Questions about Free Energy

[Donn]

Hello, I am at the start of an email debate about "Free Energy" and my opponent has brought up some nouns that I want to beg extra information about.
I have very limited online time, so I will list them and then hope for some replies and links!

1. Nicola Tesla and transmitting electricity.
2. "Over Unity"
3. Contemporary science only recently acknowledged ZPE (Zero Point Energy)
4. Ohm's Law has been disproved (using a certain electrical arrangement)
5. A NEGATIVE resistor was recently invented at a university in the USA.

Thanks in advance.
Donn

P.S. I read about Tesla on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Tesla) and I wonder if this is a balanced view? There seems to be no hint that his views/ideas/research in certain areas may have been dodgy ot wrong. Should this page be edited by a qualified skeptic?
(I got the impression from other posts that Tesla is not all he is cracked-up to be.)

 

[phildonnia]

Originally posted by Donn
1. Nicola Tesla and transmitting electricity.

Tesla did in fact figure out how to turn falling water into "free" energy. His original masterpiece is still there on the Niagara river, but it's been replaced with a larger one. There's nothing about this that's not understood by engineers, but some people insist on making Tesla the patron saint of crackpot theories. The guy was a genius without having to invent fantastic stories about things.

As for energy transmission, he conceived of an idea to "beam" electromagnetic waves as a way of transmitting energy without wires. If you have an electric toothbrush, it probably has something like this for recharging the battery.

And no, he did not invent the radio. Sorry.

2. "Over Unity"

The ratio of energy produced to total energy consumed is always one or "unity" with our current understanding of thermodynamics. An "over unity" device would be one that produces more energy. According to another law of thermodynamics, the "useful" energy produced is actually quite a bit less, with the extra energy being turned into heat.

3. Contemporary science only recently acknowledged ZPE (Zero Point Energy)

If energy may be considered a mathematical bookkeeping device, then ZPE is like a negative amount. If a money analogy may be used, ZPE is like a credit card that allows certain transactions to occur when the cash isn't actually there. It is not free energy any more than a credit card is free money. The missing energy _always_ comes due.

4. Ohm's Law has been disproved (using a certain electrical arrangement)

Capacitors and inductors are non-ohmic, and always have been. Ohm's law can be salvaged by allowing complex resistances.

5. A NEGATIVE resistor was recently invented at a university in the USA.

Can you get a cite for this? A negative resistor would do it I think. Connecting one of these to a capacitor would give you an unstable system full of free energy. I have no doubt, incidentally, that something could be made to look like a negative resistor if you ignore supplementary inputs and such. Count the wires coming in and out of the box. If there are more than two, then it's not a negative resistor.

Hope that helps. I've taken classes on physics and electronics, but I'm probably not a citable expert. I'll take no offense at anyone correcting me here.

ETA:
I just thought of something: You could take a 9v battery and claim that it was a negative resistor, since the current is opposite the voltage. You could even have it connected with a complex circuit that would make the current match the voltage in magnitude. Naturally this wouldn't work for too long.

Edited again to fix the tags.
Edited again to change "Transistors" to "Capacitors". I really should proofread better.

 

[Hutch]

A good resource I found on Free Energy claims is Eric Kreig's site, http://www.phact.org/e/skeptic. Lots of good stuff there, albeit it hasn't been updated in awhile, you do have to dig a bit, and from that site you can find others.

Good luck in your debate....post some of your responses here (the other person's too, if they agree to letting you send their posts here) and some folks will probably help out.

 

[epepke]

Hello, I am at the start of an email debate about "Free Energy" and my opponent has brought up some nouns that I want to beg extra information about.
I have very limited online time, so I will list them and then hope for some replies and links!

1. Nicola Tesla and transmitting electricity.
2. "Over Unity"
3. Contemporary science only recently acknowledged ZPE (Zero Point Energy)
4. Ohm's Law has been disproved (using a certain electrical arrangement)
5. A NEGATIVE resistor was recently invented at a university in the USA.

Phildonnia has already given a serious reply. I think this calls for a moderately flippant one as well.

1. Yeah, he could do it. Radio transmitters do it. You could do it, too, it you wanted. So what?

2. I have no idea what that means.

3. ZPE is an interesting concept. It isn't all that new, really. But nobody has figured out a way of tapping it. Furthermore, if they did, I think that a little soot in the atmosphere would be the least of our problems.

4. Not bloody likely. Many circuits don't behave according to Ohm's Law, but the reasons why they don't are obvious. Like reactance.

