New Energy

New Energy (also free energy, alternative energy or breakthrough energy) is the umbrella term used in the dissident research community for work on energy sources that mainstream physics regards as impossible, unproven or already refuted. It is not a single theory. It is a loose federation of research programmes — cold fusion and low-energy nuclear reactions, the extraction of usable energy from the vacuum or zero-point field, "over-unity" motors and generators, and unconventional water, hydrogen and plasma processes — held together chiefly by the shared conviction that the accepted account of where energy comes from is incomplete.

Mainstream science's position is straightforward and should be stated accurately. Devices that deliver more energy than they consume are held to violate the first law of thermodynamics; the vacuum's zero-point energy is held to be a ground state, from which no net work can be extracted precisely because it is the lowest state available; and cold fusion is held to have failed the replication test in 1989 and to have earned its place as a standard example of pathological science. Two US Department of Energy reviews, in 1989 and 2004, declined to recommend a dedicated programme. Almost none of this work appears in the major physics journals, and most of it is funded privately or not at all.

The researchers documented on this wiki do not all agree with each other, and several of them are among the field's sharpest critics. What the literature collected here shows is a body of experimental and theoretical work — some careful, some not — that has continued for four decades outside the institutions, and the rest of this article sets out that work.

Related articles on this wiki: Cold Fusion, Energy, Aether, Dark Energy. The full paper index is at Category:New Energy.

Cold fusion and low-energy nuclear reactions

The single largest body of New Energy work on this wiki concerns nuclear reactions claimed to occur at ordinary temperatures. The field is treated at length in the separate article Cold Fusion; what follows is the portion of it that the papers archived here contribute.

Edmund Storms is the most cited experimentalist of the group. His "Cold Fusion: From Reasons to Doubt to Reasons to Believe" (1995) argued six years after the Fleischmann-Pons announcement that the early reproducibility problem had been largely eliminated, that the "nuclear ash" had been found, and that the obstacle remaining was "more psychological than scientific." With Brian Scanlan he returned to the question in "What is Cold Fusion and Why Should You Care?" (2012), the John Chappell Memorial Paper for that year, which holds that nuclear reactions have been shown to initiate in solid materials without high-energy input and treats the resulting challenge to theory as the interesting part.

Michael C H McKubre, working at SRI International, and Frank Gordon both presented papers titled "How Hot is Cold Fusion?" and "How Hot Is Cold Fusion?" respectively on the 21st anniversary of the announcement in 2010. Both make the same central point: that whatever happened in 1989, the deuterium-palladium heat effect has since been reproduced in many laboratories and reported in a large peer-reviewed literature, across fifteen international conferences and symposia at both the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society. McKubre frames his paper as an attempt to bridge the information gap and to answer directly the question of why some experimenters see the effect and others do not — which parameters control it, how large it is, and what it is capable of doing.

Several papers here address the theory rather than the heat. Talbot A Chubb's "Interface Model of Cold Fusion" (2008) is a variant of Ion Band State theory in which Bloch-symmetry deuterons are modelled in a two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional metal lattice, confined within classical turning points. Bill Stubbs offered a deliberately deflationary reading in "Reinterpreting the Results of the Fleischmann and Pons Cold Fusion Experiments" (2011): noting that the reported energy output was essentially proportional to energy input and independent of cathode size or current strength, he argued that the cathode plays a passive role, and that the reactions are free D+ ions formed at the anode colliding with deuterons trapped in the palladium lattice — not trapped deuterons squeezed together by the lattice. Stoyan Sarg derived a mechanism for modifying the Coulomb barrier from his Basic Structures of Matter framework in "Theoretical Feasibility of Cold Fusion According to the BSM – Supergravitation Unified Theory" (2011), arguing that a theory built on high-temperature fusion cannot in principle explain the low-temperature case. Wladimir Guglinski connected the field to Kozyrev's macroscopic nonlocality in "Forecasting Effect of Macroscopic Nonlocality: A Cold Fusion Manifestation?".

