remember cold fusion?

That's AMAZING - I've often wandered whether something like that could be done, but wouldn't know how to go about developing it...

I wander if they can make one for a turntable? Cool, silent running sounds like it could be a plan

__________________________
Don't wanna be cremated or buried in a grave
Just dump me in a plastic bag and leave me on the pavement
A tribute to your modern world, your great society
I'm just another victim of your highrise fantasy!

Excuse my ignorance, but if the bugger produces more energy than it requires to operate, couldn't you harness some of it's own output to drive it ? And if you did that, wouldn't you have perpetual motion ? And wouldn't that be impossible ?

Yes.

I think he's not actually measuring his power very well. The perpetual motion assertion is clearly absurd and casts doubt on any other claims.

Paul

Theoretically, this appears possible because it is using permanent magnets and using the pull from this. Placing two attracting magnets close together on a table would pull together giving "free" energy. Of course, it isn't free energy because the magnetism is being used up and it takes energy to put it in there in the first place, so taking into account manufacture, it can't work. The power measuring here is convieniently forgetting putting the energy in the magnets to begin with. Like getting into a car that already has a full tank.

Two magnets pulling together is not free energy, the enrgy comes from whent the manets are pulled apart, it is like potential energy due to gravity.

If somthing falls off a table, is that free energy?

No it is potential energy, where did that potential energy come from?

It comes from the work you did when lifting the item from the floor to the table in the first place.

Simon

Yes, total BS.

Judd

April 1St a bit late in Japan then!!
oldie.

A lot of people seem to be working on machines to liberate free energy, getting out more energy than they put in. I wonder why? [Rhetorical question]. Wouldn't it be wonderful if they succeeded!

Re the original notorious cold fusion claim: I seem to remember my father saying he discovered or came across the phenomenon that was later mistaken for cold fusion while doing his PhD in the early fifties. Suffice it to say he didn't mistake it for cold fusion...

I've turned lead into gold...

Mike

quote:

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Originally posted by MichaelC:
I've turned lead into gold...

Mike

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That's nothing. I've turned gold into lead...



Stephen

I've turned beer into piss. Does that count?

As beer is the piss of yeast anyhow, no.




Stephen

quote:

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Originally posted by JeremyD:
A lot of people seem to be working on machines to liberate free energy, getting out more energy than they put in.

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Would solar cells count in this field? Surely, since they produce power whenever there's sufficient light, they could produce many more times the power taken to make them by the time they finally cease functioning?

I was going to point out the permanent magnets/energy to make permanent magnets thing myself, but wasn't sure if my logic would be flawed...

BTW - beer into piss is easy; it's how Heineken manage to turn piss into something masquerading as beer that astounds me! Ditto Bud - the Prince of Piss, rather than King of Beers!

__________________________
Don't wanna be cremated or buried in a grave
Just dump me in a plastic bag and leave me on the pavement
A tribute to your modern world, your great society
I'm just another victim of your highrise fantasy!

It's a long time since I was a physics student, and I never learnt that much physisc, but with that proviso, here goes:

"Free Energy" is a scientific term. It does not mean "Energy that is available for free", like solar energy. In principle, you can certainly get more energy out of a solar cell than you use to manufacture, install and dispose of it but you get less useful energy out of it than is put into it: it's simply that the Sun is the source of energy, which is free (at least until someone decides to privatise sunlight ).

What the inventors of supposed free energy machines usually mean by "free energy" is zero point energy, the minimum energy that the theory of quantum mechanics requires everything in the universe to have, even a vacuum at absolute zero.

Maybe some of the saner inventors of such machines have merely invented interesting - and possibly even better - electric motors but, being under-educated, don't know how to measure their energy consumption correctly. It requires a knowledge of electricity of A-Level physics standard...

My brother is a nuclear physicist and I'd gladly ask him for his opinion on the matter if you liked.

Unfortunately I don't understand a word he says once he's started.

He once told me that there is a current theory that it is unlikely there is any lifeform more advanced than us in the universe because they would probably, accidentally or by design, have destroyed us by now.
As apparently we are earnestly trying to do by accelerating protons so fast that they break apart and form antimatter. Which, in combination with the relevant matter, would start a chain reaction that would blow up everything in its path. And if, as suspected, there is "space dust" closer than one particle per cubic metre - the reaction would carry on. Everywhere. The whole universe. And humankind is trying to do this!! In Switzerland of all places (somewhere called CERN). A quark bomb. At least that's what I think he said.

Previously I had thought of "space dust" as something rather more, but not totally, innocent that I used to be offered at parties when I was at art college.

Rocket scientists eh? You can't trust 'em.

Except that sunlight is not "free" energy. It's free to us, but the poor old sun is burning fuel for it. Anyway, what would happen if solar cells were used in such huge worldwide proportions that the heat energy that normally disipates into the atmoshphere is instead consumed into electricity? Would we end up with global cooling??

quote:

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Originally posted by rodwsmith:
He once told me that there is a current theory that it is unlikely there is any lifeform more advanced than us in the universe because they would probably, accidentally or by design, have destroyed us by now.

As apparently we are earnestly trying to do by accelerating protons so fast that they break apart and form antimatter. Which, in combination with the relevant matter, would start a chain reaction that would blow up everything in its path. And if, as suspected, there is "space dust" closer than one particle per cubic metre - the reaction would carry on. Everywhere. The whole universe. And humankind is trying to do this!! In Switzerland of all places (somewhere called CERN). A quark bomb. At least that's what I think he said.

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This is bad news.

So : a big bang, followed by billions of years of expansion until finally life crawls from the primordial slime on the most hospitipal of squillions of possible planets. Millions of years later the most "intelligent" bioform on the planet grows up and figures out how to destroy, firstly, everything but itself and finally, itself and everything else. What next ? Another big bang ? Maybe there are more advanced forms of intelligence out there that have somehow managed to resist the temptation to press the big red button labeled "Don't press".