News Media Scammed by 'Free Energy' Hoax

Dozens of submitters, some of them quite credulous, have written in pointing to this Reuters story about an anonymous inventor who claims to have solved the universe's energy woes. It's amazing that Reuters ran this story. It's even more amazing that news media across the country are running it too. Check your local newspaper, see if they were taken in. Update: 01/24 16:38 GMT by M : Contest is over; see below.

The General Electric corporate empire was scammed - they modified the story with a skeptical headline but otherwise left it alone. The AOL/TimeWarner corporate empire didn't have any problem with the story. The Environmental News Network, which probably should know better, didn't.

Now I know that wire stories are often run with minimal verification - each paper or website assumes that Reuters, or UPI, or AP has checked the story for veracity before it went out. And I know that reporters and editors can't be experts on every field of endeavor that they report on.

But this is Basic Science. The Three Laws (everyone loves the Second Law[1]) are not a new thing, and they're not going away any time soon. This should have been taught in junior high. There's a simple, well-known test that Reuters could have applied to this story: "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof". This claim is the most extraordinary of all - free energy, perpetual motion, whatever you want to call it, and it demands proof beyond question. Reuters is running this story based on an anonymous inventor. Is that extraordinary proof?

But wait, I said perpetual motion. The phrase "perpetual motion" is one which sets off alarm bells in people's heads, so the anonymous inventor was quick to head off that thought process:

"But he is keen to head off the notion that he has tapped into the age-old myth of perpetual motion. ``Perpetual motion is impossible. This is a self-sustaining unit which at the same time provides surplus electrical energy,'' he said."

This quote is simply embarassing. It parses to "Perpetual motion is impossible. This is a perpetual motion unit." The inventor must be snickering in his Guinness right now to have snuck that one past.

The story gets better when you read it several times. Three 100 Watt light bulbs created a drain of 4500 Watts, according to the nameless inventor. That would be an impressive feat all by itself, except that it's total nonsense.

The piece would have made a good humor article. A properly skeptical and properly educated Reuters reporter could have examined these claims, poked holes in them, and published a story that simultaneously reported on the claims and educated the public about why they are a load of hogwash. Too bad that's not what happened.

Maybe you'd like to take a crack at evaluating their claims? You think you can examine their device a little more critically than Reuters? Give them a call.

And I have a second task as well. Slashdot is occasionally criticized for getting a story wrong, even though we diligently correct ourselves when necessary. My theory is that the difference between Slashdot and other media is that they never correct themselves, no matter how inaccurate, so readers are left with a false picture of accuracy. To test this claim, I'll send a Thinkgeek t-shirt to the first person who finds a retraction of this 'free energy' story published by Reuters or any of the newspapers/media outlets that ran the original story. *Any* of them. I don't expect to pay out.

Update: 01/24 16:38 GMT by M : CNN has updated their story with a new headline and several new paragraphs at the end, which qualifies. A couple of people also noted that ZDNet appears to have taken their copy of the wire story down. Lucas Garsha was the first to email, so he gets a t-shirt. I wasn't clear whether the claim should be email or in the comments, so I'll also send a t-shirt to the first commenter noting this, which appears to be skia.

[1] This is a fine world that we live in, where I can find a website devoted to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Give the author credit.

Not only did he scam most news agencies, he drinks Guinness.

Re:Give the author credit.

In other news...
In a trailer park on the shores of the Mississippi, a local man has claimed to have invented a perpetual motion human.

To prove his claim, he hooked a car battery up his wife/cousin for 10 minutes while she held a 100 watt light bulb in each hand. After removing the car battery, she proceeded to twitch for more than 37 hours.

Aleady companies are clammoring for the device, known as the "shockway," claiming it will revolutionize the world. "We could have our employees work 24 hours a day," said one business owner. "This could be the most important invention to come out of Mississippi since... since... paternity tests"

I would like to revise the headline for Reuters...