5. There are plenty of things that exhibit negative resistance. Like neon bulbs, which kept me happy as a kid when I couldn't afford transistors to do logic circuits. Hardly recent. I was delighted to find out that Mauchly played with the same toys when he was a kid.

 

[Brian]

Re: Re: Questions about Free Energy

Tesla did in fact figure out how to turn falling water into "free" energy. His original masterpiece is still there on the Niagara river, but it's been replaced with a larger one. There's nothing about this that's not understood by engineers, but some people insist on making Tesla the patron saint of crackpot theories. The guy was a genius without having to invent fantastic stories about things.

.

Um. Is it just a glorified water-wheel?

 

[Hamish]

4. Ohm's Law has been disproved (using a certain electrical arrangement)

Aha! My PhD supervisor would tell you (over the course of three hours of intense lecturing) that Ohms law is not V=IR but is properly expressed as an equation with 13 terms (including Hall effect, Spitzer resistivity, thermal effects and many more) and takes up about half a page if you want to write it down. Of course this covers all sorts of magnetized plasmas as well as solid metal conductors, but you can always get a version that works from all that.

If someone claims to have disproved it, they probably haven't taken into account all the relevant terms.

 

[pgwenthold]

3. Contemporary science only recently acknowledged ZPE (Zero Point Energy)

Define "recently."

ZPE has been recognized, at the very least, since the time that someone solved the Schroedinger equation for a harmonic oscillator. There is even an explanation for why there is ZPE - to avoid violating the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

I'd say it was probably in the mid-late 20s when it was discovered.

 

[Donn]

Thanks for the input everyone.
I am offline and compiling this in a text editor, so I don't know what else has been posted since I was last online.
I have to employ a "dial-up, post and run strategy" due to the expense of being online in South Africa. I hope to read all the links you have given me over the weekend, when I can be online for longer. This makes for estranged debate and I apologise for the awkwardness of it.

It's interesting to note how the responses come back with more minutia and detail than the claims made.
Like that Ohm's law statement; to hear that the real formula is vastly more complex and has far more terms is news that I am sure my opponent will not know. (I didn't!) Is there a link to this?

I will call my 'opponent' W for ease.

On the Tesla-front, is this 'transmitted electricity' useful as a means of powering things? I am sure to get the whole 'he was suppressed by the oil companies' thing. Could we run fridges and ovens and PCs, as well as toothbrushes, off of it?
I imagine the answer is no, else we would be doing it. I ask to stimulate detail and also in regards my Wikipedia link in my first post.

On the ZPE front, from what W says this is some kind of 'aether' of energy surrounding us and we need only tap into it. He mentions a name "Hutchinson" as being well down this road. How real is all this?

W said:
"As I have explained* earlier, Over Unity isn't about 'making energy from nothing' but rather about tapping into the huge reserves of energy that surround us and are overlooked."
*he didn't really explain earlier, he was vague.

And he posted links. I know the Naudin site has been properly thumped by Randi and others, but here it comes again!
*Ohm's Law:
http://jnaudin.free.fr/cnr/negosc.htm

phildonnia, here is his link about Negative resistors, I have not been to read these, having to wait for the weekend before I can be online for long enough.
Deborah Chung's Negative Resistance:
http://physicsweb.org/article/news/02/7/4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Negative_resistance
http://jlnlabs.imars.com/cnr/cnrexp1.htm

Ok, that's all I can do at this point.

 

[CurtC]

The Straight Dope: What's Up With Broadcast Power?

Many people excuse Tesla's failures by saying he was too far ahead of his time. I doubt it. His understanding of the medium in which he worked was primitive. He refused to accept the complex nature of the atom and for years denied Einstein's theories. His problems arose largely from the fact that he was an eccentric who was unable to work with (and consequently to learn from) other people, and the increasing unreality of his ideas shows it. Broadcast power is Exhibit A.

 

[garys_2k]

Hello, I am at the start of an email debate about "Free Energy" and my opponent has brought up some nouns that I want to beg extra information about.
I have very limited online time, so I will list them and then hope for some replies and links!

1. Nicola Tesla and transmitting electricity.

He worked on the resonant transformers we know as Tesla coils. He also likely didn't understand the difference between near-field and far-field RF measurements, so it could have fooled him into thinking he was working with more power out than was going in. But bottom line, it was a radio transmitter and the intensity falls off with r^2. He also discussed, iirc, something about globally beaming power in the "natural waveguide" between the earth and ionosphere. Woos think he was on the verge of success when he was shut down ("suppression!").

2. "Over Unity"

More power out than is going in. Some woos even think that vapor compression refrigeration systems, with their greater than one C.O.P. is an example. It's not.

