One Little Wrong Assumption...
by Darren Ashby

I must confess, ever since I learned about ohm's law and the flow of electricity, something has bugged me incessantly. When Ben Franklin discovered electricity and likened it to a flow of water he had a 50/50 chance of getting it right, and he got it wrong. Current does not flowⁱ from positive to negative, but the other way. To this day, all the formulas and equations we use accept this wrong assumption. As far as anyone can tell, it doesn't seem to matter. An amp is still an amp no matter how you think of it or the true direction it is going.

I have always wondered if we haven't made some sort of serious mistake. I mean scientists using the assumption that the world was flat came up with all sorts of incorrect theories, but a mile was still a mile. However, what if it does matter, and we are missing something fundamental that could change the way we see the world?

There are some peopleⁱⁱ out there that take mistakes like these very seriously and have concluded that if we could understand this better, we would discover all sorts of neat stuff, like antigravity, free (almost) energy, and many other holy grails of physics. You may have read some of the alternate theories on EM fields and energy that I linked to in my previous article on this topic. I received many emails on this topic, definitely proving it is of interest to my readers out there. One that I particularly liked was from Paul Bugyik. Click here if you would like to read his explanation of the MEG.

As you can probably tell, all this over-unityⁱⁱⁱ stuff is a bit of a hobby of mine. It has been that way ever since my experience with the "red bomb." The trouble is I never seem to get enough time to work on anything but a few thought experiments. Many readers wanted to know if I was going to rebuild the red bomb and see if I could figure out what was happening. Alas that has not come to pass at this time, but maybe that will change now. A friend of mine is building a homopolar motor/generator and he has asked me to help with powering the device and measuring the input and output.

A homopolar generator is based on an experiment of Faraday's (yeah the guy that did all that ground work in electrical theory). First, take a cylindrical magnet and an aluminum disk of the diameter of the magnet. Like this:

Faraday tried different combinations of spinning magnets and disks around the axis of the magnet and got some interesting results.

1st - Spinning only the disk generates a voltage from the center to the rim of the disk.

2nd - Spinning only the magnet (disk is stationary) doesn't generate any voltage. Hmm, that's a little strange...

3rd - Glue the disk to the magnet and spin both of them together and surprise! A voltage is again generated on the disk. Now that's weird!

It was the third combination that really stumped me. I didn't expect that. However, it led Faraday to conclude that the magnet is focusing an external field, one that is not attached to the materials of the magnet directly. That would explain this phenomenon. I tend to agree, and it seems to me that our current applications of permanent magnets do nothing to exploit this oddity. But that is not where the story ends. There are researchers that contend that another interesting thing happens: they say that the force of an additional load on the output is not reflected in a torque requirement to spin the magnet. One particular person touted in the proof of this is Bruce DePalma. Apparently he built a generator based on this idea that output more power than you put into it. I haven't resolved for myself how torque is not reflected back to the input shaft. But I find the stationary flux line concept very intriguing. Could this really work? I don't know, but I may get a chance to find out. I should get my first chance to try it this week. Here are a few links to more interesting stuff on homopolar generators:

http://www.fortunecity.com/greenfield/bp/16/hoprima.htm
Way better pictures than mine!

http://www.altair.org/emag.htm
A good basic background on EM theory.

http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/farhom.htm
Build your own with that old CB antenna in the garage.

http://depalma.pair.com/Tewari/Tpatent.html
http://www.totse.com/en/fringe/free_energy/dpalma5.html
More info on DePalma

http://pixii.com/index.htm
Cool historical links

One thing is for sure...

There are an awful lot of crackpots and con artists out there that are just scamming you for your money. I attended one of these free energy conferences put on by Dennis Lee and I actually saw one of his generators up close. It was a one hundred percent scam. It had all the trappings of a snake oil sale. I volunteered to go up and observe it in operation. When I pointed out obvious mistakes in their measurements, he brushed me aside, commenting that "the techs know what they are doing." So I will say this, take it all with a grain of salt. It could just be wishful thinking.

----------------------------

Footnotes

ⁱ Technically current doesn't even really 'flow' when you get down to the nitty gritty of it. It just appears that way from an aggregate viewpoint. It is really little packets of 'quanta' jumping in one direction, bumping into another packet and making it jump in the same direction. But that just strengthens my point that we need to keep an open, albeit skeptical, mind about alternate and even current interpretations of electromagnetic theory.

ⁱⁱ Tom Bearden is one of these people. He said, "Every electrical circuit and every electrical load is and always has been powered by energy extracted directly from the vacuum by the negative resistor source dipole. That statement is fully justified in particle physics, but not in electrodynamics. The electrodynamicists and leaders of the scientific community have refused to change the flawed foundations and gaps in EM theory, even though a great deal has been learned since 1867 that substantially changes the foundations assumptions used originally to construct the theory."

ⁱⁱⁱ Over-unity sounds so much more sophisticated than free energy. I think that is why the seemingly more respectable researchers in this field use that term.

Product Engineering Archive

Guides and Experts   Analog Avenue   EDA Tools   PLD   DSP   EDA   Embedded Systems   Power   Test