Posted on 09/07/2005 10:04:20 AM PDT by SmithL
The nation's energy industry is struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina. Gas prices are soaring as a result of the catastrophic storm. America's reliance on overseas oil increases every year.
And from his office in the North Bay city of Sebastopol, Mark Goldes envisions a day -- perhaps not so far off -- when none of this will be a problem.
Goldes, 73, is chief executive of a small company called Magnetic Power Inc., which has spent years researching ways to, yes, generate power using magnets.
Within a few months, he says, he might just have a breakthrough to report that could revolutionize where people get fuel.
"We're not yet ready to talk about what's happening in our lab because, honestly, we don't know what's happening," Goldes told me. "All we know is that we're seeing more energy output than input.
"We're still having trouble making it repeatable, but we think that's more an engineering problem than a scientific problem," he said.
Does Goldes realize what's he's saying -- that he's perhaps discovered a clean, inexhaustible energy source?
"That's exactly what it appears to be," he answered.
What Goldes believes he's done is produce power from what physicists call zero-point energy. In simple terms, zero-point energy results from the infinitesimal motion of molecules even when seemingly at rest.
OK, let's throw a whole bunch of caveats at this. First of all, I've spoken with physicists at some of the country's most prestigious institutions, and not one said that what Goldes claims to have accomplished is doable.
Theoretically possible, they acknowledged. But not doable.
"Zero-point energy is so tiny that nobody can feel it," said Hossein Sadeghpour, a physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "But when you get to the realm of quantum mechanics, it exists.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Oh geez. Another wacko who is sure he's proving the second law of thermodynamics is wrong.
I thought getting a critical mass of gullible people was a marketing problem.
All you need, is somebody on a bicycle hooked-up to that, and voila, free power!!
"Oh geez. Another wacko who is sure he's proving the second law of thermodynamics is wrong."
The second law IS wrong, wacko.
Actually, that the guy is talking about 'repeatability' of the phenomenon speaks well for his sincerity. Zero point energy is probably nothing more than hopeful illusions in his mirror. But as long as he requires repeatability for his gear, he is likely not to be making any bogus announcements.
That reminds me of some office humor I sent along:
The 3 laws of robotics:
1) a robot should not be able to harm or kill a human
2) a robot should obey a human command unless it contradicts rule 1
3) she should have nice skin, smell good, and serve a good martini
Source, please?
Sounds like a personal problem.
If it breaks the laws the physics, it ain't gonna work. Period.
It would be a violation of the first law. Getting more energy out than was put in.
Well, good thing I'm not trying to do it, I can't even keep my laws straight!
Sebastopol is one of the centers of New Age foolishness in Nor. Cal.
Heck, the Ancients powered the City of Atlantis with ZPMs for centuries.
Flux Capacitor?
The nation that controls magnetism controls the universe.
-- Chester Gould/Dick Tracy
He may be referring to zero-point energy, which the scientists consulted in the article dispatch sufficiently well.
Or he/she could be blowing smoke.
Nooo! The Zed PM. The Zero Point Module that the SG-1 team found in Antarctica. They used it to power the gate to open a wormhole to the Pegasus galaxy where they found Atlantis. Gotta love them Sci-Fi Fridays!
I ever meet the actor that plays Rodney in person and I'll punch his lights out just because of that idiot "Zed-PM" line. I realize the character is supposed to be irritating, but it just goes too far.
The only people who understood the 2nd law died over 100 years ago. ;)
My wife and I lived for many years in Sebastopol. Now we live west of Santa Rosa. We still live in the same house.
And speaking of military personnel...Lt. Colonel Shephard is as useless as teats on a bull...militarily speaking.
If he spoke with a British accent and shaved his head, he'd be Jean Luc Picard.
Yeah... scientific expertise in one thing, getting your whole team killed is something quite different.
Biodeisel and nuke plants first for the next 50 years to replace the outrageously priced and dwindling oil supplies.
Isn't this the guy who invented Woody Allen's Orgasmatron?
voila, free power!!
