You view a quantum field power generator demo in person - Quickest way to de-bunk?

Factual Questions
1

Ok … you’re on-site for a demo and this “quantum-field” wonder machine is being put through it’s paces to get your company to invest. You don’t know exactly how power is being generated once the plug is pulled. All you know is that the claimed operating principle does not correlate with known physics.

How do you most quickly and efficiently prove the demo is a scam?

Assume

(1) You can have one (1) portable diagnostic device of your choosing on your person to use in your de-bunking. You will not be allowed to touch the device. Your diagnostic device will have to be able to do what it will do without physically touching the device.

(2) You can inspect the machine for up to 5 minutes visually but you will not be able to ask that it be pulled off the floor or disassembled.

(3) The operator will not answer any of your questions directly as they are simply evidence that you are incapable of understanding quantum field generator physics, but will let you take non-contact measurements during operation.

How do you go about it? Can you de-bunk it with these restrictions?

Videos of machine in operation here

Inventor background here

2

So you can’t eliminate the possibility of hidden wires supplying it with power from underneath?

No, you can’t debunk it, but that means absolutely nothing.

3

I know this doesn’t answer your question, but I personally wouldn’t waste my time trying to debunk it.

4

If they won’t allow you to look for the hidden battery, consider it debunked.

5

If someone wants me to invest in their product, they will submit to any tests I want, or they will de-ass my office immediately.

6

You couldn’t debunk a 19th century perpetual motion machine with these restrictions. In fact, they are remarkably similar to the limitations scammers used then.

Crafter_Man has the only possible answer. You don’t bother. If they can find somebody that stupid they deserve to have their money.

7

“Physics doesn’t work that way.” Done.

Like the others said, with your restrictions, there’s no way to eliminate the possibility of hidden wires, battery, etc. I take those restrictions as evidence that the inventor is trying to fool me and will therefore assume the entire thing is a deliberate sham until I can perform tests at my own discretion.

8

So there is no wireless non-contact ammeter or similar non-contact sensing device you can place right next to various areas of the machine to see where the hidden current is coming from? I have a little LED probe I got free with a multi tester purchase that will go off in the presence of AC current without being in direct contact with the wire or outlet. None of these would be helpful?

9

I’ve gotta say, though, this group is a new one to me. They call themselves “World Improvement Through The Spirit Ministries” and seem to be some weird combination of Christian-themed religious nutjobs and pseudoscientific crackpots. I’m used to regligious whackos rejecting science altogether, but these people turn it in a really weird direction.

10

Nope. Let’s say I set my device up on a table in a seemingly empty room. Except that one of the table legs is hollow and has a wire running through it, and I drill a hole through the floor to run the cable somewhere else. You want to somehow detect that this is the case.

As you mentioned, there are probes that detect AC. They work by detection of the electromagnetic field. You can build a sensor to put next to a wire to detect this field.

However, if I put two wires right next to each other, the fields cancel out. Of course I can’t get them infinitely close, but certainly close enough to eliminate the possibility of detection. Furthermore, I can just make the table leg a Faraday cage which will prevent emissions altogether.

I could also just run it on DC (with AC conversion in the unit if necessary). That will also eliminate any emissions except possibly a magnetic field (if I can’t get the wires close enough to avoid a current loop). However, I can instead use many thin wires interleaved such that the field is fully canceled.

So essentially the answer is no. And that’s just one of many possible types of deception.

11

Hmm… interesting. Well lesson leaned. Thanks!

12

There’s a way of interpreting the second law of thermodynamics that makes free energy machines impossible. Of course, we all get to decide for ourselves whether we’re in a position personally to know that this won’t fall by the wayside some day.

I think this is analogous to somebody selling a machine into which you insert two dollar bills, then insert two more dollar bills, and then five dollar bills drop out the bottom. The seller then fills a blackboard with confusing math, at the bottom of which appears “2 + 2 = 5”. You might not find it possible to debunk, and it would obviously be a great investment if it works, so, what’s your choice?

I had a similar experience, actually. I’m a physicist working in industry, and a proposal came to me for a system that supposedly could rearrange molecules to change various properties of substances in some way involving quantum mechanics. They said they could change the angles between the different atoms, and were vague about the possibilities, claiming nearly anything was possible. They sent me papers they’d written, about things like “time-reversed hertzian waves”, and I couldn’t understand everything in the papers, so I tracked down the professors at a nearby university who taught the grad level courses in quantum mechanics, and they couldn’t understand everything in the papers either. Finally I asked if they could make water more dense than normal, and they said they could, and I agreed that we would proceed further with them if they could send me a sample of extra-dense water I could verify with my own analysis.

