Open Source Energy

So this post is going to delve into the highly controversial and emotionally volatile realm of so called "Free" energy.

For many hundreds...  nay, thousands of years, people have been conned into new ideas that simply turn out to be some form of snake oil.  For all intents and purposes, the con in itself is simple.  Use jargon and claims of expertise to promote and sell a product or invention that ultimately does not work as advertised.

When talking about energy, these types of claims are usually described as unity, over unity, free energy, etc.  In this article, we will be looking deeper into this realm and discuss something that is perhaps much more relevant to any impending energy revolution.  That a free energy revolution is more about Open Source freedom, than about breaking the laws of thermodynamics.

In many arguments, one often finds an attempt to use Ockham's razor as a defence of a position, especially in the realm of science.  The antithesis of Ockham is generally Rube Goldberg devices.

The reason to use these two [sic] maxims is, the basement inventor often can not explain their results.  As such, the path to a result may be much simpler than the device that takes many more, potentially unnecessary steps to achieve the same results.  And further, any attempt to explain the results or process by the basement inventor, will either be over simplified or over explained, leading to a peer review finding failings in the description and labelling the invention or discovery as a hoax, rather than looking simply at the results.

Of course, it's not simply the results that matter.  For example, claims of free energy based on some "over unity" or "zero point" energy device, may be found to be completely fraudulent, as there are those who will use disguised or hidden power sources, while claiming no external power is being used to create this "free" energy.  So results may show excess energy, when in reality there is a hidden power source which accounts for the output energy.

Yet this does not just happen with basement inventors.  In the (scientifically) well known cold fusion "failure", qualified scientists Fleischmann and Pons produced excess heat energy from experiments which were attributed to fusion at low temperatures.  Unfortunately, under peer review, an entire industry of research was quickly silenced as the (excess heat) results were difficult to replicate and explain.  The scientific community became lost in debate over the details, rather than continuing to officially, and with funding, pursue the ability to duplicate the results, regardless of whether it truly were the results of fusion, or some other unknown, to be determined, factor.

So to the point, whether in an official, scientific lab, or in a basement, people are coming up with interesting, albeit indescribable causation of energy production from experimentations.  The reality is, invention is most often driven by monetization.  In other words, if something can not be commercialized and used to make significant money for someone or some company or companies, then research will not be funded to investigate it and bring it to market.

An infamous example of this is that of Nikola Tesla's work and demonstrations of wireless power distributions between 1891 to 1917.  He took existing knowledge of electromagnetic fields and induction and was able to demonstrate the transmission of power, without wires.  The problem was, not only was there no way to metre the power, therefore no way to charge for the power, Tesla was actually working on ways to extract the energy from naturally occurring magnetic fields, therefore allowing the consumer to bypass energy companies completely.  With this knowledge, his supporters summarily pulled any funding of his work and further research into such energy sources.  Any further work on this type of energy was quickly labelled a hoax and promoters found themselves without support and potentially shamed from the scientific and academic industries altogether.

But finally, as noted in the above linked time line, about 90 years later after Tesla's work, companies began to produce and sell wireless power transmission devices.  The following Ted video on Youtube is a more advanced version of the original work that was created at MIT, under the WiTricity banner:


What we have is "paired" devices, so no rogue device can intercept and use the available energy.  What is more interesting about this technology is not that energy can be transmitted wirelessly, rather that this is a proof of concept that energy can be "extracted" from "thin air".  In theory, any energy could be collected from ambient (free) radiation.  Of course, this is real science because it can be monetized... erm, it can be explained and duplicated and has a patent, when only a few short years ago, this would have been declared psuedo or fake science.

As discoveries go through standard, due process and peer review, the devil is in the details.  Every data point has to be duplicable and explainable, without which, the entire research is tossed to the garbage can.  The burden of full and complete proof is on the claimant, not on the criticism of what might very well be a minor discussion point.

Almost all claims at human flight were discounted as hoaxes.  Yet, the Wright brothers did not need to understand that the physics of flight was due to lift, both of their wings AND their propeller, as well as proper weight balance, in order to have their plane fly.  They simply knew that the design of their airplane gave them the results that they wanted, and a new industry was borne of their results, primarily funded by their own bicycle shop.

In that same vein of thought, efficiency is often cited when discounting energy sources, for example.  Yet combustion engines had originally and for a long time, been highly inefficient, while still being used as a better alternative to animal or human propulsion or energy source, as it in some ways better resembled perpetual motion, in that an engine didn't need to stop to rest or sleep.

Speaking of perpetual motion, a grandfather clock, using a mechanism of springs and pendulum are certainly not perpetual motion, although may mimic it.  Yet the input energy itself is "free", at least as an expression of freedom.  We went from a simple and costless freedom of winding a clock, to the expense and constraint of a battery or other power source, of which themselves are not necessarily any more efficient than that of our muscles and also either need to be replaced or can fail.

We long ago solved for energy transfer and efficiency with levers and blocks and tackle.  One simply has to look at the any great architectural structure like the pyramids (Egyptian, Aztec or otherwise) or trebuchet for example to understand that individually, we can produce and store, and release significant amounts of energy.  All of this being free, as in freedom, energy.