New Energy News (June 2001)

Scientific Paper
Title	New Energy News (June 2001)
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Patrick G Bailey
Keywords	New Energy, free energy, cold fusion, zero point energy, gravitational constant, fraud
Published	2001
Journal	New Energy News
Volume	8
Number	6
No. of pages	20

Read the full paper here

Abstract

This item is a complete issue of a newsletter rather than a single paper, and carries no abstract. Its contents are summarized below.

Overview

New Energy News (ISSN 1075-0045) was the monthly bulletin of the Institute for New Energy (INE), edited by Patrick Bailey and drawing heavily on material submitted by Hal Fox. This issue — volume 8, number 6, June 2001 — is twenty pages covering an editorial, abstracts, a book review, articles, letters, meeting announcements and an advertisement. It is a primary document of the Free Energy research community at a particular moment: mid-2001, with the California electricity crisis underway, and the newsletter itself transitioning to email distribution in ASCII and PDF.

What makes this issue worth reading is not a theoretical claim — it advances none — but its internal posture. Two of its longest items are attacks on free-energy fraud, printed without editorial defensiveness, alongside a technical letter challenging the measurement of the gravitational constant and an uncritical reprint of a UFO-disclosure document. That range within twenty pages is characteristic of the field's self-understanding at the time: the belief that the physics is genuine coexisting with an unusually blunt acknowledgement that most of what is sold under its name is not.

Contents

Editorial: mid-year insights

Patrick Bailey, INE president, opens with the California energy shortage, predicting rolling blackouts before October and hoping they will "attract more public attention to advanced energy conversion technologies." His practical focus is the INE Database of Devices — then listing over 130 devices ranked on two criteria, "Interest" and "Commercialization" — for which he repeatedly solicits updated data, allowing pseudonyms for inventors so long as the reported data are truthful. He reports that about five devices "still look promising", that one over-unity generator in eastern Australia was tested in person and found "not-so-great", and that others are being tracked down for testing.

Bailey also sorts the responses to the energy crisis into three kinds of people: those who worry and do not know what to do, those exploiting the emergency to make money, and well-intentioned investors. He is explicit that the up-front lump-sum model most inventors want "seems to just never work", and argues instead for funding to prototype level followed by international licensing, with payback over time — "This approach works, and has high integrity."

A second editorial, reprinted from Global Energy Outlook and submitted by Hal Fox, is a straight piece of energy-policy commentary about Senate committee chairmanships, price ceilings, and the economics of supply and demand.

Abstracts and book review

The abstracts section points to the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration profile of American energy use, noting that refining capacity had declined since 1981 following the removal of regulatory price controls, and that April 2001 refinery utilization reached 93.8 percent of capacity.

The book review, submitted by Thomas Valone, reprints a New Scientist notice of Keith Tutt's The Search for Free Energy (Simon and Schuster, foreword by Arthur C. Clarke). The reviewer opens with Nikola Tesla — who "soothed his head with x-rays, attempted communication with Mars and proposed broadcasting power by wireless" — while granting that Tesla originated the rotating magnetic field, the AC motor and three-phase AC. The inventors Tutt covers (the Radiant Energy Device, the N-machine, the Thesta-Distatica, Cold Fusion and its variants, hydrinos, and Zero Point Energy) are said to be, by conventional lights, at least as strange as Tesla, but Tutt is judged a fair intercessor: "vivid, levelheaded and engrossing."

Articles

Hal Fox, editor of the Journal of New Energy, responds to an Economist piece on energy-technology investment. His argument is one of technological risk: the fuel cell is "a hundred-year-old technology" whose non-polluting claim ignores the fossil-fired plants producing the hydrogen, and investors in solar, wind, geothermal, tide and biomass should be aware that new-energy devices could produce power "at a cost that is only one-quarter to one-half of the current cost of power generation". His investment advice is nonetheless hedged with a striking figure: invest early, but only "if you can avoid the 95% scams or systems having little commercial advantage."

Two reprints from The Spotlight follow under the heading Free Energy Fraud. The first, by Eric Krieg — an electrical engineer and president of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking — is a detailed indictment of Dennis Lee, "promising 'free energy in a few months' for the last 15 years": bad checks in the 1970s, a buying-card scam in which one victim lost $65,000 in life savings, mimicry of born-again Christian language and claims of direct revelation, a Washington State consumer-fraud investigation in 1985, and eight felony fraud convictions in California in 1990. Krieg reports that Lee's principal revenue was dealerships sold for up to $100,000 apiece, and that his own standing offer of $50,000 for a demonstration of a working free-energy machine produced only a threat to sue and an accusation of being a CIA agent. The second letter, from an engineer, works the arithmetic on a "free electricity machine" club: at $125 per member and 1.6 million members, $200 million would not cover the plant, presses, dies, assembly lines, installers and trucks required — "thereby causing bankruptcy in the early stages of the process."

The final article, submitted by Josef Hasslberger, reprints at length from the executive summary of Steven Greer's Disclosure Project, which claims insiders can testify that classified "energy generation and anti-gravity propulsion systems" already exist, tapping "the ever-present quantum vacuum Energy State". The document insists these "are NOT perpetual motion machines nor do they violate the laws of thermodynamics", and lists projected consequences: the end of oil, coal and gas; reversal of desertification through cheap desalination; silent above-surface transport; the decommissioning of nuclear plants and neutralization of their waste.

