PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT I HAVE NO INTENTION TO FUND ANY ATTEMPT TO MAKE FREE ENERGY. I'M ONLY WILLING TO HELP PEOPLE WHO HAVE A WORKING DEVICE THAT THEY ARE WILLING TO DEMONSTRATE. I DON'T CLAIM TO SPEAK FOR THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY AT LARGE.
Dear _______
It's not just a grand prize, it's also up to 1000$ of expenses and another grand commission to who ever convinces the inventor to go for it. The most significant thing I can offer is great press. I'm an engineer and a significant published skeptic; so I could give major press. Let's face it, mainstream America just outright considers all free energy inventors to be quacks. And can you blame them given the pathetic track record? More than money, a claimant would need credibility - otherwise no one would even listen. I'm one of the few people in the world willing to listen who also has the education, experience and tools capable of really validating a claim . - that's the real thing I can offer. If you know an inventor with something you believe would work, who isn't willing to let me test because earning 1000$ in a day is less than what they can make elsewhere, than I'm willing to negotiate a higher amount.
The reason I don't want to pay money for the many plans for free energy machines out there, is that I suspect I could easily waste a lifetime trying to replicate rumors with nothing to show. There are already lots of people all across our great country who have been tinkering for decades on machines in their parents (or sometimes their own) basements. I've heard lots of urban legend of these people discovering something. If it's possible (and I can't know for sure), than surely one of them (or even Dennis Lee, whose taking orders to install free energy machines across America) would have a machine available in not too long. A few people have already started negotiating with me concerning spring time tests. A few significant people in the few energy community appreciate my efforts, because I can help expose fraud and thus make it easier for serious inventors to get funding. I don't want to put down all inventors. I don't think free energy is possible , I wish it were, but if it is - then I could really serve the world by helping to validate it.
I won't offer a reward to prove over unity impossible, since true believers would not be convinced (and I don't think you can easily prove something impossible). I've always had an interest in fantastic claims, and am simply interested in seeking truth. I think the search for truth should be a community effort where people openly share their findings (particularly what paths are dead end). For anyone tuning in late, my open prize offer is at: http://www.phact.org/e/freetest.html
eric krieg
-------- That got me the following reply: --------
From: ___________
Subject: $1000.00 reward of $1000.00 education?
I do not understand why anyone would waste
the time to prove to you the capabilities of these devices for such a small
amount of money. I am also interested in the potential energy production of
each of these devices but I feel that if I need more proof of these claims then
I should do the experimentation myself to come to a logical conclusion. Why
don't you offer a reward for proof that over unity is impossible? If this is
true you would be saving a lot of people a lot of work. I am curious as to what
your true intentions are for this reward.
Yours truly, ________________ -
Eric helped found this skeptical society
back to Eric's main Dennis Lee
page what about Joe Newman?
Creator of this page
and some of his other rants
There is another prize for anyone
who can send stuff into space A
fellow claiming a hydrogen almost-free-energy break through Tom Napier's Free Energy FAQ
page my discussion of what I feel are real sources of free energy a great discussion of F/E
claims
The
Free Energy Archive - this is a great reference source
sci.skeptic FAQ Strange
Machines
Another person willing to help test is anton
hansmann hansmann@erols.com who lives in Maryland. Also, Chris who lives in Florida is willing to have
a look. Also, Shaini
pallas7@primenet.com of Phoenix, Arizona is willing to investigate
claims.
Free
This Energy, If You Dare....
North Texas
Skeptic article on Free Energy
please send mail to eric@voicenet.com I'm
happy to publish critical responses to my claims. subscribe to Eric's Free energy email list
pages exposing Joe Newman and Dennis Lee Also, Amin, Mills (who may be legit?) Tilley, Perendev, GWE Bearden Lutec and Tewari
Note: the following points came from Mark Harrison:
MHarrison@payless.cashways.com
Why it is not productive to take a persons word or personal experience on an
extraordinary claim. ( free energy or FTL think for example). The applies
especially here on the net.
1. We can not know the motive of the claimant.
2. We can not know the prejudices of the
claimant.
3. We can not know the mental health of the
claimant
4. We can not know the observing conditions.
5. We can not know the overall health of the
claimant, see, hearing, drug or alcohol
use, etc.
6. We can not know the skill sets of the
claimant.
7. We can not know the quality of the work. This
says it all. Is the data ( if we had some) repeatable, was the sample size
large enough, has every thing been accounted for, have all other possibilities
been addressed and if so what were they, what was the quality of the measuring
devices, etc.
8. We can not know the quality of the tools used
in the work.
9. We can not know the qualification of the
claimant, this in no way implies that a certain level of education must exists
only that person is able to do the work.
10. We can not know if any data was discarded as
troubling.
11. We can not know if fraud lurks in the wings.
12. The list goes on and on.
If you think it is OK to take a claim at face value with out knowing these
things then I submit to you that I am Atila the Hun and dare you to prove
otherwise. Yes it is ok to use a personal experience on some matters but I draw
the line some where around " it is nice out side or this restaurant is
good"
Things you won't learn at a free energy seminar.
