Simon Derricutt archive from Revolution-Green
Violation of Conservation of Energy by a rocket.
Consider a mass of 1kg, accelerating force of 10N, acceleration 10m/s², with the mass initially stationary.
This is just enough to get something rising upwards in standard Earth gravity at ground level. Ignore friction, air drag, and other losses. No relativistic corrections, either. Keep it as simple as possible.
Kinetic energy is 0.5mv² where m is mass and v is velocity, and the rate of kinetic energy increase is thus the differential of this which is 2(0.5)mv which is mv. Distance travelled under constant acceleration is 0.5at², where a is the acceleration and t is time.
Work (= energy used) is force times distance in the direction of the force. Case 1 - apply the force in the lab frame of reference.
At velocity 1m/s, rate of energy used is 10Nm/s (10 watts or 10 joules per second), Rate of increase of kinetic energy is also 10 joules per second. At the point of measurement, the force has been acting for 0.1 seconds and thus we've travelled 0.5at² (0.5 times 10 time 0.01) or 0.05m, and we've done 0.5 joules of work (10N times 0.05m). Kinetic energy in the mass is 0.5mv² or 0.5 joules (since v and m are both 1).
At velocity 100m/s, rate of energy use is 1000Nm/s (1kW), rate of increase of kinetic energy is also 1000 joules per second.
Now we're 10 seconds in, we've travelled 500m, the total energy used in accelerating the mass is 10N times 500m or 5000J, and the kinetic energy of 0.5mv² is also 5000J. No problem in case 1 - energy is conserved as expected. The force is applied in the lab frame, and the energy used is measured there too, and the energy used and the energy acquired by the mass exactly agree. Case 2 - apply the force in the frame of reference of the mass. This can be done by using a rocket motor attached to it. Assume that the loss of mass of the fuel is negligible, which obviously won't be true but doesn't change the principle. This can be later adjusted to compensate for the rate of mass being ejected for a real rocket motor or jet, and either the increased acceleration as the mass reduces or adjusting the thrust as we go to keep the acceleration the same.
At velocity 1m/s, rate of energy used is 10 joules per second, rate of increase of kinetic energy is also 10 joules per second.
Again we've travelled 5cm, we've used 1 joule (0.1 second at 10 joules per second), but the kinetic energy in the mass is only 0.5J. Half the energy we put in has disappeared. At velocity 100m/s, rate of energy used remains at 10 joules per second. Rate of kinetic energy increase is however 1000 joules per second.
Again by this time we've travelled 500m, it's taken 10 seconds, and the total energy in the mass is 5000J but we've only used 100J in the rocket.
As the rocket goes faster, it produces more kinetic energy per second than is consumed to run the rocket. The kinetic energy is measured in the lab frame.
In both cases, the trajectory of the mass is exactly the same, the acceleration is the same, the kinetic energy of the mass is the same at the same points or times, and the two cases are exactly equivalent except for the amount of energy used.
Where does this extra energy come from? At low velocities, we lose energy, and in the extreme (when the mass is held stationary) the rocket produces no work which is far easier to explain since the energy is dissipated as heat.
Note that I took the force of 10N needing 10W to produce, and the actual force to power relationship may be different for different rockets or methods of propulsion, and this would change the point at which we're producing more energy than we're using, but not that there's a break-even point followed by an excess amount of energy produced than used. If you attach the rocket with a string to a central point, and make the string long enough such that by the time the rocket comes back to the start-point it's reached 100m/s (thus 500m divided by 2pi which is around 79.58m), the rocket will deliver more kinetic energy than the integral of the energy that was expended in achieving that velocity. You don't actually need the string, but that makes the measurement happen at the same point in space that you initially measured the rocket as stationary and thus having no kinetic energy. The loop will take 10 seconds, you'll use 100 joules in the rocket, and produce 5000 joules after the first loop. The problem obviously revolves around the frame of reference in which the force is applied. If we have a rocket expelling mass and thus producing a reaction force, and we hold the rocket stationary, we can measure that reaction force easily relative to the rocket which is stationary. If we let the rocket fly, that force remains relative to the rocket, and in the frame of reference of the rocket the rocket remains stationary, though from the lab frame of reference we see it accelerating off. The work done is force times distance in the direction that that force applies. In the frame of reference of the rocket, no work is done because no distance is travelled (yep, this is a strange observation but is actually true). In the lab frame, though, the rate of work done is not only easily seen and measured, but also varies as the instantaneous velocity the rocket is moving in our frame. That work done in the lab frame accumulates as kinetic energy in the rocket. That kinetic energy is a real quantity that can be measured in the lab frame (collide the rocket with some other large mass and measure the temperature rise). Thus it appears that rockets can create energy from nothing. We need two conditions to be satisfied, firstly that the force produced is relative to the moving object, and secondly that that object is moving fast enough in our frame of reference. As a first stab at this, consider the original Hero steam engine, with steam jets on the periphery of a spinning disk. The faster it goes, the more efficient it will get, and this could probably be done with a compressed air supply. To get a high peripheral velocity, may need a large diameter. The initial efficiency is pretty low, so getting it fast enough to get to OU might be difficult. It does however suggest that Schauberger may not have been mistaken. The thrust produced from reaction mass is the mass per second times the velocity of ejection. Thus 1kg/sec ejected at 1m/s gives you 1N of force, as will ejecting 10g/sec at 100m/s or 1g/s at 1000m/s. The specific impulse of rocket fuels is basically the exhaust velocity (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation ) and measured in seconds, which is the number of seconds that the fuel can propel itself at 1g acceleration ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse ). Since the velocity of ejection is measured relative to the rocket, if you eject the same amount per second at the same velocity, you get a constant thrust.
Rocket equations at www.rocketmime.com/rockets/RocketEquations.pdfTsiolkovsky equations (but not a secure site). Thus if we eject 10g/s at around mach3 or 1000m/s we'll get our 10N thrust, and after 10 seconds our 1kg mass has reduced by 10%. This will need 0.5mv² of energy per second, so 0.5x0.01x1000x1000 or 5000J/sec. In this case, break-even as regards energy used to kinetic energy gained happens at around 500m/s after 50 seconds of firing, and we'll have used half the 1kg mass as fuel. The approximation of our mass remaining substantially the same doesn't really apply. However, if that thrust is there, and it's relative to the rocket, and the rocket is going fast enough, then there is still a point where the energy gained is greater than the energy expended. Interesting point about the rocket equations is that as you use less mass per second the energy needed to achieve the same thrust goes up. Thus at 1kg/sec ejected at 1m/s you use 0.5 watt and get 1N, but if you use 1g/second at 1000m/second you need 500W to achieve that newton. Might point to some idea using ball-bearings being ejected to produced the reaction thrust and then collecting them to recycle through the contraption. Might get break-even at a low-enough speed to be useful. I thought of the Hero steam engine design, but then we need to accelerate the ejected mass up to the angular velocity at the tip-jets and that energy would also need to be recovered. Looks a bit marginal as to whether a practical design could self-loop given the losses. By the time you get to OU I expect the rotor to be spinning a lot faster than the ejected mass velocity, so you'd need a squirrel-cage around it to recover that energy, and it would also rotate in the same direction as the rotor. Of course the IVO design bypasses all this mechanical stuff and just produces a thrust, so a lot easier to make something that works. Break-even point is when the devices are moving fast enough to produce the power to run them, and since those produce 45mN per watt let's assume a 1m radius so we get 2pi(0.045)=0.2827 nM per revolution. Thus you only need 3.5368 revolutions per second to produce a watt. That's 212.2 rpm. If we now take that radius down to 10cm then we need 2120 rpm. Not exactly much of a problem. Allow around 10% losses in the bearings and air drag and we probably break even at around 2335rpm, and at 3500 rpm we're producing around 1.5W to run our 1W driver so we have 0.5W left over for something else. Faster it goes, the more power we can get out. Yep, this seems ridiculous, but logically follows. Maybe worth noting that the Becker and Bhatt experiment showed around 100mN/watt, which is around double the IVO thrust, so the power produced at any rotation speed would be around double this. On the other hand, they got this using mW, and the IVO design obviously fixed the problem of getting a big-enough and leaky-enough capacitor so it uses more power and produces a larger actual thrust. Looks like the limit of power out will be the point where the centripetal force gets too great and the disk breaks. Still, looks like you can count on maybe 5 times more energy out than in before stuff breaks. This revelation somewhat surprised me. A few things I'd thought were impossible look to be pretty easy in the end. Just needs that flip of frames to make it work, and it's been under our noses all our lives. Links:
IVO thruster https://ivolimited.us/press-release-ivo-ltd-introduces-the-worlds-first-pure-electric-thruster-for-satellites/ Becker and Bhatt blogpost: http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com/2021/02/horizon-engineers.html
One of the aims I had after being forced into taking an early retirement as the least-worst option available was to spend time thinking about the physics paradoxes I’d noted over the years, some of which had bugged me since I was a student. Of course, after a lifetime of experience I didn’t have any doubt that thermodynamics gives the right answers to whether things worked or not, but there remained that feeling that there were parts of the explanations of the reasons that couldn’t be correct. There were also some pretty basic questions as to why things are the way they are. After all, if you know what happens in a known situation that’s very useful, but if you know why it happens then you can predict what will happen in situations you haven’t actually tested, and you can design things that haven’t yet been built but ought to work.
It’s maybe time to have another go at explaining some errors in the basic definitions that have a very large effect on what we think is possible and impossible. We define energy as a scalar, which has a magnitude but no direction. When you have a certain number of joules of energy, and you add in some more, then the total is a simple numeric sum and there is no vector addition involved. (For vectors and scalars, look at the wiki if needed.) Work has the same units of joules, and likewise has no vector part. If you think about it, though, work has to have a vector part, since it is force times distance, and the distance has to be in one direction or another. Likewise, kinetic energy (as energy of movement) must have a vector part since you can’t have a movement without it being in some direction. There’s thus something wrong with the underlying definition here, since if you move something away from where it was, and then back to the original position, that can be regarded as being “no work done” and indeed any energy expended in doing in gets lost totally to heat from the friction or viscosity of the medium you’re working in. If you look at the halfway point, when the object has moved, though, you can assign a (scalar) amount of work as having been done depending on the force needed to move the object. Do the same amount of work to move it back to the original position and you’ve now done zero work – it thus seems obvious that work can be positive or negative at least, and of course if you add in a few more staging points then it’s obvious that work must be a vector in some ways and that when the total (vector) movement is zero, then you’ve done zero work. This argument is after all used in proving that Brownian motion results in zero work being done, even though here any particular particle may actually be in a different place but on average the system looks the same with the same centre of mass. That of course gets you away from the paradox that in a container of normal air there’s work being done all the time in shifting those dust particles, and yet the temperature doesn’t change. Actually, there’s also work being done all the time in the collisions of the gas molecules with each other, when you look at the repulsive force between atoms/molecules and the distances over which that force acts. Work is also being done in the elliptical orbit of a planet around a star, or the swing of a pendulum, but these are in the textbooks as classical situations in which no net work is being done over time, though at any point you can calculate at what rate work is being done.
OK, so the definitions are obviously a bit more flexible in actual use in the textbooks, and you need to dance around a bit in order to choose the right explanation that will match reality. Zero net work, when work is obviously always being done, does after all imply that work can be positive or negative, and that the direction is important. Since we’re pretty used to having to do that, normally we skip over this problem and if someone thinks there’s something wrong with it we tell them that this part of science has been settled for 150 years or more so there’s nothing to see, move on. I chose to discount that bit of hand-waving and dig deeper, since after all there’s a lot of time to think about such things when pruning vines. It took a long time to grope my way to a solution, since I also had some early learning of definitions to overcome. It’s harder to see when it’s in the language.
Similarly, heat is regarded as definitely a scalar quantity. There’s no direction associated with that, since you can add amounts of heat together or take them away and there’s no whiff of any vectors there. It’s just kinetic energy, which is defined as a scalar too. For potential energy, that’s a scalar quantity too, and we count it in joules. Using it as a scalar, all the calculations work, too. There’s no obvious evidence of a problem in the definitions such as sums coming out wrong.
However, it remains that everything is made of atoms and molecules, and thus that in order to have kinetic energy at all those particles have to be moving, and they will be moving in a particular direction since, without that movement, there’s no kinetic energy. Each particle thus has a scalar amount of kinetic energy and a vector amount of momentum, but the vector momenta will vector-add to zero overall. If they don’t sum to zero, after all, you either have a wind (in a gas), a current (in a liquid), or a moving bit of solid stuff, and such energy is easily-harvested and used to do work. For the moment, I’ll choose to discuss only fluids, and we can discuss solids later if needed since it’s a bit less obvious there. Still, in order to do work you need a single-direction force, and if your force is in random directions at a time-scale that is too short to resolve, then you can’t do effective work. Once you have a unidirectional force, or unidirectional kinetic energy to produce that force, then you can do work over a specific distance in a specific direction.
The important thing here, though, is that heat in that fluid must have a scalar amount of energy and a vector amount of momentum, where the momenta vector-sum to zero for the fluid as a whole but are definitely there when we look at individual particles. Heat isn’t a pure scalar, therefore, and this is really important and where there’s an error in the normal definition. Something that is there with a zero average size is actually there, and doesn’t cease to exist because its average is zero.
It’s well-known that the only way you can get thermal energy out of a volume of fluid is to have another fluid that is cooler and to allow energy to pass from the hotter to the colder fluid through a heat engine. It is denied that it is possible to simply convert that heat energy to useful work – and remember that work is force times distance, and that in the textbooks work is also defined as a pure scalar quantity even though that distance must be in a particular direction. It turns out that this standard viewpoint is not actually justified (or indeed justifiable in theory) since it ignores the momentum vectors that actually must exist for the kinetic energy to be there at all.
Funny thing is that potential energy is also regarded as a pure scalar. In a lot of cases, there will actually be a direction involved. For example, an electron will have potential energy in an electric field, and if released it will move upfield to the +ve side. If you release a weight, it will drop down to the ground, and if you throw it upwards in any direction it will end up on the ground at some point. A spring will push or pull in one direction. Chemical energy is often directionless when looked at at human scale, but may well have direction when looked at at the atomic scale. Certainly, when potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, it must be in one direction for each particle.
The definition error is in treating things as scalars when there’s a direction involved, and this means that we don’t see all the possibilities because they don’t show up in the maths we work out from those faulty definitions. If the foundations are faulty, then what you build on top will have an error. In this case, it’s resulted in an absolute denial that perpetual motion is possible, when it actually is possible in theory and has been shown to be possible by experiment (see Lovell device for one that’s easily replicated, though low-power). For the very large number of experiments looking for Free Energy, it has also resulted in people trying mainly ways that have no hope of working (gravity engines, magnet motors, strangely-wound transformers, motor/generator combinations, and so on) rather than trying things that will work. Just because you can’t measure that momentum vector with a wind-gauge doesn’t mean it isn’t actually there.
It’s really a problem with regarding an average as being the whole information, when averages always lose information about the subject. Here, the information lost is critical.
Changing the direction of kinetic energy (or indeed potential energy) does not necessarily require net energy to be put in. You can always put a figure on the work that is done, of course (and this is a point where I mistakenly said “no work is done” before and Abd spent a while arguing against that, and I should have said “no energy is exchanged” instead), but since work has to have a direction involved and is thus not actually a scalar, we really need instead to look at the energy exchanges and momentum exchanges in separate calculations. If you focus on the force times distance (work) for each particle it’s too easy to lose track. The big thing is that in a conservative field, a free particle will have the sum of its potential energy (due to the field) and the kinetic energy (due to its motion) as a (scalar) constant. The direction of the particle will however change, and this is a momentum exchange (between the source of the field and the particle) that is mediated by the field. Provided the field itself remains constant, then the scalar sum of the potential and kinetic energy will remain constant. However, the momentum vector will change to be more aligned with the field the longer that the particle is under the influence of that field. The ultimate example of a field changing momentum but not energy is a planet in a circular orbit. There, the kinetic energy stays constant, the potential energy stays constant, but the momentum is constantly changing direction.
Net result is that if you allow a particle to move under the influence of a field, then no matter what direction the particle enters the field, it will end up moving in one general direction down the field (note exception for radial symmetry field and a particle moving in an orbit, but it’s not that useful in harvesting energy), and this is how we recognise that a field is there and how we measure it. It’s very basic. Maybe however one of those things where we’re so used to the thing itself happening, and the maths working out, that we can’t see the errors in the definitions of the quantities involved. This changes the momentum of the particle, the kinetic energy, and the potential energy, but the scalar sum of the potential and kinetic energy remains constant.
Going back to our heat, it’s actually particles moving in random directions with scalar energy and vector momenta. If we use the right field on those particles, their directions will be changed, and we no longer have random directions but instead we have a wind or current, and producing that wind or current requires no energy to be put in but instead only requires a momentum exchange with the source of the field. It should be pretty obvious that when we have a wind or current of any type then that can do work – it has a force and a net direction, and so can move things in that direction. The problem of de-randomising all those random-direction particles is insoluble unless you realise that fields affect the momentum and not the total energy, and that to de-randomise the particles you don’t need to put any energy in. If you look at the work involved, of course it looks as if you’ll need to put energy in to do the work (since work and energy are both measured in joules and are often exactly the same thing) and thus it would be a zero-gain process, but since it’s only a momentum exchange then that problem does not exist.
The important point here is that we can change the direction of the momentum of a particle without needing to put energy in, even though we can show that there’s a force needed and a distance over which it has operated. A momentum exchange is not the same as an energy exchange.
Note that this way of producing a net directionality from a random-direction collection of particles does not require a second colder heat sink. It simply converts the heat energy directly into usable energy that is now directed rather than random. If you regard kinetic energy (and thus heat) as a scalar then this would be impossible, but both do indeed have that vector component of momentum, because they are not a continuous thing but depend on particles actually moving in a particular direction. Those momentum vectors can be changed by a momentum exchange alone, and the use of the correct field in the right configuration will allow a single container of material in thermal equilibrium to do work, and in the process lose temperature.
Another way of looking at the action of the field here is that it changes the distribution of the probabilities of any particle moving in a particular direction, and of course any other process that can change those probabilities of the momentum vectors being more in one direction than another can do the same job of converting heat into useful work or useable energy. The energy doesn’t go away when we’ve “used” it to do work, after all, it’s just that the momentum vectors get randomised. Thus using a field to de-randomise the momentum vectors isn’t the only possible way of converting heat to useful energy, and any way of producing that “diode” will also work.
That was the paradox I was really working on at the start, that while there is Conservation of Energy that applied to everything, when it comes to working with thermodynamics there will always be losses of useful energy. When you do work that takes 10 joules, you use up 10 joules of energy and yet you still must have 10 joules left at the end, but as heat rather than in your battery as chemical energy. That leads on to the question why things get randomised, and so we get down to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (HUP) as the underlying reason, but you can’t currently dig deeper than that as to the reason for the HUP. We don’t know. However, if that was the only thing happening, this universe would be a soup of particles in constant motion and maximum uncertainty, whereas what we see are planets orbiting around stars, certain places to go to mine certain minerals, and a whole lot of actual order in things. The order is introduced by the fields, with electrical forces holding together atoms and molecules and crystals, and gravity holding the planets together and in orbit around the stars. Maybe magnetic fields having some extra ordering effects, especially on plasma streams in space. If the fields didn’t produce order, we wouldn’t be here. Maybe that’s a somewhat-large omission in the standard viewpoint of How Things Work. Fields produce order. There isn’t simply a one-way trip to disorder built-in to the universe, but also the fields countering that disorder. No yin without yang.
What we end up with is that whereas the HUP produces a tendency to randomness, there’s also a tendency of conservative fields to produce order, and though we use that tendency to produce order in a lot of processes we deny that that tendency to order could be larger than the tendency to disorder. If you get the field strong enough, and get the design right, then it can be, and this is why solar panels actually work – they produce more order than disorder, and output useable energy in the process rather than requiring it to be put in.
Since we start with random momenta, then if we’re using a field we’d need to produce the particle within the field we’re wanting to use. One way that is easy to explain is producing photoelectrons within the depletion zone of a PN junction, since the electric field there is strong and the majority of such electrons will be swept to the electrode in the +ve direction of the field. The electrode thus is charged relative to the electrode the other side, and current will flow in the external circuit. Basically, almost a standard photvoltaic cell except that we need a semiconductor with a small band gap. Not something that most people could produce in the back shed, but definitely a technical problem rather than being impossible. Other ways are possible using tunnelling probabilities.
Once you’ve actually seen this you’ll likely wonder why it was so hard to explain. You’ll probably also wonder why other people haven’t seen it too. It does however need some digging down in the basic definitions that we were all taught and thus accepted as being the truth, because there were no obvious devices around that contradicted it. That may change in the next few years anyway, and it’s likely you’ll be using devices that turn ambient heat into electrical energy you can use. I think it’s reached that point where someone will produce a cheap one with a useful amount of power (rather than just measurable and costing too much anyway). Of course, there will probably still be people who claim stuff they can’t prove, but it’s pretty easy to tell the difference. Just get the data...
