Slashdot Mirror
Japanese Company Says Laws of Physics Don't Apply — to Cars
Fantastic Lad, among many others, points out another in a long series of claimed "powered by water" cars, this one by a Japanese company called "Genepax," which interestingly enough does not have so much as a Wikipedia entry. What's scary is the uncritical, even serious-sounding, presentation by Reuters of such extraordinary claims quite unbacked by extraordinary evidence. "Almost sounds too good to be true" isn't the half of it; if cars could be made which would run as "long as you have a bottle of water inside" to pour into the fuel tank ("even tea," repeats this report), not only would you know about the car, but you'd notice the long lines of people buying generators, laptops, and power tools that run on the same technology. The snippet Reuters is carrying says "Jun. 13 — Japanese company Genepax presents its eco-friendly car that runs on nothing but water. The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car's tank. The generator then releases electrons that produce electric power to run the car. Genepax, the company that invented the technology, aims to collaborate with Japanese manufacturers to mass produce it." Fantastic Lad, deadpan, goes on: "Check out the Reuter's story and accompanying video. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there some sort of conservation of energy thing happening in the whole 'separating hydrogen from water' game? I wonder what the real story is on this. Investment fraud? Magic?" Show your work; bonus points if you use Haiku.
The problem with your example is that the actual work required to move 200 watts of heat is less than 200w.
When it comes to actually producing energy, or moving a car etc this situation will never occur.
You can use less energy to accomplish a job, but you can't use no energy. That's what these cars (apparently) seem to claim-- they are running on NO energy-- they (use energy to) split the water into hydrogen and oxyen, then burn the hydrogen and oxygen to get the energy to split the water, and have extra energy left over. This is not "refrigeration technology"-- this is magic.
With that said, let me say that I wrote "apparently" in the previous paragraph, because I haven't actually seen the Japanese text, only the news articles, and I know that news articles often miss a key point, or two-- for all I know this may actually be a perfectly functional car, and the reporter screwed up the article. It could be a fuel-cell car, for example, powered off the grid (which could be said to "run on water", although not in a perpetual-motion closed cycle.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Forgive me for being sceptical of the sceptics here, but without knowing what process they claim to use to separate the hydrogen from the water, how can we reliably debunk it as not obeying the laws of physics?
It's one thing to claim that their car doesn't work, it's another to claim it doesn't work because what it proposes to do is impossible.
A few decades ago, people claimed it was impossible to go to the moon...
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
This is very simple. Energy is always conserved. So let's start at the beginning of the system.
Water is low-energy. It is the end product of burning. If you want to get energy from water, you need to convert it, or something else, to an even lower energy form. In this case they're converting it to a much higher energy form (separating the hydrogen), so something else has to be losing energy.
If you're suggesting that anything else in the system (membranes, catalysts, aluminum, whatever else people on this page have suggested) is losing energy, it has to lose a lot. It has to lose enough to power a car. It's not going to be cheap : it's the same damn thing as ethanol, gasoline, a big ol' charged battery, pure hydrogen, whatever. You have to put high energy stuff into your car, and you're not going to get away with $5 worth of some magic membrane.
Repeat after me: There is no free lunch.
If I understand correctly, this car claims to burn hydrogen to power itself. So, since burning hydrogen = producing water, you can just take the water from the exhaust and put it back in the little thingy that separates hydrogen. So, they were being modest, you don't even need to add water (or tea)!
Seriously now, I see serious posts here about things that "we don't know / don't yet comprehend" like "zero point energy" etc. Guys, perhaps if you take a couple of physics courses you will both "know" and "comprehend" and in addition you will be able to discern obvious scams.
Unless they are using a nice tiny fusion generator here. In that case when you pour water, it would be taking the deuterium out of it. Then I imagine they will tell you to throw in some old lithium batteries you have lying around, so that tritium can be generated. So, with your deuterium-tritium fuel you can power up Mr Fusion and have all the power you need!
Seriously people...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
You CAN'T run car on water. That's impossible without exotic things like cold fusion (which doesn't exist).
You CAN run a car on water AND some other reagent. Like magnesium, aluminium, sodium, calcium carbide, zinc, etc.
However, you'll NEED TO REPLACE this reagent once it's spent. And guess what? It's much more expensive than simply buying gasoline.
When it comes to actually producing energy, or moving a car etc this situation will never occur.
