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The Online-Magazine
of the DATADIWAN
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Issue Nr. 1 / March
1998 - ISSN 1435-1560
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The Online-Magazine
of the DATADIWAN
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Issue Nr. 1 / March
1998 - ISSN 1435-1560
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First published in German under the title „Strom aus dem großen
Nichts?" in Esotera, No.11, November 1993. Presented here with a February
1998 update.
| Summary:
Time and again we hear or read about claims of inventors, who believe they have invented machines powered by "Free Energy" from space. Engineers and scientists asked for their opinion about this usually state that such „perpetuum mobiles" (self-powered engines) are not possible according to the laws of physics. Not long after such announcements, we usually read reports making the whole thing appear as fraud or self-deception of the inventors. However, this matter cannot so easily be dismissed. Even if many of these inventions are indeed doomed to failure because of self-deception, fraud, or a lack of technical or scientific knowledge, certain findings of modern physics show that energy from space need not necessarily remain science fiction. Keywords:
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Table of Contents:
The Swiss „Raum-Quanten-Motor"
(Space Quantum Motor)
The RQM shareholders’
meeting in September 1997
The RQM testing station
in Switzerland
The state of affairs in
February 1998
A converter boom
since the end of the 1980s
Tesla - The ancestor of „free
energy" research
T.H. Moray’s „Radiant
Energy Device"
The Coler Converter
The Biefeld-Brown
Effect
The working
principles of space-energy converters
Impossible according
to the laws of physics?
Modern physics and the energy
of space
The „zero-point energy"
of the vacuum
Solution to the energy crisis at hand?
Bibliography
Definition of "Free Energy"
The Swiss „Raum-Quanten-Motor" (Space
Quantum Motor)
„Electric Current from the Great Naught" Swiss newspapers announced
in their headlines in June, 1993, when reporting about a company from Rapperswil
on the lake of Zurich, Switzerland, looking for investors for the development
and production of their „Space Quantum Motor". In a glossy prospectus,
the company promises an „epochal trend-shift in energy production", which
will replace nuclear and water power plants and will be more economical
than solar energy. From mid-1994, they intend to be on the market with
the domestic model RQM25 with an initial output of 20-30 kilowatts and
with the bigger model RQM200 with an output of 190-210 kilowatts.
However, given the fact that Jean-Marie Lehner, the principal shareholder
and managing director of the company, „Raum-Quanten-Motoren AG", is connected
to the circle of the dubious Swiss financial adventurer Werner K.Rey, some
observers suspect the company may not at all intend to provide a "solution
to all energy problems", but may have the sole purpose of making a lot
of money. Although the company RQM is still operating, the „epochal trend-shift
in energy collection" by the Swiss space-quantum motor still has not occurred
in February 1998, five years after the publication of the paper. What has
happened in the mean time?
| Current Affairs
The RQM Shareholders’ Meeting in September 1997 In September 1997, Jean-Marie Lehner, president of the board of directors and managing director of RQM Raum-Quanten-Motor AG at Rapperswil, Switzerland, invited the shareholders for the 4th regular shareholders’ meeting to Jona near Zurich (see Schöttl, 1997). In spite of the many critical questions from the 200 shareholders as to when the production and sale of the apparatus would be taken up and bring the long-desired dividend, Lehner managed with eloquence and tactical cleverness to obtain another raising of the stock from 4 to 6 million Swiss franks. He argued RQM was in need of new capital for the quick solution of the technical problems which repeatedly had occurred but basically were manageable. The biggest shareholder, the Leipzig company Genova, holding 25% of RQM with an investment of 4 million franks, presently was not willing to pay in additional funds. They now have massively lost voting power through the raising of the stock. The creation of new shares reserved for the RQM staff which would have shifted the voting balance to the advantage of the staff was not accepted by the shareholders. Like the raising of the stock, it was supposed to prevent the alleged unfriendly takeover by some „raider". The RQM Testing Station in Switzerland
The State of Affairs February 1998
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The most well-known of these converters probably are the so-called „Testatika" machine, developed by Methernitha, a religious community in the Emmental, Switzerland (Kelly & Bailey, 1991) and the so-called „N machine", developed in 1977 by the American, Bruce dePalma (dePalma, 1991). The Testatika consists of two contrarotating acryl disks of 80 cm diameter, an electrical circuit and a special kind of crystal-diode rectifier, and is said to produce an output of some kilowatt-hours of direct current of 10 amperes and a voltage of 250 volts at a certain rotary velocity, by separating electrostatically positive and negative aerions. The apparatus only has to be set in motion by hand at the beginning, and then operates by itself.
