Earlier this year, I posted about why perpetual motion and “Free Energy” machines are impossible. Soon after, I found someone trying to sell their own perpetual motion device on YouTube.
Today, I’m going to do one better: an indiegogo campaign called “Home Quantum Energy Generator” has raised $16,902 (far surpassing its oddly specific goal of $7,610) to build a protoype Free Energy device. This thing features several of the hallmarks of modern physics quackery:
- An inventor who is specifically not a trained physicist, but a “career Electronics Engineer”
- Layperson explanations that defy logic
- The word “Quantum” thrown in for good measure
Here are a few of my favourite quotes:
“I do not accept the conventional notion that wasted energy has to be a factor in every electrical machine.”
To paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson, the nice thing about science is that it doesn’t really matter whether you believe in it or not.“The words ‘quantum field’ sound mysterious, but this is just another way to say ‘smaller than atoms.'”
No, it’s not.“…our designs use high voltage/low current construction, which gives us a HUGE surplus of energy”
Why hasn’t anyone thought of that before now?“The machines get their input from the quantum field, which is estimated to have in the neighborhood of 200 Megawatts of power available in every cubic foot of space.”
Scientific knowledge changes all the time. Things that were once popularly thought to be true have since been thoroughly disproven. This is the enormous power of science: you don’t have to choose whether or not to believe in it, just keep coming up with new ideas, test all of them until your fingers hurt, and throw out whatever seems to be wrong.
Unfortunately, the fact that we can’t get energy for free has gone through so much rigourous testing that it now forms the basis of almost everything we know about the world we live in. It’s not about to be disproven by an electrical engineer who thought to finally “make use of the many other smaller particles” in electrical current by increasing the voltage.
As for the conspiracy to supress this knowledge, the person who actually discovered a way to get free energy would supplant Einstein as the preeminent genius of the modern world, if not all of history, and would easily become insanely rich. Even if the power companies did want to keep it quiet, they’d have a pretty hard time doing so.