I still think we're missing a good bet by not having
EVERY health club and gym in the entire country hooked
up to the grid, all those stationary bicycles, stairsteppers, treadmills could be feeding power into
the net!
Yeah! You could call it "the magneto." The "e" is long. "Magneeto."
Of course, it takes work to crank it.
Since I haven't seen the discovery of room-temperature superconductivity trumpeted in the scientific press the way I would expect, this actually makes it harder rather than easier for me to take Goldes seriously. One amazing guy just did two stunning breakthrough achievements and I never heard of him before.
Safe to say.
That being said, however, both Gravity and Magnetism have fields that will do unlimited real work upon most whatever passes into them, 24/7/52/365.
No one expects the Sun's gravity to stop pulling the Earth anytime soon, for instance.
Now, if we could only get things to fall up.
TANSTAAFL.
Lack of imagination precludes nothing but advancement.
A stationary copper wire in space that experiences annual fly-by's from a solar-orbiting magnet will generate electricity at each pass, for instance.
Magnetism more causes rotation than linear motion.
The resistance from that wire and any other conductor along the way will degrade said magnet's orbit. The energy is not free. If you put the magnet in orbit in the first place, you're just getting a tiny slice of your own energy back, very slowly.
On second look, other funny items regarding this premise:
1) The Sun's magnetic field will alter the magnet's orbit like crazy if the magnet is in close. If it isn't, "a year" and thus the interval between flybys is a very long time.
2) The orbiting magnet is in a sense (the sense of its own perspective) closer to "stationary" than that wire which is somehow resisting the Sun's gravity and yet not orbiting. For the wire, something must be working like mad to counterbalance the infalling which, for the magnet, is offset by its orbital velocity. Compared to this energy cost, what use is a little induced current once per orbit?
3) In a near-sun environment, solar cells are a wonderful energy source for a satellite and quite practical. Always available until the Sun goes out.
What resistance is that?
What resistance is that?Magnetic repulsion due to the induced current; any current you 'induce' in your wire is also producing an associated magnetic field that will serve to oppose the field you are 'passing' the wire through ...
Inducing a current in a wire takes energy. Let's say you have a hand-crank generator. Your hand turns a shaft which moves a wire coil through a static set of magnets.
The field lines of the magnets tug on electrons orbiting the copper atoms in the wire. The electrons have a certain binding energy to the atoms, but the pull of the field is greater and the electrons pop loose. For a little bit, though, each atom feels a tug. You might say it stretches before it breaks. That's a physical slowing of the coil's motion, a resistance. You feel that as a counterpressure on your hand as you turn the crank.
But suppose your generator has the magnets spinning in the neighborhood of a coil. Now the wire is stationary and the magnets move. Do you still feel a resistance? Conservation of energy says you should.
You do. The field lines are now whipping over a stationary wire. The wire, the tug of the electrons and their atoms, slows the movement of the field lines. The backing up of the field lines ripples back to the magnets, which are retarded in their motion to the same degree. You still feel the crank handle pushing back at your hand.
Same thing with a transformer. Now the current is AC, and the thrashing of the field lines caused by the reversals of the current motion induces a current in a nearby wire. But the field lines again are compressed by the resistance of the wire. That affects the source current and causes a voltage drop. Conservation of energy is observed.
By 90 degrees or 180 degrees?
Oh brother; another 'experimenter' who is believing his meter (probabaly a D'Arsonval Galvanometer/moving coil type as opposed to a DVM) and not using something more proper (like an oscilloscope and integrating the waveform) as he attempts to measure pulse-type phenomonon in his 'energy' machine ...
Why do you suggest 90 degrees here (are you thinking how the force applied to a gyroscope/a spinnign wheel reacts)?
A (field) in 'opposition' (to oppose, as in opposite) implies 180 degrees ...
"hat's because he's also come up with technology called the UltraConductor, which purports to be capable of conducting electricity at room temperature with no resistance"
It might be reasonable to believe someone could come up with an improvement to existing superconducting technology, say, a 20-30% reduction in resistance at room temp, but "capable of conducting electricity at room temperature with no resistance"??? I don't think so.
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