In Europe, N machines have been reproduced and tested from the late 1980’s onwards by a German company at Dillingen on the Danube and on the occasion of a diploma thesis at the Higher Technical Institute in Wintherthur, Switzerland (Schöttl, 1989). They are based on a magnetic field which is rotating and spatially variable and is said to produce more electric power than is needed for its driving by an effect which was unknown to physics until now. At the beginning of the 1980s, a motorbike was seen in Munich whose motor was supplemented by a device for improving its efficiency.
In 1989, the press announcement was given about the development of an energy generator based on high-frequency plasma discharges by the Russian plasma physicist Aleksandr V.Chernetskii, a professor at the Georgi Plekhanov Institute of the National Economy in Moscow (Samokhin, 1990). Plekhanov was reported to have obtained an output of five times the current he used for driving the device, and he believed he still could improve considerably on this result.
Tesla - the Ancestor of „free energy" Research
The first trials to technically utilize the hypothetical space energy
go back to the Serbian-American physicist and inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)
(Cheney, 1981; Seifer, 1996).
In an interview he gave to TIME magazine in 1931, the founder of alternate
current technology said he was working on a new energy source never before
mentioned by any scientist and of high industrial value. The apparatus
he had developed for tapping this energy from space was of astonishing
simplicity and contained mechanical as well as electronic parts. In the
same year, Tesla is reported to have operated a heavy deluxe limousine,
a "Pierce-Arrow", by this device. The combustion engine had been replaced
by an electric motor drawing its energy from a converter of 60 x 25 x 15
cm with an antenna. Tesla maintained the energy produced by the converter
was sufficient to provide the lighting for a whole house in addition to
powering the car.
T.H. Moray's "Radiant Energy Device"
Among the historical examples frequently cited by present-day converter
builders are a number of further inventions from the 1920’s and 1930’s.
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| T.H.Moray standing in front of his"Radiant Energy Device"
Source: Nu Power http://www.cyberportal.net/nuenergy/moray2.html |
The Coler Converter
Another example is the „Magnetic Current Apparatus" by the German
Navy Captain Hans Coler. Developed in the late 1920s, this converter used
magnetically and electrically coupled circuits and worked without any moving
parts. It produced only a small initial voltage but a very high current,
resulting in an overall output of about 6 kilowatt-hours. The apparatus
was tested in 1926 by Professor M.Klose of the Technical University at
Berlin-Charlottenburg and by Professor W.O.Schumann of the Technical University
at Munich, the discoverer of the Schumann resonances between ionosphere
and earth. They confirmed that it worked perfectly but were not able to
explain how the resulting output was produced.
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| Graphical Depiction of the
Coler Converter
Source: The New Physiks http://www.dnai.com/~zap/coler.htm |
The Biefeld-Brown Effect
One of the many unusual and unexplained physical effects used in space-energy
converters has been discovered in 1923 by Thomas Townsend Brown, engineer
in the US Navy, and by Professor Paul Alfred Biefeld. They found that a
condenser with horizontal pole ends, when freely suspended by a string
and subjected to a high electrical voltage, experienced a propulsion in
the direction of the positive pole. If the condenser is lying on a balance
with a perpendicular arrangement of the poles, it is lifted if the positive
pole is directed upwards and becomes heavier if the positive pole points
downwards.
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| The young T. T. Brown in his laboratory
Source: Optical Multimedia http://www.soteria.com/brown/pictures/index.htm |
The Working Principles
of Space-Energy Converters
Since the 1930s, the number of known converter types has steadily increased.
As described in the excellent booklet, „Energien aus dem Kosmos - Theoretische
und praktische Grundlagen einer neuen Technologie" (Energies from the Cosmos
- Theoretical and Practical Foundations of a New Technology), by Swiss
electrical engineer Adolf Schneider (1989),
these are based on a number of different working principles. Already around
1950, Nobel prize winner Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) had said that it
should be possible to use magnetism as a source of energy. He added: „But
we science idiots will never make it; it has to be done by outsiders".
In fact, most converters work with certain arrangements of magnets and utilize some little known effects of magnetic fields. According to Schneider (1989), the converters based on magnetism either (a) convert mechanical energy into electrical one; or (b) produce mechanical energy from the magnetic field by utilizing the attraction respectively repulsion forces of strong permanent magnets; or (c ) directly produce electrical energy from rotating magnetic fields (as does the above-mentioned N machine); or (d) generate electrical energy by periodic time-varying or space-varying of magnetic fields (as in the so-called „Kromrey machine" from Geneva, 1963); or (e) recollect energy from the process of remagnetization (this principle is used by the above-mentioned motorbike and by an invention of the Viennese engineer Franz Seidl).