Doesn't it depend on how much energy is stored in the Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms? Is it more than the energy required to split the molecule? If I remember correctly, normally the answer is no, but adding the right catalyst can change that. If it requires X amount of energy to split the molecule, and the 2 Hydrogen atoms have 2X energy, then you have energy left over to drive your car. I mean, the process works with splitting the atom. It doesn't require a nuclear bomb worth of energy to split an atom...splitting an atom leaves a whole lot of excess energy.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Truth is what you want it to be.
Adding a certain % of water might work if it helps improve internal combustion efficiency. Current internal combustion engines waste approx 80% of the energy and some of that might be recovered.
Some use a small amount of water plus a shitload of electricity to do electrolysis. They're as dumb as the "I get 200mpg with my hybrid" claims where electricity is the primary power source.
And the rest??? Well until you see independent evidence they're probably all hoaxes.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So if it works so great, why arent you still doing it. I have to remain skeptical of fantastic claims like this as well. If this is so, and you can boost up mileage just by adding water to gas, why isnt everyone doing it? It would be a no brainer. Its like all of these miracalous technologies that by retrofitting your car with some device that generates hydrogen from electrolysis and injects it into the fuel, you are supposed to get 80 mpg or some ridiculous thing. You have people selling do it yourself kits for this. if the inventors really did have this, they could make a load of money to sell licences to car manufacturers. They would be billionaries. SO why dont they? Because its not real, its a scam, and any car manufacturer or engine manufacturer would find that out. The reason they only use kits is they cant be held liable when it doesnt work, they can just say the user didnt do something right. They are of course, all get rich quick scams, taking advantage of peoples gullability.
water inject is used in some aircraft engines that are designed for it, as a way to run leaner mixture. It can help some automobile engines a little, but people claiming huge 30% or 40% efficiency increases in car are just b.s.ing themselves and probably don't even know how to consistently compute miles per gallons (in short, idiots)
The methanol part probably isn't necessary. Most gasoline is E5 or so at this point, so every ten gallons of fuel contains about half a gallon of ethanol.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
a catalyst does not change the amount of energy released or required for a reaction, it simply reduces the energy maxima, which means the reaction needs less energy to get started, however, the net energy released or required stays the same.
That's how thermodynamics works. What is often the case in these 'fueled by water' things is there is a 'catalyst' that is actually a reactant and that is where the energy comes from, of course as a reactant it all gets used up and must be replaced.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Scientists don't NEED to explain it... that's the job of the "scientists" that invented it.
If it's real, every scientist will then nod and go "Yup, they're right".
Scientists really don't give a crap about people's crackpot theories unless they *are* going to affect the known laws of science. That's where science gets interesting. Did you know, for example, that there are quantum effects that "get" energy from nowhere and then "return" it later in time. They literally "borrow" energy from the future. Much, much, much more interesting that most scientific things. However, when you do the maths, it *still* all works out and comes out to nice equations in X dimensions etc.
But a car that "runs on water" is so much crap it's unbelievable without MUCH, MUCH more information - how do you start the reaction, what inputs are there to the systems, how much energy is produced, where does that energy come from? There are a million unanswered questions and it's only a scientists job to ask them of such an "inventor", not to answer them. When the answers are forthcoming, then we can check them and see if it adds up. If they don't fit the theorems we have (for which there are no known counter-examples), then we need to investigate more. But "it just does" means they won't even look. It's a crackpot-answer, as is silence.
If you invent a perpetual motion machine, the top scientists in the world are not going to come running. Hundreds of them get invented every single day. If even science students ran round to every one, there'd be nobody left to do any real science. It's not up to science to disprove your theory, it's up to you to prove it. That's how it works, even between scientists in their own community.
A hundred scientists looking at your theory and not being able to disprove it is NOTHING in comparison to being able to provide a complete proof compatible with all known laws. It's not even close to rigourous science to say "it runs on water" and even the pseudo-science explanations are NOWHERE near rigourous answers. This is why mathematicians (who all also scientists, just as much, and in fact physics is more maths than what you would call science) hated the four-colour-theorem proof, it was done on computer and although they couldn't find any counter-examples, they also couldn't understand the proof because of the sheer size of it. However, within a few years, they were able to prove it's "correctness" and THEN they accepted it.