FREE ENERGY DEVICES AND PAST CLAIMS
There are many free energy inventions published on the net. Many sites publish various plans on how to make them as well as assurances that they actually work. The strange thing about these claims is that nobody actually has a working model where the input energy and output energy can be measured and thus prove the device to be OU. Over at Stefan’s site (overunity.com ) there are people who have been trying to make these things for years, and enthusiastic (and competent) people have done replications and measured the results. So far, no-one has managed to make anything that self-runs, or puts out more energy than was put in when the measurements are competently done.
Based on the experimental results, it seems certain that the principles that are being tried here, and the theories that support those principles, are simply wrong. Nature doesn’t work that way. The originators of the ideas didn’t understand the way Nature works, and either got their measurements wrong or lied about them when testing things out. People like Lindemann, Beardon, etc. must know that their machines don’t actually work as claimed, since otherwise they’d be running their own houses and workshops from them and would have stopped paying electricity bills.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that standard science has all the answers, and so things we think are impossible today may turn out to actually be possible tomorrow (or in a few decades, anyway). However, one axiom that is important here is that if you do the same things you will get the same results. We haven’t found an exception to that over the history of human endeavour. In order to get a different result, you need to do something significantly different.
LOGICAL ERRORS IN DERIVATIONS
Over the last few years I’ve been digging in the foundations of physics and have found some logical errors in derivations that suggest that the ancient dream of Free Energy may in fact be possible, even if it’s not quite as straightforward as winding coils, spinning flywheels, or making linked pendula. This requires (of course) doing things somewhat differently than has been tried before, and I’m working on those experimental tests. It’s taken a fair amount of study of the standard known science and experimental results, and I’m not yet in a position to prove success. Maybe this year…. The main point about what I’m doing, though, is that it has a solid base in standard theory with the observation that it misses noticing some fine points. For the 2LoT work, the standard observation is that things tend to disorder, and this is true. However, if there wasn’t also a tendency to order available, then we wouldn’t be here to observe anything. That tendency to order is caused by the fields such as gravity, electromagnetic, and nuclear, and if we make the field strong enough then it becomes more powerful than the tendency to disorder. We can exploit that, and we do that most obviously in solar panels. For the CoM work, we automatically think of objects touching to transfer momentum (or in fact an impulse) but again that force times time can only be transferred by a field and the atoms do not in fact touch. The fact that the force can only be transferred by a field, and that a change in that field can only propagate at the speed of light, means that if we can get the phase and distances right then momentum itself may not be conserved. If CoM is violatable, then it follows that CoE is also not absolute.
A LOGICAL ROUTE TO ACHIEVING PERPETUAL MOTION
There is thus a logical route to achieving perpetual motion and indeed OU, but the historical methods of trying to achieve it have failed every time they’ve been tested, so the various Free Energy machine designs available on the net tell you what not to do rather than what to do. At a basic level, you should read them to check if your own Free Energy idea has been tried before. If it’s been tried before, then almost by definition it failed, since such a machine would be both valuable and would have been replicated by anyone who had the capability. After a few years after publication, they’d be all over the place and you’d be able to buy them in the local hardware shop in the same way as today you can buy solar panels.
Of course, the ideas I’ve put forward are not easy to implement, and the 2LoT stuff does need some tighter definitions of the words we use such as work and energy, as well as noticing that fields produce order. Since the logical conclusions go against what we’ve learnt as truth and can sense using fingers, it seems few people have understood the principles and instead reject them as incredible (and wrong). The CoM digs deeper into what is intuitively true that momentum is always conserved – we’ve known that is true for around 3 centuries, so finding there’s a loophole is just a tad surprising. I even used the absolute truth of that in deriving the 2LoT work, and as it happens in that situation it is exactly true since the fields we’re using are non-varying.
IT’S CHEAPER AND FASTER TO LEARN FROM SOMEONE ELSE’S MISTAKES
The field of Free Energy is over-full of charlatans and of people who get measurements wrong, as well as people who have ideas about the way reality works that are experimentally proven to be not true (after all, if the ideas were right then their experiments would have been successful). Some people (such as Vinyasi, here) believe that they are being told the truth, and thus spend time trying to learn the theories and develop them. Instead, it’s better to look at what actually works where a replication has been done and is successful. For most of the Free Energy ideas, they’ve been built by many people and simply never worked in the sense of delivering Free Energy. You can learn from your own mistakes, but it’s cheaper and faster to learn from someone else’s mistakes. If you can find a Free Energy machine where experimenters say it works for them, and replications work, then build it. Problem is, as far as I can see there are no such projects, just people who hope that their idea will actually work this time. It remains that to get a different result, you need to do something significantly different to the non-working idea.
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MAGNETIC FIELDS ARE INHERENTLY CONSERVATIVE...
Back to Work
This is a continuation of the series of Free Work essays. Thanks to Abd for reading and responding to the last one with the points he found unacceptable, and I hope I’ve fixed those points this time. It’s also a lot less words, since I’ve missed off the history of how I got to this point.
A recap:
Mass is a fixed form of energy, and the two are connected by Einstein’s equation E=MC². I’ll generally use the term mass/energy when I need to refer to the “stuff” the world is made of.
KE is kinetic energy, which is energy of movement. Heat is random-directionality KE.
PE is potential energy, which is stored in a way that can be released.
KEWork is work that is done where the energy goes into kinetic energy of something.
PEWork is work that is done where the energy is stored in some way as potential energy in the system.
Displacement Work results in a different configuration of the system, but does not store any energy or use energy to do it.
The sum of mass, KE and PE is conserved. There is no Free Energy, and we have to use what we have. We normally convert the PE of mass into the KE of heat to power our world, but we’re also using renewables where we divert a flow of environmental energy (solar, wind, waves etc.) for our use.
Looking further, we can see that KEWork is actually just the kinetic energy in the object of interest (say, a car moving) and that similarly PEWork is just the PE embodied in the object of the work, for example a brick has moved from ground level to the top of the wall. The terms “energy” and “work” only serve to determine whether this is energy coming in to the process or energy going out of it. In Displacement work things are a different shape or format – if you’re shaping a lump of steel by hammering it there’s no change in mass or potential energy when it’s the right shape, and all the work hammering it has gone into KE as heat in the environment. Though we have to put energy in to change that shape, it is not stored in the thing itself. When we move something from one location to another, there may be a change of gravitational energy involved, but the energy that is not stored there all goes into friction (heat returned to the environment) or other losses (which also mostly end up as heat in the environment). Moving something from one place to another at the same gravitational potential takes no net energy at all – it’s Displacement work and all energy put into the work goes into the environment as heat. As usual, this is a generalisation, and moving a charged object in an electric field will also store or release energy, but here I’m just concentrating on the simple mechanics rather than covering all the possible variations.
When we do work, therefore, we change the locations of mass/energy in our world, and since mass/energy is conserved we have exactly the same amount of mass/energy at the end as we started with. It looks a bit pointless when it’s been logically reduced that far. However, that mass in a different location may be you arriving at work, or coming home again, so it is actually pretty important. If you start off from home in the morning and return there in the evening, then overall that is no net work done, but our lives wouldn’t work too well without it.
From an energy viewpoint, all the work we do is simply changing the configuration of mass/energy around, and there is no gain or loss. Work is simply the name we give to the output configuration of mass/energy.
In our normal experience, heat energy always spread out from its source until all things are at the same temperature. Hotter things cool down and colder things warm up, and heat energy moves from hotter to colder. In order to produce a local hot spot we need to put energy into it, and though we call that doing work it is simply moving energy to where we want it. Heat is transmitted in two main ways, conduction and radiation. Conduction is by physical collision of molecules or atoms, or through the bonds between them in a solid. Radiation is however a quantum process and is covered by the Stefan-Boltzmann law. A body will radiate in proportion to the 4th power of its absolute temperature, so at any temperature above absolute zero it will radiate photons and this does not depend on the environment it is in – it will happen no matter what.
Whereas we are taught that for a system in thermal equilibrium there is no heat transfer, the Stefan-Boltzmann law tells us that all of the bodies are radiating heat as EM waves. For any one of those bodies, to remain at the same temperature means that it is receiving exactly as much energy as it is radiating, and we know exactly what amount of energy it is radiating. We thus know the radiation density available in any bandwidth.
If you can accept that this statement is true, then the methods of converting that flow of energy into usable electricity will make sense. If you deny it, though, and say that no energy is being radiated in thermal equilibrium (some people do say that…), then you’ll encounter various logical problems in considering a system that is physically large (and you’ll also have problems believing that a thermal camera can work).
Any electromagnetic wave (EM wave) can be received and turned into an AC electrical wave by use of the correct size antenna. This AC can then be rectified into DC by use of a diode. The combination of an antenna and diode is known as a rectenna, and for the THz radiation of room-temperature IR it is very small and is thus known as a nantenna. Any IR in the right bandwidth that hits that nantenna will be converted at some efficiency (less than 100% but more likely in the 5-10% range) into an electrical output.
We’ve seen that at room temperature there is a continuous flow of IR energy, and with most objects having an emissivity of around 95% in this range it’s not far short of black-body intensity. If we put the nantenna into this environment it will generate power from the incident IR even if it starts off at the same temperature as everything else. We can connect the nantenna output to a load such as a resistor and the resistor will heat up. By any usual definition, this is doing work, and any other use of the electricity would likewise be work. Since the nantenna must now be radiating less IR than it receives, because by Conservation of Energy (CoE) some of the incident IR is being turned into electricity and so there is less to keep the nantenna warm, if we measure the temperature of the nantenna it will be lower than the environment. There is thus an obvious reason for heat energy to go into the nantenna array – it’s colder.
The nantenna is simply redirecting the incident random-direction photon energy as unidirectional electrical energy in the connecting wires. There are no losses of energy and no gains here (CoE again), but just energy going in a direction we choose rather than being in random directions.
We already know that most of the work we normally do will end up as heat in the environment, apart from what we store as PE in lifted weights, springs or batteries etc., so if we do work using the power from the nantenna then for most types of work the energy will return to the environment immediately which will thus remain at the same temperature. If we do PEWork, then that amount of energy will be retained for a while and returned later (maybe much later when the house falls down) and the environment will cool a bit. The amount of energy in the environment is however vast, being approximately the specific heat times the absolute temperature, and from the Sun we receive around 100 times as much as we currently use in total. This resource is practically inexhaustible.
What we have done here is to set up an energy loop:
Environmental heat => IR radiation => nantenna array => electricity => work in load => heat energy => environmental heat
Alternatively: random direction EM KE => unidirectional electrical KE => random direction thermal KE => random direction EM KE
where thermal KE is the temperature of the bodies as measured with a contact thermometer and EM KE is the electromagnetic radiation that that warm body will radiate according to the Stefan-Bolzmann law.
This loop will continue to work as long as the devices last. It doesn’t need fuel to keep running, since it is using the radiated energy in the environment and redirecting it.
Et Voila! Perpetual Motion!
If you wish to read a longer version of this that goes into more history, go to http://revolution-green.com/theory-perpetual-motion/
The irony is that Free Energy machines in the past have tried to produce energy from nothing, which is why they don’t work (energy is conserved). Using environmental energy, on the other hand, works because energy is conserved so you can’t lose it. All we need to do is to convert random energy to directional energy and we can use it again and again, and we already have devices that do that.
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(updated 26 Feb and 9th Mar 2017) Since Mark decided to repeat a previous article in this series, it’s maybe time to put the whole series into one article here. If you want a shorter version, it’s maybe better to look at http://revolution-green.com/back-to-work-again/ first and then come back here to get the historical stuff. There are a lot of words here to get through, after all. I have been somewhat surprised at the lack of response overall, though. After all the fraudulent claims of overunity and Perpetual Motion we’ve covered here, I put the logic of how to make a real Perpetual Motion system up and some examples of how to design devices that actually do this around 9 months ago and it seems no-one experimenting in Free Energy noticed that it does all they wish their (non-working) machines should do. I still get people asking about buoyancy systems and magnetic motors, and if you understand the physics here and how Energy moves around and how Work is done then it’s very easy to show that nearly all the “suppressed technologies” can’t work. There are a couple of “lost technologies” that may have used these principles, in particular the Manelas device which was said to deliver 60W or so and was seen to be around 5°C below ambient temperature.
Put in a nutshell, nearly all the systems we use to produce Work do that by a movement of energy from one place to another, since that’s how we know we can get Work done. We measure the Work in newton-metres, a force times a distance, so we are predisposed by the language to think that way. This linear movement can only ever deliver a set amount of work for a set amount of energy that moves, and that observation is encapsulated in the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
It is however possible to make the energy travel in a loop, and then we can deliver an infinite amount of work for the same set amount of energy, providing the work done does not store energy.
If you understand that sentence, then there’s no need to read any further. The rest of the explanations here merely add some meat to the bones and say the same thing in different ways in the hope of finding the explanation that makes sense to you, the reader.
There is a lot of energy available in ambient temperatures so, even with work that stores energy, we can produce such work without needing fuel of any type. This energy-loop is conceptually quite simple to set up, as well, but does need some fabrication techniques that are *difficult* to do in a home workshop and where the kit is expensive to buy.
Over the past few years my time in the workshop was diminished because there was a need to care for my mum, whose Alzheimer’s disease got gradually worse. The last year was pretty bad. For this reason, I couldn’t put this theory into practice. In the meantime, I put the theory up in case any of the Free Energy experimenters wanted to make something that actually worked for a change. This year, however, I will have the time and a lot of help in getting the fabrication done, and we should thus see Free Work from a practical device. There are of course some others working along the same lines, and so we may see several alternate systems this year. I’m not telling you my design here, but instead the principles required, since there are diverse ways of achieving a working design and your idea may be better than mine.
I was intending to use this dissertation to apply for a DPhil, but it seems that there are residence requirements and that I’d have to take the course (and there isn’t a course because this is heretical philosophy) so I can’t annoy academia by a direct attack on the sacred cow of 2LoT. As such, I’ve just sent the document to a few people who can use it and I’ll publish it here. Despite being somewhat heretical, there have been no visits from MiB or others trying to suppress the ideas, and most of this has been on R-G for quite a while without any government reaction.
Thanks to Asterix, who pointed out an inadequate explanation of one point. This is explained by applying Conservation of Energy considerations. Mike Frost also engaged in the conversation, though maybe didn’t get the definitions I stated. Ken Rauen contributed to the thinking here and even though his engine ideas will not perform as he calculates, his intuition was correct (but joining with Mark Goldes was a baaad idea). To get something that works, you need to get both the maths and the physics correct, and his design doesn’t loop energy. Phil Hardcastle’s Sebithenco idea, using a standard thermionic valve (tube, for the US speakers), produces a small but verifiable amount of power from a single heat-sink in an experiment that is easy to replicate. To develop a new idea, it’s necessary to stand up and say what you think, and then see what the sceptical response is. Most of the time, the sceptics will be right and point out something that’s been missed, but sometimes the objections are not valid. Discussions are essential, so thanks to those that actually discussed the idea rather than dismissed it.
Thanks also to Abd, who demonstrated that I haven’t explained the basics and definitions well-enough for someone who hasn’t been immersed in 2LoT as long as I have. Since I didn’t define what work is normally understood to be, my redefinitions of the subdivisions of work didn’t make sense as to why I was doing this. I also didn’t define how we normally use a heat engine to get work out of a difference in temperature, so the point about using only a single heat-sink, and why this is important, is too easy to miss. I have a tendency to skip over intermediate steps in logic that seem obvious to me, and I’ve thus added in some extra paragraphs to cover the steps I realise I’ve missed. There may still be others I haven’t noticed, so if I’m made aware of non-sequiturs I’ll try to fix them.
OK, that’s enough foreword, and let’s get to the explanations themselves.
A dissertation on Work, Energy, and Perpetual Motion
“But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. ”
— Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)
This work is a summation of essays published on the net over the last few years, on a website (Revolution-Green.com) that started by debunking claims for “Free Energy” machines. Seeing all the frauds made me want an easy way to show absolutely whether such a machine would work or not, and in the process I examined the confusions between energy, work and power in common parlance, and often in more scientific discussions too. I also saw the blind-spot in the scientific consensus, since if there is a wave there is energy flowing, and a flow of energy is necessary to do work – energy in the common meaning is in fact a relative term. Why then could we not use the energy-flows in the environment to do work without needing to burn fuel? Though this appears to be forbidden by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in a lot of circumstances, we have a flow of energy and there seems to be no bar to doing so except for that Law. I needed to explain the concepts in a way that ordinary people should be able to understand, and thus stop wasting their time trying to recreate some “suppressed” Perpetual Motion machine that never worked. In the course of that, I found that a Perpetual Motion machine was not actually forbidden by nature itself, but was simply postulated as impossible because no-one had managed to build one that worked. This is logically indefensible. Understanding the reasons that energy moves around and what work is enables the design of a real device, and I shall endeavour here to explain the logic and show a practical and proven design. Since this is basically a work of philosophy there aren’t many equations, and because of the original audience there are a lot more words than absolutely needed, with repetitions now and again. There’s not really much need for the glossary or appendix, either, since I would expect all people reading this text to know all the basics or know how to search for them.
We’ll start with the paradox. There is the principle of Conservation of Mass/Energy, and since mass and energy are equivalent via E=MC² then in a closed universe we can’t change the amount of “stuff” we’ve got (mass/energy) but whatever we do we will end up with no more and no less. If we then look at a normal physics or engineering explanation of a process, we are told that we start with X joules of energy and we can do a little less than X joules of work, and then we have no energy left. This obviously doesn’t agree with the aforementioned CoE (Conservation of Energy). We really have a semantics problem, since the words we are using are not adequate. This will shortly be addressed, but before that I need to point out a misconception in our models for thermodynamics that, if it were true, would itself make such perpetual motion impossible.
2nd Law of Thermodynamics (2LoT)
Clausius statement: Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.
Kelvin statement: It is impossible, by means of inanimate material agency, to derive mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of the coldest of the surrounding objects.
Planck’s proposition: It is impossible to construct an engine which will work in a complete cycle, and produce no effect except the raising of a weight and cooling of a heat reservoir.
Back in 1824, Sadi Carnot worked out the start of the theory of thermodynamics that we still use (because it works for classical devices). He regarded heat as a fluid, that will flow from hotter to colder and not the other way. That unidirectionality of the flow of heat is critical to how we think of thermodynamics to this day, but it is not an accurate model.
Carnot envisioned a heat engine that took heat energy from a hotter heat-sink and, by using alternate adiabatic (where no heat is transferred) and isothermal (where heat is transferred) changes of volume and pressure of a gas, the engine delivered work equivalent to the difference in temperature between the hot heat-sink and a cooler heat-sink. In this way, an idealised Carnot engine would translate all the heat-energy difference between the two heat-sinks into available mechanical work. Although this ideal engine cannot be physically realised, since real devices have losses, all subsequent devices have been considered as having a hot sink and a cold sink and can be compared to this “Carnot efficiency” to determine their departure from the ideal. Devices that use a single heat-sink only are not considered as possible, since there’s nowhere for the heat to go to. Though such devices exist and work, analysis of them is performed as if they have two heat-sinks available, and so the loophole in 2LoT is never seen.
These days we have more understanding of atomic theory and that heat is actually just random kinetic energy of molecules. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_theory_of_gases for a good explanation, and see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law for what happens with radiated heat. When we have real molecules exchanging momentum/energy in collisions, it should be pretty obvious that (a) regarding heat as a fluid is an approximation and (b) heat is not unidirectional from hot to cold but instead multi-directional and a colder body can and does radiate/conduct heat to a hotter body. The large number of random transactions in any reasonably-sized system means that the net flow of energy is always from hotter to colder, of course, but if you replace the colder body with one that is colder still, you’ll see that the hotter body cools more quickly, and that is because it’s not receiving as much heat energy from the colder body. It does not (and cannot) “know” what other bodies are in its vicinity to radiate to and cannot thus adjust the amount of energy it is radiating to make the calculations give the right answer. That would imply an awareness of what is receiving the heat that is radiated and would of course also break causality since those other bodies could be very far away.
It’s thus time to discard that idea of heat as a fluid and use a model that corresponds to reality. In reality, if we have two bodies of the same temperature (or a system in thermal equilibrium) then we can easily calculate how much energy is passing between those bodies. The Stefan-Boltzmann law gives us the radiated emissions from each body, and if there is a conductive path as well then it should be obvious that the amount of energy conducted out of a body is related to its absolute temperature, and that Newton’s law of conducted heat simply gives us the net flow by looking at the difference in temperature. If we have a flow of energy, then we should be able to get work out of that flow, providing we use the correct techniques. All that’s stopping us doing this is a semantic problem and a belief that 2LoT can never be broken – and of course that the device that actually does this is somewhat difficult to make. Later on in this dissertation I shall show that such devices have been made and do function, and that the 2LoT thus has a useful (and proven) loophole which will give us usable power from a single heat-sink (the environment) which can reasonably be regarded as Perpetual Motion of the second type, given how large that heat-sink is.