Experimental and review papers in the archive include Hideo Kozima, J. Warner and G. Goddard's "Cold Fusion Phenomenon and Atomic Processes in Transition-Metal Hydrides and Deuterides" (2001), which catalogues the characteristics any explanation must account for — sporadic occurrence, qualitative rather than quantitative reproducibility, and localisation of nuclear products in micron-scale surface regions; the Italian ENEA group's "Experimental Evidence of 4He Production Cold Fusion Experiment" (2002), reporting simultaneous excess enthalpy and helium-4 from a one-dimensional palladium stripe cathode once the deuterium-to-palladium ratio exceeds unity; and Xiaoling Yang, George H. Miley and Heinz Hora's "Condensed Matter Cluster Reactions in LENR Power Cells for a Radical New Type of Space Power Source" (2009), on multilayer thin-film and nano-particle electrodes designed to enhance cluster formation. James J. Hurtak and Patrick G Bailey reviewed the international experimental results in "Cold Fusion Research: Models and Potential Benefits" (1996).

The institutional history of the field is documented here as well. John M Bockris, whose own group at Texas A&M was one of the earliest to take up the work, wrote the first-hand account "Accountability and Academic Freedom: The Battle Concerning Research on Cold Fusion at Texas A&M University" (2000). Jed Rothwell reported the state of play from the Fifth International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF5) (1995), including a live demonstration and results from Osaka National University, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, NTT, KEK, Los Alamos and BARC. With Eugene Mallove and Adolf Schneider he compiled the "Cold Fusion and New Energy Technology Resource Guide" (1995). Mallove himself, in "Government Funding For LENR" (1999), pointedly declined the suppression narrative on one occasion: reporting that George Miley had received a Department of Energy grant to study LENR, he wrote that congratulations were in order and that the proposals had been rigorously reviewed. Bailey's "Cold Fusion: Fire From Water" (1999) notice records the documentary of that name issued by Infinite Energy. Sarg's "Cold Winter after Progress in Cold Fusion" (2012) is an essay on why, in his view, promising results in Italy did not translate into institutional uptake.

Zero-point and vacuum energy

The second major strand seeks the source of usable energy not in the nucleus but in the vacuum. Zero-point energy (ZPE) is the residual electromagnetic energy that quantum theory assigns to empty space even at absolute zero; the New Energy claim is that it is physically real rather than a formal artefact, and that it can in principle be tapped.

Setterfield's varying zero-point energy

Barry John Setterfield is the most prolific contributor to this wiki on the subject, with seven papers here, and his programme is the most systematic. It rests on stochastic electrodynamics (SED), the classical alternative to quantum electrodynamics in which the ZPE is treated as a real electromagnetic sea and quantum effects on atoms are derived from its action on charged point particles. Setterfield's distinctive move is to argue that the strength of the ZPE has increased over the lifetime of the universe, as a consequence of cosmic expansion, and to follow the consequences of that single assumption across physics.

With Daniel Dzimano he set out the cosmological case in "The Redshift and the Zero Point Energy" (2003), arguing that the two standing redshift anomalies — Tifft's quantized redshift and the breakdown of the redshift-distance relation revealed by distant Type Ia supernovae — both admit a resolution if the energy density of the vacuum ZPE has changed with time. He developed the atomic side in "Zero Point Energy and the Redshift" (2010), where the stability of atomic orbits is made dependent on ZPE strength; in "Zero Point Energy and Subatomic Particle Mass" (2011), which takes up the "bare" or intrinsic mass term normally ignored in the SED equations; and in "Zero Point Energy, Light and Time" (2012), which traces the effect of a varying ZPE on Planck's constant, the speed of light, rest masses, and the ticking rate of atomic and radiometric clocks.