So then they wanted to know how I was going to analyze the density, and I said, well, I was going to weigh a measured volume, of course, and how would you folks do it? They said they would use a microscope to measure the angle between the hydrogen atoms connected to the oxygen atom in the water molecules. So I wanted to know what kind of microscope, and they said it was a Bausch & Lomb. “An OPTICAL microscope? THAT’S what you’re basing this on?”

I hung up on them. But, it took hours of conversation and correspondence and checking up on things over a couple of months, and several of us technical folks at my company, to get to this point. Maybe I’m an idiot about quantum mechanics, and the professors who teach quantum mechanics at the local university too. I prefer to think that some elements of quantum mechanics are spooky enough that there is room for smart people to fail to see to the bottom of some things right off the bat.

13

Napier: I can’t indulge too much info due to RL implications, but we are currently performing tests on copper wire that the manufacturer claims is “superior” to regular ol’ copper wire in every respect. The manufacturer adds a “special ingredient” to the wire, and they claim it has lower resistivity, higher tensile strength, improved solderability, etc. compared to standard ETP copper wire.

I am extremely skeptical of their claims. And some of the terms used in their brochures remind me of the QM terms used in the proposal you were reviewing. But I’ll be objective in testing. PM me if you want more info on this.

14

Well I certainly hope your testing will use an optical microscope, and not some dubious actual measurements of resistivity, tensile strength, etc.

15

Yeah, those properties are all really easy to measure. If their stuff really has all those properties, they can send you a sample, and you can test it. If they don’t send it, or if it’s no better than ordinary copper, the deal’s off. If it is better in at least some way (and it’s not inconceivable that they have some new alloy or something), then hey, jackpot.

16

The “free energy” crackpots have a long history of preying on the religious to get “research funding.” They’re taking advantage of the in-group trust that folks give to someone who shares their religion. Joe Newman has been doing it since the 1970s.

This makes me curious to find out more. The fact that they contacted you, a physicist, tells me that they honestly thought the were onto something, but to be so clueless as trying to use an plain ol’ optical microscope to measure the angle between the atoms in a water molecule? I would have kept talking to them just to figure out why they thought they were onto something.

17

Is there a way of interpreting the second law of thermodynamics that doesn’t?

18

I’m not going to worry about the engineering until the physics are down pat. Show me the peer-reviewed paper proving the theoretical basis for power generation.

Once there’s a theory, at least I know it’s possible. It may still be an engineering challenge to produce the device, but at least I know what I’m looking for - whether there’s radiation, certain fields, etc.

If there’s no theory? Then even if I confirm that the device produces electricity, I still don’t know if we understand why. What if the machine is broken and producing electricity on accident through some alternate method? If the builder can’t tell me why, even a confirmation of energy production will be meaningless to me. I wouldn’t make any investments until we understand why it’s working.

19

Everyone here is being needlessly skeptical.

All you need to do to debunk/measure it correctly is

  1. you need a measuring device of some sort that can measure the energy flow to the load. A volt/ampmeter does it, there’s other methods.

  2. You need to be allowed to physically verify there are no external wires. The inventor can hide the device in a black box you can’t open, but you need to be allowed to check the boundaries of the box.

  3. The load must remain connected for a sufficient time period to exhaust any possible method of chemical energy storage.

Now you know the scammers have either hidden an RTG in there or they are really on to something. If you can measure the mass of the black box (and bring a geiger counter along) you can exhaust the possibility of it being an RTG.

A “theory” doesn’t do anything for you. At one point in the recent past, known science had no correct theories for nuclear energy. At one point in the recent past, aspirin worked via an unknown “black box” mechanism. Similarly, if you polled all the “credible” scientists in 1910 and explained the concept of the fission bomb, the majority of them would likely seriously doubt that it was even possible.

So it’s possible the scammers are on to something, you just need to go about testing properly.

20

Actually, yes. We know from e=mc^2 that ordinary matter hides more energy than we as a species could ever use. So far, the only known methods to release this energy are inefficient and require dangerous exotic conditions (fission/fusion), however, it’s definitely theoretically possible that other ways exist.

The theory behind “cold fusion” is that a metallic lattice can result in localized energy states sufficient to allow fusion. This is probably bunk, but it’s not a violation of the second law. The energy isn’t free, either, the metal is slowly consumed over time.