I'd be giving the patents away...

Thanks e14 for pulling those articles.

I was able to read it when it was first posted and I had a good chuckle. While we have yet to understand all forms of energy exchange and the efficiency of most applications can be much improved on - there is no such thing as "free energy".

I believed that the Sun and Wind are "Free Energy"

While I understand that the scepticism regarding the Michael Hopkins energy recycling dongle I really can't understand the enthusiasm for banning his posts. He has posted links to attempted explanations of his device and I challenge Tim, R_P... or Clemzky to write a brief note debunking them.

It is important that people are allowed the space to promote ideas which most of us believe to be wrong and equally important that the ideas be discussed and the issues properly resolved.

For the record, I don't think that his device will work in terms of recycling energy - it is perfectly possible that he has made real observations which lead him to believe so. After all, as any decent electrical engineer knows, it is possible to connect  a two temrinal device across a two terminal load on and AC supply and reduce the measured current. Only by discussing his ideas and measurements can they truly be resolved.

MK

The prospect of a test has been raised with an element14 staff member in the hope that those who did the harvesting energy challenge may be able to evaluate it.

The reply was to make contact with him and another company to see if the challenge could be done, and get back this week.

I'm not saying it works or not, and I support Michael that having the chance to view and discuss these ideas, can we gain knowledge.

I have seen and reported some other blatant spam.

Looking at the online profile (assuming its not false) suggests its not some flashy scammer,.

History does have some people who were informed that their idea was rubbish/impossible only to have it proven later..... so who knows.

Mark

I second your opinion Michael,

I think that even if it looks like snake oil, it is not completely clear to me that it is. His website and his statement do not reveal anything clear about how it works, but the claims are so large that it shouldn't be hard to verify them.

With regard to the 'free energy': he didn't ever use that phrase. If I recall correctly he's capturing spurious emisions from high speed serial communication, and feeding that back in the 5V connection. So it's a real form of energy harvesting. I'm just very skeptical about the amount of energy he says that he can save. I can't imagine laptop designers are OK with 20% efficiency loss.

The thing is that I can buy an "odd" source of energy. Say the cold fusion bubble from a while back. We know that each atom holds enormous amounts of energy, but that it's kind of tricky to get it out of there. If someone has a trick to do that, fine.

But if you harvest "energy" from "high speed serial communications" you are simply loading those "high speed serial communications" causing them to require more power to begin with.

It is the same with putting a windmill on your car. Sure, you can let the windmill produce electricity, but you're making the motor work harder to allow that to happen.

IMHO, the device is too small to be harvesting say "cold fusion" like energy. And if it's harvesting other stuff it's loading that other stuff so it's just pumping energy around (at a loss during each cycle).

So.... with a little bit of thinking this device can clearly be debunked without a deep investigation.

For people like me with some technical knowledge and a solid understanding and trust in the conservation of energy law it's fun to debunk such a "free energy" claim. Once. Or maybe twice. But then it stops being fun. Physics professors with the same inclination quickly learn that they can get swamped with requests to look at "free energy" devices. And things go bad quickly if once you can't find the hidden battery. So, you have to be careful too. Your reputation as a physics professor will go down the drain if a "free energy" device shows up that has your "approval". (A statement that you couldn't find how it worked will be twisted and turned into an approval before you know it).

Hi Roger,

I think I haven't said anything that contradicts your claims My point about energy harvesting was that he isn't claiming to be creating free energy, just that he's using energy that is otherwise wasted (which is indeed loading the power / data lines, whatever he is using). I think you should be able to get energy out of noise on power lines, and also be able to let a circuit run more efficiently by somehow storing + using the energy normally dissipated in filtering circuits.

I don't think it's impossible.

I don't claim it's free energy

He didn't say it was free energy

I just can't believe the amount of energy he says he's claiming to save, and he hasn't shown 'how it's done'

Those are still no reasons to be happy that a post is removed.

As Mark said:

I'm not saying it works or not, and I support Michael that having the chance to view and discuss these ideas, can we gain knowledge.

if there was that much waste rf energy being radiated from a laptop , the user would be well cooked by now , and never forget the inverse square law for radiated energy , imo the whole idea is ridiculous .

not glowing in the dark laptop user

Roger has an excellent analysis of the situation. We can steal power (energy) from a source and call it free only if we are willing to ignore the price that source has to pay for it. The second law of thermodynamics has been tested and found to be sound. While a scientific person will never close his mind and stop allowing this premise to be tested it, at this point, has a very high degree of certainty. The second part of this discussion is whether there is a place for snake oil ideas on a forum such as this one. To the extent that they generate discussions such as this one it is ok to tolerate it. However we do not want pseudo science and the gullible to take over and dillute this source of scientifically sound ideas and exchanges either. Frankly there is not too much to worry about as it seems that pseudo science has about as much chance on this forum as a guppie in a tank of pirranahs.

John

So far most of the challenges to what I'll call the " Michael Hopkins energy recycling dongle" are based on a sort of common sense application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics - which I like to generalize into the Universal Law of Everything - "There is no such thing as a free lunch".

However, and I raise this in the spirit of debate, it is not obviously a violation of the Second Law for a device to reduce the power consupmtion of a computer - we know that most of the power is wasted as heat and only a tiny amount is actually usefully emitted as visible radiation, sound or electrical signals.

The mechanism suggested by MH seems unlikely for the reasons suggested by Richard.

What I'm really interested in with this and other "controversial" observations is to explain why the observed phenomenon is apparently breaking laws of physics which seem pretty robust. Actual deliberate scams can also be interesting from an engineering point of view because their study can helps us improve our experimental and reasoning technique.

I'm not able to spare any more time for this right now (real work beckons) but I might get back to it later.

I hope that this thread has convinced  a few that it's much more fun to talk about than ban it.

MK