When a body is in thermal equilibrium with its environment it is still radiating and conducting energy away at the same rate, but its temperature does not change because it is receiving an equal amount of energy from the environment. Above absolute zero, therefore, there is always an energy flow available. Whereas with conduction it would be difficult to tap this energy flow since it is only visible and available at the atomic scale, with photons we have at least two methods of converting these to electricity. With electricity, we can do work.
Since a body above absolute zero radiates heat (Stefan-Boltzmann rule) and we can intercept that radiation and convert it to electricity, it should be obvious that though the Clausius statement is invalid in that heat is radiated from a colder body to a warmer body without anything else happening, it doesn’t itself say much about what happens and it is the interpretations of it that actually are inadequate since they only consider heat energy travelling between two heatsinks from hotter to colder. The Kelvin statement is falsified, and Planck’s proposition can be shown by experiment to be wrong. A single heat-sink will radiate energy, and we can get work from that radiation even if it is the coldest body in the local group. Further down in this text, we’ll see some practical methods for doing this.
The semantics problem
One of the big problems in this field is that the language we use is not precise enough, and Energy and Work (which have the same units) are often used interchangeably. I’ll thus start by defining the language I’ll be using here, since a degree of pedantry is needed.
I’m going to separate the words out. We have two forms of energy here (kinetic and potential) and we also have work. Potential energy (PE) includes mass, energy that is stored in springs of some sort, gravitational potential (may be stored as mass, but I’ll skip that question for now), etc.. Kinetic energy (KE) is stored as things that are moving, so we include photons, moving masses and other unbound energy not stored as mass. Work is on the other hand a bit trickier. Whenever we do work, at the end of it things are just in a different configuration than before. Some work goes into kinetic energy and/or potential energy, some of it is simply that a lump of stuff is a different shape or location. Hammering a lump of iron into a sword (or ploughshare) takes a lot of work, but at the end of it we have the same lump of iron in a different shape. Work is not a conserved quantity, and that is an important observation that is central to this thesis. It is so important that I’ll add it in bold:
Work is not a conserved quantity.
Generally, when we’re talking of how much energy we’ve got, we don’t look at the whole amount available, since that would produce ridiculous numbers when we count up the number of joules of mass/energy in the various bits of stuff we’re looking at. Instead, what we look at is a local excess of energy over another place (generally the environment) and call this what we’ve got. The total energy in a litre of Diesel is massive, but we look at what we get from combustion of it (that converts a very small quantity of mass into KE in the form of heat) and how much more heat we have than the ambient temperature. To convert that heat energy into work we need to let that excess KE move into the ambient and we harness that movement to do the work of moving our car from one place to another. Since we start from stationary and end stationary (and normally end up in the same parking-spot at the end of the day), in fact all that KE we’ve liberated by burning ends up as heat in the atmosphere and we’ve actually done no work at all, not even Displacement Work. It gets a bit complex when you really follow where all the energy goes to and what has really happened. The simple statement of “we had 10 joules of energy and performed 9 joules of work with it” is imprecise. We need some words that specify where that energy actually went.
I’ll try to restate all this a bit more simply, though. The sum of KE (energy of movement) and PE (energy stored as easily-convertible mass) remains constant no matter what you do. We get work done through the movement of energy from one place/body to another. Energy is conserved, but work is not , even though we use the same units to measure it. The work that is done can be divided three ways into KEWork (where the energy is stored as kinetic energy), PEWork (where the energy is stored as potential energy, which is some form of mass), and Displacement Work where no energy is stored in the work done and can thus not be recovered either.
Summary:
KE is kinetic energy, which is energy of movement.
PE is potential energy, which is stored in a way that can be released. I see the energy stored as mass since that is the only available store.
KEWork is work that is done where the energy goes into kinetic energy of something.
PEWork is work that is done where the energy is stored in some way as potential energy in the system.
Displacement Work results in a different configuration of the system, but does not store any energy nor use energy to do it.
A real system that turns available PE or KE into work will normally produce all 3 types of work in varying proportions. In the course of this the energy will move, and it is from this movement of energy that we get the work done. It’s worth pointing out that what we see and measure are frame-dependent and that observers in different frames of reference will disagree on the absolute values but will agree on the amount by which the values have changed. It is thus the changes that are important here, though normally we’ll agree on the absolute values too since we’ll be in the same frame of reference.
KEWork is actually just KE that is on the output side of the process we’re considering, and so is the same as KE. Ditto for PE and PEWork. Whether we call it energy or work is a matter of perspective. However, when we hammer that lump of iron, the KE that we put in all ends up as heat energy in the environment, which is also KE. We’ve just changed unidirectional KE into random-direction KE, and we normally call this energy “losses”. We can’t however lose energy, since it’s still there, and it’s simply in a form that we previously didn’t know how to re-use.
If you burn fuel to get that energy excess, then allow that excess to go to the environment through a heat engine, and then do Displacement Work with it, then all that fuel energy goes into heat in the environment, which is random directions of KE (so in fact the energy from the burnt fuel translates into KEWork, and that energy doesn’t actually disappear). Since this is in general low-grade heat, we have no heat-engines that will use that slight difference of energy from the environment to do any more work with it. Since we are taught that we can only get work out from a difference of temperature, we don’t see that the temperature itself is a store of energy that can be utilised, providing we have a method using only one heat-sink.
Work is the output energy of a process, when the configuration of mass/energy is different than before we started the process. Energy will naturally move from a higher concentration to a lower one, and not the other way round. If we want to make a concentration of energy, we have to do work to move it, and of course since work is energy then we’re just using an even higher level of directional energy to do that moving. This seems an intractable problem since we always need a higher level of energy in order to increase the density of a lower level, which is why so far we use the conversion of PE into KE (or mass to energy, in other words) to power our society. This can give us the higher density of unidirectional energy that we need to get work done.
A local concentration of kinetic energy will naturally spread out until the energy density is even and without any local high concentrations. A hotspot in any object will spread out until the temperature becomes even throughout the object, given enough time. Potential energy will also head towards the lowest possible level, releasing kinetic energy in the process. This can be seen using water – pour a glass of it into a bowl and you end up with a flat surface where no point is higher than another. Pour the glass of water through a turbine and you can get work done in the process, but since you may choose not do this the work obtained can be anywhere from zero to (almost) the available excess energy when the glassful gets poured. This natural spreading of energy is because if we add energy in one place in a container (say as hot gas) then each hot molecule will undergo a random walk that will, over time, give an equal probability of being in all places it can physically get to. Much the same using photons, except that they do not appear to collide with each other but can be reflected by mirrors, so may not be as evenly distributed. After enough time, though, the absorption and re-emission of photons in random directions will still result in an even distribution of energy.
Part of Quantum Theory says that there is a residual amount of kinetic energy left even at absolute zero, and that things will thus still move. Some people think therefore that this Zero-Point Energy (ZPE) should be able to be tapped. There’s some logic there, in that if something is moving then we should be able to make it do some work, but in the case of ZPE I suspect it’s a problem of how we measure things, and that that that energy is not actually available, but is instead imaginary. Just because we measure something to be in a slightly different position does not mean that it’s actually moved, but that since our measurements require us to use some sort of particle to hit the thing we can’t really be totally sure of the measurements. There’s an underlying uncertainty of where the fundamental particle actually is, which is a probability function. ZPE therefore seems to me extremely unlikely to be a source of new energy and thus to break CoE.
Since I’ve also pointed out that work can be subdivided into stored KE, stored PE and displacement, and it should be pretty obvious that a simple displacement is a zero-energy transaction, there is however a chance that we can get the displacement-type work (which is often what we want) for free. That displacement is a zero-energy transaction has been known since Newton, since he said that a body in motion would continue in that motion unless there was a force acting on it. So – if you lift something up you’ve put in work which is stored as gravitational potential energy, and if you let it down again you can get that energy out again as work, but if you move it sideways then no work is done except against friction, and that can be reduced arbitrarily asymptotic to zero. If you watch a pendulum swinging, you see gravity doing work accelerating the pendulum, and then in slowing it again, and yet over a cycle very little work is actually done, and that work is in heating the air as the stored energy in the system dissipates. This is an example of Displacement Work that can easily be analysed as not needing any energy to perform in loss-free conditions. It also highlights the need to look at a complete cycle in a cyclic system, in order that we don’t think work is being produced when it isn’t.
Still, what is work, really? We can define it as a force times a distance, or as a second’s worth of voltage times amps, and the unit of work is the joule in SI units. What is really happening is that our initial store of energy as PE or KE is divided up into an output amount of PE or KE that may be in different locations and may be associated with different objects than it was at the start of the process. What has changed is the configuration of the energy. Some of the initial energy may have gone into a form where we’ve had problems before in re-using it, such as heat from friction that we normally dissipate into the environment in order to stop the device from overheating. KEWork and PEWork are thus no different from KE and PE, and we only give them a different name in order to specify that they are the output side of what we are doing. Displacement work is just a shuffle of the positions of things, and would not be in the definition of work at all except that it’s normally the desired result of using (often stated as expending) energy – we want that sword to be re-shaped in order to plough the land. Language can be a bit difficult, when the roots of it go back so far. Hammering that lump of steel into the right shape will bring on a sweat, and you can’t deny that the blacksmith is working hard, but the end result has no more energy embodied than the initial lump of steel.
In looking at a purported Free Energy (or perpetual-motion) machine we should thus look at the total interplay over a cycle between KE, PE and the three kinds of work (Stored KE, stored PE, displacement). Losses almost always end as heat, which is KE. Count the joules in and out and decide how to assign them in those 5 buckets. All the historical examples I’ve looked at show no extra joules out than was put in, with the illusion being created by hidden power sources if it appears to work at first look. Conservation of mass/energy seems to be absolutely true with no exceptions.
We know that solar panels work well. We also know that if we have any cyclic motion or wave then we can rectify it and get some work done – the energy in that wave gets diverted into a path of our choice and released elsewhere after having done some work. One thing to remember is that the total energy doesn’t change – if we take some in one place it has to turn up in another. All we need to look for is a flow of energy that exists and to divert it so that it does what we want done before we let it go again. Displacement-type work does not take energy to perform, though there is an element of borrowing and returning from the energy bank. Energy is put in to start the motion, then the motion continues until we stop it and get the energy out again. That sword-to-ploughshare change is displacement-type work, in that no excess energy remains after the work has been done. The vast majority of what is normally regarded as work is displacement, where at the end of a cycle there is no work (KEwork or PEwork) actually done. Displacement work does not store any energy, and we should therefore be able to do it without using a movement of energy – all the work we do put in ends up dissipated into the random KE of heat. At least we should be able to do it with a draw on the energy bank followed by a return of that energy.
At this point, we’ve shown that work is done when we harness a movement of energy, normally from one place to another where we can quantify the energy more easily but actually it’s just the movement itself that is important. We’ve shown that energy is not used up by doing work. We have also shown that there are such energy flows even in a thermal equilibrium situation. If we can see an energy flow and have the means to harness it to do work, it doesn’t matter whether the source of that flow is a higher or lower temperature than our equipment – this simply is not relevant. Work cannot be done by something in the past or future, or at a distance, but can only be done by a movement of energy here and now. At its heart, we see that though Displacement Work is simply a different configuration of where mass and energy are, KEWork is the same thing as Kinetic Energy and PEWork is the same thing as Potential Energy. Work (both KEWork and PEWork) is therefore simply a transformation of that mass/energy into another form and must have a distinct place and time for that transformation in order that mass/energy is conserved, whereas Displacement Work does not involve such a transformation and does not require energy to do it. Any flow of energy can be diverted to do work (of any type) for us if we use the right method, and it does not matter where that energy comes from or is going to but simply that the energy flow is available at the place and time where the work is done.
The majority of the “energy sources” and devices we normally use start by releasing PE from a fuel of some sort. This then creates an energy-flow to the environment that is then utilised to perform the work we want done, using a heat-engine that requires two heatsinks to function. Renewables utilise an existent flow of energy in the natural world, and divert this energy for our use without needing us to burn fuel to create the energy-flow. I have shown here that there is in fact an energy-flow available even in a system in thermal equilibrium, that we haven’t noticed because the net flow is zero. The 2LoT tells us that we can’t utilise this energy flow because the net flow is zero, yet we already have devices that can utilise this flow and produce electricity from it. We just need to recognise what is happening and improve the delivery of power from real devices.
The stage is set for the logic showing the loophole in 2LoT, and therefore why Eddington’s pronouncement from 90 years ago is demonstrably incorrect.
The logical case for Perpetual Motion
We now need to build the logical case for how to bypass 2LoT and to get usable work from ambient temperatures. This is set up as numbered assumptions and observations, which all need to be correct in order that the deductions in the conclusions are true.
Assumptions:
1: E=mc² applies, and energy and mass are thus different forms of the same stuff.
2: Conservation of Mass/Energy universally applies, so the amount of mass/energy we have is constant. This also implies that ZPE is not available, and that we can only juggle with the energy that is available. No Free Energy, in other words.
3: Conservation of Momentum universally applies. Even if we can’t see it, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This is important when considering heat conduction. This may be not totally true at very low accelerations where momentum may be effectively quantised, but for normal situations the deviations are calculated to be too small to be measurable. See http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.fr/ for a mind-blowing theory that may well be truth.
4: Work is not a conserved quantity. This can be seen in action in any office….
5: There is a hidden assumption of causality, in that the cause always happens before the effect. Although in quantum theory this may be slightly violated, the timescales are very short and related to the uncertainty in measuring exactly where something is when something happens. Such violations will not affect the somewhat larger systems we need for a real-life system.
Observations:
1: Kinetic energy is energy of motion. Heat is simply random directionality KE. It will spread out to fill the available volume and tend towards an even distribution. We cannot totally confine it or stop it from heading towards that even distribution (though we can slow it down). A system of bodies at varying temperatures will change in the direction of having everything at the same temperature in thermal equilibrium. When such a set of bodies is in thermal equilibrium, each must be receiving exactly as much energy as it is putting out as radiation and conduction. The Stefan-Bolzmann law tells us that each body will be radiating energy no matter what the environmental temperature is.
2: Potential energy is stored as mass, and will tend toward a local minimum with a release of kinetic energy.
3: Matter is particulate – there is a scale at which this must be taken into account in the calculations. At a large enough scale (practically all mechanical devices we can make in the workshop with manual tools) we can consider matter as continuous because the numbers of atoms are so large that statistical calculations are closer to exact than we can physically measure. At a small-enough scale we are instead dealing with individual energy transactions and statistical mathematics no longer applies (and will give the wrong answers). At atomic scales, Newton’s laws will apply and within our frame of reference a slower and less-energetic particle can lose energy to a more-energetic particle. You can set up a demonstration of this on a snooker-table, with a fast ball down the length and a slow ball from the side. If you get the timing right, the slow ball will stop and the fast ball will gain speed as it is deflected.
4: Thermodynamics regards heat as a fluid that only flows from a hotter body to a colder body. This is indeed what we measure to happen, but it is not a correct model. This is a basic flaw in the derivation of the theory of thermodynamics, and is shown to be wrong by the Stefan-Boltzmann rules for radiation which show that every body above absolute zero will radiate according to the fourth power of its temperature. Two bodies in thermal equilibrium with each other must be radiating energy, and must therefore each be receiving as much energy as they are radiating. Radiated heat thus is always bidirectional (in fact omnidirectional) in its nature.
5: Conservation of Momentum also implies that conducted heat is also bidirectional in its nature. Heat will only pass in one direction when one of the bodies is at absolute zero temperature, and real matter will not achieve absolute zero. I can’t however think of a way to use the logical energy flows in heat conduction to produce a usable unidirectional energy flow external to the body. CoM thus makes macroscopic mechanical gas-based engines (and similar ideas) subject to 2LoT, unable to exceed Carnot efficiency.
6: Work can be performed only by harnessing the movement of energy from one place to another. Energy may however move without performing work. The amount of energy that moves defines the maximum amount of work that may be performed. If 1 joule of energy is moving from one location to another, then up to 1 joule of work may be done between those two locations. To get continuous work done, you need a continuous flow of energy. Classically, to produce a local concentration of energy, you need to either burn fuel which releases mass as energy, use an available energy-flow such as solar power to collect energy, or do work on the energy that is there to push it where you need it. 1 joule of work will produce at maximum 1 joule of local excess energy (from which you can at maximum extract 1 joule of work subsequently). This is why a perpetual motion machine is considered impossible. Kinetic energy of heat naturally disperses rather than concentrates itself, so the net heat flow will not naturally move from a colder to a hotter body, although we have shown already that there is an energy flow in both directions.
7: Thermodynamics does not apply to electricity, but only to the heat that is transferred. Converting the kinetic energy of heat (either as photons or as velocity of molecules) into electricity removes it from the thermodynamic equations. This is maybe the most contentious observation, but a photon incident on a photoelectric layer in a photovoltaic cell (PV) is converted 100% to electricity since energy is conserved (though note that excess photon energy over the PV voltage is normally converted to heat in the PV). The percentage of conversions is a statistical problem, but if a photon is converted then all of its energy becomes electrical – we’re dealing with a single energy transaction at a time, even though we’re also dealing with a large number of them. If that harvested energy is transferred down the wires to a load, then by Conservation of Energy it must be removed from the thermodynamic equations of the PV cell. Where heat-energy is converted into electrical energy, and that electrical energy is taken down some wire to somewhere else, that heat-energy disappears from the system which thus becomes colder than it was.
Similarly, even though it’s not quantised as far as I know, the kinetic energy of a molecule may be converted partially to electricity by a piezo crystal or a small-enough mechanical conversion, and the electricity thus produced may be used elsewhere. From an energy viewpoint, we are simply diverting some of that incident energy along a different path. This mechanical KE conversion system cannot be 100% effective since the incident molecule needs to be cleared from the receptor area – if you stop it dead it’s going to just sit there in the way. Once that bit of random heat energy is converted to electrical energy, which is not random but has a direction (so statistical mechanics no longer applies), we can direct it to wherever we want using wires and can do work with it, provided we take it away immediately so that the reverse reaction cannot occur. For most work, that directed electrical energy will get turned back into random heat energy again, but it may be stored in a battery or in lifting weights, compressing springs etc.. After a while, we’ll use that stored energy and it will again probably end up as heat in the environment.
8: The natural state for any body is to be at absolute zero. If it has more energy than this it will either radiate it away or conduct it away because such random kinetic energy will spread out. The only thing that stops the body reaching absolute zero is the inflow of heat from other bodies that are also getting rid of their heat at the rate appropriate to their temperature and composition. This is maybe the most startling observation, but can be seen to be true and that the Stefan-Boltzmann relationship states that this will happen (and also gives you the ability to say exactly at what rate). It should take no work to allow a body to cool down, but should deliver work when doing so. The work we put into refrigeration is effectively wasted.
9: When we convert the KE of a photon or molecule into electricity, we take that energy out of the local environment and move it along wires to somewhere else where we can use it to do work. In this case, the PV or other device must appear to be colder than the environment since the heat or energy that goes in is not re-radiated from the local space but reappears elsewhere. Like a cold body, a larger amount of heat goes into the device than comes out of it as heat, with the balance as electricity that is used elsewhere. This cooling effect is of course measurable. The reason that PVs and nantenna arrays have not in general been tested for this cooling effect is that it is obvious that it should happen from Conservation of Energy, yet nevertheless it hasn’t been remarked upon that this is against 2LoT. Maybe that quote from Eddington has something to do with this omission.
Assume we have a PV cell in the sunlight, and that we are not drawing any current from it. Assume the air temperature is 20°C and that we measure the PV temperature as 40°C, and that we have incident sunlight at 1kW/m² and that the PV is 20% efficient (so outputs 200W/m²). If we start to draw that 200W/m² from the PV, then its temperature will drop by 4°C to 36°C. This is an easy test of the cooling-power of a PV. Of course, I’ve made some approximations here and you won’t get exactly these figures, but it helps to put a number on things. Here, the PV is above the air temperature because it cannot convert all the LWIR it receives, so that is converted to heat in the PV as is the balance of the photon energy above the bandgap. If we used a different band-gap voltage for the PV then the balance will change.
If your logical box extends to enclose both the source of the energy and where it is used, then 2LoT is satisfied, but if you only consider either the location of the conversion or the location of the use of that energy you instead will see energy disappearing from the system or appearing where the work is done. The wires produce a physical distance between the cause and the effect, and of course storage of that energy can put a distance in time between generation and use of the energy. Overall, the laws are still applicable if we make the logical box big enough in time and space (so this isn’t really breaking 2LoT) but locally we have produced useful work without needing any fuel.
