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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.
So ... what, we should watch every crank and snake oil salesman to see if they've uncovered any new physical laws?
No thanks, sounds like a colossal waste of time.
I mean, go ahead, try to find these new laws or watch these videos. But don't expect the rest of the world to treat it as anything credible.
Life is too short to listen to every crackpot theory as if it deserves it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This is along the lines of:
"If I keep tossing this coin, eventually it will disappear into thin air and magically turn into a unicorn".
Scientifically speaking, there's virtually no difference, in fact. There's experimentation, there's pushing for new science, and then there's just bollocks.
It doesn't work like that. You find something unusual ("Hey, this part of the air is slightly warmer than expected... I wonder if...") and investigate the cause, or you hypothesise more accurate explanations of what we can observe and try to predict something entirely new (which you can then confirm by a single good experiment).
You don't just insist that flipping enough coins will make magic happen which will cause enough anomalies that will break existing laws that have held through countless billions of experiments consistently.
You are literally suggesting discovering new science by brute force, in an infinite-sized universe, with infinite levels of precision available.
What distinguishes science and pseudoscience is the scientific method.
The quack inventors aren't using science to propose a new idea like a sub-space field, then creating a test to confirm it. They are usually building something that science can already explain perfectly, then hand-waving away the difficult bits, and drawing an unsupported conclusion. By contrast, when someone asks a question, writes a theory, then builds a device to test that theory -- that's not a quack, that's a scientist.
Example: The EM drive. While everyone was skeptical, it was real scenc. It dealt with an area of physics that there wasn't 100% agreement on, there was a written formula, and it was testable.
The laws of thermodynamics only say: a heat engine can not be a 'perpetum mobile'.
Other perpetium mobiles might be possible, or not, who cares. They are certainly not covered by the laws of thermodynamics. Oh, you mean the law of energy conservation? Unfortunately, that is an universal law and strictly speaking not a law of thermodynamics (those guys have their own variation of it, as in 'the sum of all energies in a closed system is constant' etc.)
Getting boring meanwhile that 99% of all posts and articles containing the magic words 'thermodynamics' are either simply wrong or grossly misleading.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Obligatory Mark Twain quote: "It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt."
Then some scientist will come along and explain it in a few minutes and the "inventor" will immediately claim that the scientist is working for Big Government or Big Oil or Big Solar or Big Pharma, or that the scientist is in league with aliens, or that the scientist is an alien in human form trying to prevent them from discovering the secret that makes UFOs fly. They will keep the same debunked machine going around and around in the conspiracy market for thirty or forty years, speak at conferences, and take any skepticism as proof that their alien hypothesis is right.
There, fixed that for you.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
It's worth pointing out that "conservation of energy" is not a property of the universe we inhabit. Sure, at human-tinkering scale it is, and these guys won't achieve over-unity, but in the greater scheme of things: energy is not conserved in general relativity.
Incorrect. Macroscopically, and in general relativity energy is conserved. In quantum mechanics it's still conserved on average, but not conserved for specific cases which then average out in the long term or over multiple measurements/outcomes. It is a fundamental concept and not only has never been shown incorrect, but is a required underlying concept for all of physics.
Conservation of energy is mathematically equivalent to "current age of the universe is not an input to the laws of motion" (time intervals are unrelated). It doesn't work out that way in GR, mostly because the idea of "current age" doesn't apply.
Relativity is odd that way. The mass of an object depends on it's total potential energy (a compressed spring is heavier). That concept of potential energy having some absolute total value, not just relative values to an arbitrary "floor", doesn't exist in "normal" physics. All that matters is potential difference (aka "force"). That change makes most of our intuitions, heck most of the stuff engineering is built on, wrong.
There is a floor in relativity, and that is in the reference frame at rest with respect to the object. The relativity aspect is that you could imagine a moving reference frame which only adds to the energy. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. Suffice to say that if the underlying principles of physics and engineering were significantly wrong in everyday energy levels and scale, even at 15 decimal places, we wouldn't have gps or any number of practical functioning devices that show - yes indeed it is correct. We all know physics is wrong, but only at energy levels and scales that don't apply to humans.