Signs of a crackpot:
No detailed scientific information on the critical process: Check
No peer-review of the technology: Check
No published papers: Check
Unknown, heavily-debunked or non-existent scientists: Check
No announcement of breaking scientific laws BEFORE you've built a product on the basis: Check
Pseudo-science statements that are empty and meaningless: Check
A magical, unexplained source of "energy" (amazing how much that word is misused in everything from Reiki healing to water-dowsing): Check
Breaking KNOWN laws of physics in so many ways without explanation of how the equations match up, or where the extra energy comes from, or what the "new" equations would be: Check
YouTube before New Scientist: Check
Yes, we all know the laws of physics apply to air conditioning. What GP was pointing out is that geeks like to "debunk" claims by claiming something violates the laws of physics when it fact it does not, they simply don't understand what's occuring.
There's not enough information in the Reuters article to validate or debunk the operation of this car. Therefore, a large number of geeks have made a large number of assumptions about what hasn't been said, then "proven" it impossible by showing it doesn't work under the set of assumptions they made. In short, they've proven nothing.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
You're right, water injection does have a well documented history in aircraft. It also has a fairly well documented history in race cars, specifically dragsters. Both are applications where you are going to be using 100% power for a sustained period of time. It's not a coincidence that this is the only power setting that water injection is actually effective. Read that wikipedia article that the tools who actually believe in water injection are linking to, unless it's been vandalized recently it'll say exactly the same thing. Water injection isn't effective at lower power levels because it will actually serve to quench the flame. Seeing as how your average passenger car is cruising at about 15% throttle, adding water is a quick way to start causing problems.
Energy and matter are interchangeable, but they've still got to equal out.
If you wound up with less water than what you started with, and you claimed to be splitting hydrogen and oxygen, then you'd have a basis in reality, but 2H20 -> 2H2O + energy doesn't add up
Check out my sysadmin blog!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
This is nitpicking: the car doesn't actually use water as fuel; it uses hydrogen. The hydrogen is simply generated by splitting water. For the company to claim that the car uses water as fuel, they'd have to actually be burning water somehow. Instead, water is the precursor to the fuel, and the byproduct of the burning.
For example, the current equivalent would be to claim that cars run on carbon dioxide, when in fact the fuel for the car was originally synthesized (by photosynthesis and subsequently by kerogen pyrolysis) from carbon dioxide, and produces carbon dioxide when burned.
Did you see the pool? They flipped the bitch!
An idea that i'd like to present is that, for the most part, even the oil system we have today, depends on burning more resources than it pulls out, but the costs are largely hidden from the consumer. The "energy" industry of today is largely the same thing. This shit we're burning today had to come from somewhere. Call it resources, call it a zit in the earth or magic beans, but the question is... how much energy is burned up moving this stuff around, refining it, marketing it, selling it, etc. I bet if you did the math like some have, you'd notice that liquid fuel extraction (petroleum based) you'd discover that a lot of it is wasted merely to further extract MORE of it. All in all, its a losing game either way. Perhaps less energy should be wasted debunking things based only on mere assumptions, and actually figuring something new out.
For a bunch of "geeks" and "science nerds" I'm seeing a lot of bullshit and very little science. If you don't have solutions, why don't you get together with someone who can think and come up with a few? Can't hurt, seeing as to how science has been reduced to verifying predominant dogmas and outright rejecting any other possibilities.
Strangely, if your dogmas were to be followed, quantum mechanics would've been an outright pipe dream. Strangely, as far as our current means go, this stuff has proven pretty eye opening, if nothing else.
Question to ask is: if we've been hoodwinked into believing so much other shit before, even by our teachers, from the world being flat, to flies manifesting on rotten meat, to the various other propagandas of our age... what else have we been lied to or mislead about? Instead of immediately debunking things based on preaching, perhaps a second look at "HOW" something might be done, would be eye opening, would it not? Almost like the arguments that free markets don't work, when a truly free market has rarely existed because governments have been quick to destroy them, lest people gain some measure of autonomy through exchanges of value based on consent, rather than lies, misinformation and government coercion and controls.
Try figuring out how it COULD be done, rather than bitching about something we all were taught in high school. By the way, I still remember my mathematics professor telling me that that there were no numbers other than positive and negative. Guess her education was weaker than mine and when I asked her about the posible results of radicals from negative roots, she turned pale white, having a kid explain to her how that stuff should work in front of her class. Yeah, that kind of shit is what makes me not believe that teachers, professors and doctors know it all. Most only know what they've been TOLD to know, and believe only what they've been TOLD to believe.