Conclusions:
1: For macroscopic mechanical devices, whose working dimensions are large relative to either the atoms of which they are made or to the working fluid used, the statistics of random collisions mean that the net energy flow will always be from the hotter to the cooler and thus that 2LoT will apply. We thus can’t get any Free Work out of them, and real machines will only do a bit less work than we put in to start them because there are always losses. This eliminates most of the traditional Free Energy ideas (and the majority of new designs too) as viable ways of doing the job of giving us Free Work.
2: If we utilise the quantum properties of photons, where if an interaction happens (photoelectric effect or antenna) then the photon energy is converted totally or partially to electrical energy, then we can convert heat or light directly to electricity. We do not need two heat-sinks for this, since a body naturally radiates and so we simply intercept this flow. An example from real life is a solar panel. These can be driven from LEDs (at any physical temperature, and that can be below the temperature of the PV) as well as sunlight, and then it should be obvious that this is not a process that is covered by either thermodynamics in general or 2LoT in particular. It is a quantum process. It takes in random-direction KE and outputs unidirectional KE.
We can also use a rectenna to convert the THz region of the IR spectrum into available electricity, using the wave-nature of photons. These have been manufactured and tested. Although when we leave the nantenna open-circuit it will be in thermal equilibrium with its environment, once we start to draw current it will appear colder than the environment. Heat from the environment will thus flow in, and flow out again as electricity to drive a load. When used in the load, it will immediately or eventually be returned to the same environment it came from, to be harvested again by the nantenna. The same energy is recycled again and again to give continuous work output as long as the devices used do not wear out. This is a Perpetual Motion system of the second kind.
3: We should be able to make a mechanical device that similarly converts gas-pressure to electricity if we make its scale comparable to the mean free path of the gas we are using. For air at STP this means around 0.07 micron in size and capable of resolving impacts in excess of 7GHz. A section of piezo-electric material could be used, since a diaphragm and coil arrangement would require very small feature-sizes. A MIM diode could be fabricated to rectify the signal produced. Difficult but not impossible using modern fabrication techniques, and we can always change the gas used to use a somewhat larger feature size. Each collision of a gas molecule would result in a small electric charge being produced and taken out along the wires. We can reasonably expect to harvest in excess of 1kW/m² from such a device using atmospheric pressure and temperature (ambient energy), given that around 10 times this is available. Note that we calculate the energy in a volume of gas as PV (pressure times volume), and that that energy is actually available to use to do work, with the right conversion. Changing the scale of the machine to somewhere comparable to the mean free path of the gas makes this possible. There is currently no extant device that will do this, but there is no good reason why this cannot be built if desired or that, once made, that it would not work as specified. Again, this would allow the same energy to be recycled, and on each pass through the system that energy would do more work. This is thus also a Perpetual Motion device of the second kind.
4: There will be other methods possible that I either haven’t thought of or haven’t mentioned. In order to get continuous work out, we need to have a continuous loop of energy. Here, I have concentrated on the simple methods where the reason for the energy-loop is obvious, and where the devices have either been built and tested or where the technology is available to make them. The losses in a normal machine are actually simply changing unidirectional KE to omnidirectional KE (heat) that simple classical machines can no longer use. The energy is however still there, and we need to simply change the omnidirectional energy back into unidirectional energy. Any device that does that will give us an effective perpetual motion system, since we can’t destroy the energy itself.
5: For those who look to the far-distant future where the whole universe is in thermal equilibrium, it should be noted that that would not stop us either collecting energy together or doing work, though of course it would be a bit more difficult than today. Where there is an energy-flow, we can still harvest work from it, and at anywhere above absolute zero there is always an energy flow.
To restate the conclusion in a different way:
We are surrounded by a vast amount of kinetic energy that is moving in random directions such that the vector sum is substantially zero. If we use either the photoelectric effect, or a mechanical engine on a small-enough scale, to convert the random directions into a unidirectional energy flow along a path we choose, then we can perform continuous work using that flow without needing to burn fuel of any sort. Since this principle of Perpetual Motion has been demonstrated with a nantenna array, it is not impossible as has been held for centuries. Looping the available energy in order to achieve continuous work is in fact the ultimate renewable power source, and may be used anywhere on the globe. At this point in time the available methods of tapping this resource are low-power, but I am working with friends to improve the current levels of a few mW to designs that can potentially supply in the kW range.
We have been taught that only a linear movement of energy can be used to do work, and that thus the amount of work that can be done is limited by the excess energy available. In fact, it is possible to generate a loop of energy and then the amount of work that can be done is unlimited, except in so far as the energy is stored as KEWork and PEWork. Work itself is only a different configuration of energy in a system, and if we can direct the paths along which the available energy is allowed to move then we can do any work we want to without needing to add extra energy into the system. The most convenient way of directing energy is as electricity, which we can store and release as desired and which can be moved along wires from the source to the destination.
Practical devices
The obvious practical device is a rectenna that is tuned to the IR frequency required. These are very small, so are normally referred to nantennae. A reference on how these are manufactured is in the appendix, so there’s no need to explain manufacture here but simply what they are.
A nantenna is an antenna tuned to the IR band of interest (around 10 micron wavelength for room-temperature) and combined with a MIM diode to rectify it. These nantennae are fabricated in an array with connecting wires to deliver the electricity generated. With only a few watts/m² available within the bandwidth of the nantenna array, the available power out is not much – refer to the appendix for measurements.
If we get power out of the nantenna array, it follows that heat is being taken out of the environment (by Conservation of Energy) and that the nantenna array will be colder than the local environment. While we take power, the nantenna array is a cold-sink relative to the environment. Heat goes in to the nantenna array and comes out as electricity. All the heat that is thus transformed (100%) will end up as electricity in the wires, since energy is conserved. In contrast, if you look at a Peltier block or other thermoelectric generator, you’ll see that it needs to have one face hotter and the other face colder, and that the electricity is here produced as a consequence of the movement of net heat from hotter to colder. The Peltier block is thus limited by the Carnot limit and 2LoT, and so far they are way off that efficiency anyway. The nantenna, as we’ve seen, needs only one radiator of EM energy in the waveband it is tuned to, and though it also won’t translate all incident photons to electricity (thus won’t reach 100% efficiency in real terms), the efficiency is not limited except by how good the design is.
The energy-loop can be diagrammed thus:
Environmental heat => IR radiation => nantenna array => electricity => work in load => heat energy => environmental heat
The “work in load” step may be modified by storage of the electrical power in a battery, or the work may involve lifting something against gravity, but after some time the stored energy will be released back into the environment unless we send it off the Earth, for example as a laser beam. The load here is anything we want to do; it could be a simple resistor that heats up, it could be the motor in your electric car, or your mobile phone – anything that uses electrical power. Exceptions are easy to put forward, but each step is allowed in both theory and practice, and for most work we want to do the diagram is what would happen.
If we put the nantenna array in a closed insulated container, and take the electrical output to a resistor or other load such as a motor or lamp, then we will see that the temperature of the container will drop at a rate equivalent to the power delivered to the load. This is precisely what 2LoT says cannot happen, since the only results are that the container cools down and work is done outside it.
If you enclose the resistor or load in a second insulated container, then that container will heat up as the first cools down, and after enough time you will be able to run a heat engine between the two containers. Interestingly, if we regard the two containers as an isolated system, then the total entropy of that system will also decrease as the temperature-difference between the containers increases.
If we leave the nantenna in an open environment, and connect the wires at some large distance to a motor that does some work such as lifting a weight or pumping water, then that work will continue to be done as long as the motor doesn’t wear out, or the nantenna does not corrode or otherwise fail. In a practical sense, this is perpetual motion. The energy comes from the environment, is converted to electricity and then work, and at some point will return to the environment as heat which can then rejoin the cycle. If you want a shorter cycle, then put a fan on the motor and enclose it in the insulated container, when it can be seen that the available energy is simply cycled between heat energy and electrical energy – work is done but the container neither heats up nor cools down. The fan will continue to run until it wears out.
It should be obvious that however you state 2LoT, this system breaks it. It follows from this that 2LoT has a loophole that we have the means to exploit, and that a practical perpetual motion device that also delivers power to the user (the nantenna array) is in fact possible and has been built and tested. Practical details of manufacturing and testing are in the appendix. The key point in breaking 2LoT is the conversion of energy in random directions to energy with a single direction, which requires engineering on a microscopic scale.
A second type of device is also obvious, in that we need to make a PV using a semiconductor with a bandgap of around the same energy as the thermal energy at room temperature. Somewhere in the band 10-100meV would function, and the standard methods of making a PV should be applicable here as well. It is somewhat difficult to calculate beforehand what the actual output of this would be, since there is some confusion over the emission of IR wavelengths within a lattice – we only measure the emissions outside the lattice. It seems reasonable to suppose that IR is transmitted and received within the lattice in very near-field conditions, and so the actual emission rate may be a lot higher than expected. We will find this out by experiment. For far-field, though, a bandgap of 25meV will see around 138mW/m² available, and may convert 20% of that into electricity. This device is planned to be made during 2017, and the data it produces will be used in the next design.
A third type of device has been mentioned earlier, in that a piezo-electric device which is smaller than the mean-free-path of the gas it is immersed in will be able to resolve each individual collision of a gas molecule. For air at STP this is around 70nm diameter, but we could use a heavier noble gas such as Argon, Krypton or Xenon or alternatively Sulphur Hexafluoride in order to be able to use a larger diameter, or alternatively we can run the gas at a lower pressure. Electrodes on the piezo would take the signal to a fast MIM diode (or equivalent) for rectification, and so for each collision we’d get a DC electrical pulse that will add to the output from an array of similar devices. It is reasonable to expect somewhere around 1kW/m² from such a device. Gas molecules hitting the piezo will rebound with a lower velocity and we’d measure that as being cooler. If we are using other than air for the device, or other than atmospheric pressure, we’d need a hermetic seal to hold the working gas in and a heat-exchanger system to keep the working gas at near-ambient temperatures. Since I published this idea here in 2013, it’s not going to be patentable so I don’t expect it will get built until we have enough money to do it ourselves.
A large amount of power is used in cooling. If we use one of these devices for cooling, we actually get power out instead. Your refrigerator now becomes a power source in your house, rather than a power drain, though of course the energy it delivers comes from the heat in the food so will be intermittent. Producing liquid air products will also produce power rather than use it. This may cause some big changes in the ways we use “energy” since what we are really using is work, and work is free providing you can loop energy. It may take a while for the language to catch up, though.
Conclusion
It has been shown that for the heat-engines we know the 2LoT describes the limitations very well. While we have feature-sizes of the devices large relative to atomic size, we will not be able to make a device that will break 2LoT. On a macroscopic scale, heat will always flow from a hotter body to a cooler body, and we will be limited to devices that require a hotter side and a colder side to perform work by the controlled transfer of heat from the hotter to the colder heat-sink. The energy flows in a linear fashion from hot to cold, and will not go in the reverse direction without us needing to put work in. If we have a certain amount of excess energy in a location relative to another location or the environment, we can do only up to that amount of work by allowing that movement, but no more.
If however we use either the quantum nature of photons or the particulate nature of matter, and change the scale of our manufacture to suit, we can instead use a single heat-sink (or in fact gas pressure rather than gas-flow) to perform work, and instead of the energy flowing in a linear fashion it will be looped on itself, in a logical way if not actual. We convert the environmental random-directional KE to unidirectional KE to do work, and normally the work results in random-directional KE again. The same quantity of energy can give us a continuous delivery of work for as long as the device lasts, as long as that output energy is not stored. Meantime, the energy store in the environment is vast and is replenished by the Sun, so once we can use this we won’t run out of available energy. I have shown that practically a nantenna array will do this, and that they have been made and tested, and I have also given two other examples of designs that should do the same job but have not yet been tested. Though the currently-available devices only deliver a small amount of power, once the possibility of them is realised we should soon get much-improved power delivery. While they are regarded as impossible and as fraudulent if they are claimed, few will invest money into the development.
If we develop this as a technology, then we will no longer need to burn fuel to provide power. This is the ultimate carbon-free power, in that once the device is made it will continue to deliver power indefinitely. In hot climates, it can be used as air-cooling and will deliver power in the process. In cold climates, it can move the available energy from outside the homes to the inside and thus keep people warm without needing any fuel to do so. Energy is conserved, but work is not.
The central point is in understanding how and why energy moves the way it does. For heat energy, it is a random walk and so after enough time it will have equal probability of being everywhere accessible to it. Even when it is at this even concentration, though, there is still a measurable flow of energy, and all we need to do work is a flow of energy. At thermal equilibrium, the flows are just equal and opposite, and so the simple devices we’ve made for a net positive flow won’t work. We need instead devices that allow the heat energy to loop and thus deliver continuous work output. These devices already exist, but only deliver a few microwatts to milliwatts (if a large device) and are not yet useful.
Widespread use of such devices at the kW scale and above will take heat out of the local environment, but this will also be returned to the same environment after maybe a delay through accumulation in batteries to deal with peak loads. The net result will be zero, unlike burning fuel which returns energy to the environment that may have been stored millions of years ago. Since taking a large amount of heat from the environment will get more difficult the larger the amount, because of icing-up and suchlike, I do not expect these devices will be used for power-levels in the many tens of kW, though it’s possible that in a car or truck there will be enough airflow to sustain enough heat-transfer to actually run the vehicle or at least a substantial percentage of the load. We will still need other power-sources, but not to the same extent as today. It’s likely that, with the backbone of continually available (though variable with temperature) power that the other renewable power sources may be able to supply the rest of the power needs of our society. If these devices are used in conjunction with some heat-source, they will be almost 100% efficient in converting heat to electricity, unlike other heat engines. The only losses will be in the wiring resistance, thus losing some heat outside the system, since energy is conserved.
Since Perpetual Motion machines are in fact possible, and have been made and shown to work, we should direct resources into research into how to deliver a higher power-level. We do not need to have two heatsinks in order to convert heat to electricity, but we have the technology now to do this using a single heatsink (though currently at a low power). We need to improve the technology, and this does not need new physics but simply another look at what we already know.
Glossary
2LoT – Second Law of Thermodynamics
CoE – Conservation of energy
CoM – Conservation of momentum
Heat engine – a device that utilises the difference of temperature of an energy-source and an energy- sink to produce output work. The thermodynamic efficiency is limited to the Carnot efficiency, but since an optimal zero-loss Carnot engine will in fact convert the energy difference totally into work, that Carnot limit of thermodynamic efficiency is simply equivalent to CoE. You don’t get more energy out than you put in.
IR – Infra-red light, radiated by all bodies above absolute zero temperature.
KE – Kinetic energy
MIM – Metal-Insulator-Metal diode or tunnelling-device
PE – Potential energy
Perpetual Motion of the second type – where a device uses no fuel or other obvious source of power yet runs itself and a further load as well. Long considered impossible, but here shown to be not only possible but manufactured and proved to work..
PV – Photovoltaic cell, which produces electrical power from incident visible and IR light.
Stefan-Boltzmann law – this states that the radiation from a hot body is proportional to the fourth power of the absolute temperature. See http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/stefan.html for details.
STP – Standard temperature and pressure of 0°C and 100kPa
ZPE – Zero-point energy of a particle, which is the energy that it retains in its ground-state at absolute zero temperature. This may be only theoretical, and not practically available. In any case, to date no-one has managed to extract it definitively.
Appendix
1: A dissertation on how to make and use a nantenna array
ABSTRACT
Title of dissertation:
IR DETECTION AND ENERGY HARVESTING USING ANTENNA COUPLED MIM TUNNEL DIODES
Filiz Yesilkoy, PhD Dissertation, 2012
Dissertation directed by: Professor Martin Peckerar , Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The infrared (IR) spectrum lies between the microwave and optical frequency ranges, which are well suited for communication and energy harvesting purposes, respectively. The long wavelength IR (LWIR) spectrum, corresponding to wavelengths from 8μm to 15μm, includes the thermal radiation emitted by objects at room temperature and the Earth’s terrestrial radiation. Therefore, LWIR detectors are very appealing for thermal imaging purposes. Thermal detectors developed so far either demand cryogenic operation for fast detection, or they rely on the accumulation of thermal energy in their mass and subsequent measurable changes in material properties. Therefore, they are relatively slow. Quantum detectors, allow for tunable and instantaneous detection but are expensive and require complex processes for fabrication. Bolometer detectors are simple and cheap but do not allow for tunability or for rapid detection.
Harvesting the LWIR radiation energy sourced by the Earth’s heating/cooling cycle is very important for the development of mobile energy resources. While speed is not as significant an issue here, conversion efficiency is an eminent problem for cheap, large area energy transduction. This dissertation addresses the development of tunable, fast, and low cost wave detectors that can operate at room temperature and, when produced in large array format, can harvest Earth’s terrestrial radiation energy.
You can download the full dissertation at:
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/13528/Yesilkoy_umd_0117E_13795.pdf
A search will bring up a lot of similar devices, since the principle of operation is well-known.
List of relevant articles on R-G
http://revolution-green.com/free-energy-by-simon-derricutt/ The first article, that introduced the piezoelectric idea to get Free Work from atmospheric pressure. About 4 years ago, but the ideas predate that by decades.
http://revolution-green.com/robert-murray-smith_ambient-energy/ RMS’s replication of the Lovell device, which shows that it’s not that difficult to make a device that harvests ambient energy from room-temperature, and uses only a single heat-sink.
http://revolution-green.com/paradigm-change/ gives some details of Dan Sheehan’s work. This has gone dark since, so I don’t know what progress he’s made.
http://revolution-green.com/thoughts-proell-effect-similar-ideas/ which explores Ken Rauen’s ideas and his intended method of beating 2LoT. At the time, I said it wouldn’t work based on Conservation of Momentum considerations, but now I would say he doesn’t loop the energy. He did however point me at MerCaT devices, which are PVs that work at IR energies and are commercially available. Devices that loop energy exist, but the output is somewhat too low to be useful. Ken came close to seeing that an energy-loop was possible but chose the wrong way to implement it.
http://revolution-green.com/simon-derricut-free-energy-philosophy/ is where Mark took a comment and turned it into an article. Just about the start of seeing Free Work as a concept.
http://revolution-green.com/some-philosophy-on-work-and-how-we-might-get-it-for-free/ is where the Free Work idea was really put forward, and also the invention of 3 different kinds of work so we could better analyse where the energy was flowing and what was being done.
http://revolution-green.com/infrared-pv-gives-power-at-night-too/ shows a nantenna array and what it can do. Again, this is a real device that loops energy, and is a perpetual motion device. Since the reasons for it working are well-known in theory, and it’s only the manufacture that is a bit expensive and difficult, no-one realised that it is disallowed from working by thermodynamics theory. Luckily, being against theory is not a bar to something actually working experimentally.
http://revolution-green.com/some-energy-basics/ explains how energy moves, and in the comments there’s the first set of points (where all must be correct in order to achieve the conclusions) that specifies how to actually make a Free Work system. One needed a bit of expansion to show why it was logical to remove the electricity generated by a PV or nantenna from the heat equations.
http://revolution-green.com/new-year-simon/ was where the underlying error in the formulation of the 2LoT was exposed, in that the heat was modelled as a fluid that would only flow from hotter to colder. Here I show that it flows in all directions possible, and that just because we normally measure the net flow doesn’t mean that that is the reality. Again, Mark took a comment and made an article of it.
Most of these articles have further explanations in the comments section. Sometimes it takes many words to transfer an idea, and there are certainly a lot of words here.
Damn! The MiB just turned up!
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DEFINING FREE ENERGY
Down at the philosophical base, it’s not actually Free Energy that we want. We want to get work done for free instead. Work can only be done when mass/energy moves from one configuration to another. After the work is done we have just the same amount of mass/energy as we started with, just in a different configuration.
If we run a cyclical process, then at the same point in the cycle the mass/energy will be in a certain configuration and thus we need a way to persuade the energy in our system to return to an imbalance so that we can again do work with it. When we look at a Free Energy device, therefore, we need to look at how that imbalance is restored since this does not naturally happen.
If you have a local concentration of energy, then it will naturally spread out in the space available until it is of uniform density and no more work can be extracted. To compress it into a small volume again, we need to do work. Having confined it by doing work, we can then get that work out again by letting it naturally expand. It’s that re-compressing of the energy density that doesn’t naturally happen, and without that you can’t continually extract work from the same amount of energy.
This is maybe a difficult concept – it took me a while to see it clearly. Maybe a bit more talking around it might be useful…. Work and energy are not the same thing, though they have the same dimensions and the words are largely used interchangeably.