Non-magnetic principles used are the energy collection by resonance tuning (as in the Testatika, John Bedini’s converter, 1984, see Bedini, 1991, and in the Chernetskii converter), electrogravitation (used in addition to T.T.Brown’s inventions in John Searl’s flying rotor disks), and finally analogous magnetogravitation as used in an invention of William Hooper. In the latter, a strong induced electrical field generates an attractive resp. repulsive force upon electrically neutral matter which depends on the strength of the current. This force cannot be shielded. A last principle, discovered by the Japanese physicist Shinichi Seike, is the production of electrical energy by strong magnetic fields arranged in a special topology. Seike’s devices are said to be able to generate also antigravitation fields instead of electrical current.
Impossible according to the Laws of
Physics?
A fool’s paradise of unlimited energy, almost for free, obtained through
mysterious devices - the technical control of gravity: Such science-fiction-like
claims strongly resonate with primaeval human dreams and are therefore
bound to stir unbelief and scepticism as well. Innumerable inventors have
believed to have found the perpetuum mobile, and the scientific community,
made wiser from such experiences, already habitually reacts with defence,
if not with derision and ridicule. Every single physicist and engineer
has learned that a perpetuum mobile - a machine which performs work or
produces energy from nothing - is impossible, because such an undertaking
is not allowed by the first law of thermodynamics. This „Law of the Conservation
of Energy", formulated in 1842 by Julius Robert Mayer (1814-1878), states
that the sum of all energies always remains the same, and thus energy can
only be transformed into another form (e.g., heat into work) but cannot
be generated or annihilated. The conclusion is drawn that machines with
an efficiency of more than 1 (100%), producing more energy than is used
to operate them, cannot exist. As Gottfried Hilscher claims in his book,
„Energie im Überfluß" (Energy in Abundance) (Hilscher,
1981), this is already refuted by the heat pump which, by the way, first
was developed by Nikola Tesla. Whereas, for instance, conventional electrical
power stations have weak energetical efficiencies of under 40%. With heat
pumps, it has been possible since the 1980s to obtain efficiencies of nearly
2.
According to Hilscher, the energy conservation law is only valid for closed systems and linear effects. But in space-energy converters, especially if magnets are involved, we are dealing with open systems drawing their effective energy from a cosmic energy field, the „gravity field", „tachyon field", or „zero-point energy field". He maintains that the converters produce nonlinear effects which violate the energy conservation law.
Modern Physics and the Energy of Space
The fact that today even renowned physicists at least theoretically
do not exclude the possibility of energy collection from space is demonstrated
by the special issue on „Speculations in Energy" of the journal „Speculations
in Science and Technology" published in 1990. In the light of the recent
recognition of the so-called „vacuum energy" or „zero-point energy" by
modern physics (Puthoff 1987, 1989a, 1989b, 1991;
Milonni, 1994; Powell, 1994),
the energy of space is now no longer a fantasy, and its technical utilization
has become in the least a matter of serious discussion. As to its chances
of concrete realization, the authors of the special issue have strongly
diverging views. For some it is already at hand, while for others it still
has a long way to go.
Although there is no doubt that on its long way through history it
has gone through many transformations of meaning and changes of context,
we may say that the vacuum-energy concept of modern physics is an up-to-date
version of the ancient concept of the „ether". The „akasha" of Indian
philosophy and the „aither" of the ancient Greeks was the „quintessence"
of the five elements from which the material world was composed, and at
the same time, represented empty space and some subtle primeval energy
or substance. In ever-changing forms and by many different names, the concept
of the ether played a role in the physics, philosophy, biology, and medicine
of the occident up to the physics of 19th Century. In physics, Isaac Newton
espoused it as well as later Maxwell and many others for whom the ether
was the carrier medium of all electromagnetic waves (Cantor
& Hodge, 1981). According to general conviction, the theory of
the ether was refuted in physics at the end of last century, when the American
physicists Albert A. Michelson and E.W.Morley, in a famous series of experiments
from 1881 to 1889, were unable to demonstrate the relative movement of
Earth in some ether thought to be stationary - the so-called „ether drift".
In 1905, Albert Einstein, in his „Special Theory of Relativity", which
was based on this result, rejected the idea of an ether and only used space
itself as carrier of the electromagnetic field.
