We now know the physics, which is: this is the quantum mechanics of the sequence of symmetry operations to create mass out of light by compressing charge.
- Dan Winter, Public Speaker on Sacred Geometry
Wait, what? Beats me, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what he’s talking about. Well actually that’s not quite true. He’s stringing together physics words which sound to physicists just like lorem ipsum sounds to classics scholars. And I don’t know what Sacred Geometry is supposed to be either, but it doesn’t sound promising. I found this particular gem of not-physics via StumbleUpon as part of a trailer for a documentary by an outfit calling itself Covert Garage, which aims to “lift the lid on underground energy inventions”.
Well. In theory this could be a fine undertaking. There’s lots of hobbyists who have built vehicles which run on vegetable oil, or batteries, or which are brutally optimized for highest possible fuel efficiency, and many other creative, clever, and legitimate ideas which may well have real applications for the future.
The trailer seems not to be about any of that. It’s about a guy named Joe, who has built a device called the Joe Cell which they don’t quite come out and say is a free energy machine. There’s the perfunctory soundbite from a dour-looking professor saying the device can’t possibly work, followed by a cut to a shot of the device working. “Working”, anyway. “If it’s so easy to build one of these machines, why aren’t hundreds of people doing it?”, he reasonably asks - followed by a cut to hundreds of pages of Google results of people doing it. “Doing it”, anyway.
But that could just be a marketing tactic to drum up interest. There’s also a shot of a man talking to a gathering of the enthusiasts of this device. He offered $5000 to anyone who was willing to bring in their purportedly water-powered cars to his mechanic to be examined. There were no takers. This is followed by a shot of the inventor explaining the conspiracy to shut him down. That’s more promising, as it’s a pretty good look into the mindset of many free-energy types. As such I couldn’t hazard a guess about the view the documentary takes, credulous or incredulous. Actually I think the ideal would just be to let the cameras roll and let the intrinsic… colorfulness of the people involved speak for itself.
As for my opinion, it’s true that there are plenty of unexplained things left in physics. Macroscopic room-temperature electrical phenomena aren’t among those things. The device doesn’t and can’t work. Noether’s Theorem guarantees that even the unexplained things in physics can’t generate free energy as long as the laws of nature don’t change with time. As far as we have ever seen, they don’t.
But never let it be said that I’m not willing to keep an open mind. The Joe Cell is small, and it is supposed to produce enough power to run a car. That makes it an absolutely ideal candidate for the Built on Facts Protocol for testing free energy. I’m not holding my breath that Joe will rush to apply.
3 responses so far ↓
1 CCPhysicist // Jul 17, 2008 at 9:13 am
Just google it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_geometry
Sacred Geometry is probably a follow-on to some of the geometrical speculations that were made in the spirit of the Eightfold Way or of the use of the Platonic solids in Greek cosmology.
My question for the proponents is quite simple: Since laws currently require power companies to buy electricity from a homeowner, just put a fake solar panel on the roof and your “free energy” machine in the garage and you could make all the money you need to expand into large scale manufacturing and production. If making a movie or selling a book is more profitable than selling your free energy, you are not making “free” energy.
2 Åka // Jul 17, 2008 at 10:31 am
Technobabble fills a legitimate function in science fiction, where it’s supposed to represent some “real science” in the fictional universe, something that we don’t need to know the details about to see the consequenses of. Technobabble can be a little like nonsens poetry, when it’s well done I actually rather like it. When some people use it like in your example, to give credibility to something that is really not science, the effect is mostly just absurd (at least to us who know a little about real science).
3 Uncle Al // Jul 17, 2008 at 10:34 am
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/htoo.htm
The Schund Electrolic Xerocell
QFT with hermitian hamiltonians are invariant under the Poincaré group containing spatial reflections. Parity is a spatial reflection and parity is not a QFT symmetry! QFT are invariant under the identity component of the Poincaré group - the subgroup consisting of elements that can be continuous path joined to the Poincaré group identity; only an orthochronous Poincaré group representation. This subgroup excludes parity and time reversal.
Parity is not a Noetherian symmetry, either. Local symmetries create conservation laws through Noether’s theorem. A conserved quantity derives from each symmetry commuting with time, and the reverse. A divergence-free current (conserved property) arises if the Lagrangian or the action is invariant under continuous transformation. A physical system with a Lagrangian invariant with respect to the symmetry transformations of a Lie group has, in the case of a group with a finite (or countably infinite) number of independent infinitesimal generators, a conservation law for each such generator, and certain “dependencies” in the case of a larger infinite number of generators (General Relativity and the Bianchi identities). Parity is a discrete symmetry that cannot be approximated by a Taylor series or other sum of infinitesimals. Noether’s theorem with its dependence upon smooth Lie groups is excluded.
Conservation of angular momentum coupled to vacuum isotropy is not default true for opposite parity mass distributions. This is testable to 5×10^(-14) difference/average in existing apparatus (note 20-micron diameter tungsten suspensory filament at the top). Somebody should look (pdf).
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