"Irish Inventor on Crack Says World Needs His Energy"

cya

Ethelred [grantham.de]

Cold Fusion and the duping of the Media

I don't know how many of you know about Mancow [mancow.com], a nationally syndicated broadcaster beaming out of Chicago, but he did a better job of messing with the media.

He sent out a press release stating that, to publicize his program, a set of billboard ads depicting the Juniors from last years' election (that would be Al Gore, Jr. and George Bush, Jr.) sparking up the large-sized blunts, to steal a line from Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie.

He watched the media report on this; to his amazement, Fox News Channel, CNN, and all the local network affiliate newscasts all repeated, word-for-word, this news release.

Problem was, of course, it was untrue.

Now, before you say 'it's another cold fusion insident', think about fuel cell technology. I wouldn't be in the least surprised if any of the scientists who are currently working on fuel cells at least had a pilot light under their ass because of the concept of cold fusion. After all, fuel cells create energy from hydrogen and run cool, right?

Re:Not just the major outlets

Someday, I'll live in a world where every child grows up with a decent science education and critical thinking is encouraged...

Bah. Science at its most basic *does not* say that the laws can never be changed. It just says that you're probably better off not trying to break them.

A real scientific mind would be intriqued by the concpet of such a shakeup, and could at least spare such a grand hypothesis enough time to think up a suitable experiment or twenty.

Just because magnets are the domain of quacks doesn't mean they don't attract.

Re:Not just the major outlets

Yes, I know zero-point energy is real. No, I don't think this crank from Ireland could even explain the concept.)

How do "know* something is real that's never been demonstrated?

Zero-point energy has a very testable hypothesis: the Casimir effect. Which has been demonstrated. Check this article [lanl.gov] or this one [iastate.edu].

ZPF has been demonstrated

There have been experimental demonstrations of the veracity of the Casimir Effect [lanl.gov], in which two closely spaced parallel plates are driven toward each other by the pressurre created by the ZPF.

It still doesn't get around the laws of thermodynamics, however. Just becasue it's an exotic energy source doesn't mean the rules don't apply to it. It's just beloved by fringe free energy types becasue it involves the magic word 'quantum', and seems to spring from nowhere.

Kuro5hin readers aren't THAT dumb...

Thanks for reminding me about K5... I hadn't visited them much since their server problems back in December. Now, about the K5 readers being "...taken in...", allow me to quote the first comment -- I think it sums things up perfectly.

Perpetual Energy or Hoax? (3.72 / 11) (#1)
by greyrat [kuro5hin.org] on Tue Jan 22nd, 2002 at 03:28:12 PM EST


Hoax. Next!

-- END OF LINE.

I have discovered a wonderful proof of this

But the *$!? lameness filter won't let me type it in.

Laws

Young Lady, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

-- Homer Simpson

Re:Laws

In Stephen Hawking's Cambridge Lectures [britannica.com], he points out that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a statistical, rather than absolute, law. It applies in most cases that we have observed, yet we can not prove it applies to all cases.

The relevant part; tape 2, side 2:

"...The Second Law of Thermodynamics. It states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases with time. Moreover, when two systems are joined together, the entropy of the combined system is greater than the sum of the entropies of the individual systems."

(He gives an example)

" The Second Law of Thermodynamics has a rather different status to that of other laws of science. Other laws, such as Newton's Law of Gravity, for example, are absolute laws. That is, they always hold.

On the other hand, the Second Law is a statistical law. That is, it does not hold always, just in the vast majority of cases."

Damn those black holes. Or gravastars. Whatever you want to call them.

Zero-point energy probably does exist. There certainly is something there, we have managed to prove that much. I just don't believe that a single person, working alone, with a mechanical background, is going to 'suddenly uncover' the secret. I believe we are, unfortunately, beyond that point in our scientific development.

Almost all of these supposed 'perpetual motion' devices have some mechanical component. Something moving, some clockworks, something. There was even one instance where the reporter noticed the speed of the device was rather random. Upon closer inspection, a small cable was found, leading to the next room. The device was, in fact, powered by an elderly man in a rocking chair!

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain", huh?

Re:Laws

100 years ago if you would have told me there were going to be atomic bombs, microwave ovens,...