A guy that went by Teilhard de Chardin, long ago, said something to the effect of "in the cosmos, only the fantastic has a chance of being real."
Given that everything we once took to be science fiction or "tools of the devil" are now things we take for granted every day, perhaps the idea that energy is easier to extract than we've been taught by our establishment, may well not be as "unpossible" as we've been taught to believe. Frankly, I've seen entirely too many things in my life to think that its all as simple and cut and dry as school would have us believe.
That is why I simply said, if I see a working sample, or if I am asked to witness such a thing, I will gladly maintain an open mind. Why? I've seen too much weird shit in my life, survived lots of weird shit, and delved in places where I was told not to.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
There is a HUGE error in your statement.
A fission nuclear reaction splits an ATOM.
Hydrogen/Oxygen electrolysis splits a MOLECULE.
There is no nuclear reactions here. It merely requires overcoming the covalent bonds, which are held together using the strong electromagnetic force.
Putting them back together leaves you exactly where you started.... so without destroying some part of the atoms involved, where does the energy come from?
Remember, nuclear fission splits an atom into two SMALLER atoms the sum mass of which is slightly smaller than the original mass. There is no way to "put them back together" without requiring an absurd input of energy AND additional mass.
Whatever geek told you that it was against the laws of physics to move large amounts of heat with small amounts of energy was an idiot.
Depends on the magnitude of "large" and "small".
Technically you need no energy to cool a computer. The chip will get hot, and because it is warmer than the surroundings it will radiate heat.
True.
However, the amount of heat that can be dissipated into the surroundings is fairly simple to calculate. It is a result of the heat of the chip and the heat of the surroundings.
No, it's more complex than that. The movement of heat occurs by radiation, conduction and convection. Lets go over them.
Radiation
Everything above absolute zero emits some electromagnetic radiation. You can clearly see this if you heat up a piece of iron. At some point, the iron will begin to glow. Ultra-thin "survivor" blankets are often made of reflective material, to block heat transfer by radiation. In hot climates, you often see houses made out of white material - this is to reflect more of the sun's rays. A black house would absorb more of the sun's rays and get warmer.
Conduction
Heat can move easily when two objects are touching. Ever wonder how a thermos keeps things at the same temperature? The inner & outer skin are separated by a vacuum, and the vacuum reduces heat loss from conduction. Different materials conduct heat at different rates. Some of the best conductors of heat are copper & aluminum, so for a computer chip, you can mount a large heat sink made of copper or aluminum and the heat moves more rapidly. In a cold climate, the insulation in your home is chosen to conduct heat at a low rate.
Convection
Most things expand when they are heated. When things expand, they become less dense, and a gas or liquid that is less dense will rise. So, if your computer chip is mounted on the top external surface of the computer case, it will warm the air immediately above the chip, the heated air will expand and rise, to be replaced by cooler air from the surroundings. If you put that computer chip on the bottom surface of the computer case, convection will not occur.
If you wish to move heat at a higher rate, then you will need to input your own energy into the equation.
Not necessarily, better design can result in a higher rate of heat transfer, but only up to a certain point. Beyond that, you need to input energy, like a cooling fan.
If oil doesn't give us a net energy surplus after taking into account drilling and transportation, then where is the energy coming from that makes up the loss? Further, if this energy source exists, why wouldn't we be using it to power our cars instead of wasting time with oil?
Not a typewriter
Just because you're eloquent doesn't mean you aren't a fucking crackpot.
Nobody expects the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
Therefore, a large number of geeks have made a large number of assumptions about what hasn't been said, then "proven" it impossible by showing it doesn't work under the set of assumptions they made. In short, they've proven nothing.
The only assumptions are in the article. Number 1 is it runs on water. It doesn't. Number 2 is it gets hydrogen from water from a chemical reaction with the real fuel producing hydrogen and oxygen. The real fuel is consumed in the process is assumed. Number 3 it uses the produced hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity in a fuel cell producing earth friendly water ending the catalyst cycle.
Conclusion, water is a catalyst and carrier of energy in the hydrogen and oxygen form. The real consumed fuel isn't isn't mentioned much.