Prepared by Tom Napier. Copyright (c) 1999, All rights reserved.
You would expect that anyone promoting a machine to generate free energy would be an expert on the subject of energy and its measurement. After all, if you can't measure energy input and output accurately how can you tell that the output exceeds the input? Of course there is a simple answer to that. Connect the output of the machine to its input and demonstrate that it runs continuously while generating significant excess power. Failing this test, which no free energy machine has yet been seen to pass, you must rely on measurements of input and output power. You must also know how to compare them.
Well, if there is one thing which free energy promoters seem to have in common it is a massive ignorance, real or feigned, about what energy is and how to measure it. Luckily for them, their audiences seem to share this failing and thus cannot readily distinguish between the plausible and the possible. To remedy this lack, this note attempts to summarize the basics of energy in two thousand words or so.
What is energy?
"Energy" is a general concept which scientists and engineers use to make their sums come out right. Energy comes in many different forms, light, heat, mechanical motion and electricity are all forms of energy but these can all be measured in the same units. When you change one form of energy into another you always end up with exactly as much as you started with, if you have accounted correctly for all the inputs and outputs. This is such a basic idea that it is given a name, the Conservation of Energy. It is the most fundamental of the scientific laws. By the way, it is a generalization from observation, not something which spoil-sport scientists just made up because they liked it.
In practice, when you convert energy from one form to another some of it is invariably converted into an undesired form such as frictional heat. This subtracts from the useful output energy. Thus the useful output of a conversion device always contains a bit less energy than its input. This is expressed in the form of an efficiency, (Useful output)/(Necessary input). Since useful energy is always lost the efficiency is always less than one.
We are used to the idea that scientists and engineers are making constant improvements in things and efficiencies are always rising. Is there a limit to efficiency? After all, the idea behind one type of free energy machine is that one can make the efficiency greater than one, hence the name "over-unity" applied to such devices.
An over-unity machine would require an input of energy in some
form to make it run but it would generate more energy, in the same or a
different form, than it consumes. As mentioned above, the simple way to
prove that a device is "over-unity" is to run it from its own
output. No matter how many calculations you may be shown to
"prove" that a machine is over- unity, if it can't pass that test
then it isn't.
Mechanical energy
Let's define a few terms without getting too technical. Force should be a familiar concept. A push from a spring is a force and so is the weight of an object. However, until the thing to which the force is applied actually moves, no work is done. You may think you are working hard when you hold a weight up in the air but you aren't really. You could be replaced by a shelf which does no work at all. When you lifted the weight off the floor you did do work. You exerted a force for a distance and that is the definition of "work," Force times Distance. In this case the work, or energy, would be measured in foot.pounds.
Because you lifted it, the weight has acquired energy, which it didn't have when it was on the floor. You could get this energy back again by letting the weight fall, for example by connecting a string to the weight and letting it drive an electric generator. (Of course you could just let the weight fall. Then its energy will go into making a hole in the floor.)
No amount of push represents energy unless the thing being
pushed moves. One demonstration you might see is a car engine bending a
torque wrench. Torque is just a force which tends to make something
turn. It is measured by multiplying the force by the distance from the
pivot. Funnily enough this also gives foot.pounds but this doesn't mean
that torque equals energy unless the thing the torque is applied to moves.
If the shaft made a complete turn then the torque would have been exerted
through 2 pi radians. The work done would have been equal to 2 pi times
the torque.
Power
Power is simply the rate of doing work, that is, it is work done per second. A one horsepower motor outputs 550 foot.pounds per second. That is, it could lift a 550 pound weight at one foot per second or a 50 pound weight at 11 feet per second.
One way of measuring the 1 HP output would be to apply a brake to slow the motor down. This is wasteful, all the motor output is converted to heat, but it allows you to measure the motor's output at any speed you want. The torque exerted on the brake can be multiplied by 2 pi times the rotation rate to calculate the output power. For example, suppose the motor was rated at 1 HP at 3000 rpm. If you braked it to run at 3000 rpm then in each minute it should generate an output of 550 times 60 foot.pounds. At 3000 rpm this is 11 foot.pounds per turn, corresponding to a torque of 11 divided by 2 pi or about 1.75 foot.pounds. If you measured the force on the brake at one foot from the motor shaft it should be 1.75 pounds if the motor is performing as planned. Normal electric motors become very inefficient if you brake them so that they run much slower than the makers intended. When running at their normal speed, motors are from 75% to 90% efficient. If you hear of a device which doubles the output of an electric motor this doesn't mean that it has gone from 80% to 160%. It is much more likely to have gone from 10% to 20%.
Mechanical energy is commonly measured in the foot.pounds used
above and mechanical power in foot.pounds per second or, with the 550
conversion factor, in horsepower. (This is all much simpler in the metric
system.) Since many over-unity systems use electric power either as an input or
an output we need to be able to measure electrical power and to compare it to
mechanical power.