3. Contemporary science only recently acknowledged ZPE (Zero Point Energy)

Yeah, as said earlier it was figured out in the 1920s and confirmed with experiments on the Casimir Effect. It is real and may, someday, result in trivially small amounts of power being extracted from this "vacuum energy." Who knows, with nano-scale devices I wouldn't rule it out, but no, it won't run a car or power a house.

4. Ohm's Law has been disproved (using a certain electrical arrangement)

Nope, not for the expanded version that accounts for the other effects.

5. A NEGATIVE resistor was recently invented at a university in the USA.

Check your links, this one is "real" only in that an increasing voltage across the junction causes less current to flow. The slope of the line is down to the right, not up. But it is DIFFERENTIAL resistance, not real. Hooking a battery to the thing will not result in a runaway current, nor would a capacitor cause it to oscillate forever.
[/quote]
Thanks in advance.
Donn

P.S. I read about Tesla on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Tesla) and I wonder if this is a balanced view? There seems to be no hint that his views/ideas/research in certain areas may have been dodgy ot wrong. Should this page be edited by a qualified skeptic?
(I got the impression from other posts that Tesla is not all he is cracked-up to be.) [/B][/QUOTE]

 

[Donn]

garys,
I blush to admit my highscool science does not permit me to understand:

But it is DIFFERENTIAL resistance, not real. Hooking a battery to the thing will not result in a runaway current, nor would a capacitor cause it to oscillate forever.

And my calculus is covered in 15 years of dust...

Could you expand on what 'differential' means here, it seems a valid point to press.

Thanks.

 

[Hellbound]

While I applaud all the replies given by the well-educated, intelligent, and informed people on the board (good stuff, I learned some things ), I don't really think it's necesary.

Simply tell your opponant this:

The theory really isn't important. Simply show me one working device. Just one. A single device that consistantly and reliably produces more energy than is input. Let it be studied by an independant investigator, to insure that there are no hidden batteries or other less-noticeable electrical arrangements that produce energy. One, solitary, single working example, tested and examined, would make all the debate about "theories" of how it could work meaningless. If it's possible, show me. Put up, or shut up. I can claim the ability to make a warp drive all day long; until I can show it to you, it's bullsh*t. Same with "free energy" devices. A single free energy device, once created, is quite frankly a way to print money. You could, literally, rule the world. Presidents and Kings would bow at your feet to get this type of technology. Multi-national corporations would grovel and beg. If it can be done, it simply defies all rationality that it is not being done. All the "theories" in the world are so much hot air without a working model. Call me when you have one.

Rant over But it's just like the case with psi powers....theories are dandy, but simply show me something. If you can't show an effect exists, why bother with a theory about it?

By the way, has anyone heard my theory on the invisible monkeys that are the cause of gravity?

 

[CurtC]

Donn wrote:
I blush to admit my highscool science does not permit me to understand:

Do you recall how a resistor works? As you increase the voltage across it, the current increases in proportion?

Many devices, especially semiconductors, don't have this linear relationship. For example, with a diode, its current increases exponentially with the voltage across it. But there are a few devices that you can operate in a condition, so that once it's already turned on, if you make a marginal increase in the voltage, the current actually decreases. The device is still sinking power, not sourcing it. It's just that, at least over some limited range, an increased voltage results in a decreased current, so the marginal, or differential, resistance is negative.

If someone had a device with a negative absolute resistance, it would be a source of power instead of a sink.

 

[69dodge]

Originally posted by Donn
here is his link about Negative resistors, I have not been to read these, having to wait for the weekend before I can be online for long enough.
Deborah Chung's Negative Resistance:
http://physicsweb.org/article/news/02/7/4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Negative_resistance
http://jlnlabs.imars.com/cnr/cnrexp1.htm

I looked at these links.

She claims negative resistence, not just negative differential resistence. That is, the resistence (i.e., voltage divided by current) is claimed to be constant and negative, and not merely a quickly increasing but positive function of voltage.

However, she doesn't measure the voltage and current at the same places in the circuit! So, what's that supposed to prove?!

Look at the first diagram in your last link. The current that is measured flows between points A and C, while the voltage that is measured is between points B and D. And notice that the power supply connected to A and C, which drives the current, has the usual polarity for the current's direction.

 

[tracer]

Re: Re: Questions about Free Energy

Ohm's law can be salvaged by allowing complex resistances.

I thought the complex-number equivalent of resistance was called impedance, and consisted of resistive impedance (the real part) and reactive impedance (the imaginary part).

