A conventional battery transduces chemical potential into electricity. This new device transduces magnetic potential into electricity. The device's permanent magnet is depleted in a controlled fashion. Eventually the magnet goes dead and the current stops flowing. What we have, then, is a magnetic battery. The permanent magnet may be constructed of samarium cobalt, which resists demagnetization.
One advantage of magnetic batteries is environmental. Isn't it preferable to litter our planet with demagnetized chunks of iron, cobalt, and boron, instead of fermenting battery acid? Forget about free energy, though. Commercially-practical magnets are not born, they are made. Making them takes energy. I suspect that when the energy of manufacturing samarium cobalt is factored into the equation, the performance ratio of the new device falls well below one. Another limitation is the output current. The experimental device produced current by the milliamps. Unless something improves, you won't be using magnetic batteries to start your car or heat your range top.
The White Paper
After filing the patent, Bearden and the other inventors posted a white paper claiming to have overcome the depletion problem. Surprise, surprise: they disclaim perpetual motion to win the patent, then quickly explain away the disclaimer. They now claim a theoretical foundation for operating magnetic batteries (or any batteries for that matter) indefinitely, without depletion. Several of the inventors have or claim to have scientific doctorate degrees and have been active in electromagnetic R&D for decades. Thus, their claims warrant at least some serious attention. Unfortunately, the first thing one notices about the white paper is the lack of scientific rigor. Equations are few and far between. The authors present only basic Maxwellian equalities, without enhancement. Virtually the entire sixty-nine page document is a rambling qualitative discourse. The pages are sprinkled with references to space-time, general relativity, and gauge field theory, in a fashion that can only be described as techno-babble.
I'm no quantum physicist, but statements from the paper such as the following do nothing to increase the authors’ credibility:
In short, the mutual iterative interaction of each coil wound on the flux path of the special nanocrystalline material, with and between the two energy flows, results in special kinds of regenerative energy feedback and energy feedforward, and regauging of the energy of the system and the energy of the system process. This excess energy in the system and in the system process is thus a form of free and asymmetrical self-regauging, permitted by the well known gauge freedom of quantum field theory. Further, the excess energy from the permanent magnet dipole is continually replenished from the active vacuum by the stated giant negentropy process associated with the permanent magnet's magnetic dipole due to its broken 3-symmetry in its energetic exchange with the vacuum.
The thrust of the argument is that any energy potential—a chemical battery, a magnetic dipole, even a rock balanced on a hill—is a limitless well of free energy, if properly tapped.
In effect, the authors are saying, “We can cause electricity to flow forever from a battery by breaking the loop between the plus terminal and the minus terminal.” They dangle the seductive fruit of limitless electricity, but omit the circuit diagram. I, and many others I am sure, would very much like to see how current can flow from a battery without closing the loop between plus and minus.
Qualitative dissertations packed with jargon but short on rigor have long been the refuge of quacks and marketeers. Such packaging gives legs to marginal theories, turning them into greased pigs not easily dispatched by experts in the field. The invention described in the patent is unambiguously a depleting magnetic potential battery. It could be useful, but it's no energy revolution. If the inventors ever receive a patent on a non-depleting version of their machine, the world will pay serious attention. Until then, free energy will remain in the realm of fiction, and no amount of hype will turn a battery into a bombshell.
There is an even deeper lesson here than the folly of chasing free energy. The proponents of such schemes generally fall into two categories: greedy con men, and “hermit scientists.” This latter category of person is often highly intelligent, and is glamorized by such Hollywood movies as Back to the Future. Nonetheless, their isolation, ego, and mistrust of other scientists leads them to abandon rigor in the name of aggrandizement. All of science is interdependent, relying on the critique and revisions of others to correct errors in judgement and practice. The hard lesson here is that when a scientist, even a highly intelligent one, becomes detached from the scientific community, the result can be tragic.
* * * *
Charles Mirho is a patent attorney and freelance author. Prior to becoming a lawyer, Charles was a software programmer specializing in communications and multimedia. Charles has a JD from Santa Clara University and an MSEE from Rutgers. He has published two books and numerous fiction and nonfiction articles. Learn more about him and his work at his web site.
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Figure-Eight in the Sky
A new perspective on an old fascination
By Brian Tung
8/26/02
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
—William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
One of my favorite things to look at when I was a kid was my dad's globe. This was a National Geographic affair; it was not mounted, but instead sat freely in a clear plastic stand. It was also a quality item, and my dad made it clear to me that I was only to look and touch gently, not throw it about like a ball.
I formed all sorts of weird ideas about the globe. It was one of my first exposures to the idea that we were not on top of the world. (I grew up in the Bay Area in California.) Instead, we were at a latitude of 40 degrees, and it occurred to me that we therefore did not stand up straight when we thought we were standing up straight. Instead, we stood at an angle of 50 degrees to the vertical. If we had really wanted to stand up straight, we should have leaned over by an angle of 50 degrees toward the north. As I said, I formed all sorts of weird ideas about the globe.
