eCat cold fusion update; an open source energy movement?
Paul D. Fernhout
bit dangerous until they are better understood, because of potental
dangers from radiation, exposure to the materials, and also the usual
fire and/or explosion risks related to handling hydrogen:
"Building a personal e-cat"
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/H-Ni_Fusion/message/170?var=1
It seems to me that the eCat is either about to be exposed as a
tremendous scam/hoax/confusion, or it is going to show up in the
mainstream pretty soon as the real deal, since things seem to be
accelerating on it:
http://pesn.com/2011/05/17/9501827_Ampenergo_Amps_Up_Rossis_Energy_Catalyzer_in_America/
I'd guess, handwaving, and being conservative until others are
duplicating the device in their own shops and labs, I'd say there is at
least a 75% chance the eCat is the real deal, especially after seeing
the video linked in the first post on the page here, from a decade ago
talking about nickel and cold fusion presaging it:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread651819/pg6
More there:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread702644/pg1
And stuff from somewhat the opposite side of the political
conspiracy-ish spectrum: :-)
"Swedish Skeptics Confirm "Nuclear Process" in Tiny 4.7 kW Reactor
(Rossi E-cat)"
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2715435/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2687239/posts
It's not often I see an topic that has such a wide range of people
excited and hopeful.
On the first page of the ATS discussion there is a comment from about
four months ago, saying something I said only recently, that maybe this
cold fusion process explains what is really happening to power the sun
(which may have a nickel/iron core according to the "iron sun" theory).
My recent comment on that:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=488&cpage=1#comment-35961
But the comment that was months before mine:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread651819/pg1
"reply posted on 17-1-2011 @ 10:28 AM by amagnus
Interesting how some try to patent what already appears in nature.
Although not written in text books this fusion reaction is constantly
occurring on the surface of our Sun. We have a Sun with a core of molten
iron/nickel/silicon similar to that of Earth.
The outer plasma layers mislead many scientists into believing the
current "standard" model which predicts a core of helium/hydrogen. NASA
would like you to believe this B.S. too.
Wait till experiments involving molten nickel are done. They can't
patent the Sun."
While I don't have the facilities (or training) to do this safely, I was
wondering about what would happen if you had a coil of nickel wire that
you ran a high current through to bring it almost to its melting point,
with the coil either in an atmosphere of pure hydrogen, or maybe in a
water bath. If it was in water, one might even add carefully calibrated
ultrasonic emitters to create cavitation sonoluminescence effects that
might pump up the energetic hydrogen content of the water just at the
edges of the coil. Anyway, people have been trying stuff for two
decades, so I would expect that would have been tried already, trying to
have the nickel at near molten temperatures? And then of course, one
could just melt the nickel and bubble hydrogen through it? I guess the
challenge is to measure the heat properly in the whole system to find
proof something is happening.
More on that iron sun theory:
http://www.thesunisiron.com/
And further, maybe nickel-based fusion explains where the heat of the
Earth comes from, and even where oil and natural gas come from, with
such things created at the edge of the nickel in the Earth as hydrogen
is ejected from the Earth's core from quantum edge effects and combines
with other elements produced there? Could gas giant planets also have
nickel/iron cores?
And in general, is is even possible that hot fusion does not really
exist much in nature and perhaps all stars are powered mostly by
nickel-hydrogen cold fusion, with just some hot fusion at the surface
excited by stuff happening at the boundary of the nickel/iron core and
emitted hydrogen, and that in general the sun perhaps produces hydrogen
instead of consumes it? That would be really ironic, if it turns out hot
fusion does not exist (much) in nature and has essentially been a
collective delusion for decades by the mainstream physics community who
denied cold fusion.
Could the universe have started with nickel/iron, and we are just seeing
a lot of hydrogen as a byproduct of quantum effects at the edges of such
masses? Could that help explain the "missing mass" of the universe?
Might be be about to see an entirely new cosmological model emerge?
Maybe that is why hot fusion has been so hard to accomplish, because the
underlying assumptions are wrong about it? (And maybe H-bombs don't work
the way people expect, either?) The iron sun theorists suggest that
mainstream physicists have made the mistake of assuming that just
because they detect hydrogen at the sun's surface that that means the
whole thing is made of hydrogen, similar to saying the Earth is made of
air and water because that is mostly what you see when you look at it
from space.
