This guy was on Coast to Coast AM last night. He claims that he’s found a way to get free energy out of an electromagnetic machine.
I’m distinctly skeptical of his motor, but I’m not a physicist, and I don’t know much about electromagnetism. I don’t have the knowledge necessary to fully evaluate his claims. All I really know is that such claims have a track record of not panning out.
Can somebody explain this for me in fairly simple language?
Sure, I’ll give it a shot.
So this guy, Paul Babcock, claims that all the physicists from the last 200 years, Maxwell, Watt, Einstein, Dirac, you name them, were completely wrong about magnetism and that you can actually do work with a magnetic field. Instead of using this knowledge building incredible machines that he could sell for millions of dollars, he promises to share the secrets with all comers for the low price of $39.
I think that about sums it up.
Remember Beakman from the ‘90s edutainment show Beakman’s World? He recently teamed up with Captain Disillusion (a youtube personality that debunks viral videos from an editing perspective) to do a video on just this topic, free energy from magnets, BEAKMALLUSION: Free Energy Devices - YouTube
some choice quotes, 7:22-7:53 “opposite poles of two magnets attract. The closer they get to each other, the more the two magnetic fields interact, and potential energy increases. But once they snap together, all the energy dissipates as heat. You have to put in just as much work to pull them apart again. What about when the same poles of two magnets repel? It must take energy to push like that. Yeah, but who is doing the pushing? The magnets, or you?”
9:35-10:00 “When two magnets are close together it is not just their closest poles that are interacting, it is their magnetic fields as a whole. So in a set up like this see perpetual motion device the magnets are doing as much pulling as pushing. Try it for yourself and see that instead of spinning fast, the rotor gets stuck whenever the stator magnet is exactly halfway between each pair of rotor magnets. They lock together like the teeth of two invisible cogs.”
To see what really happens when we recreate the device, see 9:46-10:00
To see how free energy charlatans can fool and misdirect the public, see 10:02-10:40
You can be pretty sure that most of what you hear on Coast to Coast is a hoax, a fraud, or nuts.
That’s all the debunking you need to hear.
I stopped at “free energy.”
Tell us all how it’s completely and utterly wrong, to the point energy is not conserved.
If you can’t break either basic physics (Newtonian physics, at that) or undergraduate calculus, and in so doing prove that either reality is logically inconsistent or every single physicist has missed something major for four centuries, there is no free energy.
Screw bill nye! I love Beakman!
It’s not a zero sum game. They’re both great!
Reading through the claims on his website, I see stuff like
What’s he’s actually claiming is that his magic formula can make an electric motor work harder. My understanding of electric motors is pretty limited, but I think the general rule is, if you change one thing, it changes other things. Who knows, maybe the motor overheats and burns out; maybe it runs at less than its rated speed; maybe it’s only feasible for little toy motors.
There’s nothing there to be scrutinized. There’s no explanation of how his amazing motor is supposed to work. Just empty claims without any proof, not even an explanation.
And if there was any merit to his claims, he should be publishing papers in Physical Review Letters and waiting for a phone call from Stockholm, or filing patents and talking with investors about starting a company. Not selling DVDs for $37.00.
p.s. The first claim:
appears to be some kind of strawman argument along with obfuscation. Of course there are other factors that determine the strength of a magnetic field other than “quantity of electricity,” whatever that means. (What does that mean anyway? Nobody familiar with physics would use a phrase like that, you’d say current, voltage, or power. Which are all different things.) Why would that drive engineers and physicists “nuts”??
(For what it’s worth, I’m an experimental astrophysicist so I can at least speak the language of both engineers and physicists to some degree.)
I agree. Except millions is way too small. If somebody invented a source of free energy, it would be worth billions. Probably even hundreds of billions.
But that’s only if it works. If it doesn’t work, you go online and hope a few suckers will pay you thirty-nine bucks.
I just can’t ignore this thread…
I have to amplify this. Electricity isn’t electrons. Everything is always “full” of electrons, to the extent it always has enough electrons to be neutral solid matter, as opposed to an ionized plasma. It might have a slight deficiency if it becomes positively charged, but that’s trivial; it’s like missing a few drops of water from a whole ocean.
A wire conducting electricity isn’t gaining or losing electrons any more than a flowing river is gaining or losing water: It’s getting inflow in one end and discharging outflow from the other at any given instant. The flow, the current, is electricity.
Now, how do you measure current? There’s no single answer. You can measure the volume, the pressure, or the speed. Is the Mississippi River at its mouth “more” or “less” than a firehose? You can step into the Mississippi without getting your skin torn off, but I wouldn’t try that with the firehose. However, you can’t navigate a paddle boat up the firehose.
Just saying “more” or “less” without specifying what is meaningless. It’s words strung together in a way which appears to make sense but doesn’t. It’s the patter of a conman or the ravings of an ignoramus, and given that he’s selling something, I’m betting it’s a carny’s patter to draw in the marks.
But zoom out, and go back to my first post in this thread. What is he promising? Free energy. Energy out of a system without putting more energy into it. We know with mathematical certainty that that cannot happen, at least if you accept basic physics and calculus.
Why? It’s implicit in the basic laws of motion. If you accept Newtonian mechanics, which is basic “throw a ball into the air and watch it fall” eighth-grade stuff, and you accept simple, undergraduate calculus, you can mathematically prove that energy is conserved, so free energy is impossible. It isn’t even hard. We’ve know how to do it since before quantum physics existed.
Someone claiming they have a free energy device is even worse than someone claiming they can drive their Ford Pinto to the Moon. We know that free energy is impossible to a much much greater degree of certainty than we know that you can’t drive an econo-box to space.
Maybe but Beakman owns it with the soundeffects!
No, not really. It’s whargarble. It’s a bunch of terms concerning magnetism and electricity strung together in a way that vaguely sounds like they mean something.
If by “not panning out” you mean never been true in the history of the world, you‘re on to something. Now the question is why would you think this guy’s lies have any more merit than all the other lies of the same sort that have gone before, and not dismiss them out of hand? I mean, you know it’s utter bullshit, does it matter why it’s utter bullshit?
(aside)
Personally, I much prefer Beakman to Nye (and of course, Mr. Wizard over both), because Nye never seems to even attempt to do any science. His MO seems to consist much more of being randomly zany while shouting the word “Science!” very loudly and enthusiastically. His staff seems to make some real effort at getting some education in there, but Nye’s role in the process is to interrupt them just when they’re about to get to the good part.
When I’m having a slow day I’ll check out Energetic Forumto learn about all the suppressed technology Big Evil Corporations are keeping from the public…and with *just a little more time and money *so many of these devices will be ready to be released to the public…
Aaron Murakami is an interesting guy. He’s YOUNG…20’s??!..and already giving seminars and selling free engergy products.