talkmagic.co.uk

Anyone seen this? Interesting methinks, assuming it's genuine.

http://www.rense.com/general9/unveil.htm

Can't be true. They're claiming perpetual motion with 500% efficiency, which is just flat impossible.

I've heard of the Rense website before. Lots of conspiracy theories and other crank stuff. Potentially entertaining if you're in the right mood.

This has been debunked a lot by a lot of very respectable people

I don't really do conspiracy theories and so tend not to frequent websites that propogate them. It's a shame it's been debunked, I'd have liked it to be true.

I believe this is a very old chestnut seeing a new incarnation; during the early 20th century similar devices were being "sold" by various carpet-baggers and it came back into common issue in the early & mid 1970s and for a very short while in the mid-80's (using "crystals" set in a particular array).

Then again, if they have a genuine development it will probably never come to market... kind of like the Water Powered Combustion system that Detroit crushed some 70 years ago (the actual carburetor is on display in the Smithsonian and variations have been written up in reputable publications). Electrical Power is HUGE BUSINESS and you can bet the big money folk controlling the flow of electricity aren't going to let this kind of thing happen... just look at what they did to Mr. Tesla when he started pushing FREE ENERGY.

Oh dear... magnets.

Right, listen up. No energy conversion process can ever be >100% efficient. Some energy is always lost to heat and friction. The second law of thermodynamics has been shown exhaustively to work like this since William Thomson (later the Lord Kelvin) and many others worked it out in the 1840s. This is mainstream physics, taught, demonstrated and tested to destruction in every undergraduate physics or engineering course. As XKCD have on their marvellous t-shirt, "Science: it works, bitches"

For this machine to be 500% efficient, for every calorie it takes in, it must produce 5 calories. This is nonsense. You can't make energy, only convert it between forms (including matter). So, if it works, this machine must be converting itself from matter to heat, which is VERY inefficient indeed!

Tediously, at some point, Tesla always seems to be invoked in these discussions. It's almost like a version of Godwin's Law (look it up - it's fun to look things up). Tesla may have been a genius but he was also something of a crank. He may have demonstrated power transmission in 1890-something, but he was also making pronouncements about things that simply can't work for the very reason that they don't work. The best one can say is that he did a lot of thinking and some of it was good, but the rest was nonsense. There was no conspiracy to keep his "free energy" work suppressed. He was strange to start off with, but increasingly severe OCD made him a nightmare to work with. He became obsessed with the number 3 and spent considerable amounts of time finding and nursing sick pigeons, for example. Funds from his European patents dried up at the outbreak of WWI and the tower he built to experiment with energy transmission was demolished so it couldn't be used by German spies. His condition, outbursts and general lack of research rigour left him ostracised by backers, industry and science. He died, bitter and penniless due to those factors.