At the Fringe of Science
by Darren Ashby

Have you ever had an experiment go wrong? Gotten a result you couldn't explain? One may wonder if in our rush to get things done, in our effort to make everything make sense to us, we don't brush aside potentially amazing discoveries.

It is good to keep a healthy dose of skepticism, but opening the mind a crack doesn't hurt either. This experience at the fringe starts with something I saw with my own two eyes.

Strange Things Happen

Several years ago I was employed to design and build various test fixtures for the electronics received by the incoming quality control department. I was assigned to build a motor controller test fixture. I had to create a system that would allow a motor to spin freely, load the motor to a certain current draw, and then stall it completely. This would be done to check the current limit of the controller. All this would be automated to minimize human error in logging the data.

This was quite a project for an EE student just finishing his sophomore year at USU, but I was happy to go for it. I had built over a hundred automated test fixtures by this time for the department. Almost all were state machines controlled with discrete logic. I had gotten this job when I showed an ability to reduce 10 indicator lights to one simple green-is-good, red-is-bad LED signal. Dummy-proof fixtures were the motto from then on. We used state machines because that was the class I was in at the time. We did get into micro-controller systems later on, once the department was willing to buy the Parallax PIC programmer development system (I think I had one of the first ones Parallax made. This was way before their basic stamp!) We also used a lot of LM324 op-amps for various signal conditioning and detecting reasons. I suppose this real world experience at the time of my education really helped drill in the basics. Anyway, rather than prattle on, let's get to the point.

I had some 2 hp DC permanent magnet brush motors at my disposal that I could use to create the load on the primary motor. It was simple to tie the two motors together with a belt/pulley arrangement like this:

Figure 2: Block Diagram of the Loading System

It worked most of the time. Quite well actually, right up until it was time to stall the motor. Just seconds after the motor would enter the stall condition, the surge suppressor would go "up in smoke" followed shortly thereafter by the FET. The original version had 100W surge suppressors, thinking I just needed more power (grunt, grunt) I tried some 300W devices. They lasted a second or two longer. I finally got the "red bomb," as it was called by then, to last a few minutes. To do so took 6500W beasties. For the life of me I couldn't figure out where the power was coming from to kill these parts, the motor would only draw a few amps in this stalled condition. On top of that, the entire machine was powered off of a 15A, 120VAC branch circuit. My boss wouldn't let me spend anymore time on it, and I dismantled it. A tear came to my eye as it died that final death. I had never before lost a design to the "it-will-never-work" demon.

The power problem kept bugging me though, and over time I came up with a partial theory. Realizing this would only occur when the motor was stalled, I thought about the interaction of the magnetic fields in this condition. Essentially you have a coil with pulsing current surrounded by a permanent magnet on either end, like this:

Figure 3: Pulsing Current Surrounded by a Magnet

My very incomplete hypothesis went like this:

The magnetic field would build up pressing against the fields from the permanent magnets, like stretching a rubber band. Then when the FET would open the field would collapse at a faster than normal rate driven by the external magnets. This increased rate of collapse would somehow generate higher than normal voltage spikes that the surge suppressors couldn't handle.

I never investigated further than this thought process, and my work on this idea was limited to a few paper designs of some nasty little surprise shockers that I might spring on a friend or unsuspecting coworker. I always wondered though...

Enter the MEG

A few weeks ago I stumbled onto a web site that showed a Motionless Electromagnetic Generator (MEG). Most of the time I brush this stuff off as crazy or impossible, but this design reminded me of the red bomb experience. Take a look at this:

Figure 4: The Bearden MEG

Here a guy named Tom Bearden (this one was built by Jean-Louis Naudin; he verifies a lot of Bearden's designs) has designed a coil of wire pulsing current against a permanent magnetic field. He purports to generate energy. (Actually they say it taps into vacuum energy, a legitimate quantum physics principle.) Is this what caused the red bomb to burn itself out? All I can say is maybe. I haven't had a chance to build one myself. Take a look at this link if you want to study this some more. There is even a video of it operating at a COP of 1.75. (No that's not the local law enforcement IQ, it's the way these guys describe getting more power out than you put in.) A COP, or coefficient of performance, of 1.75 means you are getting 175% of the power input at the power output. Notice that the leads of the scope go off screen on the video, so the signal could be faked. Email me if you think I should build one. If I get enough responses it just might convince me to try.

Sounds Crazy, Don't It!

Over unity, perpetual motion, free energy, there are all sorts of devices that claim to do amazing things, things that we have a hard time believing. But if you were to go back in time a few hundred years and tell people that there is an electrical force that can levitate trains, I am sure you would get strange looks. So I submit to you: Is there some kernel of truth to this? At the very least, is there something new we can learn from it? I'm not a Ph.D. in electro-physics, and I have to admit that most of the stuff that Bearden explains goes over my head. If any of you can dumb it down for me, please do so. Here is a final link to a lot of links on the MEG. According to this page, even the Department of Defense is looking into it.

One Final Thought...

Many people are considered idiots before they are considered brilliant. Who knows, maybe the red bomb really was ground breaking. Do you think they will let me in on their patent?

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