[EAS]Free Energy

[pjk]

Subject:   Free Energy

from
WHAT'S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 27 Apr 01   Washington, DC

[...snip...]

4. FREE ENERGY I: LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS ARE EXPECTED TO SURVIVE.
Many of you have no doubt received the SPAM from a company
offering a to install a "30kW permanent magnet generator" in your
home at no cost.  It requires no input power.  All the company
asks is that you agree to let them sell the electricity generated
in excess of 26,000 Kilowatt hours per year.  The e-mail source
is obscure, but the scam is very familiar.  This was the pitch
made by Dennis Lee in his nationwide tour in 1999 (WN 10 Oct 99). 
The scam was thoroughly debunked by ABC correspondent Janice
Lieberman on ABC Good Morning America (WN 29 Oct 99). 

5. FREE ENERGY II: THE APS AND THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS.  On
Monday, at the invitation of a senior physicist, Bob Park gave a
talk at a retirement community in Gaithersburg, MD.  The title
was "The Seven Warning Signs of Voodoo Science."  To everyone's
surprise there was a group of free-energy hecklers in the back of
the auditorium, including Tom Valone, a former patent examiner,
who in 1999 organized a Conference on Free Energy (COFE)held in
Washington, DC (WN 05 Mar 99).  Today, an e-mail announced that,
at the invitation of APS member Scott Chubb, Valone will give a
talk at the APS meeting in Washington, DC, "to protest the
treatment I received from Robert Park upon organizing COFE."

THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY (Note: Opinions are the author's,
and are not necessarily shared by the APS, but they should be.)

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"Free energy" was one of the rallying cries of Nikola Tesla
(1856-1943). I doubt today's free energy proponents will leave us in
the end as durable a legacy as Tesla did, with his invention, while
still a student, of alternating-current generators, transformers and
motors. To these George Westinghouse bought the patent rights in 1885.
Despite a titanic struggle with Edison's direct-current system, the
Tesla-Westinghouse approach prevailed.  --PJK