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.

Comments

Accusation through misunderstanding

[Aighearach]

It may be that they're not intending to "break the laws" of physics at all, but discover/uncover new ones. It may be that "overunity" sucks energy out of some sort of sub-space field (intentionally borrowing from sci-fi, calm down) that we haven't yet discovered. It seems that the pundits are the source of most of the perpetual-motion misconceptions, rather than the tinkerers themselves.

They aren't trying to create "free energy" in the physics domain. They're trying to create "free energy" in the economics domain; if we can suck energy out of dimension X, then until we're bombed by the inhabitants of that realm it will appear as (economically) "free."

They're talking about "free as in beer" not "free as in freedom."

Re:Accusation through misunderstanding

[Lab Rat Jason]

I came here to post the same thing... except that instead of sub-space sci-fi... I was going with mother nature... like your compass spinning when standing at magnetic north, I suspect they will stumble upon a method of extracting a minute amount of energy from the environment, and due to their lack of scientific understanding they will attribute it to perpetual motion rather than simple energy balance accounting. Then some scientist will come along and explain it in a few minutes and the "inventor" will be all sad because science crapped on their idea.

The bottom line is they spend years tinkering with an idea, that a scientist armed with a little math and chemistry can debunk in a matter of minutes... leaving the rest of the time to do real science.

Re:Accusation through misunderstanding

[gstoddart]

It may be that they're not intending to "break the laws" of physics at all, but discover/uncover new ones. It may be that "overunity" sucks energy out of some sort of sub-space field

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.

Re:Accusation through misunderstanding

[ledow]

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.

Re:Accusation through misunderstanding

[jbeaupre]

One of my favorite sci-fi short stories had a similar premise. Some guy discovers a way to make an inter-dimensional portal. No one knows where the other end is, but it's blazing hot on the other side. Everyone starts building simple heat engines to harvest the energy. And all is well until .... ... the Devil sues the guy. Heat was being drained from Hell and was predicted to cause widespread problems. Epistemological (as opposed to ecological) disaster of biblical proportions.

Funny stuff.

Re:Accusation through misunderstanding

[captaindomon]

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.

Re:Accusation through misunderstanding

[burtosis]

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.

Re:Accusation through misunderstanding

[burtosis]

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.

I'm one of these guys...

[bcware]

Yeah, I perform my own "perpetual" motion experiments, but I have never shared my inventions with anyone. I have a PhD... in pharmacy, but I've never seriously entertained the idea that I might succeed. My goal has always simply been to come close. We don't need true perpetual motion, for example, just something that doesn't need to be reset very often. If I only have to raise a weight, reset a machine, wind a clock, etc, etc, weekly who cares. It's a minor inconvenience. For some reason these machines are dismissed and treated as black or white; complete success or complete failure. I live in the grey area.

Re: /. editors know less science than mad scientis

[sbaker]

OK - so how about http://www.genchem.net/thermo/... or http://www.physlink.com/Educat... or https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k...

None of them are talking only about heat engines - they carefully point out that historically, thermodynamics was all about steam engines. But nowadays, it's realized that the laws are far more universal than that.

Not one of them talks about "the triple of volume, pressure and temperature" - that stuff is a tiny, tiny subset of what modern thermodynamics covers. You're still back in the Victorian era of steam engines.

Anyway - I'm done arguing with you. I guess that 99% of other people here agree with me.