I'm not saying that the iron sun theory is true for sure, and I don't
know enough to really understand all the details and implications, just
that it would be ironically funny if it was. :-) And cold fusion would
lend more evidence to that theory. But probably no one would ever
apologize for the decades of "disciplined minds" in the physics
community that systematically discouraged others from exploring that
idea. Related:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
That said, I can still accept that most new ideas are indeed bunk. :-)
But something like a basic income or a gift economy or widespread 3D
printing and personal gardening robots would at least allow more people
to have the time and self-assurance to pursue new ideas. Those changes
towards and alternative socioeconomics might accomplish that better that
more exhortations to young people to risk their careers (and chance at
having children) to follow heretical ideas despite all the peer pressure
and the almost certainly of suffering financial disaster by stepping out
of line.
Contrast talking about a basic income as a means of change in science
with this:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html
"We are lucky that we can be heretics today without any danger of being
burned at the stake. But unfortunately I am an old heretic. Old heretics
do not cut much ice. When you hear an old heretic talking, you can
always say, �Too bad he has lost his marbles�, and pass on. What the
world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of the people
who read this piece may fill that role."
Also related:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He
claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't
more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an
economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and
working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."
Anyway, we will see what happens as science begins to think about the
implications of the eCat if it really works... It's getting harder to
believe the eCat is a scam/hoax/confusion by the day. If it is a
scam/hoax/confusion, it is a really big one probably involving at least
a dozen or more people at this point. But there has been mass hysteria
before (like with "mesmerism"). Still, even if it is not for real, we'll
have dirt cheap solar panels in a couple decades almost certainly, I'd
speculate. So, one way or another, we'll have cheap energy real soon
now, despite the relatively paltry investment in that area compared to
trillions of dollars spent war making over oil field profits...
One significance for open manufacturing is that cheaper energy costs
might shift the balance from central to local, since energy costs often
lead to centralized production facilities as more cost effective than
small scale. We might begin to see yet more areas where local
convenience and customization issues dominate cost concerns if the
energy cost to heat, cool, cut, or transform materials becomes a much
lesser concern. We might see a reduction in the areas where energy costs
drive centralization, to minimize surface area by having a big scale vat
of something, or to minimize startup or shutdown energy costs, or to get
utility scale discounts on things like electricity, especially near
cheap sources of energy like centralizing aluminum smelters near
hydroelectric plants.
Background:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/mecs/special_topics/energy_use_manufacturing/energyuse98_02/energy_cons.html#ce
And:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Current_consumption
"The U.S. Department of Energy tracks national energy consumption in
four broad sectors: industrial, transportation, residential, and
commercial. The industrial sector has long been the country's largest
energy user, currently representing about 33% of the total. Next in
importance is the transportation sector, followed by the residential and
commercial sectors."
Although maybe I am wrong about the centralizing effects of energy
demands? See:
"'Alarming' Use Of Energy In Modern Manufacturing Methods"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090327112547.htm
"Modern manufacturing methods are spectacularly inefficient in their use
of energy and materials, according to a detailed MIT analysis of the
energy use of 20 major manufacturing processes. Overall, new
manufacturing systems are anywhere from 1,000 to one million times
bigger consumers of energy, per pound of output, than more traditional
industries. In short, pound for pound, making microchips uses up orders
of magnitude more energy than making manhole covers. ... Gutowksi notes
that manufacturers have traditionally been more concerned about factors
like price, quality, or cycle time, and not as concerned over how much
energy their manufacturing processes use. This latter issue will become
more important, however, as the new industries scale up -- especially if
energy prices rise again or if a carbon tax is adopted, he says. ... The
bottom line is that "new processes are huge users of materials and
energy," he says. Because some of these processes are so new, "they will
be optimized and improved over time," he says. But as things stand now,
over the last several decades as traditional processes such as machining
and casting have increasingly given way to newer ones for the production
of semiconductors, MEMS and nano-materials and devices, for a given
quantity of output "we have increased our energy and materials
consumption by three to six orders of magnitude.""
And also:
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/ddoniger/senate_climate_and_energy_bill.html
"The entire manufacturing sector directly emits 17 percent of U.S.
carbon dioxide pollution, and is indirectly responsible for another 10
percent due to emissions from purchased electricity.
For the vast majority � 96 percent of manufacturing firms,
employing 93 percent of America�s 13 million manufacturing workers and
accounting for 85 percent of all shipment values � energy costs are a
small fraction (averaging less than 2 percent) of the value of the goods
they produce, and costs associated with curbing carbon pollution are
just a fraction of that fraction.
About 3 percent of manufacturing firms � accounting for 6 percent
of manufacturing jobs � are responsible for 46 percent of the entire
sector�s CO2 emissions. These energy-intensive firms have greater energy
costs (more than 5 percent of the value of goods produced). Many of
them face significant import competition from countries that do not all
have comparable carbon policies."