The clear plastic stand, incidentally, had a number of fascinating symbols and etchings on it. There was a grid of squares, each covering 100 square miles on the globe. There were latitude and longitude markings, so one could see at an instant how far two different cities were displaced in those coordinates.
The thing that fascinated me most about the globe, however, was an unexplained, elongated figure-8 that was unceremoniously placed in the sparse expanse of the southeast Pacific. What was it, I wondered? It had the names of the months marked at various points around the curve, so it clearly had something to do with the year, but what was the significance? Why was it in the shape of a figure-8? What was it doing down there in the south Pacific? And couldn't people remember the months of the year without being reminded by a strange marking on a globe?
I'm sure you're dying to know the answers to those questions (well, maybe not the last one), so I'll give them to you, but let me start with something that seems unrelated at first blush.
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In his Republic, Plato (427-347 B.C.) describes—among a whole host of other things—his curriculum for the ideal schooling in the Republic. One of the subjects to be studied, as a science, is that of astronomy.
We must keep in mind, however, that Plato's conception of astronomy was not what we moderns are used to. The image that most people today have of an astronomer is that of a solitary observer, dwarfed by a tremendous telescope, staring up at the sky in search of goodness only knows what. (As a matter of fact, most professional astronomers today rarely if ever look through the telescopes they use to do their research, but that's a development of the last century or so.) The job of the astronomer is to make observations of the heavens, and from those observations, enhance our knowledge of the cosmos.
That was most certainly not Plato's id
eal. His curriculum was designed in order to form rigorous thinkers, and to that end, the “real” astronomy was not what was up in the sky. The stars and the planets showed inconsistencies that were a result of being sensible objects in the physical world. It would be no more appropriate to study the “real” astronomy by looking up at the sky than it would be to study geometry by looking at the imperfect straight lines and round circles that humans could draw out in the sand. Astronomy was a set of abstract concepts that could only be approached by logical thought. (He would surely have been distressed by Hipparchus's attempt to keep track of the changing heavens by mapping the stars.)
Accordingly, when Plato and his followers sought solutions to astronomical conundrums, the first criterion by which the solutions were measured was not how well they matched observations (although it was something of a consideration of Plato's), but by how elegant those solutions were. For example, Plato and his contemporaries felt that the most perfect shape was the circle. It is as perfectly symmetrical as any shape can be; it is, in a sense, the figure that all regular polygons aspire vainly to be. So, they concluded, the ideal astronomical theory for any problem must consist of circles or combinations of circles.
One such problem was the motions of the planets in the sky. The planets do not stay in place as the stars do, but instead move through the constellations. Mostly, they move slowly from west to east ("prograde” or “direct” motion) as the months pass, but occasionally, they move east to west ("retrograde” motion). Even such an idealist as Plato could not ignore that blatant a variation in motion. After all, the Sun and the Moon don't exhibit retrograde motion, so there was a clear basis for comparison. But Plato was no mathematician—he was an idea man, not an analytical genius. So he was forced to pose this question to others: What theory, consisting of circles, either in isolation or in combination, could explain the apparent motion of the planets?
Eventually, a workable solution was arrived at, centuries after Plato's death, by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy (c. 85-165), in his geocentric theory of the solar system. But long before Ptolemy, other Greeks tried their hand at solving Plato's poser. One such person was Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 400-347 B.C.), a Greek mathematician and a contemporary of Plato.
Eudoxus's idea can be imagined as follows. Suppose that you have, resting on a tabletop, a globe that spins on a tilted axis (unlike my dad's free-standing globe). Imagine that there's an ant walking along the equator. Obviously, the ant retraces its path periodically, and we might call each time around the path one orbit.
Because the globe is tilted, the ant does not stay at the same height above the table throughout each orbit, but rather rises and falls. If at one point during its travels, the ant is at its lowest point, then half an orbit later (and half an orbit earlier as well), it is at its highest point. Midway between these extremes, the ant is at its average height.
Now, suppose that instead of putting the globe on a table, you put it on a turntable, and you set the turntable spinning at exactly the same rate as the ant's walking, but in the opposite direction. For example, if we assume that the ant is walking west to east along the equator—that is, counterclockwise, as seen from above the north pole—then the turntable is spinning clockwise. Then, because the two motions roughly cancel each other out, the ant appears to remain more or less in place (relative to an outside observer).
But not precisely in place. The ant would stay exactly in place if the globe weren't tilted, for then both the ant and the turntable would be moving horizontally, and their equal but opposite rotations would cancel each other out completely. But because the globe is tilted, the rotations don't cancel out perfectly, and the ant must at least be sometimes high, sometimes low. After all, without the turntable, the ant's height goes up and down, and the turntable can't affect the ant's height; it can only move the ant side to side.
