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YouTube and the Modern Mad Scientist (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: Making change for $1.00 and getting $1.10 back. That's the premise of overunity, free energy, and perpetual motion experiments. Using money as the the analogy is fitting because these concepts are heavily aligned with scams trying to land a payday for their "research". But there is another branch of people working on them: tinkerers who believe they can actually solve the problem. Laws of thermodynamics say otherwise, but this isn't necessarily wasted time. Other breakthroughs are waiting to be discovered as these mad scientists try to remove all efficiency losses from their doomed systems. YouTube can be an interesting place to look for ideas on low-friction, high efficiency fabrication.

3 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Accusation through misunderstanding by TheCarp · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes but its not brute force. Some of these things are orthogonal to each other. You can not understand magnetism and thermodynamics to the point that you think your crazy idea works, yet still not reject all of modern physics well enough to contribute to other fields in your mad quest.

    I was going to make up a fake example....but I realize I have one.

    A while back I had a passing interest in water torches. What is a water torch? It is an oxy-hydrogen torch which uses electrical current to produce its input gasses via electrolysis. The real upside (for me) is that there is no need to store dangerous gasses, as they can be produced and used as needed. These are actually produced commercially, and have been for many years, you can buy one off craigslist for a few hundred bucks.

    Problem comes in.... some people believe that they can produce some sort of free energy device by feeding oxyhydrogen gas into their car that they make from their alternator.... stupid....I know.... but, if you want to do this, a very natural first step is to make an oxyhydrogen torch to test your oxyhydrogen generator.

    In fact, if you wanted to look at this as a DIY project....good luck finding many people doing it who are NOT these special car free energy crazies. However, they really have produced a lot of good info....in spite of their own stupidity.

    So its not brute fore, because the problems they are solving are real, its just the problem they are trying so solve isn't....which means.... they will never stop solving problems trying to solve it....

    --
    "I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
  2. Re:Accusation through misunderstanding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I like the allegorical chemical photography example. "Photography is a hoax. You're doing some trick there in the dark where we can't see it. Whenever we try to develop your so-called photgraphs with the lights on so we can see what's really happening, the experiment fails."

  3. Re:Accusation through misunderstanding by burtosis · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not only is energy not conserved, but it keeps increasing as our universe full of dark energy keeps expanding.

    This energy could be mined:

    http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1995ApJ...446...63H

    Again incorrect. When you total all energy in the universe, including that from gravitational fields it is likely zero. It has always been zero, and will continue to be zero. Even if you were to somehow harvest dark energy (which btw only is a meaningful amount when you talk about millions of light years) you would essentially be bringing two masses together and is exploiting gravitational potential energy.