But all that ignores how energy issues can still shape the processes we
choose or how we choose to implement them. I can wonder if that would be
in general an interesting area of research, and if anyone has deeply
thought that through before, the impact of energy use and centralization?
In general, maybe we are seeing an entire move in industry towards
ignoring energy costs, and the move to decentralize manufacturing back
towards the home (the way it used to be) is just a general trend, which
cheap energy will just accelerate further?
We are also seeing dropping costs for robotics, dropping costs for
computing, now probably eventually dropping costs for energy (current
opposite trends related to rising oil prices excepted), and that will
eventually mean falling costs for materials and even food? So, we may
see massive deflation at some point in that sense, even if, depending on
how our economy is structured, we still may see a lot of starvation as
the old model collapses or some greedy few enforce artificial scarcity
in a widespread systematic way, like outlined here:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Even when things are dirt cheap, if you don't have a job, you can't buy
anything, and you may still be on the hook for expensive monopolistic
services in regulated industries like medicine or law. It helps if you
have a means of production, as well as a place to operate it, and raw
material to use with it, and energy to power it, and a way to ensure
that you get some good out of all that for yourself and it is not all
taken away by others for some reason. Although even then you may be at
the mercy of the doctors and lawyers, without some strategy to deal with
that (vitamin D and eating a lot of vegetables to stay well, and I don't
know what about the lawyers...)
So, the balance in several areas may be beginning to shift more towards
the local, and apparently has been for some time. And as has been said
by others on this list, that ability to produce locally may be an
end-run around a collapsing economic system where human labor has less
and less value in the marketplace.
Although, as Manuel de Landa says on balance:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into
villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they
are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we
find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be
established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
Still, I would hope our social hierarchies would be better and more
accountable to human needs if they were entered into by more free and
more self-sufficient citizenry, ones with access to lots of cheap local
power to run local production facilities, rather than having our
hierarchies made up mainly of people living in fear of losing their
livelihood permanently and so being willing to do whatever it takes to
stay in the hierarchy even if it seems to them obviously immoral or
harmful to the planet. That is the old Jeffersonian ideal of the
"gentleman farmer", but rewritten for the 21st century urban dweller
with a recycling 3D printer and a cold fusion furnace co-generator
system. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffersonian_democracy
Also on that abovetopsecret site, several people made the point similar
to what I said elsewhere: that focusing on trying to patent and make
money off of such a huge innovation is quite possibly going to cause
grief to the inventor (and maybe the world) rather than just making it a
gift to the world -- including that the inventor may be shut out from
work on it if the rights get owned by someone else eventually. My
comments on the reasons to free the ideas there:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
"The core political value of America is representative democracy;
citizens have a civic duty to aid the state and resist corruption,
especially monarchism and aristocracy.[1] The yeoman farmer best
exemplifies civic virtue and independence from corrupting city
influences; government policy should be for his benefit. Financiers,
bankers and industrialists make cities the 'cesspools of corruption',
and should be avoided.[2] ... Jeffersonian agrarians held that the
economy of the United States should rely more on agriculture for
strategic commodities than on industry. ... However, Jeffersonian ideals
are not opposed to all manufacturing; rather, he believed that all
people have the right to work to provide for their own subsistence and
that an economic system which undermines that right is unacceptable.[15]
Jefferson's belief was that unlimited expansion of commerce and industry
would lead to the growth of a class of wage laborers who relied on
others for income and sustenance, as indeed happened during the later
Industrial Revolution and Gilded Age. Such a situation, Jefferson
feared, would leave the American people vulnerable to political
subjugation and economic manipulation. The solution Jefferson came up
with "was a graduated income tax that would serve as a disincentive to
vast accumulations of wealth and would make funds available for some
sort of benign redistribution downward."[16][17]"
In practice, once the information is out there, on the eCat which is the
good aspect of patents, we can expect a lot of people to duplicate these
things at home for personal use. Comments on the legality of that from
one source:
http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/crashcourse/rights/
"In most European countries, the exclusive exploitation rights granted
by a patent are restricted to commercial exploitation. A private person
who builds the patented invention in his own home for his own personal
goals cannot infringe on a patent. The reasoning behind this is that
such a situation cannot harm the patent holder. US law is more strict.
It forbids anyone from making, using or selling the invention, even when
the use is strictly personal. Of course, since patent infringement
lawsuits are very expensive, a private person is rarely if ever
prosecuted for using the invention in his own home. Such a situation
could occur when a private person offers on his website a piece of
software that uses someone else's patented technology. The patent holder
may feel that the freely available software threatens his commercial
product, and then decide to use the patent to prevent the distribution
of the free product.
