Alternate Energy - over-unity
Over-unity refers to a violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics.
Getting more energy out of a closed system than you put into it.
Reports of this can generally be put down to
either a combination of wishful thinking and stunningly bad lab practices
or an outright attempt at fraud.
The latest from
Steorn (Wikipedia
here) appears to be a case of the latter.
A few talking points on the subject from
Don Lancaster:
(scroll down to the August 24 entry -- he doesn't support permalinks)
Outside of the inescapable fact that it flat out ain't gonna happen nohow noway, what other hurdles would a successful first law thermodynamic challenge face?
~ Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
~ It is up to the claimant to prove correctness, NOT up to others to prove them in error.
~ The foremost goal of any legitimate researcher when "too good to be true" results occur is to attempt to prove themselves wrong.
~ The thermodynamic laws are tested and retested millions of times every minute.
~ Student lab errors have long ago discovered any and every possible variation on normal groupings of magnets and related common components.
~ "Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck" gets them every time. Peer review done in credible journals counts more than costly paid ads in non scientific ones.
~ There's a half life of any perpetual motion claim in which the credibility and failure to duplicate drops something like twenty percent per week.
~ "Publish or perish" is alive and well. There are zillions of second tier researchers just sitting around for something they can glomb onto and run with.
~ Questions such as "where is one net watt" and "why cannot the output be connected to the input" must be convincingly answered.
~ The ultimate criteria is whether the item is not in Aisle 13 of Wal-Mart because they immediately sold out.
~ The odds against are overwhelming. It always pays to bet on the side of bogosity. While holding on to your wallet.
~ Any technical field has secret insider gotchas that absolutely guarantee outsiders will make fundamental stupid measuring errors. Not the least of which is correct RMS power measurement of unusual waveforms.
And, of course...
~ Any individual knowledgeable enough to propose a first or second law violation already knows that they will never do so.
Again, more on pseudoscience bashing here.
Don's website is an excellent resource -- here is the
home page, start here and start drilling down.
Posted by DaveH at August 27, 2006 11:05 PM