That’s still not free energy, though. It might be really friggin’ cheap energy, but it’s still not free.
What if the year were 1890, and I had a new energy device to show off. It relies on this “secret substance” that I hide inside a lead shield painted black. I don’t know (or tell anyone) how it works, just that this secret substance will remain warm forever, and I’ve hooked up some kind of apparatus to use the heat to produce usable energy.
No credible scientists of the era have any theories as to some kind of substance that remains perpetually warm. I tell everyone it’ll remain hot forever, and empirical measurements made over any reasonable timespan show that I am “correct”.
How would you investigate my invention? Suppose I will allow any instrument or reasonable inquiry, but I will not allow you to remove the lead shield, as I don’t want the source of my secret substance found until I can make bank.
Some of the “skeptics” here would walk away from a major opportunity. Amusingly, they would be correct in doing so, since my “secret substance” actually has a half life of about 10 years and it’s also very dangerous to be exposed to.
What’s that supposed to argue against, or for?
This is actually well-attested with strength of steel: add a bit of niobium and it becomes much stronger. Professor Poliakov explains it. One can also consider carbon steel, Damascus steel (vanadium), etc.
With specific consideration to Napier’s time reversal, you need to speak to my brother who did his doctorate on that subject.
An important part of the skepticism that your hypothetical anecdote ignores is that major developments don’t tend to happen that way. Your story assumes that decades of understanding, engineering, and technological development could have been replicated by a single person working in secret. A viewer of the new technology would rightly be skeptical of that, and indeed history didn’t play out that way in practice for RTGs or for any other leap in power generation.
A few years ago, my elderly father nearly got scammed by some jackhole selling investments in one of those magnetic-type perpertual motion machines. He met said jackhole at his church, and if I understand matters correctly, the jackhole had been invited to speak to the congregation by the church elders or perhaps pastor. I wonder if it was the same crew?
Yeah, but if they came from the future? Or, wait, maybe they’re aliens and they want to jump our planet ahead so it can join the United Federation of Planets. Or angels. They could be angels, couldn’t they? Huh? Huh? You couldn’t prove they weren’t. So if they were alien angels from the future, they could be giving us this technology and not want us to investigate it because we’re so stupid. What do you have to say then? Huh? I mean, it could happen! I saw it in a video game.
last month I fielded a phone call from my ultra-christian sister and her son about something similar. It doesn’t look quite like the ‘black box’ discussed here, but close enough. She sank her last bit of pop’s inheritance into it. :smack:
its going to be a fun christmas get together this year:eek:
Can you name any particular historical example where a genuine technological leap forward made by a single person was introduced to investors and interested parties under precisely the kind of magic-show conditions that would prevent them from objectively examining claims made about the thing?
Each of your three conditions violates the constraints set out in the OP. And yet they still don’t rule out ordinary scientific mechanisms, as you note.
I think Habeed was arguing against dracoi’s statement that he’d need to see the theory first. I basically agree - the theory would be nice, and without a theory that tells me that it’s probably bogus, but the real proof is in the pudding. Show me that it works, and the theory can come later.
This also applies to psychic experiences, dowsing, and all other kinds of paranormal stuff.
I’d be interested in the answer to that. I always have to wonder in these cases if the people are “true believers.” It’s even more complicated here because there are two orthogonal axes! Are they genuine Christians that happen to have a good scam going? Or do they really believe they have some novel scientific principle and happen to have found that Christians make really good “investors”? Or maybe they really believe in all of it and somehow justify their cheating as being part of the development process and that they can do no wrong because they believe in God.
I know that D-Wave systems initially got a lot of flack for how willing they were to let people play with the actual machine, to verify that it was in fact performing quantum computing.
I think the problem is that they themselves weren’t quite sure and they had probably determined that though the machine is doing something interesting, it wasn’t functionally better than a regular off-the-shelf alternative yet. I think it’s a bit like coming up with a new rotary engine. Theoretically, it’s the best thing ever, but the actual implementation might make it functionally worse than a regular reciprocating engine, with the potential that it can never be made to perform better than one. How do you go about selling something which is legitimately a technology breakthrough, but functionally unimpressive?
Yeah, but in a way Habeed is also backing up my feelings about the importance of theory. Without understanding the theory, we don’t realize that 1) radiation is dangerous and 2) the product has a half-life and is not easily replaced. At full production, under realistic conditions, our employees turn into giant walking tumors and we run out of pure radioisotopes because we lack the infrastructure to make/purify more. Not such a good investment after all. 
There is a certain amount of testing that would satisfy me as an investor even if we didn’t have a working theory, but the OP’s conditions would not meet that threshold. I’d want to disassemble the device down to its components and then have an independent third party re-assemble it to prove that we can replicate the device. In the OP’s limitations, we’re not able to even touch the device.
Maybe you sometimes just can’t, and your potentially profitable idea dies on the vine. But I’m pretty sure the right answer isn’t smoke and mirrors.
Surely your breakthrough doesn’t have to be impressive; it has to be profitable? It has to give your customers an edge. And if you can’t sell it, hire a salesman. Look at Babbage’s Difference Engine and Analytical Engine for one technological breakthrough that failed. Not because it didn’t work, but because it required too much money to make it work. Well, more money than Babbage could get out of his investors, principally the British government.
They’ve been changing the angle of the hydrogen atoms in water for years. For example, this company.
To debundk this device, take a simple ohm meter, attach two vacuum tubes (one to each lead) a and the then attache those to Blue LED at precisely a 37 degree angle. Point this detector at the device. If the needle on the ohm meter doesn’t move, and the led doesn’t glow red, then you point out that you are not picking up any Mu flavored Tachyon Neutrinos, that should be present if there really was a fluctuation in the quantum field he said his device relied on. Therefore it can’t possibly be doing what he says it is.
Let him try to argue his way out of that.
Fool!! You understand Nothing of this!
We use a closed-loop phlogiston process; your laughable “detector” will only detect open loop phlogiston.
That’s why the detector has a Fermi capacitor to detect the gamma radiation induced by oscillating phlogistons.
If you aren’t bounded by the need for accuracy, you easily counter any argument. Just look at any number of Pit threads.