In fact, the existence of the ether had not been refuted at all, nor
by the Michelson-Morley experiments, nor by his theory, as Einstein admitted
himself on May 5, 1920, when he said in a speech at the University of Leyden
that „to deny the ether would mean, in the last consequence, to assume
that empty space possessed no physical qualities whatsoever" (Einstein,
1920). In reality, physics had only liberated itself from the blind alley
of the mechanical ether which had blocked the physics of the 19th Century
and had returned to another kind of ether, more akin to the original Indian
„akasha". The development of quantum physics would soon fill again the
allegedly „empty" space with a new „quantum ether".
The „zero-point energy" of the Vacuum
In 1916, the great physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner in chemistry
of 1920, Walther Nernst (1864-1941), argued that even in empty space and
at the absolute zero temperature point the electromagnetic field must be
in a state of ceaseless activity, the so-called „quantum fluctuations",
and thus still possess a certain energy. However, this „zero-point energy"
(ZPE) remained controversial until Werner Heisenberg showed in 1925 that
its existence follows from the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.
The general recognition of ZPE finally came in 1927 with its incorporation
into the theory of Quantum Electrodynamics by Paul Dirac. Thus the vacuum
is far from being empty - it is, even in the absence of matter, filled
by a „sea of energy", whose density according to cautious estimates is
of the order of nuclear energy. In 1948, the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir
and his American colleague Willis Lamb demonstrated by means of the Casimir
and Lamb effects (which today carry their names) that this energy by all
means has concrete, measurable consequences. The effects have been repeatedly
experimentally proven since then.
At the end of the 1960’s, the American physicist Timothy Boyer showed
that many quantum-mechanical effects can be explained by the interaction
of matter with the ZPE (Boyer, 1975, 1980), and the
well-known Russian physicist and citizen’s rights activist Andrei Sakharov
demonstrated that gravitation may not be an independent force but may be
based on some electromagnetic effect (Sakharov,
1968). It can be understood as a consequence of changes in the vacuum energy
caused by the presence of matter.
Very recently, the vacuum energy has started to play a steadily increasing
role in several fields of modern physics. In this process, the works of
the American physicist Harold E.Puthoff, who developed Boyer’s approach,
have had a strong influence (Puthoff, 1987, 1989a,
1989b, 1991). He showed in 1987 that matter may owe its stability to the
ZPE. The electrons „orbiting" around the nucleus of an atom would crash
into the nucleus if the energy they continously radiate would not be „replenished"
from the vacuum. Puthoff was also able to confirm Sakharov’s view that
gravitation may arise directly from the ZPE.
The new field of Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics, barely ten years old,
finally shows that the vacuum plays a very special role in radiation processes
within small cavities (Berman, 1994). The new
effects discovered by this new branch of electromagnetics possess great
significance both for technology as well as for biology, because the conditions
for their occurrence are fulfilled in cells and other biological cavities,
not least of them the DNA molecule (Popp et. al., 1992,
1994; Bischof, 1995).
Solution of the Energy Crisis at Hand?
Does all this mean the solution of the energy crisis will come from
the utilization of vacuum energy? As Puthoff writes in the above-mentioned
special issue of „Speculations in Science and Technology", in spite of
all the innumerable converters, he could not see at the moment (that was,
in 1990) any clear experimental proofs or any complete and convincing theoretical
foundation for it. He quotes the author of the Russian vacuum book, „Something
Called Nothing", Roman Podolny, who writes: „It would be just as presumptuous
to deny the feasibility of useful application as it would be irresponsible
to guarantee such application" (Podolny, 1986).
Thus until further notice, hydrogen, solar, wind and tidal energy, will
remain the only renewable and clean alternatives to nuclear and fossil
energy sources.
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Translation and Copyright: 1998 Marco Bischof
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The concept subsumes „Methods of energy generation that produce a net energy (the output) which exceeds the total energy input by some measurable quantity (the so-called „over-unity effect"), thus activating some potential energy in the environment" (Valone). Conventional examples are the heat pump (originally invented by Nikola Tesla), solar and wind energy, and the conversion of thermal energy from the sea. However, in the Frontier Sciences other kinds of „Free energy" technologies play a more important role, the so-called „non-conventional energy technologies". They are „unusual or unique methods for energy generation which anticipate or necessitate a further development in theoretical physics" (Valone). The most important group of these methods is based on extensions of the theory of electromagnetic theory and/or the theory of relativity which allow the hypothesis of energy generation from the vacuum, the so-called „empty space" of physics. They include, for instance, Thomas E. Bearden’s „scalar wave" theory and the Russian „torsion field" theories.
Bibliography:
Bischof, Marco: Strom aus dem Großen Nichts?. Esotera
Nr. 11 (1993), pp. 92-97.
Valone, Thomas: Non-conventional energy and propulsion methods.
Proc. 26th IECEC, Vol.4 (1991), p. 440.
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