So geeks want to know, what's the real fuel?
The truth shall set you free!
If this was an instance of the violation of the law of thermodynamics, it wouldn't have been introduced to the world as a new car. It would have been heralded as the wondrous piece of science it would have been. It would turn science on its ear and literally change everything we think we know. You'll forgive my incredible scepticism when someone comes around with a scheme to break that law in the form of a gadget they are trying to hawk.
I would love for this to work. I want to believe, trust me. But do you really think this is the way it's going to happen? Do you really think someone who manages to break the law of thermodynamics is going to be so dumb as to not really know what he has and what it means and just stick it in a little car and try and sell it that way?
The law of thermodynamics is not called a law lightly. It's not because we've never found a way to break it. It's because we don't know of a way where it could be broken that wouldn't lead to a universe that is in any way like the one we live in. It's called a law because we cannot even conceive a way for it not to be. I am certainly not going to sit around here and bandy about techspeak babble on how it might be possible to break it, which is what the poster I replied to was chastising us for not doing. Anyone capable of breaking the law of thermodynamics certainly won't need my help explaining it. And if they want to induce belief, stuffing it in the boot of a car and selling it like the rest of the snake oil vendors is certainly not the way to generate credibility.
-- Paul Johnson, "Modern Times"
Why do you think we do it--all the space probes and particle accelerators? We are looking for things we cannot explain, and it turns out that there are a lot of them. The truly revolutionary moments of discovery are not heralded by shouts of "Eureka," but by someone quietly rechecking the math and recalibrating the instruments because things just didn't add up. Most often, the battle-cry of science is "hmm, that's strange."
I'm not saying that these guys have rewritten everything we think we know about the universe, but they would be well within their rights if they had done so. More likely there is some other reactant consumed or the water is pressurized or ionized or heated or whatever. Steam locomotives ran on water too, you know. The articles linked do not describe the process in sufficient detail to talk intelligently about it one way or the other.
Really, all the posts here are about whether or not you, the reader, can accept something into your world that does not look like what you see every day. If not, well, you just keep waving that femur. Maybe we'll send you a postcard from The Future.
> If this was an instance of the violation of the law of thermodynamics, it wouldn't
> have been introduced to the world as a new car. It would have been heralded as the
> wondrous piece of science it would have been. It would turn science on its ear and
> literally change everything we think we know. You'll forgive my incredible scepticism
> when someone comes around with a scheme to break that law in the form of a gadget
> they are trying to hawk.
Mod this man up. If I was a Japanese guy who discovered some "free-energy-from-water" process, I wouldn't be using it to merely power a car. Japan doesn't have any native oil production at all. Hint, they started the Asian portion of World War II because the USA embargoed oil exports to Japan due to atrocities like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre "The Rape of Nanking". Due to the embargo, Japan was looking at totally running out of oil by the end of 1942. Civilians would starve, as would the occupation army in China, and their vaunted military machine would grind to a halt and collapse. Japan had a choice between pulling out of China and grovelling before the USA, or else militarily capture oil-producing territories. Guess which they chose?
Japan would dearly love to have "free-energy-from-water". Due to their annual oil bills, they would greatly benefit from something like this device. But rather than merely putting it in cars, they'd scale them up into large electrical powerplants that would run their cities. The Japanese desparation accounts for the fact that Japan is the last country where serious research into cold fusion is going on http://newenergytimes.com/news/2008/29img/Arata-Demo.htm. Cold fusion, BTW, is the only conceivable form of free-energy-from-water that doesn't break the known laws of physics, but implementation is the problem. The fact that the company is hawking a consumer product to the man on the street, rather than a big power plant to government, is what pegs my bogo-meter.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Exactly. The only ways this could possibly work is not if they're introducing energy, but changing the air/fuel mixture or changing the way combustion occurs with different fuels.
The only problem is when you start looking at your emissions. A leaner mixture will provide more NOx, for example. It's something that requires scientific evaluation, which is why I tried to find patents and scholarly investigations.
I would argue wrong...
What is fire? Explosions, and flames are examples of chain reactions.
The amount of energy needed to start a flame or explosion is many factors lower than keeping it going.
So while I agree one should be skeptical, one should not dismiss...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
that's what I'm getting at, the marketing on these things call it a catalyst, but really it is not, it is actually a reactant and the real source of the supposed free energy.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?