While you're certainly correct about these things, I believe that this case is different.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, as pointed out by the the parent's poster, is a statistical law. However, it is not only a statistical law derived from experiment (such as, say, "General Relativity agrees with 100.0% of experiments done to date"), but it is also a mathematical theorem (such as, say, "a + b = b + a"). I can believe that a given law of science could be proven wrong. For a theorem which is as deeply rooted as the 2nd law (which is a result of combinatronics), though... This would require mathematics as we know it to topple.

To be honest, I think it is beyond possibility. This, incidentally, also means that the First Law (conservation of energy) is true as well. If energy is perfectly conserved in an ideal system, the change in entropy is zero. If the 2nd law were false and the change in entropy could be less than zero, energy conservation would also have failed.

So, like any theorem, there are conditions that must be met before it is true. What are the 2nd law's conditions?

Answer: Your system must consist of discrete particles that can be in any one of several states. The states do not have to be equally probable. The more particles you have, the more statistically insignificant any deviations from the mean become. Ergo, when you're looking at something macroscopic (like, say, a "free energy machine"), you'll be looking at ~10^(24 or 25) particles... WHICH IS PLENTY.

Sure, it is possible for the entropy in such a system to spontaneously decrease, but it unimaginably, overwhelmingly unlikely. It is very likely that the entropy will increase up to a certain maximum. Therefore, even if you got extraordinarily lucky and saw the entropy drop, it would soon bounce back up again.

That's the 2nd law in a nutshell...

As far as the Zero Point energy goes, I'm a little more fuzzy. Didn't Guth predict that if the energy in empty space fell to absolute zero it would undergo inflationary expansion? I remember reading that somewhere... Anyone?

Re:Laws

The second law of thermodynamics is statistical (or maybe probabilistic) because, when you look at the microscopic motions particles, it is possible for the second law to be broken, but incredibly unlikely. The classic example is: I have a sealed box of an odorous gas. I take it into a large room and open the box. The gas obviously will disperse and fill the room; this is predicted by the 2nd law of thermodynamics. If you look at the random motions of just one of these gas particles, it would look perfectly OK if you watched the movie "in reverse". However, it wouldn't look ok for the entire process to go in reverse. The reason is that it is incredibly unlikely that if a room is full of gas, then all the gas particles will, by chance, all move into the box in the corner. It is possible, but so incredibly unlikely you'd be waiting for many many times the age of the universe before it probably would happen. In more technical terms, there are many more states that the gas can be in if it "evenly" fills the room, but comparitively few if the gas is all in one corner. If each "state" of the particles on a microscopic level is equally likely (i.e. if the gas has been in the room for a long enough time that it has reached equilibrium), then the probability that the gas will fill the room instead of all being in the box is very close to 1.

So the cases where you'd see the 2nd Law not holding are where the probabilities of observing it are much more favorable than 1 in 10^80 or something. This means that you need to be looking at small numbers of particles (maybe 5 or 10 instead of ~10^23 particles for macroscopic objects) for long times. Certainly you wouldn't see it being violated constantly in a 40 pound lump of metal that some guy put together in his backyard.

Gravity, in contrast (according to theory anyway) always works. Full stop. It's not like that it's just an incredibly likely that objects will attract each other, it's a "certainty". It's the same with most of the other physical laws out there. Quantum mechanics is "probabilistic", but in another somewhat different sense, and theromodynamics doesn't really apply on the scale of quantum mechanics anyway. (Thermodynamics deals with the study of "macroscopic" systems with large numbers of particles, where general properties of the set of particles can be expressed. Properties like total energy, volume, # of particles, temperature, pressure, etc.)

let's not hang em just yet

I don't know about that assumption that the media/news outlets never do retractions. If you do read an actual physical newspaper, you'll see that usually on the editor's page they do print retractions and corrections.

It's quite possible that a) they don't even know that the story is wrong, b) no one has read and analyzed some tiny newstory from AP/Reuters/etc.. and c) no one has told them it's wrong.