Two further papers extend the model outward. "A Plasma Universe with Changing Zero Point Energy" (2011) applies it to plasma astronomy, since a weaker ZPE in earlier epochs implies higher voltages, stronger currents and faster electric and magnetic interactions than at present. "Zero Point Energy and Giantism in Fossils" (2011) argues that the same reduction in current strengths and interaction speeds applies to living systems, and offers it as an account of the giant flora and fauna of the fossil record. In "Zero Point Energy and Relativity" (2012) Setterfield takes the argument to relativity itself, contending that the vacuum properties SED assigns to the ZPE satisfy every criterion the Michelson-Morley experiment imposed on the aether, and that the main predictions of special relativity follow from a real vacuum energy without the postulates. The whole programme is drawn together in the 465-page "Cosmology and the Zero Point Energy" (2013).

Other vacuum-energy work

Thomas F Valone has approached the vacuum from the applications side. "Understanding Zero Point Energy" (1999) is an attempt to say plainly what ZPE is and is not, distinguishing the virtual-particle and van der Waals contributions and noting that its estimated energy density exceeds nuclear densities. "Quantum Vacuum Zero Point and Negative Energy: Theory and Applications" (2011) makes a concrete proposal: that the built-in voltage potential of certain semiconductor p-n junctions and rectifying devices could generate DC electricity at zero bias in the presence of the Johnson and 1/f noise that Koch measured in solid-state devices in 1982.

Moray B King works on the activation rather than the rectification of the vacuum. "Scalar Compression" (2001) surveys the technique of impressing opposing electric or magnetic fields so that the field lines cancel and leave a pure pulsed scalar potential — using caduceus and bifilar coils, or abruptly bucking magnets — and argues that the largest effects should occur when a symmetric shell of charged plasma implodes, connecting the idea to sonoluminescence and solar flares.

Harold E Puthoff, one of the founders of the modern SED literature, issued "The 1-Watt Challenge" (1994) through the Space Energy Journal: a demand that claimants demonstrate a self-sustaining device producing one continuous watt. It remains the field's most-quoted internal test.

The remaining papers approach the vacuum theoretically. Richard Oldani's "Quantum References: The Determination of a Zero Point in Quantum Systems" (2003) replaces Heisenberg's microscope with an ideal radar system at the coordinate origin, and finds a minimum uncertainty arising from the physical extension of the photon in space-time. Hossein Javadi and F. Forouzbakhsh's "Zero Point Energy and the Dirac Equation" (2007) derives the ZPE from a redefined graviton carrying charge and magnetic effects. David G Yurth's "Y-Bias & Angularity" (2006) proposes a self-organizing-criticality model running from the zero point outward. Dan A Davidson ties the vacuum back to the older tradition in "Free Energy, Gravity and the Aether" (1996), treating the aether as a superfluid medium underlying both gravitation and free-energy effects. Bill Ramsay documented Gregory Hodowanec's Rhysmonic Cosmology as a New Energy framework in "'New Energy' and Hodowanec's Rhysmonic Cosmology" (1999). John V. Milewski's "What is Zero Point Energy?" (2015) complains that the energy talks all invoke a "sea of energy" without ever saying what it is made of, and attempts a definition.

Not everyone here is persuaded. Friedwardt Winterberg's "Wheeler's Geometrodynamics and the Zero Point Vacuum Energy" (1992) shows that Wheeler's claim — that a zero-point vacuum energy of mass density 10⁹⁵ g/cm³ is compensated by negative gravitational energy between Planck-length fluctuations — is untenable. This is a technical result against the standard picture of the vacuum, not against the New Energy programme; but it illustrates that the vacuum energy is contested on this wiki in both directions.

Over-unity devices and magnetic motors

The most contested area of the field concerns machines said to deliver more energy than is put into them. The papers here divide sharply between mechanical analyses, device documentation, and sceptical test reports.