When we burn a fuel, we release the energy in it that is stored as mass and we produce a local concentration of energy. For example burning diesel in a motor. We can then allow that local concentration to dissipate to the environment and do some work in the process. The more concentrated that energy is when we start extracting work (so – the hotter it is) the more work we can do with the same amount of energy – the possible work that that energy release can do cannot all be transformed into work done. That’s Carnot’s law in another guise.
A machine therefore needs to have an identifiable energy flow that it can harness to do work. Normally we burn a fuel to create that energy flow, but of course there are natural energy-flows as well that are driven by the Sun one way or another. If you can’t see that energy-flow, it won’t work. That’s about as simple as it gets.
That endless stream of energy from the Sun can drive a lot of things, and if we learned to use all of it we could do about 100 times the total work done in the world. It gives rise to HEP, wind, solar power, wave power etc.. The changing gravity caused by the Sun and Moon give rise to tides, and again we can get power from that that was stored in the moving masses.
If ZPE worked, then I’d expect to see some clues somewhere that energy was being created somewhere. If it can happen, then it will and we should be able to see it. We don’t even see anything in cosmology that could only be explained by ZPE, so it’s most likely that it’s not a real source of new energy. I’d still back people honestly researching it, but I see it as a dead end.
THE FLOW OF ENERGY
There’s a large flux of neutrinos that could be an energy flow that could be tapped, except that they interact so little with the matter we are made of that it’s not a practical source of Free Work. Unless people can give a good reason why their layered (normal) materials should stop such subatomic particles, therefore, such machines are science fiction. Yep, most likely a scam, too….
In the end, therefore, we need to look for the flow of energy that is being harnessed, and why that energy is flowing. If we’re burning something (coal, oil, Thorium, Palladium, Nickel…) then we’re producing the energy flow, and that won’t be Free Work but could be pretty cheap if we get it right. Otherwise we need to find an energy flow that naturally exists (solar, wind, tides, geothermal…) and harness it to do work (and again the idea is to do it cheaply). I’m open to other ideas, but I haven’t seen one that hangs together and can be proved.
Anyone who can control the flow of something essential to life (such as water, food or energy) can control others – that’s Hydraulic Despotism. We see it in action at the moment. Working on ideas that pass such control to each individual so that he/she can’t be dictated to is definitely a good thing. Given Free Work (or at least very cheap work) we can extract water from the air and use indoor farming to produce food nearly everywhere on the planet, and thus giving people their own power source rather than relying on the grid can enable all the rest. At this moment in time, solar (and possibly wind) power can do this but there are problems with making this constantly available 24/7/365.
Boiled down, though, when you’re looking at the various inventions that purport to give Free Energy you should look to see what energy-flow is being harnessed. If there’s no such flow, it won’t work.
DEBUNKER BY DEFAULT
Mark Dansie started off trying to also subject the various Free Energy claims to such a scientific verification since he wanted to see one that really worked. What he found was bad measurements and a fair amount of fraud, and in the meantime gained a reputation as a debunker. In the nature of things, you will no doubt be similarly castigated for proving that most if not all of the projects you test don’t actually work as stated. This is because most of them rely on a principle that has been shown to not work many times. To get any of those principles to work they will need to be changed and to add something new that no-one has done before.
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This post was sparked by Dendric who has been arguing for various ideas as regards Free Energy, and maybe feels annoyed that we aren’t accepting the new theories that explain the way the universe works in a different way to the standard. Dendric has put up his own website with pointers to various theories and ideas at http://ufsolution.wix.com/unifiedfieldsolution for people to look at.
My problem is not with new ideas. When I was learning physics a long time ago I had to learn quite a few new ideas, some of which were mutually exclusive – they couldn’t both be correct but we had to accept them as such because they gave the right predictions as to what we actually measure when we do the experiments. Part of the drive for a Theory Of Everything is to try to get a mutually-consistent set of theories that don’t have those ugly mismatches at the edges. So far, no-one has succeeded is making such a theory that is understandable to most people. Although String Theory is supposed to get pretty close to being consistent, it’s said that there only half a dozen people in the world that actually understand it (and I’m not one of them). Still, as a mainstream theory, with 11 dimensions and 8 of them curled up so we can’t see them it certainly takes a lot of swallowing. Given that, the Aether theories look pretty tame by comparison and thus easy to believe that they might be right.
The problem, though, is when you come to predicting what we’ll measure in any particular experiment. If you predict that you will be able to utilise ZPE, then when you build a device that is designed to do just that then we should measure more energy out than in. So far, no-one has shown that actually working, so there must be a problem with the theory. We still have the logical problem of not being able to prove a negative, so although a failure to demonstrate ZPE is not in itself a demonstration that it is impossible, when enough people have tried and failed you should have a pretty good idea that the principle is wrong.
The common problem with all the OU devices either currently advertised or in the archives is that we can’t actually test one and show that it works. There is no Searl Generator that works. The one that was claimed to work flew away. Tom Beardon’s MEG has no extant working version. Bill Alek’s OU Auroratek transformer can’t be shown to work for longer than it takes the battery to run down, and the same applies to the battery-powered GAIA bubble-machine. There’s no working Perendev magnetic motor, there’s no working Keely motor, there’s no working John Rohner motor, there’s no…. Yep, it gets boring after a while, since no matter how clever the theory is there isn’t an actual working device you can go see and measure the output. Yep, you can point an FLIR camera at things and see where the heat is (and isn’t) but there is nothing you can take home with you and plug in a real load and it will just work. I have no doubt that my emergency generator works; I fill it with fuel and oil and pull the cord, after which it will give me a couple of kW until the fuel runs out. I have no doubt a UPS would keep my computer running – until the battery runs out. The point about an OU device (or other exotic energy ideas) is that I would get the same result without needing to either refill the fuel or recharge the battery. If I had to refill the fuel can, water would be a nice thing to use instead of an oil derivative, being a whole lot cheaper.
A public demonstration of an OU machine is quite acceptable to the authorities. Rosch did a pretty-public demo and convinced quite a few people, and there are a lot of examples from history where various OU devices have been openly advertised and demonstrated. Rossi has done a few too…. If the demo is well-staged, then a fair number of people have left convinced they’ve seen OU or exotic energy in action. Getting one to take home and use is another story though. You can order one and pay for it, but somehow the delivery-date keeps getting extended until it’s obvious to a blind man it isn’t going to happen. GDS are playing that game at the moment, hoping for enough people to pay before the game is up and Greg Potter has to depart to another country that hasn’t an extradition treaty. Should we give him a bit more time to deliver and avoid telling the world it’s a scam in case it isn’t? Do we need to keep such an open mind that we forgive the slight lapse of never showing it working over the last 4 years or so (that we know of) whilst still offering it for sale?
A freshly-minted science graduate will have a known set of things that are true and a known set that aren’t. With experience, though, and some time actually working at new ideas, that graduate should come to the realisation that our theories are only the best we know so far and that even well-respected ones can be overturned and can be shown to have a limited range of validity. They are fine for the normal situation, but if you go outside the known limits then you need to apply some more-complex maths or something totally new happens. However, what the theories really do for us is to predict what will happen when we do something, and what we will measure as a result.
What I ask for Dendric’s theories (or at least the ones he espouses) is a set of predictions. The predictions will be of the form: if you design something this way, and build a device to these specifications, you will measure this result. That result, of course, needs to be different to what the standard theories would predict for the same configuration and actions. I want a degree of specificity. Can we get antigravity or at least something that gives us a thrust without needing reaction-mass being ejected? Can we get an endless stream of work out of a device without needing to refuel? Can we get a miniature nuclear power reactor that is safe to use? Add in your own wish-list here….
In the absence of such specific results, it’s fine to discuss the ideas and think about a different explanation of the way the universe works but it should be realised that until there is some concrete testable result attainable then it can’t be proven. To show that the ideas have some validity, we’ll need to actually build something and get the measurements. Until that data is in and can be validated by other people, we might as well stick to the theories that work well-enough.
I can claim I have a unicorn in my field below the vines. I can produce a photo of her if needed (but note that the horn doesn’t show up on a digital camera and can only be seen by virgins anyway). Difficult to get a photo anyway, but I managed it. In order to prove that RĂ©glisse isn’t a unicorn you have to come visit with a team of unicorn experts (and they must be all virgins) to test out my theory. I expect I can find reasons to dismiss your dismissal of my claims, by calling the sexual purity of your testers into question, so apart from the cost of the whole exercise you can’t stop me claiming that RĂ©glisse actually exists and is a unicorn. Yep, gets a bit silly, doesn’t it? A logical response, since I’m doing the claiming, is to ask me to prove I’m correct and to assume I’m either mistaken or lying to get publicity and/or money. In the same way, someone with a claim for some new physics has to show me that it’s valid. It’s not up to me to prove that they are wrong, but it’s up to them to prove they are right or at least show that the claim is reasonable. A really good way to show that the claim is valid is to build a real device and to show that it works as specified.
In the end, it all boils down to Mark’s catchphrase of “Show me the data!”. Without the data from a working device, any theory, no mater how attractive, is just another theory among many. Prove it.
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ENERGY AND WORK
At the basic level, all energy (and work) is free. It costs us effort to mine it or harvest it, or we have to pay someone else to do that job for us. Although a magnet motor would be pretty nice if it worked, there’s still a cost involved in manufacture and we’d look at that cost relative to what the other methods cost us. The breakthrough meme is thus a little fuzzy, therefore, since what we’re really looking for is a method of powering our lives that is cheaper.
TESTING FOR OVERUNITY
Any such method that was real would be very easy to demonstrate to the satisfaction of any scientific test, and so refusal to subject it to such a test is a big Red Flag. If you ignore those red flags and invest anyway, you’ll probably lose your money. That’s about the size of it….
Edit: since I just read a nice comment from Stuart at https://disqus.com/home/discus… where it looks like Stuart is totally missing the point that a real OU machine would be dead easy to test and to demonstrate. He’s answering about Mark D here:
“So as you say Mark struggles to determine what constitutes an OU device, he struggles to understand how it works when he does see one, and he struggles to think outside the box without his instruments to tell him, because he is so conditioned to other factors influencing the way he thinks.”
“Mark Dansie and his associates need to learn to assess possible OU without using their instruments. To work using only his initiative and imagination.
Will he makes mistakes, of course he will. Just like when driving a car you make mistakes, making a wrong move which lands you in a near miss or other bother like thinking, damn I should have turned at the next corner not this one.
The main thing is to go and look at OU with an open mind, not a closed one.
The question should be “will it work” ? Not why it won’t work because I cannot work outside my laws of physics prison walls.”
No, Stuart, the question isn’t why it will work or won’t work. The question is does it demonstrably work, and then you can go into the question of why if you want to. Asterix gave a pretty good method of proving whether the Rosch device worked – stick it in the wilds somewhere just doing real physical work. My version of that to test an OU idea is to set it going and walk away from it leaving it running doing some real work. The longer it keeps on doing work, the more you have to accept that it’s not faked in some way. Measurements are the icing on the cake, but the body of it is that demonstration of an appreciable amount of work being done beyond what could be stored inside it with known methods (unknown methods may of course also be a major discovery even if the thing itself isn’t really OU). Pump water up into a reservoir or lift weights and you can see the amounts being lifted without any measurement kit around.
Even Yilidiz with his fan could have demonstrated this way, by just leaving it running untouched for any reasonable time. Put it on the table, set it running and walk away. After a few months any conceivable battery or other power source would have been exhausted and credibility would gradually arrive. Running a fan at around 8W or so for 5 minutes or so and then stopping it and handling it is bound to destroy credibility, when that amount of energy could be supplied by an easily-changeable coin-cell and a bit of sleight-of-hand.
So: first demonstrate that something indubitably works. Then you can get down to the measurements and quantify just how well it works and modify the theory that has worked well up until that point. Recognising a real OU device will actually be pretty easy when it does get shown. It’s also worth noting that PVs comply with these ideas pretty nicely, and explaining the photoelectric effect was quite a useful change to theory (thanks, Einstein). Is it hard to demonstrate a PV works without measuring kit? No, just connect it to a motor and show work being done – as long as there’s light it will work.
Can we get something like a PV working on any other part of the EM spectrum? Of course – it’s all the same principle. Things we can do with RF we can also do with light, X-rays and gamma rays if we get the device the right dimensions and construction. If we look at the power flux available and the efficiency with which we can convert it to electricity then we can predict just how much power we can get, so Steorn’s latest offering may indeed actually work this time. The cost of that power per kWh may however be somewhat excessive when compared to other sources and it may not work everywhere – may be a problem if you take it hiking and rely on it to charge your satellite phone. If you tell me it will supply kW in future, you have to demonstrate that and not just claim it. I expect it will be stuck in the sub-watt range since there’s not much more than that actually available.
I look forward to the time that someone shows a device that breaks the laws of physics we know. Time for yet another modification of the laws based on experimental proof, and some fun for people working out why. At any point in time, the laws are simply “the best we know so far” and are open to disproof. That’s the way science works.
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Recently I’ve had a couple of people contact me with some ideas for how to get “free energy” using buoyancy. I’ve also reviewed some ideas using motors and generators, and explained why I don’t expect them to work either. It’s maybe time to have a bit of a rant (again) about the difference between work and energy, and why I think that whereas Free Work may be attainable (and has been demonstrated), Free Energy is most unlikely to be shown.
Let’s start with the paradox. There is the principle of Conservation of Mass/Energy, and since mass and energy are equivalent via E=MC² then in a closed universe we can’t change the amount of “stuff” we’ve got (mass/energy) but whatever we do we will end up with no more and no less. If we then look at a normal physics explanation of a process, we are told that we start with X joules of energy and we can do a little less than X joules of work, and then we have no energy left. This obviously doesn’t agree with the aforementioned CoE (conservation of energy). We really have a semantics problem, since the words we are using are not adequate.
I’m going to separate the words out. We have two forms of energy here (kinetic and potential) and we also have work. Potential energy includes mass, energy that is stored in springs of some sort, gravitational potential (may be stored as mass, but I’ll skip that question for now) etc.. Kinetic energy is stored as things that are moving, so we include photons, moving masses and other unbound energy not stored as mass. Work is on the other hand a bit trickier. Whenever we do work, at the end of it things are just in a different configuration than before. Some work goes into kinetic energy (KE) and/or potential energy (PE), some of it is simply that a lump of stuff is a different shape or location. Hammering a lump of iron into a sword (or ploughshare) takes a lot of work, but at the end of it we have the same lump of iron in a different shape. Work is not a conserved quantity, and that is an important observation.
Generally, when we’re talking of how much energy we’ve got, we don’t look at the whole amount available, since that would produce ridiculous numbers when we count up the number of joules in the various bits of stuff we’re looking at. Instead, what we look at is a local excess of energy over another place and call this what we’ve got. The total energy in a litre of Diesel is massive, but we look at what we get from combustion of it (that converts a very small quantity into KE in the form of heat) and how much more heat we have than the ambient temperature. To convert that heat energy into work we need to let that excess KE move into the ambient and we harness that movement to do the work of moving our car from one place to another. Since we start from stationary and end stationary (and normally end up in the same parking-spot at the end of the day), in fact all that KE we’ve liberated by burning ends up as heat in the atmosphere and we’ve actually done no work at all. Yep, it gets a bit complex when you really follow where all the energy goes to and what has really happened.
I’ll try to restate all this a bit more simply, though. The sum of KE and PE remains constant no matter what you do. We get work done when we harness the movement of energy from one place to another. Energy is conserved, but work is not even though we use the same units to measure it.
A local concentration of kinetic energy will naturally spread out until the energy density is even and without any local high concentrations. This can be seen using water – pour a glass of it into a bowl and you end up with a flat surface where no point is higher than another. Pour the glass of water through a turbine and you can get work done in the process, but you don’t have to do this so the work obtained can be anywhere from zero to (almost) the available excess energy when the glassful gets poured.
Part of Quantum Theory says that there is a residual amount of kinetic energy left even at absolute zero, and that things will thus still move. Some people think therefore that this Zero-Point Energy (ZPE) should be able to be tapped. There’s some logic there, in that if something is moving then we should be able to make it do some work, but in the case of ZPE I suspect it’s a problem of how we measure things and that that that energy is not actually available but is instead imaginary. Just because we measure something to be in a slightly different position does not mean that it’s actually moved, but that since our measurements require us to use some sort of particle to hit the thing we can’t really be totally sure of the measurements. There’s an underlying uncertainty of where the fundamental particle actually is, which is a probability function. ZPE therefore seems to me extremely unlikely to be a source of new energy and thus to break CoE.
With mechanical systems such as the motor/generators, gravity/buoyancy machines or electromagnetic systems, we start by putting some work in to get it going. That work gets stored somewhere as either KE or PE, and if we get work out of the machine then the available stored KE and PE reduces until it reaches zero and the machine stops. An equivalent system would be a bath full of water, where you think that if you pour in a glass of water to make it overflow then you’ll get a continuous stream of water out. It doesn’t happen – you just get a glassful out and then it stops overflowing. You can’t get more energy out than you put in.
So far I’ve trashed pretty well all of the “traditional” Free Energy systems as being non-workable. All is not lost, though, since I’ve pointed out that work is not a conserved quantity. Since I’ve also pointed out that work can be subdivided into stored KE, stored PE and displacement, and it should be pretty obvious that a simple displacement is a zero-energy transaction, there is however a chance that we can get the displacement-type work (which is often what we want) for free. That displacement is a zero-energy transaction has been known since Newton, since he said that a body in motion would continue in that motion unless there was a force acting. So – if you lift something up you’ve put in work which is stored as gravitational potential energy, and if you put it down again you can get that energy out again as work, but if you move it sideways then no work is done except against friction, and that can be reduced arbitrarily asymptotic to zero.
In looking at a purported Free Energy (or perpetual-motion) machine we should thus look at the total interplay over a cycle between KE, PE and the three kinds of work (Stored KE, stored PE, displacement). Count the joules in and out and decide how to assign them in those 5 buckets. Do this assiduously and you can decide for yourself whether any Free Energy invention will actually work. The majority show a zero-sum overall when they are idealised to zero losses, so in real lossy life will just slow down and stop.
So, what does work? We know that solar panels work pretty well. We also know that if we have any cyclic motion or wave then we can rectify it and get some work done. One thing to remember is that the total energy doesn’t change – if we take some in one place it has to turn up in another. All we need to look for is a flow of energy that exists and to divert it so that it does what we want done before we let it go again. Displacement-type work does not take energy to perform, though there is an element of borrowing and returning from the energy bank. Energy is put in to start the motion, then the motion continues until we stop it and get the energy out again. That sword-to-ploughshare change is displacement-type work, in that no excess energy remains after the work has been done. The vast majority of what is normally regarded as work is displacement, where at the end of a cycle there is no work (KEwork or PEwork) actually done. Displacement work does not store any energy, and we should therefore be able to do it without using energy – all the energy we do put in ends up dissipated. At least we should be able to do it with a draw on the energy bank followed by a return of that energy.
I think it’s possible to harvest infrared to get a reasonable amount of electrical power. The Robert Murray-Smith experiments showed that in a small way, and it may be possible to get the harvest up by quite a few orders of magnitude. For this, we’re stopping an IR photon (which is moving energy) and converting it to electrical energy (moving electron in this case) and then either using it in some movement (so it’s re-emitted) or storing it in a battery as chemical potential energy for a later release. Instead of going what path it wants to, we’re redirecting the path of that energy so that it does some work for us while we’re harnessing it. In a while I may have some data to present on performance of real devices. They are however just a wee bit hard to actually manufacture.
What I’d like you to take away from this rant is that “energy” needs to be redefined as to whether it’s a local excess or overall, and whether it’s PE or KE, and that “work” should be subdivided into KEwork, PEwork and DisplacementWork (and remember that DisplacementWork is actually no work at all, takes no energy and should thus be Free Work). Getting the word definitions right should help in seeing whether any system does what it is claimed to. If you don’t have the language right and thus confuse things that should be separate, then you can’t think correctly and get the wrong answers. I’ve used a lot of words in order to try to get across an idea that is really quite simple but is normally obfuscated by the common language.
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We’ve been somewhat short on content for a while, but at this moment Mark Goldes and Ken Rauen are coming back to trying to get free work from ambient energy (and of course free money from donations). I don’t particularly want rants on the status of Aesop as replies here – we all know that a lot of money has disappeared without any working product and that the promises to get it right this time thus have a hollow ring, but let’s try to follow the rabbit-hole and see where it leads instead. Mark Goldes replied politely to my comment on PESN about this, so let’s try to keep the replies polite as well. Argue with the ideas, not the people.