Is that all? Does the ant only move up and down, or does it trace out a more complex figure? Now, to make that more precise, suppose you start the globe with the ant on the equator exactly at its average height, and you shine a laser pointer on the ant. (It's a weak pointer that doesn't hurt the ant.) As the turntable rotates clockwise, both the ant and the laser dot move west to east across the globe, but whereas the ant stays at the same latitude (0 degrees, on the equator), the laser dot appears to change latitude throughout its orbit. In fact, since the globe is tilted by 23.4 degrees—the tilt of the Earth's axis—the laser dot's latitude fluctuates between 23.4 degrees north and 23.4 degrees south. Now, the crucial question: Relative to the laser dot, what is the motion of the ant—or just as significantly, from the point of view of the ant, what is the motion of the laser dot?
Eudoxus had sufficient genius for visualization that he arrived at the surprising but right answer. Here's how he might have reasoned. If the Earth were flat, you could walk forever in a straight line without retracing any part of your path. But the Earth is not flat; instead, as Eudoxus probably suspected, it's a sphere. And since the sphere is curved, you can't walk a literally straight line. The curvature of the Earth forces your path to be curved one way or another. The straightest path you can walk is to go around the Earth in as wide a circle as possible. One such path is the equator; you can easily see that by walking along the equator, you are neither turning north nor south. Another way to walk as straight as possible is to start at the north pole, walk due south along some particular line of longitude until you get to the south pole, and then return to the north pole along the “opposite” line of longitude.
Each of these straightest paths is called a great circle. There are an infinite number of them on the Earth, or on the globe, or indeed on any sphere. Each of them has the same diameter as the sphere, and the center of any great circle is the same as the center of the sphere. The ant on the globe traces out a great circle—namely, the equator. The laser dot traces out another great circle, but one that is horizontal and therefore not the equator. Since the globe is tilted by 23.4 degrees, the laser dot's great circle is tilted to the equator by 23.4 degrees as well. These two circles intersect at two opposite points, which must obviously be along the equator, 180 degrees apart. This is the key to Eudoxus's idea.
Suppose we start with the ant and the laser dot at the same spot again. The ant proceeds directly eastward along the equator. The laser dot follows a great circle that is inclined to the equator, by 23.4 degrees, either to the northeast, or the southeast. For the sake of discussion, let's suppose that the laser dot is moving to the northeast of the original starting point.
At first, the ant and the laser dot are still close together, and we can for all practical purposes ignore the spherical shape of the globe, just as, in real life, we can ignore the spherical shape of the Earth when navigating inside our home. Since the ant and the laser dot are moving at the same speed, they appear to be carried along at the edge of an ever-expanding compass dial, as in Figure 1.
Initially, the laser dot seems to be moving mostly northward, relative to the ant. But because the ant puts all of its motion into the eastward direction, and the laser dot only puts most of it there, the laser dot must also appear to be moving slightly westward, from the standpoint of the ant. (See Figure 2.)
If the globe were actually flat, the ant and laser dot would spread out forever, with the dot always moving to the north-northwest of the ant. But the globe isn't flat, and if the ant and laser dot continue far enough, the globe's curvature will come into play.
For example, after a quarter of an orbit, the ant is 90 degrees (1/4 of 360) away from its starting point, along the equator. The laser dot, travelling at the same rate, is also 90 degrees from its starting point, but north of the ant. You might expect that it would also be somewhat to the west of the ant, as before, but it's not. Instead, it's exactly due north of the ant. (See Figure 3.)
What has happened? The new factor is that the laser dot's path is taking it to higher latitudes on the globe, where the lines of longitude are closer together. As they both approach the 1/4-or
bit point in their travels, therefore, the laser dot is gaining on the ant in longitude. This makes up perfectly for the start of their voyages, where the ant moved out ahead of the dot in longitude, so by the time that they have gone through a quarter orbit, both the laser dot and the ant have moved through exactly 90 degrees of longitude.
If we follow their motion further, into the second quarter of the orbits, the laser dot now races ahead of the ant in longitude. But we know that they must meet again after both have travelled through a half orbit; at that time, they must both be on the opposite side of the globe from their original starting point. As seen in Figure 4, from the point of view of the ant, the laser dot must have travelled in a wide looping path, starting toward the north-northwest, then curving eastward, then returning from the north-northeast.
In the second half of their orbits, the exact same thing happens, except inverted. Again, the laser dot, with some of its motion toward the south, falls behind the ant in longitude, and it appears to the ant to be moving to the south-southwest. Then, as it moves to more southern latitudes, where the lines of longitude are closer together, it catches up with and overtakes the ant in longitude. Finally, as its path takes it back toward the equator, the ant and the laser dot meet once more at the starting point, one orbit later for each. (See Figure 5.)
This figure-8 shape is the path that the laser dot appears to take from the perspective of the ant. The amazing thing is that Eudoxus was able to figure this all out without the benefit of actual globes or laser pointers. To him, incidentally, the looping path, retracing itself over and over again, resembled the loops placed around a horse's feet to fetter it, so he called the path a “horsefetter.” Naturally, he spoke Greek, so the word he used was hippopede, pronounced “hip-POP-puh-dee,” from the Greek words for “horse” and “feet."
Strange Horizons, August 2002 Page 4