can be expressed. Properties like total energy, volume, # of particles, temperature, pressure, etc.)

let's not hang em just yet

[Synistyr]

I don't know about that assumption that the media/news outlets never do retractions. If you do read an actual physical newspaper, you'll see that usually on the editor's page they do print retractions and corrections.

It's quite possible that a) they don't even know that the story is wrong, b) no one has read and analyzed some tiny newstory from AP/Reuters/etc.. and c) no one has told them it's wrong.

Why don't you write your local paper that ran the story, and let them know? How else are they going to know to print a retraction/correction?

Define the extraordinary proof, please

[Planesdragon]

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.

Re:Define the extraordinary proof, please

[michael]

I think a test along these lines would be a good start. That was a link I was thinking about including in the story, maybe I should have.

Oops.

[chrisserwin]

"The 58-year-old electrical engineer, who lives in the Irish republic and intends -- for ``security and publicity-avoidance reasons'' -- to keep his identity a secret, has spent 23 years perfecting the Jasker Power System."

Ummm... Mr. Jasker... I think we let the cat out of the bag.

Hee hee hee...

[gnovos]

Next time you are handed one of those promotional AOL CDs with a "free 70 hours", here is your new retort:

"So is that Free as in Beer, Free as in Speech, or Free as in Energy?"

U.S. Patent office's solution.

[enkidu]

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.

wouldn't it be ironic

[Jafa]

Wouldn't it be ironic, the one time slashdot takes a high headed journalistic stand, it's for a some crazy story that some time from now turns out to be true.

J

At least they went for skepticism

[Logic Bomb]

The CNN article that's linked to here is the one I read. While it seems silly they even bothered to run this story, they at least offered significant skepticism and the words of several expert-types who said it was probably a big load of crap. In other words, they don't need to correct themselves, because they never said "this is true".

Here's how it works---

[Muerte23]

First, you connect the three car batteries (12V each) to the machine for an "initial power source". Those of you who have read "Stone Soup" might know where I'm going with this.

Then you power three 100W light bulbs for an hour. That's only 0.3kWh, or probably close to $0.05 worth of electricity.

Upon demonstration to the reporters, the three batteries on the outside are left with an "increased charge". The machine put out more than it took in *.

The secret: Four car batteries are in the box. It's self repleneshing! Demonstrate this to enough reporters, using nwe external batteries each time, and it will run forever!!!

Sigh.

*Editor's Note: If only more women were like that.

Erm, sorry to have to say this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite frankly, in my experience at least half of the Slashdot stories about physics are incorrect, whether due to hoaxes, a submitter who didn't understand what he was talking about, or an editor who just had to stick in that sentence of his own to prove how smart he was.

When it comes to science news, I don't trust Reuters to get it right, but I do trust them a hell of a lot more than Slashdot. So stop crowing so loudly over someone else's embarrassment.

A little credit to Reuters

[blamanj]

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."

But the voltage *increased*!...

[coyote-san]

*snicker* According to the CNN report, part of the "evidence" that the 4 12V car batteries were recharged while powering 3 100W light bulbs was the fact that the voltage actually increased from 48.9V to 51.2V.

Could there be any other reason for the voltage (and voltage alone, not power) to increase?

Surely it couldn't be something as trivial as the batteries warming up.... or would that only occur to someone who knows of the (really dangerous) way to deal with a dead battery in cold weather - hook up the jumper cables then short them. If you don't succeed in blowing up the battery, you may have warmed it up enough that it will have enough juice to turn the starter.

Re:But the voltage *increased*!...

[Phil Karn]

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.

This isn't so dumb...

[seldolivaw]

The article is a factual account of what the reporter saw, what the "scientist" claimed, and it includes a lot of balancing views pointing out fairly obvious things like the laws of thermodynamics, etc.. The chances of this guy breaking the laws of thermodynamics are infinitismal, but the article doesn't claim any more than that. It is clearly written with tongue planted firmly in cheek ("the most important Irish invention since Guiness"?), and maybe if Americans understood the concepts of "sarcasm" and "subtlety" more people would have got the joke.

Standard Perpetual Motion Device Screening Test

[Camel Pilot]

How about if the inventor of said device allows himself/herself to be locked in a hermitically sealed container with their invention powering a CO2 scubber/Oxygen Generator. Wait 24 hours and open up. Yes/No.

Succesful completion of this test would be extraordinary and get peoples attention.

Kuro5hin readers aren't THAT dumb...

[Raetsel]

Thanks for reminding me about K5... I hadn't visited them much since their server problems back in December. Now, about the K5 readers being "...taken in...", allow me to quote the first comment -- I think it sums things up perfectly.

Perpetual Energy or Hoax? (3.72 / 11) (#1)
by greyrat on Tue Jan 22nd, 2002 at 03:28:12 PM EST


Hoax. Next!

-- END OF LINE.

Re:Not just the major outlets

[RayBender]

Yes, I know zero-point energy is real. No, I don't think this crank from Ireland could even explain the concept.)

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 .

Notes on possible identity of inventor

[Chairboy]

I suspect that the person is Peter Chambers, and I offer the following evidence:

1. The administrative contact for jasker.com is Peter Chambers.
2. A search on Google.com identifies a Peter Chambers as an alumni of Brunel University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, issued 1972. This is 29 years ago. If he got his degree when he was 29, not unlikely, that would make him the 58 year old unnamed inventor.

Just a thought, and it all hinges on the assumption that the two are the same Peter Chambers and that he got the degree at 29.