The start-point here is what Aesop Institute says at http://www.aesopinstitute.org/no-fuel-piston-engines.html which is unfortunately coming through Scribd so might not display on some peoples’ screens. Oh well – the gist is that Ken Rauen has thought up a gas-cycle that works using a heat source but no heat sink, and has developed the original 10-piston idea to one that only needs 4 pistons. Also worth looking at is Ken Rauen’s ideas on this from 10 years ago at http://www.pureenergysystems.com/academy/CarnotExcedence/ (or do your own search). Worth noting that it was said to work at that time, and that in the intervening years no-one has verified that it works.
Let’s start with some concepts of temperature. In a gas, the macroscopic energy stored at a certain temperature depends on the heat capacity of that gas. This heat capacity depends on the translation, rotational and vibrational velocity of the gas molecules, and thus different gases will contain a varying amount of joules of energy per litre when they are the same measured temperature. In a gas-cycle engine, we don’t really need to worry too much about things other than the velocity of the gas molecules and the gas will be the same at all points in the process (no chemical combinations), and we could use a monatomic gas for simplicity. Pressure is just molecules hitting the walls of the container, and they will recoil on average at the same speed that they hit the walls unless the walls are either moving or are hotter/cooler than the gas. At atmospheric pressure, any one molecule in air at STP collides at around 7GHz, so we don’t normally notice the random variations in pressure caused by the individual collisions.The directions are random, and the speeds follow a Boltzmann distribution. Incidentally it’s worth noting that the smaller the microphone and the lower the air-pressure, the more you notice the random variations as white noise – although this makes an effective lower limit on a useful size for a spy microphone before the noise gets too great, this can itself be used as a source of energy from the ambient.
By Newton’s laws, which are accurate enough at the ~500m/s of a gas molecule at STP (and still apply relativistically though they become a bit more complex), collisions will conserve energy and momentum. Although in reality the walls are also made of atoms and will thus exchange energy with the gas, let’s have an ideal piston and cylinder to start with that does not alter the gas energy in any way – the real situation introduces losses so an ideal container will be the best system possible.
Compressing the gas puts energy in since the wall is moving and the molecules will rebound with a higher kinetic energy, and we measure this increased kinetic energy as higher temperature and pressure. Similarly we get that energy out again by the expansion of the cylinder and the gas will cool down – all nice and perfect and ideal at the moment and those laws of conservation of energy and momentum will always apply even as we use real-world rather than ideal conditions.
If you put energy in as heat, then that is shared amongst the gas molecules’ kinetic energy and will increase the measured pressure. You can get this energy out either as joules of heat or as joules of work (or a combination of both) but providing those laws of conservation still hold then in any cycle you can’t get out more than you’ve put in. The important word here is cycle, since any piston engine will run a cycle and will be at particular conditions at any specified point.
So, can you produce a “cold point” using pistons such that that gives you a flow of heat energy from ambient, and from that flow of energy you can extract the work? To create a “cold spot” you can use adiabatic expansion – where we start at ambient temperature this will cost us work. The amount of work we can then get by using up the flow of energy from ambient to this “cold spot” is exactly the amount of work we’ve just put in – and that’s if it’s all ideal. This is the big Ooops in the idea, and why it can’t work to get energy from the ambient. Note that Ken Rauen built and tested a motor that used the Proell effect a decade ago. He said it worked, but I’ve never seen anyone confirm that. If it worked, it should just keep working (and giving you work out and cooling down) until it wore out. Obviously it didn’t. If it had done, then he would have demonstrated it widely (as would Mark Goldes) and have got a Nobel prize at least. The Proell effect seems to be a non-effect. By building it better with lower friction and better insulation he could make it spin for a longer time before it stopped, but the same can also be said about magnet motors. You can get it arbitrarily close to 100% if you spend enough time and (someone else’s) money, but you can’t get that over-100% out of it.
To analyse any energy machine, we need to look at what the energy flows are in joules at all points – if we look at temperatures then we can make errors, but count the joules in and out and things become obvious. It also helps if, instead of using equations naked, you put in actual amounts of gas etc. that you want to use so that you have real numbers to work with.
So far I haven’t mentioned the laws of thermodynamics. I don’t need to – this works on simple mechanics of collisions but just happens to end up agreeing with thermodynamics. What this says is that any idea of trying to use ambient energy (single heat source/sink) in a motor with pistons just isn’t going to work – while momentum is a conserved quantity you can’t do it with pistons or macroscopic structures. In a real situation, it won’t even break even – the losses will stop it dead. I had a discussion with Bill a while back on one of Tesla’s ideas that used a similar proposition of creating a cool sink and then having an almost Carnot-efficiency motor using the difference between that and ambient and thus converting all the input energy to work – again it seems logical until you go work out what happens to the energy flows.
OK, so that’s knocked out the idea of a piston engine possibly using ambient energy to do useful work for us. Are there sneakier ways? About a year and a half ago I put up one idea here that skews the probabilities of passing a barrier. Nope, I haven’t managed to build one of these and see if it really works or not, though I have thought of a possible way to get the accuracy needed. One of these days…. Since it would do a ridiculously small amount of work and is difficult to make, it’s only value is to annoy the people who say it can’t work and to satisfy myself that it does. OK – if it does….
Note that if you are a bit creative then the ambient temperature can be split into two sections. One is the ambient conductive energy of the air or other material substance, and the other is the temperature of the sky. Say ambient air temperature is 20°C. I’ve measured blue-sky temperature (using an IR thermometer) at -35°C in summer here. There is a temperature difference there we could exploit with a piston engine with atmosphere as the hot side and a radiator with a parabolic mirror pointed at the sky as the cold side. Clouds, by the way, measure somewhat warmer and could be somewhere round -2°C, but that varies a lot. You’d need a big radiator and mirror to get any reasonable amount of power, and the whole thing will be somewhat large for the power produced. It’ll be free energy from ambient, but would probably cost you more in depreciation and maintenance than using power from the wall.
Energy moves around. In the course of energy moving from one location to another we can get out some work. Something will move from one place to another, or something gets heated, or something changes shape. The sorts of things we loosely call “using energy”. Since mass/energy is a conserved quantity, of course we can’t use it up. We can’t make it or destroy it, we can only move it from one place to another. At the end of the work you’ve done, exactly the same amount of mass/energy remains as you started with, but it’s in a different configuration (more spread-out, and thus higher entropy). As I’ve said before, there’s a bit of a language problem that affects our thinking on work and energy.
One important point that isn’t much noticed is that all flows of heat are in two directions (or more). While the hot body will radiate more to the cold body, that cold body is still radiating energy to the hotter one – replace the cold body with a colder one and you can measure the increased heat loss from the hotter body. Thus even at ambient temperature, there must be a heat flow in both directions and thus if you can interrupt just one direction of flow you have the energy-flow needed to get work out. Take a while thinking about that one before you automatically reject it. Without that radiation, the IR thermometers wouldn’t work.
Let’s say we have a white-hot radiating body and we take some selected spectrum of that suitable for photoelectricity to illuminate a PV. The PV gives us electricity – we know that works. If instead of the PV we had a photoelectric effect that worked on long-wave IR, and again use the right spectrum for it, then again we’d expect it to work. If the PV worked on the IR we get at around 300K, then we could expect an electrical output from that, too, and that’s around ambient temperature. By it’s nature it won’t be a high voltage per layer (of the order of maybe 10mV) but you could have a lot of layers in series. We may not be able to yet make such a semiconductor layer but it should at some point be possible. If it only works at a higher temperature than ambient (say 300°C), it would still be almost 100% efficient at converting heat to electricity which would be worth it. Maybe it’s actually possible to use ambient energy to do work, providing we don’t try to do it using thermodynamics. Just don’t expect to be able to do it with a piston engine and a single heatsink – it needs something sneakier.
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I suppose I was around 12 years old when I built my first “free energy” device. An aerial wire, a coil, a variable capacitor, a diode and a crystal earpiece. I could listen to the BBC’s Third Program using it. At Droitwich there was a massive aerial system I’d seen from the train in passing, and it’s said that people living close enough to it listened to the Third Program through the fillings in their teeth picking up the radio waves.
Wherever there are waves, and we can put in some device that changes the probability of the wave passing in one direction as opposed to the other (some form of diode) then we’ll be able to harvest energy. Some waves we can get energy out from in both directions – the equivalent of a bridge-rectifier. Ocean waves, sound waves, radio waves, light, heat… you find a lot of waves in Nature, and they are all sources of free energy if we can convert them to a version we can use.
In a normal gas-filled heat engine, the molecules are all bouncing off each other producing the pressure. Put more heat in and the molecules bounce faster and the pressure goes up. Allow one wall of the cylinder to move (use a piston) and that pressure can move the piston, reduce the pressure, and the random motion of the gas molecules (heat energy) gets converted into nice linear motion of the piston. In the process, since the gas molecules will bounce off the piston at a lower velocity than they hit it at, they will cool down. Is there another way to use this effect? We want to use single molecules so that Newton’s laws of motion apply, and energy is thus transferred by collisions – the molecules cool down and we harvest the energy.
Around a dozen years ago, our design group was tasked to produce a couple of patent applications. Since we were basically involved in redesigning boards to reduce cost and improve reliability, we could only find one real copier-related idea, so that gave us only half the task done. That patent was granted after the site shut down and my job disappeared to Hungary (much cheaper there), but that’s maybe another story. At the time, therefore, we had to put another patent idea in. I thus came up with a perpetual motion machine as the other. I’ve had this open on the net for a long time now, so anyone who manages to make one can do so, but it won’t be patentable as such.
Imagine a piece of gold-leaf that is pierced with holes that are funnel-shaped. An air molecule that is on the left in the diagram has a better chance of getting through the holes than one on the right moving left, since whereas a hit on the inside of the funnel tends to make the hole bigger (and guide the molecule towards the hole), a hit on the outside of the funnel tends to make the hole smaller. In order for this to work the gold-leaf must be thin and thus flexible in the funnel, and the holes should be slit-shaped and of the order of size of the mean-free-path of the gas molecules. We have changed the usual probability, of the gas molecules passing through the holes in either direction equally, to one where they have more chance passing left to right. Since we are dealing with large numbers of molecules, this translates as a higher pressure on the right, and the equilibrium happens when the higher pressure on the right sends the same number of molecules right-to-left as left-to-right.
The gold-leaf thus generates a movement of gas from one side to the other and an unequal pressure on either side. If this pierced gold-leaf is then mounted in the vanes of a windmill, the windmill will turn without any energy being input – the energy to do this comes from the heat energy in the gas.
Connect this to a generator and we would generate electricity from the energy in the air, which would of course cool down.
This idea generates electricity of the order of nanowatts, but after that it’s only a matter of scale.
Note that the gas WILL cool down – the energy has to come from somewhere.
This breaks the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics since energy will move from a colder body (the air) to a hotter body (whatever you connect the output to) without any work being input to the system.
OK, then how about another method that maybe gives us more energy? Although the windmill should work, it’s not exactly world-shattering power output. Sorry, but this needs a bit of maths, so I’ll start off by defining the data I’ll be using:
(Figures here from ICAO atmosphere, as stated in Tennent’s Science Data Book, rounded to 2 decimal places since this is an order-of-magnitude calculation)
2.55E+25 – molecules per cubic metre
1.225Kg/m³ – density of air
6.63E-8m – 66.3nm – mean-free-path: Λ
6.92E+9 – collisions per second (about 6.9GHz hit-rate): R
4.80E-26Kg – average mass of an air molecule: M
459m/s – velocity of molecule: V
(other useful number – Avogadro’s number 6.02E+23)
Derived numbers:
5.06E-21J – approximate energy of a molecule: E (=1/2 M V²)
2.90E+14 – number of mean-free-path diameter circles in 1m : Q (= 4/πΛ²)
These are extreme numbers relative to daily life, and even very small volumes of gas have large numbers of molecules and collisions, thus any individual collision is difficult to distinguish. With a very small microphone, though, the fluctuations do give an increased noise figure so we can see that the smaller the microphone the bigger the noise signal will be, and you can’t design around that. This snippet of information is well-known to sound engineers.
When a molecule hits the wall of its container, it rebounds off at the same speed on average, since the collision is perfectly elastic, thus it retains its temperature. Of course, if it hits a warmer body, it will gain energy and get “hotter” (faster), and if it hits a colder body it will lose energy and get “colder” (that is, slower). These energy transfers are continually happening, since there is a range of velocities of the gas molecules, and they are all hitting each other and transferring energy at an average rate of around 6.9GHz at room temperature. This is important, since we will be dummying a molecule into believing it’s hitting another one, and is thus giving its energy to us instead.
A portion of the wall, of diameter around the mean free path of an air molecule, will receive around the velocity, divided by the mean-free-path, hits per second. This is 459 divided by 6.63E-8, or 6.9E+9 hits per second (about 7GHz).
If we can absorb the energy from the molecule, by using a small microphone of diameter 0.07 micron, we will thus get a hit rate of the order of 7GHz. Of course not all the energy can be absorbed since (a) there is a range of angles of incidence giving about one third of the total energy in the direction we want, (b) the microphone will probably not be very efficient at converting mechanical to electrical energy – say we can get 30% efficiency here. Overall harvest-efficiency will be of the order of 10%….
…or about 10 kW using the given figures (I’m interested in ballpark numbers for now). Actually quite a surprisingly large amount.
So approximately 10kW per square metre is available, from which we could probably harvest about 1kW per square metre once we’ve got the engineering sorted.
In order to harvest the energy, we need a small microphone. This would need to be made in nanoengineering using probably piezo technology. We get a signal from this when it is hit by a molecule, and thus the molecule rebounds at a lower energy. Recently I’ve seen that we can get diodes that will rectify a signal of this frequency, so instead of heat as the output we could in fact get electricity, but stick with the heat output for now since it nicely shows 2nd law to be breakable.
The piezo element should be of the order of size of the mean-free-path. Note that we can use a bigger piezo element if we use helium as the gas, which has a mean-free-path of 3 times that of air, so we could use a piezo of about 0.2 micron as opposed to that of air of 0.07 micron. That may make this a bit more usable. With the longer mean-free-path, the frequency goes down to around 2.3GHz, and here it’s also easier to use a diode to rectify it and add the outputs from a number of piezo elements to drive a load. We would also have less energy available from Helium, since the energy per molecule remains the same whilst R and Q are both smaller. I need to get more data on Helium to calculate the ratio, but the increase in dimensions may make it worth it, depending upon the manufacturing difficulties. 0.07 micron is right at the limit of current fab technology.
Per element, we have the kinetic energy of the molecule times the hit-rate, which is E times R or about 3.5E-11 watts incident on each piezo. Restated, that’s 35 picowatts. It takes a lot of elements to get a reasonable amount of power, but it is free. A 1kW array will be around a square metre and would currently have an astronomical price, but it’s a one-off cost and after that you just harvest energy from the air.
Note that conservation of energy is observed within our array – we are just transferring it from one side to the other. Conversion between mechanical and electrical energy is a normal occurrence.
If we build an array of these elements, then we have a system where the gas is cooled on the side of the piezos and heated on the side of the resistors, and this breaks the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics since energy is moved from a cooler to a hotter body without using energy to do it.
If you choose the resistors and heat as output, then you can of course use a Peltier block to get electricity, but at lower output than the diode version. If the array is put into the wall of an insulated container with the piezos on the inside, then the inside will cool down. A useful no-energy fridge. You can also build a room-heater or an air-conditioner depending upon configuration.
The laws of thermodynamics break down when we look at things on the nanoscale where the particulate nature of matter becomes important. This can be used to do work without needing energy to do it. In physics, we need to re-evaluate the equivalence of work and energy, since they cannot be the same thing. Energy is a finite resource, whereas work is an infinite resource (this can be seen in any office, as well). Trouble is that, since they use the same units and since in normal systems they absolutely equate to each other, they are seen as being the same thing and that is also what is taught in the schools and universities.
It ain’t necessarily so…
I’ll probably get complaints that you just can’t break the Laws of Thermodynamics. With the ideas put forward above, though, you have a choice. If they work, they break 2LoT, but if they don’t then they break Newton’s laws of motion. Which Law would you suggest is more easily broken? Thermodynamics was worked out using the idea of heat as a perfect fluid, without granularity, whereas the real world has molecules that have a certain size, so at the molecular scale the original calculations do not match reality since the built-in assumptions are invalid.
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I've been working on the problem of PV and the energy anomaly for a while, and in discussions on R-G suddenly realised that creating energy is actually dead easy in theory, just hasn't been recognised.
First thing here is that Potential Energy (PE) needs a bit more definition, since there are two types. The first one can be converted to Kinetic Energy (KE) just by letting it go or removing the thing that stops it converting itself to KE. An example would be releasing the string on a crossbow, where the PE in the bow turns to KE in the bow and the bolt. The other type of PE isn't so obvious, and you need to do something more to convert it to the first type of PE. This second type of PE can easily be created. Here, an example is moving a neutral atom in an electric field. You can move the atom anywhere, and in a gas it would diffuse by Brownian motion and take no extra energy to move it.
The atom as a whole does not change its (first type) PE as it moves in the electric field. However, each proton and electron within that atom will indeed have a different PE based on where it is in the field, but you need to separate them to be able to use it. If you ionise that atom into a free electron and an ion, the PE they have is now visible, and of the first type, and the ion and electron will accelerate in different directions changing that (first type) PE into KE.
Creating the second type of PE costs no work. We need to put in some work (ionisation energy) to change that to PE that will convert to KE if we let that happen.
This depends on two types of charge being available, and that when together they are neutral and cannot be controlled by an electric field, and that there is a certain trigger energy required to separate them that is recovered when they recombine.
Simplest practical way is to use a gas and ionise it in a strong and high-voltage electric field. The same thing would in fact happen with a photovoltaic cell (PV), but the difficulty there is that the PN junction voltage (in volts) is about half the band-gap energy (in eV), and so the photoelectron costs you about twice as much energy as you can get out of it once it's gone across the PN junction. The process works the same, but it's not obvious you're creating energy. Thus better to ionise the atom, where we know that the atom + energy = ion + electron is reversible, and to do that in an electric field that has more potential across it than the ionisation energy. There is a little extra energy needed to ionise (that ends up as heat) since you need to get the ion and electron far enough apart they don't just recombine.
It seems to me that this has likely been experimentally seen, but has been misinterpreted as being some sort of nuclear reaction (after all, you can't violate Conservation of Energy (CoE)). See George Egely's work, now Eng8. Might be able to improve on that design if I'm right here.
However, if you use two oppositely-charged plates to produce your electric field, any KE you get is going to need to be recovered as heat and then needs to be converted to electricity. We really need to use the type of field in a PN junction, where either side of the volume of field you have no field. Thus create ions in the middle of this PV-type field, they'll exit the field on different sides and make a space-charge that tends to reduce the field strength, and we can use electrodes in those spaces to produce a current. Use an electret to get the field, and it may need to be shaped to have holes to allow the electrons and ions to move in the field direction. This is a first stab at a workable design that generates electricity, may need a lot more thought to get it good.
The main thing to take away is that creating the second type of PE costs no work (it's really Free Energy), but converting it to the first type of PE will take a certain trigger energy that in a good design will be recovered and re-used in a cycle. This isn't Zero-point energy - we're simply creating it from nothing. Whenever we move a neutral atom in an electric field we are creating and destroying the second type of PE, but there's no work involved and so we don't recognise it. It's only once we separate the atom into an ion and electrons that the PE from the location of that charge within that electric field becomes convertible to KE and thus visible and measurable.
Simon Derricutt, 8 March 2025
Update 10 March
Seems that the standard physics doesn't see the PE of the electrons and protons of a neutral atom in an electric field as positive, but as zero because they assign opposite signs to the PE of the protons to the PE of the electrons, which thus sums to zero. PE is actually a scalar, though, and doesn't have direction and, critically, cannot be negative. Standard theory pretends it can be negative, and this is a logic error.
Thus this standard error hides the fact that every time we move a neutral atom within an electric field we change the PE of every charge within that atom. That PE comes from nothing as we increase the field and disappears to nothing if we reduce it. It is not subject to CoE, and it obviously takes no work to create or destroy it since no net force is needed.
Converting this "hidden" PE to actual PE and thus KE simply needs us to ionise that atom.
Note that though directionality of a scalar is often important, it doesn't have a direction or a sign, only magnitude. Some cock-ups from people getting that physics wrong....
