Those Pesky Laws of Physics
Here’s a little discussion on Facebook, based on this video:
A lady writes: Cool idea to put the kids to work…. now we just need a storage battery!
Craig: Sorry to break it to you, but this is a fraud.
Lady: I don’t know about the feasibility of launching it and sustaining it over time, but it looks like a real concept that has been proposed to several international foundations, e.g., http://news.nationalgeographic.com/…/151006-energy…/
Craig: It doesn’t matter who endorses it; it violates the laws of physics. Trained cyclists produce about 400 Watts, so 0.4 kWhrs in an hour. The average house uses 30 kWhrs/day. At most, you’d be generating 1/75th of what you need.
Yes, sadly we can’t create energy out of nothing, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying for thousands of years. Sometimes it is based on a fuzzy kind of logic: Why can’t we just put a wind turbine on an electric car and make enough electricity so that it can go forever? Why can’t we make a motor out of magnets that can go forever?…Hoaxes and scams are built on these confusions.
It is can be difficult to understand the difference between energy from within a system and energy that is outside of a system. This makes a significant difference because our laws of thermodynamics only refer to energy within a system. There is always the possibility that we can begin to harness a new energy source or avoid the effect of an existing one: (meta materials and gravity, harnessing the Earth’s magnetic field, the static charge found in humidity…
Unfortunately it is part of human nature that as soon as something new is discovered scammers are sure to follow.
If I had my way, physics would be a required subject both in high school and in college.
Yep. There is a lot of energy out there in the universe to be harnessed. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’re all that close to making that happen.
Such a generator could make a useful contribution in an off grid third world situation where demands are very limited – a couple of LED lights, a phone charger, a radio, maybe a small television