Why don't you write your local paper that ran the story, and let them know? How else are they going to know to print a retraction/correction?

incredulous

"If the Jasker men really are onto something, it could be the most important Irish invention since Guinness."

Nothing is more inportant than Guinness. Nothing.

Define the extraordinary proof, please

If you're going to draw the line, please finish it.

If you require "extraordinary proof" to refute science, why not define what you need? I agree that running a light bulb for three hours isn't that impressive, and this is probably a scam of some sort.

But on the same time, science demands that we ask "what if this is true?". If he really has a free energy device, what amazing thing could he do to prove that it works?

My own suggestion: go to an ivy-league school (heck, any college) and set the darn thing up powering something that causes a healthy drain. (*not* a lightbulb... well, maybe a strobe light or something that really sucks up the juice) and let it go until it stops.

Once the bulb stops, plug it into the wall and see if it starts. If it does, the invention's probably not free energy. If it doesn't, plug in another bulb and see how long THAT one lasts.

A year or so of healthy drain would be enough to prove free energy, don't you think? Or at least, enough to get the damn patent and immortalize the freakish invention.

Re:Define the extraordinary proof, please

I think a test along these lines [syc.org] would be a good start. That was a link I was thinking about including in the story, maybe I should have.

Standard Perpetual Motion Device Screening Test

How about if the inventor of said device allows himself/herself to be locked in a hermitically sealed container with their invention powering a CO2 scubber/Oxygen Generator. Wait 24 hours and open up. Yes/No.

Succesful completion of this test would be extraordinary and get peoples attention.

Re:Standard Perpetual Motion Device Screening Test

Ah, you're of course referring to the classic Schrodinger's Drunken Irishman quandary. Will he be drunk or not at the end of 24 hours? Until we open the box, he's both drunk AND sober!

Re:Define the extraordinary proof, please

But on the same time, science demands that we ask "what if this is true?"

No, science demands nothing of the sort. Science operates not by proving, by confirming beyond the shadow of a doubt, but by disproving, by testing to failure. When presented with an extraordinary claim, science demands we ask, "How do we prove that this is false?"

In this case, I'd say that proof might have something to do with the fact that he needs 4 12-volt car batteries of at least 60 amp-hours each to provide the 50 amp-hours required to drive a 300 watt load for two hours. Hell, I can do the same thing just by plugging the light bulbs into my wall, but nobody claims that's an over-unity device.

And I bet it solves the Stopping problem too

I wonder if the inventor will prove NP=P and provide a 2 terraherz processor that can be overclocked indefinitely with zero waste heat.

Personally, I think this story is a hoot! :-)

Oops.

"The 58-year-old electrical engineer, who lives in the Irish republic and intends -- for ``security and publicity-avoidance reasons'' -- to keep his identity a secret, has spent 23 years perfecting the Jasker Power System."

Ummm... Mr. Jasker... I think we let the cat out of the bag.

Hee hee hee...

Next time you are handed one of those promotional AOL CDs with a "free 70 hours", here is your new retort:

"So is that Free as in Beer, Free as in Speech, or Free as in Energy?"

Hmmm

Maybe that Mendocino guy could use this to power the town without all that nasty electromagnetic radiation?

U.S. Patent office's solution.

A long while back the U.S Patent office got so many of these "perpetual energy" machines that the office head put down the policy that the inventor had to submit a working prototype. The office would then set it going and if it was still running a year later, they would consider the patent application. This cut down on the number of applications considerably.

A two hour test run is bullshit. Let's see it run for 2 years in an empty room, then we'll talk.

Dbl std: Perpetual Motion vs. Software Patents

> The office would then set it going and if it was still running a year later, they would consider the patent application.

So why don't they do this with software patents?

wouldn't it be ironic

Wouldn't it be ironic, the one time slashdot takes a high headed journalistic stand, it's for a some crazy story that some time from now turns out to be true.

J

Insight from Carl Sagan

I just can't help thinking of this quote from Carl Sagan as I read about this story:

"They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at Newton. Of course, they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."