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Re: Build The Exodus Propellantless Drive At Home | Andrew Aurigema | Exodus 2024 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUudT5CqlG4
With space work, there's so much experience needed to get things right that I'd be talking to people who already do it rather than setting something up myself. Add in what I can, but at this moment that's not enough to help a lot. Might get them a power-supply that doesn't need fuel, though. I've been talking to a few people working on reactionless space drives, looks like some will work. For the other technical improvements, I'm not sure if I've sent you the attached file before (probably not). Background is that Bob Norman, who started Micron Technology and basically invented Flash memory (he had over 200 patents by the time he died in 2021) was a friend, and someone he'd worked with before (Mr. A) wanted his help on controlling this "UFO drive". Bob had an NDA that said he could tell me what he saw it do, but not talk about what was inside the box. Thus I know that a much stronger effect is actually possible, and it's been done, just don't know how it was done. It's why I started to look carefully at CoM back in 2015, and found there was indeed a loophole that allowed a non-reactive thrust to exist because the speed of light is not infinite. There might be some clues in that file that make sense relative to the technology you're not telling me about. I haven't solved it yet, except of course there are various ways working that deliver a fairly low thrust for the power used. Getting high thrust for the much lower power Mr. A managed is not yet solved AFAIK. Incidentally, I think there was never any theory for Mr. A, and it was experimentally noticed and developed. Anyway, might be some clues. Another guy I know had been working along these lines and had seen some of the same effects, so I have hopes that the technology isn't totally lost. Best regards, Simon
> Good points. Actually we could pull it off by building an as simple as possible but rugged (e.g. redundancy and redundant system architectures, watchdog timers, heartbeat, software-defined radio, safety-critical programming techniques) remote-controlled KISS spacecraft. Leaning heavily on COTS parts and public information about all kinds of (sub)systems. Developing something new at NASA or building a poor man's copy of something using NASA patents are very different disciplines. I'm not prepared to divulge the technique now. If new data in 2027 indicates Apophis will hit the earth, I'll let you and Mark know that, the technique and some other things ASAP.
> > Of course someone will find it useful, and moving some Earth-grazer asteroid out of the way is definitely a good thing to do (more so if it was going to hit us). Just that I don't see myself building and sending up such a craft, and it needs a large company such as NASA. Please explain the 'certain technique" to multiply the thrust by 10^12. That would make it really useful. Not something I've read about. If it does actually do that, flying cars becomes reality.
> > > Thanks for the tip! If they're not using a certain technique then there is something that can enhance the thrust by a factor of 10^12 at the same electrical potential (voltage).
> > > > What would you use it for?
> > > Apophis deflection spacecraft. Asteroid Apophis is Coming | Ground Zero: California - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-yXhTmSSro Unless there's some clue that Charles Buhler has missed something that could be important, he's probably going to do a better job. Thus better to send him the money you'd have spent on it. They didn't miss anything, you need asymmetry worked out with some basic thrust to apply the enhancement technique on. You might also find https://www.altpropulsion.com/charles-buhler-exodus-technologies-propellantless-propulsion/ useful.
> > > > Maybe not really worth building one at home, given the rather small actual thrust available and the high voltages needed. What would you use it for? Unless there's some clue that Charles Buhler has missed something that could be important, he's probably going to do a better job. Thus better to send him the money you'd have spent on it.
> > > > > Exodus Technologies https://www.exoduspropulsion.space/ Exodus Propulsion Contact Information (Email) cbuhler [at] exodustechnologies [dot] space US Patent: US11511891B2 / WIPO Patent: WO2020159603A2 System and method for generating forces using asymmetrical electrostatic pressure https://patents.google.com/patent/US11511891B2/en Charles R. Buhler - IEEE Explore https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/author/37267914400Build The Exodus Propellantless Drive At Home | Andrew Aurigema Exodus 2024 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUudT5CqlG4 Exodus Propellantless Propulsion Business Applications | Exodus 2024 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8ghnnCRQJs Biefeld-Brown Effect in Vacuum Chamber | Falcon Space - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXXjQ3BMBKc
Preview YouTube video Asteroid Apophis is Coming | Ground Zero: CaliforniaPreview YouTube video Asteroid Apophis is Coming | Ground Zero: California
Preview YouTube video Build The Exodus Propellantless Drive At Home | Andrew Aurigema | Exodus 2024Preview YouTube video Build The Exodus Propellantless Drive At Home | Andrew Aurigema | Exodus 2024
Preview YouTube video Exodus Propellantless Propulsion Business Applications | Exodus 2024Preview YouTube video Exodus Propellantless Propulsion Business Applications | Exodus 2024
Preview YouTube video Biefeld-Brown Effect in Vacuum Chamber | Falcon SpacePreview YouTube video Biefeld-Brown Effect in Vacuum Chamber | Falcon Space
MrA-Bobemails-extracts.txt:
13/01/15 08:41
The Banduric write ups are quite interesting. It seems like they ould prove it by suspending the device from an arm and use the device to spin the arm, much like Brown demonstrated with his high voltage. A couple years ago they disclosed that the B2 plane used + a milion volts on the leading edge and minus on the back edge with the exhaust being negative charged. The high voltages remove 60 percent of the weight and make it more invisible to radar. I was very surprised this was disclosed. I went on a hunt on propulsion systems a few years ago when I started this and I am convinced the TR3B is real and is made by spinning a mercury like substance in a toroid structure. The things I read said they were getting 85% weight cancellation, so it could fly at mach 10 and above. I guess I could be called a UFO nut, but I have other reason to believe it is true, but I won't talk about it on line. The bottom line is that there are several examples all pointing to high voltage moving fields being able to produce lift. I sure wonder on the voltages used and disk sizes how much difference they would see on lift.
27/03/15 22:13
A MOST interesting day yesterday. Mr A turned up and showed me what he had. All I can say is unbelievable. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it. I don't want to say anything electronically, that how good this is. Think in terms of U with an F and an O strung together. It works and lets just say has plenty of power. He has a control problem he was asking for help on. I can't do the work, but I had the perfect solution for working it out. We set up a lab in another somewhat distant location where I can feed information to someone to do the job. I will do it without phone or email as its to valuable to take a chance. A snail information passing method, slow but safe. I would not believe it if I had not seen it. This would change everything and I mean everything. He is very concerned and on the run and for good reason, which I can't go into detail on. I will try to pass info in little bits over time. I know this sounds paranoid, but believe me its not.
29/03/15 08:15
Mt A did show me a demo and that's why I am so excited. I don't know how it works yet, but I know it does and its incredible. he had a big disk that fit into the back of his van. He pulled it out with some difficulty as I guess it ways about 200 pounds. The thing ran on a battery and when he energized it it went about 3 foot up and just hovered. He didn't get in and ride it as he doesn't trust it. Something is unstable and it just jumps around periodically. He had a wireless transmitter/receiver he took off a quadracopter as his control. He could give it commands to go where ever he wanted. He could go up down with ease. He said he didn't want to lose control of it so he stays close. we put a couple of big tool boxes on it and it acted like they were not there. the unit the does the magic ways about 50 pounds and is housed in a cylinder. I didn't get to look inside. He wants help figuring out the instability as its a real danger until that is understood. We agreed to how to work and I have just the guy to do my work for me. We are setting that up and our snail mail system. Until thats all set I won't know more, but frankly seeing it work was just amazing. I think you could solve many problems with this. He said he can turn it on and it will hover for about a week before he has battery issues. Thats all I best say, but it is the most amazing thing I have ever seen.
30/03/15 04:47
I will pass on Bandurics stuff, but it really doesn't compete with Mr. A's. He already has something that lifts hundreds of pounds and can go very fast. The stability issue occurs when it all of a sudden will take a 10 foot jump in a direction. It periodically does these jumps in all directions but down. He said he initially rode the thing but the quick jumps snapped his neck and hurt so he went wireless. If this problem was solved you could use it as a car or plane. I think you could make generators out of it, so usage is many fold. The battery he uses is a standard car battery used on a ford pickup. Probably about 100 amp battery.
31/03/15 07:26
I will run the material by Mr A and see if there is any similarity. There was a slight sound, a low pitched whine that was barely audible. The glitch isn't in the wify, he has determined that, its in his controller. It will be fun to look at it once we get the everything set up. I will let you know what happens.
02/04/15 02:45
When the device makes a jump is stays at the jump location, it doesn't drift or try to come back. I think I might know what it is already, but need to get things set up before we dive in. This is the kind of thing I usually am good at so looking forward to taking a look.
02/04/15 07:24
Actually the initial stuff related to a special radar. I was designing pulsed arrays to feed into his antenna array. I have a pretty good idea what he saw, but can't imagine where he went with it. I have probably said too much already and will go quiet for a while on the subject.
08/04/15 07:33
Got my first hand delivered message from Mr A activity. I think it will work pretty good with one to two day delivery time.
09/04/15 07:06
Yes, I think we have a working exchange, although it is a bit slow, but it will work and meet Mr A's requirements.
16/04/15 09:08
I got a few numbers back from the lab on Mr. a stuff. When hovering it consumes 500 mA, but what is amazing is that almost drops to zero when in motion. That is hard to figure. He took a compass and market off 50 yards and it turned his needle. After 50 yards it dropped off very quick. He didn't have any equipment to measure any strengths. With a little scope antenna he was picking up a 2 MHz signal that goes away when its off and comes back when on. The device vibrates when standing still and the jumps appear when it reaches a max wobble, it then jumps. I wish I could look into it, but promised I wouldn't. It never jumps up or down, just sideways. More feedback than I thought. I have some good clues on what to do.
17/04/15 07:46
Since we can't look inside, I have made a list of tests I want and we will just work through them. i have some control inputs he gave me to play with, so we will characterize them and hopefully I can get full control of the thing. One interesting thing I forgot to mention, when We give it a little nudge to go forward or reverse it continues to pick up speed without advancing the throttle, so a small increase will lead to very fast movement . To keep constant speed you need to bang/bang on and off to get a constant velocity. That is easy enough to design, but surprising in how it works. The Lab man was scared of the speeds, so I am trying to figure out some safe tests to measure speed and acceleration.
18/04/15 03:15
Mr A's device is totally free standing with nothing between it and ground. When he demoed it to me I pushed a big wooden box under it to see if it would lift up and it didn't, the height seemed set buy the controls relative to ground. I'm still scratching my head a bit on that. I see what your saying by the small resistance so once in motion it will stay in motion. My lab guy did tell me it went damn fast and was accelerating when he stopped it, very surprised by it continuing to build speed of a pulse. I need to quantify this and get some numbers as to speed and wind resistance. I think I might wire in a wind generator and see if it will power the unit, or recharge the battery, so it is perpetual. Your right, out unit would make it run forever, from what we know right now. You had some very good suggestions for further testing. I made a list of these and some more and sent a not to the lab guy. Your so right about the field normally dropping of gradually. I was told it was like a wall. The compass reacted to a certain distance and then just switched, almost an instant off. It appears there are some real anomalies here. The flying over a scale is a most interesting idea, I will pass it on as soon as I get a note back. I tried to contact Mr. A, but he seems to have disappeared. Very frustrating, but some things he told me I'm not surprised. That I can't talk about.
19/04/15 06:42
Yes, I think an accelerometer and motion detectors make total sense. The lab guy has a lot of stuff so if we get lucky we might not have to design it. they are coming out with very good radar systems made for drones, so there are some interesting things to possibly do with that, but that's more a bit down the road after better characterization.
20/04/15 21:58
No news from the lab guy, the delivery guy didn't go, so no exchange of notes. Was hoping for some feedback on some of the tests. The lab guy said he has a lot of old equipment with accelerometers and things. He said to give him some time, but he thinks he knows how to rig up a monitoring system that will work pretty good. He has done a lot of work like that in the past so has a pretty good idea of what to do and what to use. Yes, we plan on using the WiFI that is commonly available so we can get readings. the lab guy said he has modules made for that, for prior testing, so I think we are good to go on that. still no response from Mr. A. He told me how to reach him (convoluted) and he will eventually get back with me.
21/04/15 07:04
Yes, the lab guy is really well suited for what we are doing. Its someone I new years ago and trust pretty well and just recently found out he was reasonably close. We don't use regular nail, they keep full records of all to/from and rumored they read a lot of them. I have my own courier. I can tell the results of most tests, just can't divulge any operation details by email or mail according to the agreed on rules.there might be some tests that the results divulge too much, but will cross that bridge when I get there.
22/04/15 05:43
Nope, Mr. A doesn't trust snail mail as it allows tracking, so we worked out a way to get info passed. Mr. A has had some real problems and I fully agree with the protocol. Yes, I hope we all can eventually learn the details of why it works, but I'm not fully convinced that Mr A knows exactly all the whys. I am a bit concerned about Mr A, he seemed very nervous, to the point of an nervous breakdown. Time will tell how this goes, but its an incredible invention. This capability would really lower all transportation costs, even space if it works as well as I think. He said he had about $2000 dollars in the prototype and he paid high retail prices for some things. White I was able to see it would only cost less than $500. Mr. A wants to build a big unit and see how it scales, but he can't find a place to work where people don't show up. He is trying to get lost!
23/04/15 08:00
I asked Mr. A about documenting and getting copies sent around. he seemed a bit nervous by the thought as I'm not sure he trusts anyone. He said he has it fully documented and they were in a very safe place. Probably so safe no one would find them. I asked the lab guy to look at how hard it would be to open and look at. He said it was built in such a way that you could probably tell we looked unless we had some special equipment. He was going to check on x-ray and ultrasound testing. Yes, cities are good to get lost in, but he needs some good size areas for testing that are not easily observed. He said he found something that looked interesting and was going to go check it out. That is probably where he is at right now. we need to be careful and not make Mr. A too nervous so he takes his machine away, which he would do if we break the rules he laid down. I offered my place, but he said I have been compromised as a connection point, so it might not be safe. Real paranoia.
24/04/15 07:51
Not a bad idea to disguise the unit, it does look like a little UFO right now. Make it look like a drone maybe, or for just carting around a vehicle as you said. The affects of EMI should not be dismissed, but I personally don't think that is it. When Mr. A was here he told me what he had been gong through and if true I would be paranoid too. I have no reason to doubt him as he was always a solid guy when I was around him. Still, we need the dta to make sure. Still nothing back, so nothing to report. Yes, we need to be careful so we don't lose the prototype he left, it is valuable beyond words.
25/04/15 07:39
I am going to send a note to lab guy to see if we can make ours look like a drone. If it works we can show Mr. A. That is a good idea.
26/04/15 08:25
Yes, we will make it look like a drone. I got some data back today, a bit confusing. He started the unit and tossed flower at it and the flower just gathered in a ball around the unit. He was really surprised. Its non magnetic and there was no wind. He said he stuck his hand in it and felt nothing and just had his hand covered in flower when he removed it. Very strange. He sent for metal fillings so he could hold up plates and see if he can see a force field. He turned it off and held a magnet and it showed that there must be magnets in side. He was going to spend some time later to see if he could map it out s to what was there. When it starts up a compass just spins until it stabilizes, about 5 seconds. The craft then has a North and a South orientation. he market it as to where the divide and the N/s direction. It always powered up the same. He held a neon tube close to it and nothing lit up. He stuck a voltmeter ground probe in ground and probed around the unit and saw no real voltage reading. He powered off and back on and saw about 1k volts for the 5 seconds stabilizing time, then it went to zero. He made it move and saw no voltage swings. He said he hear a hum as mentioned before, but when he got it moving the hum decreased. He thought if he let it go fast it would be totally silent. When he turned it on he got a scale reading of 85 pounds (its weight) and as it lifted off it registered 85 pounds until the 5 seconds were up and it registered zero. That makes no sense. He put his hand under it and felt nothing. He said his dog went under and laid down in the shade, so it must not have felt a thing. He put it in motion and fast walked behind it and felt no push and did the same in front with no push or pull. He said it was like watching a magic show.
27/04/15 08:04
The data I Gave makes no sense. I thought the flower would be pulled to the device or ejected away, but not staying in a s[here around the top of the device. The under side did not do anything, so there is a difference on top and bottom. Likewise, the scale function does not make sense. It acts like it has force, but from where? This is going to take longer to figure than I thought. I sent a message to repeat the measurements as it is hard to believe. Yes, I hope we know some day the why and how it works.
02/05/15 00:39
I sent a message to Mr A and ask that we show this to some people. This is way to important to sit on. I hope I can get him to agree. To me this is light years ahead of the EMDrive.
03/05/15 08:00
Mr. A told me some things that were going on and I think he has reason to be concerned and paranoid about things. He is building a big unit that he can ride inside easily and said he is thinking about making a big coming out showing at some big public event. Something like a football game or baseball game, he hasn't decided what would be ideal. He said if the bigger one works as well as the smaller one when scaled up he may build a bunch and do a big showing one some day, but he needs to build and test first. I think his idea makes sense as how to disclose the capability.
04/05/15 04:50
Yes, your so right about being careful how Mr. A demonstrats his unit, so they don't panic and shoot it down. I'm sure he will clear it with the places so its respected, but a very good point. I really like the idea of a raceway. Open with a big track, so he can really demo it well and if the press are alerted a lot of video and pictures to hit the news and internet. It would be great if he could race a car around the track, make it a real interest story and drive home the capabilities. The demo will have to be done at low altitude because of air restrictions. Need to check what the rules are and make sure he is covered.
05/05/15 05:13
I got a note from Lab Guy, quite interesting. He said it looks like there are a lot of thin rings inside the unit that surround a cylinder, but that's all he could see with his x-ray unit. He said curiosity got the better of him and he took the unit out for a spin. He said he was going to run it across his property and back so he hit the go forward at about half power and was shocked. He said it took off so fast he had trouble reacting fast enough to stop it. He said when he brought it back the Aluminum was very hot. He said he didn't have any gauges to measure anything, but he did get a blister when he touched it. He put it away and just sat there for a long time thinking about what he saw. He tried to estimate the distance and time it took, but he said he doesn't trust it because the numbers are ridiculously fast. He was trying to see what he had to measure it and might gave some sensors that might work. He said the bigger problem is the Aluminum, its not going to hold up long distances or higher speeds. He said after a fast flight it sat and wobbled for a while before sitting there stable.
06/05/15 01:04
I understand fully what your saying and think it will work wonderfully. How to get it to work is a bit clumsy right now as it is to big to easily turn a generator, but it could be done to show feasibility. I know it has huge torque as it moved about easily with a tool box loaded on it when he demoed it. We flew it a little ways but not far as it might fall off with the bit of wable we had. It would be great to rig up a wheel driving a generator and self loop it. Probably couldn't get it to be 60 Hz easily, but we need DC so the speed shouldn't matter. I sent Mr. A a question a while back related to this issue. I asked how small he could make it or is there other configurations that it could be built for motor generator usage, but so far I have not herd Back from him, he has gone quiet. I do believe that this will easily be used as an energy source, but its not in the best size and shape, but anything that proves over unity would set the world afire, but Mr. A is one nervous dude. i will try to address this with him without pushing for answers. The lab guy has this on his agenda, but our top priority was to try to help in the control and figure the damn thing out. I have a long list of things I want done from lab guy and he has added to it, so good things are coming.
06/05/15 07:36
The internal rings we don't know the temperature from his probing, just the outer shell got hot on a fast run. He did say he touched the propulsion unit and it felt normal, so I think that is good news, cooling might not be a big issue. I agree on the need for caution on acceleration. Would hate to make someone black out or worse by taking off or stopping fast. I didn't mention, but when he hit the stop accelerating it stopped on a dime, way faster than he thought possible. He thought he would have to throw it in reverse, but it stopped before he even got to that.
07/05/15 08:03
He claimed what he showed was the first unit, so I don't think a small one was built. I will try and find out the possibilities though. When it sits still it draws power and as you start moving the power drops quickly, so I have assumed he has a feedback mechanism in place. Regardless, it seems like it could easily turn a generator with eventually little or no input once started. A battery to start it and then it kicks out and we charge the battery from the generator and drive the units small requirements. If nothing else we could remove the aluminum shell and mount the unit on a generator and it would be much smaller.
08/05/15 07:26
Testing the generator would be easy, just hook both to an L shaped rod and let the unit go in circles> it might not do it at 60 Hz, but just turning it and getting a voltage out would demonstrate a lot. The whole power seems backward, that's why I think it must have a built in feedback that takes over from the battery. When its sitting the unit wabbles and seems unstable but with the least forward motion it get rock solid with no wobble.
13/05/15 05:40
Mr A never did tell me what effect he saw, just that he saw one. He plays things pretty close to the vest. The radar would be a logical place to start, but just reading I doubt I would notice anything, but still worth a look see. The lab guy said he couldn't see much from the x-rays, a lot of metal of various types and shapes, but it all runs together pretty bad. He never mentioned gaps, but I will ask. I got a not from Mr. A I asked about the strange power and this is what he related. Each design needs to be zeroed out to the design and what you want. sitting on the ground turned on draws 0 energy, but not to exciting. Add 100mV for this design and it lifts off, add 200mV and it lifts a bit higher. depending on the height you want you pick the the current level in the on null mode. I picked 3 feet as it was reasonable numbers. When you want to make things move you change the input bias I showed you. When the bias moves it trips the internal circuitry to switch modes, when that happens it operates quite differently and I get gain out of the engine and my draw becomes totally internal satisfied, so the battery doesn't draw and it looks like zero, but in reality there is a lot, but its made from the engine. Please be careful as there are control issues to work out as you know. I wanted you to look at the instability while sitting there, but another problem is the mode switch. I'm assuming your not crazy enough to try and ride it at this point. If you fly it at altitude and shift it to stop it doesn't hover at that altitude, it will drop like a rock to 3 feet and stay. I am working on adding a mode that when your off power up and switch to off it will stay at that setting, so if you want to go down you need to lower it and then go into neutral. I think I have that figured out and will be added to my next model, the big unit. Simon, the control works on this unit as a neutral setting of 6 volts. two wires, above 6 volts it goes up and below 6 volts it goes down. there are two other pairs that work the same way for right/left and back/forward. when they all get within about a half a volt of 6 volts its the neutral 3 volt hover. This seems way different than the EM drive and from the x-rays there isn't disks, just toroids around the cylinder.