It is always permissible to use a patented invention for research
purposes. Such study may give new insights in possible uses of the
invention, or possible alternatives to what is described in the patent.
This might even result in new patents for the alternatives, or in
workarounds.
Of course, the "research" should not simply be a commercial
exploitation in disguise."
See also, by others:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Article:Free_Energy_and_the_Open_Source_Energy_Movement_Part_1
"In this series of articles, we will attempt to examine several �Free
Energy" devices, and explain their workings in a very simplified way;
while discussing the proposed theories behind them. Also, we will take a
look at the new inventors and researchers working within the Open Source
Energy movement; and how Internet collaboration has changed the face of
invention�"
I quote that last that with the caveat that probably a lot of "free
energy" devices are bunk or hoaxes or scams or self-delusions, just
maybe not all, given that we don't fully understand the implications of
quantum physics and things like the Casimir effect...
Of course, cheap energy would just ratchet up another notch the
potential of technology as an amplifier, making the moral question of
what we do with it that much more important. Still, as James P. Hogan
points out in Voyage From Yesteryear, the person, spiritual, and
political ideology and social arrangements flowing from an awareness of
vast abundance of energy in the universe may be a very different one
from an ideology based around an assumption of profound scarcity of
energy relative to our needs or wants.
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.
Ricky Connolly
"We are lucky that we can be heretics today without any danger of being burned at the stake. But unfortunately I am an old heretic. Old heretics do not cut much ice. When you hear an old heretic talking, you can always say, “Too bad he has lost his marbles”, and pass on. What the world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of the people who read this piece may fill that role."
Also related:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."
Anyway, we will see what happens as science begins to think about the implications of the eCat if it really works... It's getting harder to believe the eCat is a scam/hoax/confusion by the day. If it is a scam/hoax/confusion, it is a really big one probably involving at least a dozen or more people at this point. But there has been mass hysteria before (like with "mesmerism"). Still, even if it is not for real, we'll have dirt cheap solar panels in a couple decades almost certainly, I'd speculate. So, one way or another, we'll have cheap energy real soon now, despite the relatively paltry investment in that area compared to trillions of dollars spent war making over oil field profits...
One significance for open manufacturing is that cheaper energy costs might shift the balance from central to local, since energy costs often lead to centralized production facilities as more cost effective than small scale. We might begin to see yet more areas where local convenience and customization issues dominate cost concerns if the energy cost to heat, cool, cut, or transform materials becomes a much lesser concern. We might see a reduction in the areas where energy costs drive centralization, to minimize surface area by having a big scale vat of something, or to minimize startup or shutdown energy costs, or to get utility scale discounts on things like electricity, especially near cheap sources of energy like centralizing aluminum smelters near hydroelectric plants.
Background:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/mecs/special_topics/energy_use_manufacturing/energyuse98_02/energy_cons.html#ce
And:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Current_consumption
"The U.S. Department of Energy tracks national energy consumption in four broad sectors: industrial, transportation, residential, and commercial. The industrial sector has long been the country's largest energy user, currently representing about 33% of the total. Next in importance is the transportation sector, followed by the residential and commercial sectors."
Although maybe I am wrong about the centralizing effects of energy demands? See:
"'Alarming' Use Of Energy In Modern Manufacturing Methods"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090327112547.htm
"Modern manufacturing methods are spectacularly inefficient in their use of energy and materials, according to a detailed MIT analysis of the energy use of 20 major manufacturing processes. Overall, new manufacturing systems are anywhere from 1,000 to one million times bigger consumers of energy, per pound of output, than more traditional industries. In short, pound for pound, making microchips uses up orders of magnitude more energy than making manhole covers. ... Gutowksi notes that manufacturers have traditionally been more concerned about factors like price, quality, or cycle time, and not as concerned over how much energy their manufacturing processes use. This latter issue will become more important, however, as the new industries scale up -- especially if energy prices rise again or if a carbon tax is adopted, he says. ... The bottom line is that "new processes are huge users of materials and energy," he says. Because some of these processes are so new, "they will be optimized and improved over time," he says. But as things stand now, over the last several decades as traditional processes such as machining and casting have increasingly given way to newer ones for the production of semiconductors, MEMS and nano-materials and devices, for a given quantity of output "we have increased our energy and materials consumption by three to six orders of magnitude.""
And also:
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/ddoniger/senate_climate_and_energy_bill.html
"The entire manufacturing sector directly emits 17 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide pollution, and is indirectly responsible for another 10 percent due to emissions from purchased electricity.
