At 01:37 PM 12/15/2009, Esa Ruoho wrote:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/emergingtech/0,1000000183,39938307,00.htm
From that page:
The device is powered by a large 10,000 mAH 1.2v nickel metal
hydride rechargeable battery. Steorn says that this is recharged by
the device itself, but has not included any metering or other
instrumentation that would show this. Without any information about
the device's own power consumption, it is impossible to tell whether
this is happening, nor whether the battery is sufficient to keep the
device rotating for the duration of the demonstration without Steorn's claims.
In other words, the demonstration demonstrates nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Steorn is saying, essentially, "Trust us!"
But they are providing no evidence to trust, only claims without
specificity. Why? If they have evidence that this is over-unity,
surely an examination of the circuitry and the exact operating
parameters of the device, with measurements of rotational velocity,
battery voltage with time, and all that, would show it. Absolutely,
it's possible that there is excess energy -- if excess energy is
possible -- but that the efficiency is still too low to maintain
function, but what's the reason for believing that there is excess
energy here? Because Steorn says so? But I mean for *Steorn* to believe it.
We know that cold fusion researchers persisted because they saw
events that convinced them, that they could not explain with ordinary
chemistry. That wasn't enough to convince others, because of the lack
of reproducibility, but it was enough to keep them going. Cold fusion
remains a fragile effect, very difficult to reproduce except possibly
under certain conditions (I'm hoping that codeposition does turn out
to be relatively easy to reproduce; it seems to be that way from the
reports of quite a few who have tried it, but I also get buzz of
failed replications, so that's my work, to find out and to make
reproduction reliable, very purely and simply.)
So, the possibilities:
They have an over-unity device, they believe, but they haven't proven
it. They need more money, so they hope to bring in some suckers, er,
investors to provide it. But why do they believe they have an
over-unity device, if they haven't actually demonstrated it? What's
the basis for the belief? Theory? Now, wouldn't that be ironic? "It's
over-unity because our theory is really cool, wait till you see it,
it's intuitively obvious that it is correct. At least it is to any
smart people like us. Scientists stuck in their outmoded theories may
not be able to see it...."
They have an over-unity device, and they have the evidence. If so,
why not show it? The difficulty of obtaining patents for something
like this? It would even be possible to show the evidence without
revealing the Secret. You'd do it with a Black Box as part of the
demonstration. People would be able to see the Black Box, and its
contents. But not the actual arrangement of those contents when it
was in working order. With the right design, this could be a
convincing demonstration even if all details were not known, just
that the unknown details were not ones that could conceivably produce
the results unless existing theory is incorrect. For example, take
that battery out, what's there? A pile of coils and stuff that
couldn't produce sustained rotary motion that runs over unity
(presumably it can accelerate without energy input, but we really
don't care what happens in the black box as long as it doesn't
contain a traditional power source.
So you put all kinds of instrumentation on the battery and observe
some parameter from the black box, like rotational velocity over time.
Last possibility, they have no over-unity device and they know it.
They are selling something else, like their ability to generate buzz.
Or they are seeking money to abscond with. Or they simply like the
publicity, seeing how long they can pull everyone's chain.
Apparently, quite a long time *even if the device is real.* Because
they haven't proven it publicly in all these years, yet they still
gain attention. Rationally, they would have exhausted everyone's
patience long ago.
Note how thoroughly different this is from low-energy nuclear
reactions. There were some secrets in the early days (look how
effective that was!). But there has been demonstration after
demonstration, many, from many different research groups and many
approaches, including exact replications, or more general
replications. Excess heat and helium have been reliably correlated.
Radiation is detected; the autoradiographs of palladium cathodes from
BARC are stunning in their implications. The neutron results from
SPAWAR are extremely difficult to dismiss as artifact. Some of these
results might indeed ultimately be red herrings, but the *scientific
consensus* is, by now, that there is a real anomaly here, worthy of
study, and that excess energy (not "over unity energy," there is no
violation of the conservation laws implied) is a confirmed effect.
And that should have been obvious by the mid-1990s, if not for the
shutdown of consideration by the nuclear physics community and by
chemists, who should have known better, competing with each other to
dissociate themselves from the debacle.....