Electrical power
Since we usually encounter electricity in the form of a current which supplies continuous power it is much more common to refer to electrical power than to electrical energy. Thus we talk of watts or kilowatts, the units of power. In mechanics our basic energy unit, the foot.pound, was divided by time to get the rate of power usage. In electricity we multiply power by time to get total energy. Thus the electric company bills you for your energy usage in kilowatt.hours.
Two things need to be considered next. How to convert
from electrical measurements to mechanical measurements and how to measure
electrical power. Let's take the easy one first. If you compare the
units in which electrical and mechanical power are measured you find that one
horsepower is 0.7457 kilowatts. One outcome of this is that if you had an
over-unity electric motor it would drive that brake I mentioned at a 1 HP
output level using less than 0.7457 kilowatts of input. If the motor is
85% efficient, a typical figure, it will actually take 0.7457/0.85 or 0.877
kilowatts to drive it.
Measuring electrical power
Measuring electrical power is very easy in principle and very difficult in practice. If the current and voltage going to a device never change than the power input is simply current times voltage. Both can be easily measured with an accuracy of a percent or so. Unfortunately, while supply voltages, as from a battery, can be almost constant, currents vary rapidly with time, particularly when you are driving a motor. Most current meters measure the mean value of the current. This will only tell you the mean power if the voltage is absolutely steady.
If the voltage changes when the current changes, which it almost certainly does, then measuring the mean current gives quite the wrong value for the power. What you have to do is to use a wattmeter. This multiplies the instantaneous voltage by the instantaneous current to get the power and then averages the power to arrive at the mean value. However, even accurate wattmeters can give spurious results if the current contains very fast spikes. The current into electric motors often does.
Things get much more complicated when the power source is alternating current (AC). Then, even if the mean current and voltage are absolutely constant the power can be changing.
There are two ways of measuring AC voltages and currents. Cheap meters assume that the AC voltage is always a pure sine wave. They turn it into half cycles all in the same direction and measure the mean value. Then they apply a correction factor to convert this into a true voltage. Since the AC voltage is rarely a pure sine wave and AC current almost never is, cheap meters are unreliable even when measuring voltage, much less power. They only give reliable results if the load you are connected to is a pure resistor such as an electric heater.
The alternative is to use an RMS meter. (Root Mean Square, it's a description of the averaging method they use.) This will give a correct voltage or current reading unless there are spikes in the current.
There are two standard ways of measuring current. One is
to pass the current through a small resistor and to measure the voltage.
This is potentially accurate but is prone to error in practice since the
voltage measured is usually in the millivolt range. It is easy to pick up
interference or to include more resistance in the circuit than you mean
to. The alternative is the "clip-on" ammeter. This can
also pick up interference and may not be better than 5% accurate anyway.
Not all clip-on meters can measure DC.
The power factor problem
Even accurate RMS voltage and current meters cannot measure power input or output. This is because of the so-called Power Factor (PF) of the source or the load. The PF is the ratio between the real power and the product of the current and voltage. It is the cosine of the phase angle between the AC voltage and the AC current. Luckily the true power is never greater than the product of the RMS current and voltage so current and voltage measurements give an upper limit to the input power of a device. They should not be used to measure the output power.
The PF of a device can range from one down to zero. Resistors have a PF of one but pure capacitors and inductors have a PF of zero. Most real devices are designed to have PFs close to one but the real power input or output of a device can be close to zero even when input large currents are flowing.
To take a dangerous example, if you connected a big capacitor to a 110 V outlet a huge current would flow through it but your electricity meter, which measures watts quite accurately, wouldn't register any power drain. Unfortunately the current flowing through the wires leading to your house would make them heat up so the power company would be supplying power which no one would be billed for. They don't like doing this which is why they are likely to disconnect you if you try this experiment.
Electric motors are quite inductive and show a similar effect. This is why large electric motors are fitted with capacitors. These stop them taking more current than their power rating would indicate.
Thus to measure the output power of a device you must use a
meter which takes the power factor into account or which uses the same
instantaneous multiplication process mentioned above for DC power measurements.
The last resort
Luckily there is a way of measuring electrical output power
which cannot be fooled. If you drive a resistive load the rate of heat
output is an accurate measurement of the electrical input power. Some RMS
meters actually measure the heat generated by the input power. A good way
of measuring the output of an over-unity device is to connect it to an electric
kettle containing a known amount of water. If the room temperature is
known, and the kettle is well wrapped in insulation, the time it takes to bring
the water to the boil will indicate the true power output. Just don't
bank on any inventor letting you run this test!
Conclusion
I hope this note goes some way to showing that there is scope
for error even in apparently simple input and output measurements. If any
device were really "over-unity" it would be easy to connect its
output to its input. There's a good reason why that demonstration is
never shown, it's too hard to fake.
A rational
review of meg claims and Randi’s info and my info . free energy
scams T Dennis Lee page Joe Newman? Also, Amin, Tilley, Perendev, Bearden Lutec
and Tewari Xogen and GWE cold fusion Adams Hamel Searl Betavoltaic
http://www.benwiens.com/encyclopedia.html
- great dictionary of energy
back to Skeptic page Rants page Newman Dennis Lee