For the vast majority – 96 percent of manufacturing firms, employing 93 percent of America’s 13 million manufacturing workers and accounting for 85 percent of all shipment values – energy costs are a small fraction (averaging less than 2 percent) of the value of the goods they produce, and costs associated with curbing carbon pollution are just a fraction of that fraction.
About 3 percent of manufacturing firms – accounting for 6 percent of manufacturing jobs – are responsible for 46 percent of the entire sector’s CO2 emissions. These energy-intensive firms have greater energy costs (more than 5 percent of the value of goods produced). Many of them face significant import competition from countries that do not all have comparable carbon policies."
But all that ignores how energy issues can still shape the processes we choose or how we choose to implement them. I can wonder if that would be in general an interesting area of research, and if anyone has deeply thought that through before, the impact of energy use and centralization?
In general, maybe we are seeing an entire move in industry towards ignoring energy costs, and the move to decentralize manufacturing back towards the home (the way it used to be) is just a general trend, which cheap energy will just accelerate further?
We are also seeing dropping costs for robotics, dropping costs for computing, now probably eventually dropping costs for energy (current opposite trends related to rising oil prices excepted), and that will eventually mean falling costs for materials and even food? So, we may see massive deflation at some point in that sense, even if, depending on how our economy is structured, we still may see a lot of starvation as the old model collapses or some greedy few enforce artificial scarcity in a widespread systematic way, like outlined here:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Even when things are dirt cheap, if you don't have a job, you can't buy anything, and you may still be on the hook for expensive monopolistic services in regulated industries like medicine or law. It helps if you have a means of production, as well as a place to operate it, and raw material to use with it, and energy to power it, and a way to ensure that you get some good out of all that for yourself and it is not all taken away by others for some reason. Although even then you may be at the mercy of the doctors and lawyers, without some strategy to deal with that (vitamin D and eating a lot of vegetables to stay well, and I don't know what about the lawyers...)
So, the balance in several areas may be beginning to shift more towards the local, and apparently has been for some time. And as has been said by others on this list, that ability to produce locally may be an end-run around a collapsing economic system where human labor has less and less value in the marketplace.
Although, as Manuel de Landa says on balance:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
Still, I would hope our social hierarchies would be better and more accountable to human needs if they were entered into by more free and more self-sufficient citizenry, ones with access to lots of cheap local power to run local production facilities, rather than having our hierarchies made up mainly of people living in fear of losing their livelihood permanently and so being willing to do whatever it takes to stay in the hierarchy even if it seems to them obviously immoral or harmful to the planet. That is the old Jeffersonian ideal of the "gentleman farmer", but rewritten for the 21st century urban dweller with a recycling 3D printer and a cold fusion furnace co-generator system. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffersonian_democracy
Also on that abovetopsecret site, several people made the point similar to what I said elsewhere: that focusing on trying to patent and make money off of such a huge innovation is quite possibly going to cause grief to the inventor (and maybe the world) rather than just making it a gift to the world -- including that the inventor may be shut out from work on it if the rights get owned by someone else eventually. My comments on the reasons to free the ideas there:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
"The core political value of America is representative democracy; citizens have a civic duty to aid the state and resist corruption, especially monarchism and aristocracy.[1] The yeoman farmer best exemplifies civic virtue and independence from corrupting city influences; government policy should be for his benefit. Financiers, bankers and industrialists make cities the 'cesspools of corruption', and should be avoided.[2] ... Jeffersonian agrarians held that the economy of the United States should rely more on agriculture for strategic commodities than on industry. ... However, Jeffersonian ideals are not opposed to all manufacturing; rather, he believed that all people have the right to work to provide for their own subsistence and that an economic system which undermines that right is unacceptable.[15] Jefferson's belief was that unlimited expansion of commerce and industry would lead to the growth of a class of wage laborers who relied on others for income and sustenance, as indeed happened during the later Industrial Revolution and Gilded Age. Such a situation, Jefferson feared, would leave the American people vulnerable to political subjugation and economic manipulation. The solution Jefferson came up with "was a graduated income tax that would serve as a disincentive to vast accumulations of wealth and would make funds available for some sort of benign redistribution downward."[16][17]"
In practice, once the information is out there, on the eCat which is the good aspect of patents, we can expect a lot of people to duplicate these things at home for personal use. Comments on the legality of that from one source:
http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/crashcourse/rights/
"In most European countries, the exclusive exploitation rights granted by a patent are restricted to commercial exploitation. A private person who builds the patented invention in his own home for his own personal goals cannot infringe on a patent. The reasoning behind this is that such a situation cannot harm the patent holder. US law is more strict. It forbids anyone from making, using or selling the invention, even when the use is strictly personal. Of course, since patent infringement lawsuits are very expensive, a private person is rarely if ever prosecuted for using the invention in his own home. Such a situation could occur when a private person offers on his website a piece of software that uses someone else's patented technology. The patent holder may feel that the freely available software threatens his commercial product, and then decide to use the patent to prevent the distribution of the free product.
