Free energy from the quantum vacuum
KNOWING how much Feedback appreciates pellucid examples of totally rational scientific exposition, Colin Osborne directs us to the website , where we can read in copious detail about Tom Bearden’s Motionless Electromagnetic Generator. This wonderful device, a package 10 centimetres long that promises to deliver 2.5 kilowatts of free energy harvested from the quantum vacuum, must be real: it is the subject of US patent 6362718.
To our untutored eye, it looks like a perfectly normal electrical transformer with a permanent magnet at its centre. So what’s holding up the cornucopia of free energy? The lack of $12 million in development money, apparently, and the insistence of potential funders on engaging conventional electrical engineers – who everyone knows are blinkered. These engineers just don’t understand how the “giant negentropy mechanism continuously replenishes the A-potential as fast as energy is extracted from it”. Nor can they see that “due to the peculiar nature of the Aharonov-Bohm effect that generates the excess energy inputs to the MEG from its immediately adjacent space, we are dealing with multiple energy inputs and signals to every coil and every wire…”
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When we dig around we find a host of carping critics, including arch-debunker James Randi. Shame on them. They will surely get their comeuppance when Bearden publishes his promised papers “pointing out suggested changes in Aristotelian logic and some of its shortcomings”.
“Kurt Hartman wonders whether the sign he found taped to an entrance door will help any students find the class it advertised – it said “Learn to read””
THE word “chemical” has become such a byword for nastiness that those who try to sell us things that have chemicals in – as opposed to things that are “natural” (which also have chemicals in, of course) – are in something of a quandary.
Two solutions have been adopted. One comes from Waitrose, the UK supermarket. Nigel Russel bought a memorial light candle there which was not only described as kosher, but was “made of pure chemicals only”. So that’s all right then.
Meanwhile Henry Bewley noticed that UK health store Holland & Barrett cannot pretend its ABC-plus multivitamin and multimineral formula is “natural”, but neither is it keen to say that it is “made of chemicals”. So in a neat piece of linguistic footwork it labels the product “Naturally inspired”.
FOR years the photo industry has been telling people to stop stockpiling picture negatives and prints in a shoebox under the stairs. It’s far better to use a digital camera and store your snapshots electronically, they’ve been saying.
“People used to average four rolls of film a year. Now they are taking huge numbers of digital snapshots,” Pierre Schaeffer of Eastman Kodak tells Feedback. “But they aren’t thinking about storage and indexing and security. People think their photos are as secure as they always were. When we explain that they risk losing their pictures when they change their PC or it crashes or is infected with a virus, they get very angry.
“When Microsoft releases the next version of Windows during 2006, many people will need to upgrade to a new PC. They will throw out their old one and then find they have lost the first years of their children’s lives. We are facing a Y2K millennium bug of imaging.”
So what is Kodak advising? “If in doubt, print it out,” says Schaeffer. So we should all go back to storing pictures in a shoebox under the stairs. Shareholders will be pleased. Kodak sells digital cameras, digital storage and the paper to make digital prints.
OUR mention of the nested acronym in the name of the UK’s OCR examinations board – that’s Oxford, Cambridge and RSA, and that’s the Royal Society of Arts (17 December) – reminded Michael Heaney of a strange, now-vanished, feature on the board’s website. He was deeply puzzled at references in their physics exam papers to “ocrawatts” and, if memory serves, “ocrabytes”. It took him a little while to realise that OCR had recently engulfed the Midland Examining Group (MEG) and had been updating its web pages accordingly – and automatically.
INHABITANTS of the Lateu settlement on Tegua Island in Vanuatu, Steve Shinners read in The Australian last month, “started dismantling their wooden homes in August and moved about 548.64 metres inland”. We can only admire their dedication to precision in the face of global-warming-induced adversity.
FINALLY, Paul Dove’s idea of naming reverse concepts with reverse words, such as “knilb” – to open one’s eyes and quickly close them again (19 November) – reminds Ron Hinde of a cartoon he saw 20 years ago. Two white-coated people are walking past a laboratory over which hangs a word balloon with “M´Ç´Ç˛ú!” in it. One says to the other, “Sounds like an implosion.”