Jovan Marjanovic has contributed three papers offering a mechanical rather than electromagnetic route to over-unity. "Basic Principles of Construction for Over Unity Electro Motors and Generators" (2009) sets out design principles based on unbalanced magnetic forces and movable magnetic shields. "Angular Momentum, Parametric Oscillator and Over Unity" (2010) advances his central claim: that in the part of a system where conservation of angular momentum holds, conservation of total energy does not, and that a pendulum driven as a parametric oscillator can therefore yield an energy surplus. "The Secret of Free Energy from the Pendulum" (2011) works out how pendulum length and the critical angle at which the pivot begins to move determine the maximum over-unity quotient. Nebojša Simin analysed the related two-stage oscillator of the Serbian inventor Veljko Milkovic in "Free Energy of the Oscillating Pendulum-Lever System" (2007), separating orbital from radial damping in a pendulum-lever device.

The wiki also preserves primary documentation of the classic devices. Mark M Hendershot contributed "From the Archives of Lester J. Hendershot" (1994), a son's account of his father's generator drawn from the family papers. Martin Holwerda compared that machine with a second in "Hendershot and Prentice Generators" (1992), concluding that both claim to draw energy from the natural earth environment in the manner of T. Henry Moray's work, and that the Prentice device is the easier of the two to replicate and understand. Walter L Rosenthal documented Floyd Sweet's Vacuum Triode Amplifier — two ferrite magnets and a small number of coreless coils, claimed to be self-powered and to produce over a kilowatt of 120 V 60 Hz output — in "Floyd Sweet's VTA Unit" (1993). Gaston Burridge wrote up "The Smith Coil" (1979) of Wilbert B. Smith, placing it alongside the Hendershot motor and the Moray apparatus as devices that had resisted explanation. Jeane L Manning told the Moray story itself in "Gunfire in the Laboratory: T. Henry Moray and the Free Energy Machine" (1994), reprinted in Suppressed Inventions. Harold Aspden recounted his own involvement with Robert G Adams's motor, and the 1993 Colorado "think tank" that preceded a New Energy Symposium, in "The Adams & Aspden Motor Patent" (1996), where his contribution was on magnetism and the aether as an energy source.

Hal Fox attempted a commercial assessment in "New Energy Devices That Will Change The World" (2001), selecting four technologies out of twelve years of survey work: Kenneth Shoulders's high-density charge clusters, Randell Mills's below-ground-state hydrogen, the Russian Koldamasov device, and one further candidate.

Water, hydrogen and plasma

A fourth strand looks for anomalous energy in water and hydrogen rather than in vacuum or lattice.

Peter Graneau is the most substantial contributor. His work grows out of a conceptual objection: "Red and Green Potential Energy" (1997) observes that physics developed for 170 years after the Principia with very little thought given to energy at all, that the conservation principle dates only from Helmholtz's 1847 lecture, and that a paradox lurks in the treatment of positive and negative potential energy inherited from F. E. Neumann. Readers of the Energy article on this wiki will recognise the complaint. In "The Alternative to Nuclear Energy" (2008) Graneau sets his water-based programme against the nuclear power industry, which he treats as the significant "new energy" development of the past century and as one whose difficulties — proliferation above all — were never resolved by the "atoms for peace" campaign.

Philipp M Kanarev argued in "Water Is The Main Power Carrier Of Future Power Engineering" (2001) that the failure of controlled thermonuclear fusion to deliver after twenty-five milliard dollars is a symptom of theory lagging behind engineering, and that water is the power carrier that should be pursued instead. With Tadahiko Mizuno he reported in "Cold Fusion By Plasma Electrolysis of Water" (2003) that plasma electrolysis of water transmutes the atomic nuclei of alkaline metals and of the cathode material, generating excess gas — a result which straddles this section and the cold fusion one above.

