If you are a scientist and you are thinking about signing up as a person “interested in testing this technology”, you are being taken for a ride. Currently, according to their webpage, they have about 4300 scientists signed up to this effect.
Congratulations, guys and gals, you are now officially helping with the scam: the next stage of their campaign marketing for investors is going to say: “We have 4300 actual scientists interested in our technology”, which is going to be read as something other than what it actually means by the innocent.
DNFTT.
[QUOTE=Chronos]
Easy. If they drive the car around for a year, under constant surveilance (of the outside of the car), and are never once seen refuelling it, then they’re darned well onto something big. Maybe they just have some super-duper fuel that they can put in it when they make it, and go for a year of driving on a single fill-up. OK, so that wouldn’t be free energy, and it wouldn’t inherently violate any laws of physics, but it’d still be huge, and something worth investing in. Note that they never need to open the hood and let me get a look at the innards, for me to see that they’re not refuelling it.
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While I agree with the overall thrust of your POV, I think this is unrealistic. I agree that with Toadspittle that if they could do this, I’d just assume (like, I suspect, most skeptics) that they’d refuelled on the sly somewhere. This sort of long, woolly test (driving a car round for a year) is exactly the sort of test beloved of the Uri Geller’s and Breatharians of the world.
But I think that if they wanted to actually convince real scientists and engineers of the device’s worth, they’d just:
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put the device in a locked box with an external power outlet,
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allow it to be put into a bare room controlled by an independant third party with cctv cameras watching the whole time
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connect the power outlet up to the largest possible suitable load (motor, heat element, whatever)
See how long runs for. Unless the device is huge, it wouldn’t be long before its power output would exceed that which could be outputted by any battery or fuel cell of the size of the locked box.
[QUOTE=Colophon]
Hmm. The company doesn’t scream “scam” at me.
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Do you think clever scammers would? What do you expect? Do you expect house thieves to go round with striped shirts, little black eye masks and big sacks, too?