Posted by Joel L. Lewis (24.197.38.131) on May 14, 2003 at 13:18:52:
In Reply to: Re: Time to ditch 'O/U'? posted by Joel L. Lewis on May 14, 2003 at 13:14:14:
Whoops-every time I say 'Times article' in that last reply, I mean 'Discovery article'. Sorry 'bout that.:-)
: I don't think we can affect our 'supply' of gravity. It seems to me that that is rather like being concerned about using up our 'supply' of electricity'-it's a question of having the resources to tap it. Another example-carbons, which are the real power source we burn in all fossil fuels. Some of you may have heard about this allready, but for the rest of you: Believe it or not, in last month's edition of Discover they ran a story on an inventor(Ready, at the time of publication, to open his own plant for'full-scale' operation' 'any day now')who had discovered a process for extracting clean, pure fuel oil, kerrosene, and natural gasses from pretty much any organic waste product. Even more significantly, the energy required to run the process is only something like 15% of the energy that can be potentially extracted from the oil-low enough to be run off of the natural gas the process itself extracts! Now, as the material from which the fuel is being extracted is not running the process, but the natural gas extracted BY the process is sufficient to RUN the process, I submit that if this process works as well as is claimed(which certainly appeared in the article to be the case), this man has for all intents and purposses achieved 'free energy'! What has he really done? Fiqured out way to indirrectly extract energy stored up by the Sun(Remember your High-School Science classes?)with a much lower input of energy. As long as the sun burns, thus energizing life and providing such a supply of hydrocarbons, this energy will be available-unless our need becomes so varacious as to out pace such an apparently rapid rate of storage!
: The same goes for any 'Gravity-turbine'-in fact, I propose that the name is missleading, as it would be closer to the process in the times article, in that we are simply attempting to tap stored energy-in the case of the times article, it's hydrocarbons ultimately created by the sun(or more precisely, one could argue, the atomic reactions within the Sun), and in the case of a 'gravity-wheel' it's............MASS. We are attempting to tap gravity, which is created(most substantially-yes, I know that there are other factors such as spin(?) that come into play), or at least made relevent to our 'Newtonian/Relativistic' universe, by mass, and are attempting to convert this force into spin. Just as the Moon's tug-o-war with the Earth does not dimminish it's gravity, nor the planets' the Sun's, so no potential 'gravity wheel' would affect the Earth's Gravity.
: : By the subject line, I do NOT mean it is time to ditch the quest for better energy sources - merely that the term "Over Unity" is deeply misleading....
: : I believe that Bessler's wheel was genuine but I do not believe it was "Over Unity".
: : The term O/U means an excess of output power over input power.
: : Bessler's wheel clearly gave output power, but if you added up all the input power, it would come to a slightly greater figure (depending on the friction / sound losses etc).
: : The key thing about Bessler's wheel was that he figured out a way _CONTINUALLY_ to extract energy from gravity - a "conservative force". That was his great discovery.
: : This certainly upsets ideas about conservative forces, but does not necessarily contravene the 'law' of the conservation of energy because gravity was constantly making good the losses AND providing the putput power.
: : At least, the above holds good in terms of the small scale situation of the experimenter with his wheel. I suppose you might argue that it does contravene the law of the conservation of energy on the large scale because lots of working Bessler wheels will give out energy that ultimately goes into the universe as heat and light. But I would still say that this isn't "O/U" because you are merely cycling energy from one source - "gravity" into another form....
: : In any event, it does raise interesting questions
more misunderstanding than clarity IMHO.
: : Nick