Stanley A Meyer documented his "Hydrogen Fracturing Process" (1990), in which an electron extraction circuit is used to remove and consume electrons dislodged from gas atoms, driving the gas into what he called a "critical state" of highly energised atoms with missing electrons, maintained by pulsing at resonant frequency. Alexander A Scarborough, better known on this wiki for abiogenic petroleum, contributed to the Alternate Energy Sources series of the Clean Energy Research Institute at the University of Miami with "Alternate Energy Sources VI" (1976), on wind, ocean, nuclear and hydrogen sources.

Replication, testing and the internal critics

New Energy is unusual among the subjects on this wiki in that its most valuable papers are often the negative ones, and its own literature contains sustained internal criticism.

The clearest case is Robert Kincheloe's "Homopolar 'Free Energy' Generator Test" (1986). Invited in 1985 to test a machine claimed to show free-energy behaviour in a Faraday homopolar generator, Kincheloe reported plainly that "it did not perform as claimed" — and then reported, equally plainly, that repeatable data nonetheless showed anomalous results not conforming to traditional theory, in particular in the relation between extracted output power and the increase in input power. The paper is a model of what a test report in this field can be: the claim fails, and the anomaly is recorded anyway.

Patrick G Bailey and Toby Grotz conducted the field's principal audit of itself in "A Critical Review of the Available Information Regarding Claims of Zero-Point Energy, Free-Energy, and Over-Unity Experiments and Devices" (1993). Reviewing the experiments, motors, generators and demonstrations reported as near-unity or over-unity, they surveyed twenty-six researchers and selected eleven as worth immediate interest and support — a rejection rate of well over half, from inside the community. Their conclusion was carefully hedged: whether a new form of potential energy can be demonstrated and usefully applied "remains to be" seen.

Puthoff's 1-Watt Challenge, discussed above, belongs to the same tradition, as does Winterberg's technical rebuttal of Wheeler.

Conferences, publications and advocacy

The field organised itself through conferences and independent journals rather than through universities, and the archive here documents that infrastructure.

Richard L Hull filed "Reports from the 1994 New Energy Symposium" from the Denver meeting of that year. Charles A Yost, editor of the Space Energy Journal, covered the Third International Symposium on New Energy at Denver in "IANS Conference Summary" (1996), summarising papers on the Correa devices, gravitomagnetics, the hydrosonic pump and pulsed abnormal glow discharge. His companion piece "Fringe Science Conferences" (1996) is an unusually candid reflection on the territory: an engineer and practitioner of hard science, Yost describes attending such gatherings since 1984 and finding them to run together the over-unity and Tesla material with claims about alien visitation and the paranormal — a mixture he neither endorses uncritically nor uses as grounds for dismissal.

Toby Grotz argued the funding case in "NASA To Search For Energy" (1999), responding to a newspaper proposal to convert NASA into a National Alternative Energy Research Administration by observing that the Department of Energy already holds that mission, has spent roughly twenty billion dollars on hot fusion and billions more on solar, wind, tidal, geothermal and biomass, and asking what the results have been.

Infinite Energy, founded in 1995 by Eugene Mallove, remains the principal magazine of the field.

Criticisms from researchers on this wiki

This wiki does not present New Energy as a settled body of results, and the criticisms recorded above come from within it.

Kincheloe's test found the device under examination did not work as claimed. Bailey and Grotz found fewer than half the researchers they surveyed worth supporting. Puthoff's 1-Watt Challenge implies that no device had met even that minimal bar by 1994. Winterberg's paper attacks a standard result about the vacuum energy on technical grounds. Stubbs's reinterpretation of Fleischmann and Pons concludes that the palladium cathode — the centrepiece of the orthodox cold fusion picture — is doing nothing. Milewski's complaint is that the field talks constantly about an energy it has never defined. Mallove, whose reputation rests on the suppression argument, wrote in 1999 that a Department of Energy grant for LENR research had been rigorously reviewed and that congratulations were due.

Taken together these amount to a coherent internal position: that the phenomena are worth investigating, that the great majority of specific device claims do not survive testing, and that the field's principal weakness is its own reluctance to say so.