New Energy News (November 2001)

Scientific Paper
Title	New Energy News (November 2001)
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Patrick G Bailey
Keywords	New Energy
Published	2001
Journal	New Energy News
Volume	8
Number	11
No. of pages	21

Read the full paper here

Overview

This issue of the Institute for New Energy's monthly newsletter — Volume 8, Number 11, ISSN 1075-0045, edited by Patrick G Bailey — is the conference number. Its first half is given over to the 2001 INE/EEMF Symposium held at the Quality Inn City Center in Salt Lake City on 26–27 October 2001: a welcome by Bailey and Hal Fox, the final programme, and a session-by-session summary of what was actually presented. The second half carries a database announcement, five forwarded articles on conventional energy politics and technology, two letters, and meeting notices.

The issue is a useful roll-call. It records who was speaking in the new-energy field at the end of 2001, what each was claiming, and how the INE's own leadership assessed the claims. It also documents the moment the INE closed its device database to the public: the files were re-uploaded with uppercase ".HTML" extensions so that members reaching for the capitalised filenames would get current data while "the general public will not".

Contents of the issue

Welcome to the 2001 INE/EEMF Symposium

Bailey and Fox open by placing the symposium in a lineage: the four International Symposiums on New Energy of 1993–1997, then the INE's shift after 1997 to reporting through New Energy News and to conference proceedings published in the Journal of New Energy, which they note is abstracted by Chemical Abstracts. They list allied organisations — the Advanced Energy Network in South Africa, Antigravity News and Space Drive Technology in Nevada, Cycles in Australia, KeelyNet in Texas, the Planetary Association for Clean Energy in Canada, Infinite Energy magazine, and Cold Fusion Times. Their diagnosis of the field's difficulty is political rather than technical: "The lack of political acceptance seems to slow the progress of the commercialization of these new sciences."

The conference programme and summary

The two-day programme, reproduced in full, ran to roughly twenty papers. Attendance was 40–50. Papers presented in person included Hal Fox on high-density charge-cluster technology; Bailey on the status of the INE devices database; Dan Chicea on electrolysis loading experiments; Moray B King on "Scalar Compression"; Kenneth Shoulders on EVs (electrum validum, his term for charge clusters) with an evening workshop; Sapogin, Ryabov and Graboshnikov on "New Sources of Energy from the Point of Unitary Quantum Theory"; Tom Valone on magnetic motors; Nick Nelson on "Magnetic Vortex Domains and Structures — Insights from Research at the Oregon Vortex"; Hideo Kozima and Warner on cold-fusion phenomena in transition-metal hydrides and deuterides; and Bruce Harvey on "Goodbye Einstein". Bailey's own second paper was "Dangers of Using Volt and Amp Meters to Measure Device Efficiency: Examples of Fraudulent Over-Unity Claims".

Papers sent in but not presented by their authors, and summarised from the floor, included Donald Reed on a new paradigm for time, Kanarev on water as the power carrier of future energy engineering, Chiharu Sano on "Twisting & Untwisting of Spirals of Ether and Fractal Vortices Connecting Dynamic Ethers", Panov on torsion technologies, Ducrey on fusion by sound waves, Mahmoud A Melehy on energy stored in a gravitational field, Dan A Davidson on shape power and on why exotic inventions do not reach the public domain, Don Hotson on Dirac's equation, and Fran De Aquino on control of gravity in photoluminescent materials.

The summary that follows is the most informative part of the issue, because it is written in the INE's own voice. Fox's lead paper claimed that "the greatest discovery of the 20th Century is the multiple, independent discovery of high-density electron charge clusters (HDCC) and their uses", and that after twelve years of searching, four devices with strong commercial potential had been identified. Chicea reported that thin-film metal cathodes gave a higher excess power density. Valone demonstrated a wooden ramp with magnets set along its inside edges, unopposed, up which a steel ball would roll — and Bailey records the open question rather than an answer: "Is the resulting kinetic energy when the ball drops from the other end of the ramp really 'free energy'? Can we close that loop and make a real over-unity device? Stay tuned..." Harvey's paper argued "why we can toss out almost all of Einstein's relativity, and especially the Lorentz Transformation", and to propose replacement electromagnetic equations that would still reproduce the historical data.

Bailey's own contribution is again the measurement lesson: voltage and current meters are calibrated to read RMS values, so that multiplying the two readings gives the correct average power only when voltage and current are in phase and both waveforms are sinusoidal. "Otherwise, anyone can build an apparent 'over-unity' device using such simple math — like possibly the Adams Motor in New Zealand and the new EM rotational device in NE Australia."