Letters

Bernd Nurnberger, an electrical engineer in Yokohama, credits Tom Bearden's writings with convincing him that "the old EM theory the way I had absorbed it was seriously flawed", notes that five years on "there still is no complete textbook", and raises an interesting question about releasing inventions as shareware or into the public domain rather than patenting them.

The substantial letter is from Pari Spolter, replying to Dezso Sarkadi, and is the issue's one piece of technical argument. Quoting Science (vol. 287, 2000) on the embarrassment that the 1998 CODATA value of the gravitational constant, 6.673 ± 0.010 × 10⁻¹¹ m³kg⁻¹s⁻², carried ten times the uncertainty of the 1986 value of 6.67259 ± 0.00085, Spolter asks whether the tiny torsion-balance deflection is due to the inertial mass of the spheres at all, or to electrostatic attraction between heavy metals. Her evidence is Heyl's 1930 experiment, in which only the platinum small masses were lacquer-coated:

uncoated gold 6.6782 ± 0.00387; coated platinum 6.664 ± 0.003; uncoated glass 6.674 ± 0.00274 (× 10⁻⁸ cgs)

The coated platinum result differs from the uncoated glass at 95% confidence and from the uncoated gold at 99%. She is careful about what this does and does not show — Heyl reported no conductivity measurements, the effectiveness of the lacquer is unknown, the 66 kg steel large masses were uncoated, and the experiment was not designed to test the point — and proposes the obvious control: repeat the measurement with insulated and uninsulated masses. "To my knowledge no experiment has yet been performed to rule out this possibility."

Meetings

Eiichi Yamamoto reports the condolence meeting for Shuji Inomata, president of the Japan Psychotronics Institute (founded 1978), held in Tokyo on 26 May 2001 with about fifty in attendance; messages came from Hal Fox, Beverly Rubik, Brian O'Leary, Toby Grotz, Paul Von Ward, Jeane Manning, Brian Josephson and David Lorimer, and the JPI office was to close. Announcements follow for the INE symposium (Salt Lake City, September 2001), the Ninth International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF-9, Tsinghua University, Beijing, May 2002), the Ninth Russian Conference on Cold Nuclear Transmutation (Sochi, autumn 2001, covering cold fusion, transmutation and ball lightning), and the St. Petersburg Congress "Fundamental Problems of Natural Sciences and Engineering" for 2002, whose seven sections include "Etherdynamics" and "Time and space in genuine universe".

Assessment

As a scientific document this issue makes no claim and proves nothing; it should be read as a primary source on the state and self-policing of the new-energy community in 2001. On that footing its most creditable feature is the fraud coverage. A newsletter devoted to over-unity devices printing four pages naming a convicted fraudster, quoting his victims' losses, and reproducing an engineer's cost calculation showing that a specific offer cannot work, is not behaving like a movement immune to evidence. Fox's own "95% scams" estimate is a remarkably candid number to publish in a fundraising context. Bailey's insistence on a device database with explicit ranking criteria, open to correction, is likewise the right instinct — the field's chronic problem is precisely that claims are never registered in a form that permits later checking.

Spolter's letter is the strongest content. The observation she builds on is real and was widely noted at the time: the 1998 CODATA revision genuinely did inflate the uncertainty in G tenfold after irreconcilable laboratory results. Her use of Heyl's 1930 data is careful, her statistics are stated with sample standard deviations, and she names the confounds in her own argument before a critic could. The proposed control experiment is cheap and decisive. Against it, two things must be said. The suggested mechanism is implausible as stated: an electrostatic effect large enough to alter G by parts in a thousand between coated and uncoated metals would have shown up as a violation of the Equivalence Principle in Eötvös-type torsion experiments, which by 2001 constrained composition-dependent forces to parts in 10¹². And the Heyl spread she cites is more economically explained by the systematic effects — fibre anelasticity, patch potentials, density inhomogeneity in the masses — that have since been identified as the actual reason G measurements disagree; modern torsion experiments do routinely gold-coat and ground their masses, which is close to the control she asked for. Her question was legitimate; the answer has come in against it.

The Disclosure Project reprint is the issue's weakest element and sits oddly beside the fraud articles. Its central move — asserting that suppressed devices already exist, work, and would solve nearly every environmental problem — is exactly the unfalsifiable, conspiracy-buttressed claim that Krieg, two pages earlier, identifies as the standard cover for non-delivery: "These people often hide behind an elaborate conspiracy theory as an excuse for not delivering." No device, measurement, or testable prediction accompanies it. Printing both without comment leaves the reader to notice the contradiction unaided, and it is a fair criticism of the editorial hand that the juxtaposition is never addressed. The claim that vacuum-tapping devices "do not violate the laws of thermodynamics" is asserted rather than argued; the Casimir Effect establishes that vacuum fluctuations are real and produce measurable forces, but it does not establish that net energy can be extracted cyclically, and the difference between those two statements is where this entire literature stands or falls.

See also

• Patrick G Bailey
• New Energy News
• Journal of New Energy
• Hal Fox
• Pari Spolter
• Free Energy
• Cold Fusion
• Zero Point Energy