It is always permissible to use a patented invention for research purposes. Such study may give new insights in possible uses of the invention, or possible alternatives to what is described in the patent. This might even result in new patents for the alternatives, or in workarounds.
Of course, the "research" should not simply be a commercial exploitation in disguise."
See also, by others:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Article:Free_Energy_and_the_Open_Source_Energy_Movement_Part_1
"In this series of articles, we will attempt to examine several “Free Energy" devices, and explain their workings in a very simplified way; while discussing the proposed theories behind them. Also, we will take a look at the new inventors and researchers working within the Open Source Energy movement; and how Internet collaboration has changed the face of invention…"
I quote that last that with the caveat that probably a lot of "free energy" devices are bunk or hoaxes or scams or self-delusions, just maybe not all, given that we don't fully understand the implications of quantum physics and things like the Casimir effect...
Of course, cheap energy would just ratchet up another notch the potential of technology as an amplifier, making the moral question of what we do with it that much more important. Still, as James P. Hogan points out in Voyage From Yesteryear, the person, spiritual, and political ideology and social arrangements flowing from an awareness of vast abundance of energy in the universe may be a very different one from an ideology based around an assumption of profound scarcity of energy relative to our needs or wants.
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.
--
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Eugen Leitl
> Cold fusion is a scam
Apart from muon-catalyzed one. (Which isn't a scam, but isn't
net energy producing).
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
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tim.thelion
Unfortunately, we can see in the video with certanty that it IS a
scam, as Ricky has said. You see, he claims that there are no cables
running out of the device, so therefor it cannot be a trick...
If there are no cables running out of the device, where is all that
energy going? Is it creating heat, light, sound? No. If there is no
ground, we KNOW for certain, that the fantisized kilowatt of
electricity simply does not exist.
Sorry
Tim
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> > And in other news, people are looking into DIY eCats, but that sounds a bit
> > dangerous until they are better understood, because of potental dangers from
> > radiation, exposure to the materials, and also the usual fire and/or
> > explosion risks related to handling hydrogen:
> > "Building a personal e-cat"
> > http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/H-Ni_Fusion/message/170?var=1
>
> > It seems to me that the eCat is either about to be exposed as a tremendous
> > scam/hoax/confusion, or it is going to show up in the mainstream pretty soon
> > as the real deal, since things seem to be accelerating on it:
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> > And:
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> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Current_cons...
> > broad sectors: industrial, transportation, residential, and commercial. The
> > industrial sector has long been the country's largest energy user, currently
> > representing about 33% of the total. Next in importance is the
> > transportation sector, followed by the residential and commercial sectors."
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> > Although maybe I am wrong about the centralizing effects of energy demands?
> > See:
> > "'Alarming' Use Of Energy In Modern Manufacturing Methods"
> > http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090327112547.htm
> > "Modern manufacturing methods are spectacularly inefficient in their use of
> > energy
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> číst dál »
jonathan.w
producing steam. That would be 600Wh per Kg of water/steam.
It might still be fake, but you're going to have to find something
better...
Sorry
Jo
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> read more »
Windell H. Oskay
No. Burden of proof lies with the extraordinary claim.
Niles Calder
> It might still be fakeNo. Burden of proof lies with the extraordinary claim.
Windell H. Oskay
>>
>>
> No, the burden of proof lies with those trying to prove something.
> Extraordinary claims require the same damn quality of proof as everything
> else.
Burden of proof lies with the claim, which happens to be extraordinary.
No need to contradict me here.
Paul D. Fernhout
>> It might still be fake
>
> No. Burden of proof lies with the extraordinary claim.
I certainly think people are right to be skeptical initially.
And unfortunately, this is a case where the lack of openness, related to
trying to create artificial scarcity through patents and proprietary
information, is making it harder to really assess this invention or to
replicate it. So that is another potential benefit to a social process
of open manufacturing and open research -- better progress for science
and technology.
I'm still not 100% convinced because it sounds too good to be true, and
it has not been independently recreated. So, I pick 75% convinced as a
kind of arbitrary number, based on a several scientists and skeptics
being convinced at public demonstrations.