If it's bollox, I'm at my Karma cap anyhow, so I can afford to lose the points. With a cap of 50, there's no real reason to make every comment super insightful, seeing as how there's no reward once you get to 50.

Parts Wear Out

[paulywog]

The article states: "the device can run indefinitely -- or at least until the parts wear out, adding that he has supplied all his own domestic power needs free for 17 months."

But, hold on... What causes parts to wear out, typically? Friction, or the heat energy that is associated with friction. At the very least, "wearing out" indicates a change in the physical or chemical characteristics of something. Change can only come through the transfer of energy. So, either the device is able to create not only enough power to light bulbs and keep itself running, but also extra power to wear out its own parts!! I guess it's too efficient for it's own good.

Holes in the story ALL OVER the place!

Dbl std: Perpetual Motion vs. Software Patents

[lildogie]

> The office would then set it going and if it was still running a year later, they would consider the patent application.

So why don't they do this with software patents?

Re:Free Energy not impossible

[Captn Pepe]

I hate to break it to you, but our universe isn't even symmetric under time translation, much less time reversal. It is expanding after all, and this means that you can tell how much time has passed since the big bang by measuring the ambient photon temperature (the CMB), and can tell what direction you are moving in by noting whether the universe is expanding or contracting.

In fact, if the cosmological constant is real (probably) and is due to a non-zero vacuum energy (quite possibly), then energy is not conserved globally. But even if this isn't the case, you can get "free energy" out of an expanding universe with relative ease: just tie a string to two masses and wind it around an axle, place the masses many megaparsecs apart, and let the expansion of the universe pull them apart and consequentially spin the axle. Just make sure you can keep extending the string for all eternity, and you're set until the mass of the length of string becomes comparable to that of your masses on the ends. :-)

Really, though -- our universe is symmetric under time translation to very high accuracy for the distances and timescales that engineers are interested in, so in that regime yes, energy is conserved.

World Energy Demand Solved...

[Remik]

...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

Insight from Carl Sagan

[Robotech_Master]

I just can't help thinking of this quote from Carl Sagan as I read about this story:

"They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at Newton. Of course, they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

New idea?

[zjbs14]

Here's the quote from the jasker.com website:

"THIS INVENTION EFFECTIVELY GUARANTEES THE CONTINUITY OF MANKIND".

No, that would be sex.

No sig, sorry.

Has anyone looked at the official website?

[LichP]

I have a standard trick to writing essays, and it involves writing complete b*llocks. And I'm quite good at it, so I can spot it when I see it. Looking at the Brief Description on the official Jasker website, I spotted rather a lot. I quoth:

This [electricity genreation] is accomplished, by utilisation of existing and proven state of the art technologies, combining novel features and innovative assembly techniques.

Which are what?

The credibility of the system is definitively established and can be interpreted and demonstrated as being "the practical application of accepted techniques".

By whom, and which apps and techniques?

There are no stages in the operation of this invention that require any constituent component to perform at anything other than that being, within its capability or in accordance with its specification.

This is grammatically broken imo. If it holds any meaning, then I think it says "Nothing does anything it shouldn't."

All the parts for this invention are in practical and productive everyday use. The methodology technique is accomplished by the innovative application in logical sequence of specifically selected constituent components whose performance compliment each other and function in co-operation.

This has to be one of the single-most badly constructed paragraphs of complete cr*p I have ever seen for quite some time. My translation: "It uses bog-standard components which work together."

Attainment is determined by the systematic mathematical application in the defined mode, of the accurately selected operational segments.

Again, broken. First question that springs to mind is 'What is the defined mode?' Try dropping the comma and it makes slightly more sense. My translation: "We use maths to work out how to make this thing gain energy." Being a Maths undergrad, I am a little insulted.

In reality the achievement of this invention adheres strictly with known, accepted and proven physics principles. It is emphasised there are no new discoveries disproving accepted physics laws. To reiterate there are no physics heresies, no physics contradictions and no ambiguous claims.

In short, this is a lie, as has been previously pointed out by other /.ers.

This invention is achieved by the application and utilisation of a capital energy source to create a prolific income energy system, with the consequential composition being a "controlled loop, self-generating module", that produces instant and constant mechanical drive power and or instant and constant electrical power.

More b*llsh*t, although slightly better crafted than previous paragraphs, imo. My translation: "We put in energy, it uses it, but spits out more. So we get surplus."

This invention is mankind's first income energy reservoir from a capital energy source.

To be taken with a handful of salt. My translation: "We think it works, and we think it's the first one to work." In summary, a load of badly-formed b*llshit, about as insubstantial as a pea in the path of a steam-roller. -- From Phil Mod me to death if you like, but I'll die a martyr. At least in my dreams. OK, so I won't but I like to pretend ...

Give me a T-shirt, please, Michael

[lythe]

The Reuters story doesn't once say "this is true," either. In fact, they go to great lengths to explain why the guy is probably a crackpot.

I'd like to see a retraction from Slashdot on this one - since, unlike the Reuters story, the Slashdot story is actually false, in that it claims Reuters was wrong. But Reuters was scrupulously accurate - quoting the man's claims, then quoting experts, then explaining the claims and why they're unlikely to be possible, while never once stating that he's legit or even that it's very likely he's legit.

Can I get my T-shirt now? I'd like it signed from Michael, "I admit I was wrong, and futhermore, I don't understand the first thing about journalism. I expected all journalists to take my side in stories rather than presenting a balanced viewpoint. Now I see what an idiot I was."

Thanks.