14/05/15 06:04
Getting exciting getting to the point of testing. Lets hope it goes reasonably well. Yes, what I described were the control lines. There is a big thick cable from the battery into the engine. I don't know exactly what or how he switches its use in and out. Very limited things we can do to control things with the limited access. To me the description made sense as to how it works, I'm a bit surprised at your comment about it not being real.
15/05/15 06:36
The power cable is two cables in parallel about like what a car battery uses. The measurements didn't show that much draw when hovering, but the first 5 seconds were not measured to well with the equipment he had. I think the battery cables are an overkill.
28/05/15 07:39
No problem telling your brother as the key stuff isn't there. Some good tests. I do know that there is no difference over water, it acts the same. the cliff thing has been tested also. It was flown off a 300 foot cliff and it just went steady forward with no detected dip. it was flown over several objects and it just went flat over things like wood, but when it went over metal there was a very slight lift as it went over. I knew this from what Mr A said when he demoed it to me, Forgot about it in all the talk, but very relevant to the thinking.
31/05/15 18:33
It is very hard to get messages to and from Mr. A, but the lab guy I have a direct contact that makes the run all the time so passing information can be done easily. For quite a while now he said that no one is around when he stops. I'm a bit concerned. Waiting is very difficult when there is so much testing o be done.
02/05/15 04:22
Yes, no one has been around for a while when my guy stops buy. I just found out that last time he was there he ran into the guys sister, who was there watching his property. She said he was nervous about something and decided to leave and was going to join mr. A and they were going to work together. She said he would figure out a way to contact me down the road a bit. I wonder what went on. Not good news to be able to get good updates.
03/06/15 17:27
Yes, I'm concerned about the lab guy myself, but not from heath issues on working with the device. My carrier guy said that there were people watching his property and not just paranoia as the sister said she saw them herself. I guess he took off with the unit in the middle of the night according to the sister. Just hoping to hear from him one day. Damn nothing goes easy. She said he made a deal with Mr. A to join him and work together on the big one. She had no idea what area he was going to.
05/06/15 03:25
Yes, it would be great to know who was watching the two guys. Mr A told me he thought it was one of those 3 or 4 initial groups, but he wasn't sure which one. Every time you go to confront them they take off. I just hope he disappeared properly.
06/06/15 07:59
Yes, I'm very anxious to hear from the two guys. I hope everything is ok and they are working together.
03/07/15 15:22
I got a quick note from lab guy. He is now working with Mr. A and they have taken the project out of country. Didn't say much more, but would try to get a note to me off and on, but it will be hard.
05/07/15 08:16
LG mentioned that he got a look inside the engine and said it was incredibly simple, but he had no idea why it worked. He said he went and bought hardware like what he saw and it came to a little over $250. He said he hooked it up as best as he could remember, butt it just flopped along the ground. Mr. A was watching and told him that his initially did the same thing, it only took him 2 years to figure out how to fix it. interesting he could get that much to work by just seeing it.
05/08/15 05:24
I sure wish I would hear something more from Mr. A and the lab guy, it would be nice to know where they are and how things are developing. Do you have any idea when Banduric will have results from his testing. it would be great to have it showing promise. I have half a suspicion Mr. A's stuff may be one the same principle as Banduric, a lot of high voltage involved.
12/08/15 07:31
Mr A told me that once its moving it generates its own power, so essentially it doesn't need a battery to run. the Two batteries he uses are for the idle mode and some non engine type things, I think the control is still done off the battery. That doesn't make much sense to me, but it was what I was told and what I wrote down. He used the term lock and said when you power on it initializes and comes to hover at the set conditions, it soon Locks and runs from its own power. Pretty incredible if true and from what I saw I believe it to be true. when ascending after lock obtained there is no battery draw except for the mentioned circuits. Damn I wish I would hear something from them.
13/08/15 07:10
Yes, it is troubling about Mr a's device and the secrecy, but then the other guy left because he was being monitored all the time. His sister confirmed that as she saw them hanging around. I know who I don't trust. I personally think it would solve about every problem the world has, thats the frustrating part.
14/08/15 06:31
The high energy fields sure are a concern, I hope someone does further studies and examines the physiological aspect of the affects. One sure wonders when you look at the paranoia that seems to plague the whole subject. Mr. A was a bit strange, even way back when when we worked together. The other guy I had not known to long, but he seemed very normal and quite a nice guy.
17/08/15 05:44
I would think Mr A could easily sell his idea for a billion and live the rest of his life in luxury, but that isn't what he seems to want. He seemed intent on getting a company going, but i don't see how if he won't show it. Hopefully he comes to his senses. I know lab guys sisters name, I think i might try and contact her and have a chat.
01/09/15 06:50
Yes, I wonder about Mr A and miniaturization. I suspect it does get too small as it seems to use coils and transformers for its operation. I went back through my notes and the lab guy said he got things to move around, but couldn't control the up down. He did say there was material used he didn't recognize and Mr. A was not talking at that time as to the function. I had over looked that comment. That's sure a good question. Have not heard anything from either of them. I did send a note to lab guys sister and hope to hear from her. She knows I was the one that got him involved, so she should open up some.
02/09/15 07:31
Yes, I would love to know Mr. A's basics. I am going to really try hard to get enough details to at least get a start on the concept, If I ever hear from them again. Even without the lift, just the movement one might be able to drive a generator. Its so damn frustrating knowing its there and not being able to look at the details.
03/09/15 07:50
Yes, just to understand why it moves around the ground would be a big start in understanding Mr A's idea. I have been poking around the UFO stuff to see if there was any pointers to similar technology and there are some things that sound similar believe it or not. Here is one in particular that says a lot of things about how it is done. There are several like this from different people that are food for thought. I know you don't like listening to videos and this is a bit long, so I understand if you don't watch it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDjE9ME452c
04/09/15 07:31
to me it seems like Mr. A gets is affect from high voltages from coils and Transformers. The overall engine was something like 40 or 50 pounds in weight, which isn't that much. The McCanles videos talked about a lot of the same things as what I have heard from the two guys comments to me. Yes, his video is pure speculation, but it just seems to hold a lot of water.
05/06/15 06:22
The control system is quite small for Mr. A's system, but it is heavy for the size. The control system was mostly inside the unit, so I didn't get a look at it. I sure wish I would hear something.
19/09/15 06:18
I got a message from lab guys sister and she said she had not heard anything and was getting worried. She said she would take a trip if she knew where to go.
20/09/15 06:24
Yes, I'm concerned about both of them, its been quite a while. They didn't want to use any public messaging methods as they are all tracked and only deliver hand messages and I'm sure that's not always easy to arrange. The whole subject is driving me crazy.
16/10/15 06:03
I sent a not to lab guys sister and got an answer back. She said she has not heard a thing from him and is very concerned as they have always been close. She promised to contact me if she gets word. Very troubling.
17/10/15 06:16
The lab guy never told me exactly what he did to get it moving around. All he said was he used a lot of transformer, inductor type things configured strangely. We had an agreement I would never sent technical data via email or regular mail as it isn't secure. Even If I could tell you I would have to find an alternative way to pass it to you.
01/01/16 07:00
The whole Mr A thing is most troubling. Information wise I think I have told you everything I know and its not much. Mostly has to do with very high voltages.
02/01/16 01:45
Mr A and the Lab guy didn't give me much. I just got what I saw when he was here that I related. The lab guy made the device that flopped round, but he sent no technical details as it could not be sent by email and be safe. He did say that it was mostly high voltage stuff with transformers and inductors, but a couple of very interesting twists he said he would tell me in person, but we never got together after that and now I don't know where he is at. He dd say it was powerful and scared him as it was uncontrolled. He said when he flipped the ON switch it took off and hit the old Kids swing set he had and it bent the hell out of the pole from the impact. He was afraid to do much after that until he figured a safe way to test and that's where it ends, he went to be with Mr. A. This sounds like a story right out of the conspiracy books.
03/01/16
Nope, the tech guy would not give out any information over the phone or email. I think that was smart, but it leaves us unknowing.
04/01/16
Mt A has given us a lot of clues we wouldn't normally have, but a lot of it doesn't make sense. Maybe something we tackle after the decay thing gets put to bed.
12/01/16
There have been a lot of pieces in the news lately about scientists think they know how to create gravity and are understanding its basic nature. That ties in to the discussion on Vortex about current loops to create anti gravity fields. I wish Mr. A would show somewhere and demo his divice, it would shake things up.
20/02/16 06:00
The lab guys sister contacted me and said she talked to him. He is doing fine and is living out of country. She said she had no details, but he was almost giddy happy with where they are. She said she had no idea of plans or anything, she was just happy to hear he was ok. So many scams and I know this one isn't, but its seems to be going no where, frustrating.
21/02/16 06:37
Yes, very good news on the lab guy, I had become concerned about them and it sounds like things are very positive, just need to know more!
27/04/16 04:43
Mr. A's machine seems like a big revolutionary jump in technology, I just hope it sees the light of day as I'm very concerned about how things are going on that front.
10/05/16 01:56
UFO's are very hard to figure, they have been around most of my life. When I was about 12 there was a big orange ball that was parked above our town and everyone was out looking at it. There was a radar station just outside of town and everyone was calling it asking what it was, but they said they couldn't see it on radar, but confirmed they could visually see it. They scrambled the jets out of Ellsworth and we could see them coming and as thy got close the ball just darted away. The jets turned and tried to go to the next location and as thy got close it did the same darting action. It was so fast you could hardly see it move. This went on for close to an hour and finally it just took of and was gone in a few seconds. I have always been a believer after seeing that. The other things just help confirm what I thought. I now believe with all my hart the military has crafts that are very advanced and are space capable. From what I saw with Mr. A's device it seemed more like it was operating from electromagnet forces. When it was wobbling I could put my hand on it and feel a push that felt kind of like what magnetic forces feel like, hard to describe. Something I thought of that I hadn't written down or mentioned was the hair on my arm stood up when I was touching it. Your right, when Mr A's device moved it had no wake of any type I could feel.
11/05/16 08:13
I'm pretty sure the device was not ball lightning. It was huge and had different colors of light and it traversed a big triangle path twice in the sky. I just can't believe a ball lightning would look and act like that. What is weird is the military later said they knew nothing about it. The local paper wanted to run an article in the newspaper and they said what objects, what jets. I know the guy that called the base and they had on going discussions about it, it was a cover up. The hair on my arm was easily detected, not a ot of hair elsewhere except my head and thats getting pretty sparse also. I could have easily missed it in my excitement.
16/05/16 05:04
Mr A said their was a lot of high voltage. I did ask if there was fluids he rotated and he laughed and said I see you have been following UFO's on the Internet. He said no, his unit used no exotic material, exotic being something you can't buy. I think the EMdrive and Banduric devices are of interest, but they seem like toys and fall short of what is needed for real use. His device could have been used for a floating vehicle and is way head of these theories. Something basic i being missed. I also think frequencies and resonances are important.
23/05/16 06:27
I don't know what most of the UFO stuff is, most of it BS, but I think there is some reality to all the reports. Wat I saw with Mr A was incredible and that's just some inventor stumbling across an affect. I can't imagine what it could do with 50 years of research and a few trillion dollars. I think there is something there, its a matter of how exotic the science turns out to be. They have the replacement for the SR71 going, its starting to be openly talked about. Just a question is how advanced are they really.
25/05/16 07:22
Mr A or the lack of anything from him is incredibly perplexing and frustrating. I have spent a lot of time thinking on what he is doing and why he doesn't come forward, no answers at all as it just doesn't add up, like much in these kind of things.
07/07/16 08:02
Still not hearing much from Mr. A and Lab guy. Lab guy contacts his sister every so often, but is not passing on any information. He just tells her things are going great, better than he could have hoped for. I don't think we hve enough info to do anything. I hope one of these days a get a technical dump, but I sure am not counting on it.
23/07/16 00:41
I got a not from lab guys sister, she said he was back for a visit and was very excited with the progress. I guess him and Mr.A have really hit it off and work together very well. She said they have built a craft that holds 4, but they have just tested 2so far. They have tested it up to 1000 feet, but they both got nervous and brought it back down, not test pilots I guess. He said it goes very fast, but they don't have the guts to open it up. they are trying to design remote control to test it, but it gets out of range very fast. It doesn't look like much as they built it as an Aluminum cube. They have cameras on all 4 sides, so the steer by looking at a monitor. They want to add infrared, but that is down the road some. He is working on control things that they need. Pretty sketchy note, but it sounds like a lot of progress.
26/07/16 06:49
The news from lab guy was very promising. I think they need to hook up with someone like Boeing to get proper testing, but I know that will not happen. I sure wish he would show up on my doorstep to talk.
03/06/17 04:00
I ran across an interesting patent that has a lot of the same things Mr. A was pushing, I attached it for you to look at. I see it was abandoned as they quit paying the fees. There have been public disclosures on this with pictures shown of crafts sitting in hangers. The lab guys mother I was communicating with has disappeared so I have lost all contact with that effort. US 2006/0145019 AI John St. Clair
03/07/17 04:45
Very disapointing with the Mr. A development. I will keep trying to make contact, but will not hold my breath. I think I have told you about everything I know, but will go back and revue everything and send anything I missed or did not disclose. It sure seems like the answer is simple if you get it right.
24/01/18 18:19
I was hoping for a demo by now, but it seems to have gone the other way with a loss of contact to the parties. I had regular contact with lab guys mother for a while and got more from her than from him. I think he was the type that told his mother everything and she was the type that liked to talk. I asked her what problems they were having and she said that the outer surface was getting hot and they were looking into carbon coating. She said they were having capacitor problems as they were breaking down with the high voltages they were using. She had no idea what the voltages were. She said that he was getting good at making things out of metal, something he had never done before. Way back before I lost contact with lab guy he said that there was a lot of tubing wrapped around the vehicle, but he had not figured out what it was doing exactly. He did say there were some funny looking attachments to these tubes at regular intervals. He promised to send a drawing of what it all looked like, but it never happened. He said it operated off 2 marine style batteries and they never seemed to run down. Must have recharged on the fly would be my guess. The mother also mentioned he was working on a machine that would do special wire winding for what they needed, the hand winding was just to hard and too slow. Last I heard from her she was off to visit him and see a demo of it working. She said they were very proud of what they had achieved and were working on a full sized model, not just the miniature version I had seen. I tried several times to contact her but no connection. I will try again and see if can make contact again.
20/02/18 00:02
I tried contacting Mr. A's mother but she is gone and the people around there said she leased the land and said she would be back at harvest time. They didn't know where she was off to, so it's a big strike out to get an update on what is going on. I left word to contact me when she shows up.
19/08/18 17:42
I can't help but think we are missing something fundamental. What lab guy described was a gig system flopping around with out direction, but obviously a lot of force. He did not describe anything relating to his antenna, but maybe that was because it is the secret sauce of making it work. The effect he got was huge, so I think we are missing something more fundamental. If your idea works we could look at scaling up in size. It all shows promise and I think you are close to getting the desired results.
19/08/18 20:02
The whole Mr A thing bothers me, I wish I knew what was going on. It would be great to get an update, but my contact was though Lab Guys mother and now she has taken off, so I have no contacts and just have to hope one of them contact me. I wish I had another shot at seeing Mr A's device in action, there are so many more things I would be looking for now that I sort of have an idea as to how it might be working.
27/08/18 01:19
It was also of note that the guy worked on satellites where antenna technology is essential. Something to be noted. The pulsed microwave seems like a real possibility for being a major component for making things work.
10/09/18 05:53
I think back on how casually I accepted what I saw from Mr. A's system. Thinking about it now it was absolutely revolutionary. It lifted the heavy toolbox with no problem and just so nice. It was big and made of metal so its overall weight must be quite large. Thinking back on it, I think it had to be several Hundred Pounds. I sure wish I would get another shot at seeing it.
19/09/18 05:23
I know Mr. A was a very good engineer, but he was always struggling to get the results to be exactly what he wants. He had a mathematician he worked with and I know they had ongoing arguments about the very nature of their work. Small little subtleties always had big impacts on the results. An interesting field of work, but I think it would have driven me crazy trying to work on that stuff.
07/10/18 01:44
I went back and checked what I wrote down about what the Lab Guy told me after looking at the design and building his own. He did say that when he turned it on it did nothing and he was pissed so he kicked it and it started flopping all over the place. He turned it off and back on and it started its flopping routine. I never mentioned it as I thought it was probably a connection issue, but who knows with this stuff so I decided to pass it on.
20/10/18 18:55
Your probably right, Lab guys think it was probably my false literal interpretation of what was said. It sure does sound like a connection issue. I agree, what they were doing sounds a lot different than what you have done. He did report the use of a lot of inductors and transformers in what he had built with little mention of much relating to Antenna specifics. What you are doing sounds like it could be a much better solution long term as you don't have all the weight to overcome in getting a force. The shape I think might be important as both Lab guy and what Mr. A showed me was round, so there may be a preferred bias for some reason relating to that. It seems that it would be the most unlikely to work as everything would seem to cancel out. I think the shape is a good question and might be the hidden parameter leading to success. The power thing when not moving is most troubling. There is a clue in its operating nature but I sure can't think of a reason. 11/07/20 - last email from Bob.
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Simon Derricutt email October 21, 2025:
Building a spacecraft/flying car is an aspiration, but probably will stay beyond what I can do here. I also get very travel-sick, and thus likely wouldn't function in free-fall, so wouldn't be able to flight-test a spacecraft. Flying car, maybe OK. From that file I sent, I know that propellant-less (AKA reactionless) propulsion is possible and has been done. A simple way to produce a reactionless thruster is to have two current-loops that are 1/4 wave apart and driven by sine-waves with 90° phase difference. In theory you get the pair with a net thrust in one direction; in practice it's a very small thrust, but if CoM was absolute you'd get no thrust at all. Clearly this isn't a good way of doing the job, but as a way of demonstrating it's not impossible it's OK. Thus the other methods of producing reactionless thrust are also not impossible, though some of them may not actually work. Easy to get fooled when it's a very small thrust. For UFOs, again I have evidence humans can build them and have done so.Mr. A flew that thing up to 1000ft or so before chickening out. Likely one such test killed him and his friend if that overheating problem became critical when they were too high up. In air, you can produce plasma which then enables you to control it electrically, and propel it using a 3-phase or more drive, and nothing moves other than the air. The drives would glow at night. Back in July 2017 I saw a blue-green ovoid shape pass over here quietly at around 1am. Subtended around 10 minutes of arc (about 1/3 of the angle of the Moon) and was out of sight over the trees heading West in just over a second. No idea how high it was and thus how big it was. AFAIK no human-built aircraft would have that blue-green colour exhaust (shades of red/ orange and maybe yellow), but a plasma-drive could do. I assume this was a human aircraft, given that alien ones would be a somewhat less probable. I think it's a fair bet that the military have interesting stuff available, and are keeping it secret. Might be way too costly for civilian use, might need fission reactors to get enough power to drive them, might be other dangers involved so you wouldn't want many people using that technology. Might be a step too far to assume that UFOs must be from alien starpeople. The really outrageous stuff like the SR-71 was kept secret for at least 20 years, and it's a fair bet that we only know about stuff that's been superseded by something better. Seems that Eugene Podkletnov has something new - see https://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg122036.html I also noticed on Linked In he's "Looking for work". I haven't talked to him, Phil says Podkletnov seems certain his claims are correct. I think gravity may possibly be a result of a gradient in rate of time, caused by the density of the matter-wave from mass. Starting from that thought, alters what methods you might use to alter gravity. Still, note that the reactionless thrusters are not "anti-gravity" drives. They simply produce thrust in a specific direction. Anti-gravity can make something lighter, can't other wise produce a thrust, bit like using a Helium balloon which can lift something but after that it gets blown in the wind. Thus precisely what something does is quite important as to how useful it becomes. Looks like Apophis won't be a problem - see https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/apophis/ but there could be some other one we don't know about yet. NASA say they don't know of any problem asteroids in the next century, so I won't be around to find ways to divert them. The Earth is however in a shooting-gallery for asteroids, they've hit us before and thus will do again, and we need to be able to divert them.
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