Or maybe 50% convinced might be more accurate as far as reaching the
convincing others stage, with independent replication being the other
50%? Until multiple people are independently replicating the technology,
sure, it could be a scam, like the videos of cell phones popping popcorn
video are:
"Claim: Eggs or popcorn kernels can be cooked by placing them between
activated cell phones."
http://www.snopes.com/science/cookegg.asp
But if the eCat is a scam, it is a pretty big and good one at this
point. :-)
The easiest explanation for a way it could be a scam that I have been
able to come up with is that is is possible these results could be faked
by beaming microwaves at an eCat. The eCat is metal, so a focused
microwave beam could heat it up, and would be invisible to an audience.
But the emitter probably would have to be above the ceiling since I
assume people would look under the table. A microwave emitter could
potentially be under the floor, I guess. Still, that just does not sound
socially plausible that people would go to that much trouble to run such
a scam at the risk of detection in multiple public demonstrations.
Still, it's true that scammers run seances and so on... And microwave
transmitter technology is easily available. But I think that just fairly
unlikely. And the people involved seem overall legitimate enough (even
without being perfect given some controversy in Rossi's past, but which
has an explanation from railing against the powers that be even back then).
By the way, the overwhelming evidence for the planet we know the most
about, the Earth, is that it has a nickel/iron core. What evidence do we
really have about what is at the core of the sun, or even of Jupiter or
Saturn? Why should those other bodies be any different than the Earth in
the absence of significant direct evidence? Even the moon has a
nickel/iron core based on the latest research. And we can see tons of
nickel/iron objects in the asteroids.
Given that observational evidence, and now the likelihood that fusion
occurs at the edge of a mass of nickel, what real evidence do we have
about whether hot fusion goes on in the core of the sun, beyond some
mathematical models that likely are based on all sorts of assumptions?
All we can see is what is happening at the surface of the sun, and what
goes on there might not really reflect what goes on below, and even what
we see may have alternative explanations. How can we really prove that
the sun is consuming hydrogen instead of producing it? Why does old
dogma of "hot fusion" get a free pass just because it is old and in a
lot of text books? Obviously, hot fusion is the thing that no one can
replicate in a sustained way despite years of effort and billions of
dollars of funding. :-)
Often it seems that the burden of proof lies with those who are trying
to overturn dogma that perhaps never had much real good proof in the
first place. But the old dogma proponents ended up with all the research
funds for various historic reasons and, in an intolerant religious sort
of way, they systematically indoctrinate newcomers to the profession and
prevent alternative research from being done as the establishment tries
to protect its perks and its dogmas and not have to update its lectures.
An example is astronomers denying well-respected astronomer Halton Arp
telescope time to pursue his theory of an electric universe. It was just
too threatening an idea to academic cosmologists who focus on gravity as
the main shaping force of the cosmos. I'm not saying Arp is right
(though he may be), just that it is an example of how the scientific
process really seems to work with money on the line:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_Arp
It would be very ironic if hot fusion just does not really happen much
in nature, despite decades of dogma asserting it and endless attacks on
the cold fusion researchers. Again, what proof do we really have for hot
fusion in the sun? The H-bomb supposedly works, but even that gets
started by a process involving heavy metals...
The more scientists and engineers can be self-reliant, like having their
own means of production or a basic income, the more they can explore new
ideas, and the less incentive they have to lie about the results
(although self-delusion or a desire for fame may always be factors).
Rossi is an example of that, supposedly using his own money to do this
innovative research. Again, it's hard to know all this for sure at a
distance.
So, one can hope that an end result of open manufacturing and related
socioeconomic trends will be an improved scientific process. It seems we
desperately need one, according to Dr. David Goodstein, (then) vice
provost of Caltech and physics professor (and things have only gotten
worse since IMHO), who wrote back in 1994:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"We must find a radically different social structure to organize
research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not
meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a
fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to
survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather
than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the
faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if
we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been
very good at guiding our own destiny."
Dr. Goodstein talks there about the competition for funds leading to a
breakdown of ethics in science that extends to a breakdown of the
peer-review system, which may be good usually for assessing most
research, but is not good for arbitrating a fierce competition for
research funds. The temptations for scientists to lie and cheat become
just too strong. And a process of progressive desensitization and
cognitive dissonance, especially combined with pressures from
authorities or peers, may lead just about anyone down a dark path, as
documented here:
"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad
Decisions, and Hurtful Acts"
http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986
and here:
"The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil"
http://www.amazon.com/Lucifer-Effect-Understanding-Good-People/dp/0812974441/
Consider this claim by the cold fusion proponents about what happened at
MIT in an effort to discredit cold fusion research, even though their
own results (before manipulation) supposedly showed excess heat
production but the graphs given out were altered to hide that:
"MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report"
http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/mitcfreport.pdf
"From the pile of information that I had been collecting about the
on-going work at MIT and elsewhere, I found two draft documents
concerning this calorimetry that had been given to me by PFC team
members during the rush toward publication. I could see immediately that
there was a serious discrepancy between the unpublished, pre-processed
raw data (the July 10, 1989 draft) and the final published data on the
July 13, 1989 draft. (See page 11 graphs reproduced from these drafts).