Articles

The forwarded articles are all about conventional energy. Phil Watts, chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, is reported telling a UN Development Program audience three weeks after 11 September 2001 that Shell was preparing for the "End of the Hydrocarbon Age", with two scenarios: "Dynamics as Usual", in which petroleum falls from 40 to 25 per cent of global energy by 2050, and "The Spirit of the Coming Age", a shift to hydrogen and fuel cells, backed by a Shell commitment of $500 million to $1 billion over five years. B.C. Hydro is reported shortlisting companies for two demonstration wave-energy plants. A SF Gate piece by Hal Plotkin argues that energy independence is a weapon against terrorism.

The longest article is a reprint from New Scientist on the Los Alamos thermoacoustic-Stirling engine developed by Greg Swift and Scott Backhaus from Peter Ceperley's 1979 travelling-wave idea. The account is technically detailed: helium at 30 atmospheres, a hot exchanger at up to 700 °C and a cold one near 20 °C, a regenerator of about 800 stainless steel mesh sheets with 65-micrometre threads and 170-micrometre openings, a 4.5-metre resonator tuned to 80 oscillations per second, and a slotted "jet pump" disc inserted to cancel the streaming gas flow that had defeated Ceperley. Measured average efficiency is given as 30 per cent, with 38–40 per cent projected. The first application was to be liquefying natural gas at a remote wellhead, producing some 2,000 litres a day.

Letters

A reader forwards a Popular Science advertisement soliciting $5 registrations for a "permanent magnet" generator to be installed free once enough households sign up. Bailey identifies it as probably one of Dennis Lee's promotions and replies at length, urging members to attend the demonstrations and "demand to see proof that 'extra energy' is actually produced by any of his devices — not just by 'meter readings'". He restates the INE's standing offer: a videotape of the device running, with measurements taken by meters and at least one high-bandwidth digital oscilloscope that computes average power itself. "So far, over 10 years, we have not seen one such videotape — instead we have seen a lot of hand waving and religious promotions." Wealthy backers, he says, are ready to write six-figure cheques on sight of such a tape.

Assessment

The conference summary is the issue's lasting contribution, and it is candid in a way that conference reports usually are not. Bailey does not smooth over the fact that Valone's magnetic ramp is an open question rather than a result, and his own paper — delivered to an audience largely composed of over-unity enthusiasts — was an explanation of how their favourite measurement produces false positives. The letter on Dennis Lee is more forceful still: a decade-long standing offer, unmet, is exactly the kind of concrete track record a field this contested should be keeping, and it is to the INE's credit that it published the negative result.

The measurement argument itself is sound and correctly stated. RMS calibration means that multiplying meter readings gives the true average power only for in-phase sinusoids; for a device with phase shift or harmonic content, the product overstates delivered power by a factor readers can be shown. Naming specific devices — the Adams Motor, the north-Queensland rotational machine — rather than gesturing at "some claims" gives the criticism teeth.

Against this the issue sets claims that are never held to the same standard. Fox's assertion that high-density charge clusters constitute "the greatest discovery of the 20th Century" is presented without a single measurement, and the four commercially promising devices are enumerated but not characterised. Harvey's proposal to discard the Lorentz transformation is reported approvingly — "'Goodbye Einstein': I liked that!" — with no mention of the measurements the transformation was built to explain and that any replacement must reproduce: the muon lifetime dilation seen in cosmic-ray and storage-ring experiments, the Ives–Stilwell transverse Doppler shift, and the isotropy limits from modern Michelson–Morley resonator experiments. The paper may have addressed them; the summary does not say, and a reader is left with an endorsement rather than an assessment. The same asymmetry attends the torsion-field, ether-vortex and gravity-control papers listed in the programme, which are catalogued without comment.

There is also a self-inflicted difficulty in the database announcement. Restricting the device rankings to members by capitalising filenames is not security, and more importantly it withdraws from public inspection precisely the evaluative data — interest and commercialisation rankings for some 145 devices — that would let outsiders judge whether the INE's own criteria were being applied consistently. An organisation asking to be taken seriously on measurement grounds is weakened by making its measurements private.

The thermoacoustic engine article, finally, sits oddly in a new-energy newsletter and is the better for it: it is a conventional, peer-reviewed, efficiency-bounded piece of engineering, reported with numbers, and it shows what the surrounding claims lack.

See also

• Patrick G Bailey
• New Energy News
• Hal Fox
• Journal of New Energy
• Moray B King
• Hideo Kozima
• Bruce Harvey
• Free Energy