 

[phildonnia]

...
The theory really isn't important. Simply show me one working device. Just one. ... One, solitary, single working example, tested and examined, would make all the debate about "theories" of how it could work meaningless. If it's possible, show me. Put up, or shut up.

This is totally reasonable, and also quite in the scientific spirit, however, it cuts the other way as well. We must also consider as irrelevant any objections based on theoretical arguments.

 

[ktesibios]

I looked at these links.

However, she doesn't measure the voltage and current at the same places in the circuit! So, what's that supposed to prove?!

Look at the first diagram in your last link. The current that is measured flows between points A and C, while the voltage that is measured is between points B and D. And notice that the power supply connected to A and C, which drives the current, has the usual polarity for the current's direction.

Four-terminal measurements are commonly used to avoid having IR drop in the current leads cause errors in the voltage measurement. Chung's experimental setup is very reminiscent of that.

Reading her paper (the link to which might be the only genuinely useful thing on the entire Naudin Web site), I found two interesting items:

"Air was blown to the junction to remove the heat caused by the current. The temperature change of the junction, which was monitored by a K-type thermocouple attched to it, was thus in a range of 1-5 C."

IOW, the junction dissipated power, rather than acting as a source.

"Although the negative resistance reported here is apparent rather than true, its mechanism resembles that of true negative resistance (which actually does not occur due to energetics) in that the electrons flow in the unexpected direction relative to the applied current/voltage."

Chung clearly doesn't see this as a case of a true negative resistor, nor as having any sort of "free energy" implications.

Regarding Naudin- I'd advise taking everything on his site with a large grain of salt. Remember the MEG? There was nothing in his results that wasn't nicely explained by modeling the circuit using a transformer model that took into account the parasitic reactances of the transformer, coupled with an order-of-magnitude measurement error (oddly, all of the voltage and current measurements which were supposed to show over-unity operation turned out to indicate a load impedance mighty close to 1/10 the value of the actual load resistor, and screwing up on a range setting of a scope or the implications of a 10X probe is an awfully easy).

Once the measurement error became apparent, Naudin started trying to verify his results using a current probe instead of using a scope to measure the voltage drop across a current-sampling resistor. This must not have worked out as desired, because the page dedicated to it just disappeared.

In fact, although the MEG pages may still be on the Web site somewhere, the link from the front page is long gone.

I tend not to put much confidence in an experimenter who trumpets apparently positive results and just quietly walks away from negative results without reporting them.

"It didn't @#$% work" can be information just as valuable as "hey, look at what this does". Anyone who doesn't recognize that ought not to claim to be doing science.

 

[Hamish]

[B
Like that Ohm's law statement; to hear that the real formula is vastly more complex and has far more terms is news that I am sure my opponent will not know. (I didn't!) Is there a link to this?
[/B]

No, there is no link to the whole thing. This is really specialised stuff. My supervisor is the only person I know who could actually describe the entire equation and he couldn't use a computer if his life depended on it. Googling for "Generalized Ohm's Law" will throw you bits and pieces but you'd have to be a right nutter to actually want to use the whole thing.

This page has a version (about a fifth of the way down the page) which includes the Hall effect and electron inertia. It's fairly impressive even with only five terms.

 

[Hutch]

On the ZPE front, from what W says this is some kind of 'aether' of energy surrounding us and we need only tap into it. He mentions a name "Hutchinson" as being well down this road. How real is all this?

Just for the record, I don't know who this Hutchinson is, but it ain't me and I may have to call a worldwide meeting of the Hutchinson clan to vote him out of the family.

 

[Hellbound]

This is totally reasonable, and also quite in the scientific spirit, however, it cuts the other way as well. We must also consider as irrelevant any objections based on theoretical arguments.

If there is evidence otherwise, yes.

Currently, we have ample theoretical evidence as to why perpetual motion and/or free energy are not possible. We also have much physical (albet circumstancial) evidence...no one has been able to come anywhere close. Thus, what I speak of is about the burden of proof...the opponent claims something outside the default position, it's up to him to show it. And, if the theory exists today to "prove" it's possible, then frankly it can be done today. It hasn't been. There's no reason it shouldn't have been: it would wipe out a huge number of local, regional, and global problems in one fell swoop as well as being a license to print money for whoever invented the thing. Theoretical arguments have their place, don't get me wrong. The problem here is that the overwhelming majority of experts in the field agree that free energy is impossible...a few "creative" interpretations of theory are used to claim it is. The only way to settle this dispute is experiment, so show me the machine The theoretical arguments in these cases will go in circles...and all it takes is one device to conclusively end the discussions.