At first glance, it appeared that the data had been altered between July
10th and 13th to conform to what would be most welcome to the hot fusion
people�a null result for excess heat in the heavy water data. I would
later publicly challenge the creation and handling of these graphs by
MIT PFC staff (see extensive Exhibits J through Z-11). The Phase-II
Calorimetry curves were later investigated in the outstanding analysis
by my cold fusion colleague and fellow MIT graduate Dr. Mitchell R.
Swartz. There can be no doubt now that these curves were the end result
of a serious lapse in scientific standards in this affair that happened
at MIT. ...
As the record shows, the first assault against the truth in 1989 was
press manipulation by faculty members engaged in the lavishly funded hot
fusion research at MIT�s Plasma Fusion Center (PFC). They did not
believe the Utah work at all. They suspected that Pons and Fleischmann
were engaged in a �scam,� and they were concerned that if the public
were to have a too openminded attitude toward the prospect of cold
fusion as an energy solution, funding for their beleaguered
thermonuclear program would be endangered�even more so than in its
perennial brushes with budgetary extinction.
The truth about the calorimetry experiment performed at MIT in 1989
under DoE contract funding (DoE Contract DE-ACO2-78ET51013) is stark and
unambiguous. Its purported �negative� result was used to influence the
U.S. Department of Energy�s rushed 1989 report against cold fusion. In
alphabetical sequence, it is the very first report cited in the U.S.
DoE�s ERAB (Energy Research Advisory Board) Cold Fusion Panel report of
1989. Some would characterize the data manipulation in the sixteen
author MIT paper of 1989 as mere �data fudging.� We do not mince words:
the use of improperly handled scientific data to draw in the public mind
and in the mind of the scientific community a completely false
conclusion about an emerging discovery of overarching importance to
humankind is high-level scientific misconduct, plain and simple. ...
To use press manipulation and data manipulation to misdirect billions
of dollars in Federal scientific funding is scandal of the highest
order. To coin a phrase in this era of various �-Gate� scandals and
cover-ups�this is HeavyWatergate, one of the greatest (but still to be
acknowledged) scandals in the history of science. ..."
Still, despite that, do I know what to believe on this? No, not really.
Do I know for sure that is true, that someone at MIT reworked the graphs
to show a negative result? No. And in any case, the big issue is, since
when does failure to replicate something in one famous lab prove
something can't possibly work? That is a big failure just there of
science as a social enterprise. It is one thing to say an idea needs
more research, it is another to essentially blacklist all researchers in
an area and refuse to publish any related papers...
One thing I do know is that solar energy can relatively easily solve all
our energy needs if we cover 1% of the USA with solar panels. And I know
we currently use approaching 50% or so of the land in the USA for
livestock-related agriculture, which is overall giving us poor health
compared to eating more vegetables which takes less land to produce. So,
it is no unthinkable to just use a small fraction of that to power our
country indefinitely. Research dollars for solar energy have been hard
to come by as well, and recently have been coming from independently
wealthy people like at Google with Nanosolar. We could have had better
renewable energy sources decades ago, but our society failed to make the
investment, yet had trillions of dollars for all kinds of other madness
including fighting over oil profits. It's just sad all around...
And then it is sad that the issue of artificial scarcity through patents
and trade secrets is slowing down the process of evaluating (or
improving) what inventions people do come up with...
The only good thing I can say about that is that maybe humanity, as a
whole, and in the West especially, may not have the moral compass to
handle even greater technical capacity given the sad track record of
what we have done with all of what we have already. If there is any
value to all the socio-economic ideology related to funding, patents,
academic dogma, and copyrights that holds back science and engineering
advances at this point, that may be it -- that morally as a whole
humanity still has far to go. Of course, that is a bit of a
chicken-and-egg issue, because one might argue that if we had much
better technology (like 3D printing and dirt cheap solar panels or cold
fusion eCats), it might be easier to have a better and more generous
ideology? James P. Hogan explored that idea in Voyage from Yesteryear.
Iain Banks explores it in a different way in the Culture novels.