I’ve only recently discovered LibraryThing. It’s a website where you build a library of books you own (or have read), rate them and then receive useful recommendations based on what others with similar tastes like.
It’s noice and I loike it. I loike it a lot.
(If you love to ‘tweet’ and this raises your ire, please don’t leave me angry comments, k thx bye)
Back in August 2006 a company called Steorn took out a full-page advert in The Economist claiming they had developed a free energy device – charmingly called an Orbo – and were looking for qualified scientists to be a part of their validation process. Steorn is based in Dublin, Ireland and is headed up by a guy called Seán McCarthy.
The claim of free energy is a big one. Many people have attempted it – even Da Vinci tried his hand at it – but so far no one has succeeded. Free energy isn’t the same as solar energy or wind energy, it’s an entirely different beast. There is a law in physics called The Conservation of Energy which says that the energy contained within a closed system will remain constant. This is not a law to be trifled with as it has an enormous amount of strong scientific evidence to support it and, so far, not a shred of evidence against it. Some physicists have even said that a violation of this law “would undermine not just little bits of science – the whole edifice would be no more”.
What Steorn are claiming is that they have a device which, isolated from any external energy source, will produce more energy than it requires to run. This is huge. This would solve all of the world’s energy problems. Imagine it; hook this thing up to a 9 volt battery and it will produce more than 9 volts which you will be hook up to another Orbo (or even back into itself, thus removing the need for a battery in the first place) and so on, giving you potentially infinite energy.
So, should we believe them? After all, scientific knowledge is continually being added to and there have been plenty of times in the past where the ‘scientists’ of the day have scoffed at a new idea. Could this be the next major development in our understanding of the universe? A whole new paradigm? They seem like really genuine people and qualified engineers have been singing their praises. There doesn’t seem to be any overt financial scam going on either.
What we should do is be sceptical (or, ‘skeptical’ if you live in the US). This simply means that we should demand good evidence before believing the claim. And there are some strong warning signs that we should heed as well:
My thoughts are that they probably genuinely believe in what they are doing (I like to look for the good in people) but that they are either accessing an external source of energy they hadn’t considered or that they are subconsciously allowing themselves to overlook another critical issue in their excitement. I’m deeply suspicious given their reluctance to demonstrate the technology and their unconventional approach of avoiding the public rigour of the scientific community and instead choosing to talk to the media (who are much more gullible).
I would love for them to have broken a strongly-held law of physics, especially given the potential benefit our world could gain. But I’m going to need some very strong evidence before I’m convinced.
I’ll leave you with Robert Park’s Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science:
Huh.
Saying “WWW” requires the use of nine syllables.
Saying “World Wide Web” only requires three.
Welcome to the Internet.
Yes, yes, we all know that blogging is really quite sad and self-indulgent. It’s bad enough that we all get to babble our opinionated nonsense to the world in a way that wouldn’t be possible if we required a paying audience like times gone by. But what’s with this disturbing trend to blog about blogging and the obligatory monthly stats-round-up of your own position among your fellow bloggers? C’mon.
(I realise the delicious irony that in order to make this comment I also am forced to do it. I apologise.)
I picked up Feynman’s 1964 book, Six Easy Pieces the other day. It has been released as part of a new collection of reprints from Penguin that sell for just NZ$12.95 each and, at that price, I’ll read just about anything.
And what a pleasant surprise!
This is a book about physics which would be enough to put most people off right from the start but it has a few things going for it. Firstly, it’s a pretty thin book (only 138 pages) which, combined with the word ‘easy’ in the title, reassures you that even if you’ve bitten off more than you can chew at least it will all be over in short order. Secondly, it’s written by the late Richard Feynman who, by all accounts was one of the smartest physicists of recent time as well as a damn fine artist and bongo player to boot.
The book is aimed at people who, like me, have a high school understanding of physics but little else. But I’m sure that whether you only vaguely understand that our world is made of atoms or you daydream about quantum entanglement, you’ll find this an entertaining and enlightening read.
As the title suggests, the book is broken into six chapters, each derived from lectures he gave at Caltech. The first, Atoms in Motion for me was perhaps the most staggering. It neatly explains how atoms work and how these workings relate to everything from heat to chemical structures and even why ice expands when cold while just about everything else contracts. Second is Basic Physics which gives a brief history of our understanding of the way the universe works and introduces an enormously useful analogy of science being like observers of a celestial chess game where we begin to notice patterns and rules but are nowhere near able to actually play the game ourselves because every once in a while we observe something completely left-field the equivalent of castling. Third is The Relation of Physics to Other Sciences where we see that the behaviour of atoms helps to explain the behaviour of chemicals which helps to explain the behaviour of rocks and living things. Fourth is Conservation of Energy which gets pretty mathematical but explains the relationship between the law and most (all?) of the equations that underpin physics as well as showing why the recently popular claims of free energy simply can’t happen. Fifth is The Theory of Gravitation which, after explaining the history behind our discoveries ends up concluding that we still have no idea what gravity is. And sixth and finally, the moment everyone waits for, Quantum Behaviour. Feynman walks us through analogies of experiments with particles and waves and then goes on to show that, at the level of the atom, nothing behaves like we expect it to. He shows that the maths is reliable but that we just can’t reconcile it with our natural understanding of the physical world. But all throughout the book he has been highlighting just how much we don’t know and this somehow turns my potential despair at quantum behaviour into a kind of exciting challenge that we can still make headway but that we might have to rely a little less on intuition and more on the evidence provided by experimentation.
In summary, if you spot the rack of bright orange books in your local bookstore, keep an eye out for this one and grab it if you can. It’ll only take a moment out of your life and, if you are only ever going to read one book about physics, this is definitely the book you should read. (I also managed to pick up Pinker’s The Language Instinct from the same collection too – that’s next on my list after I finish Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale and Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel).
Let me know when 3 News gets rid of their intensely annoying and distracting touch-screen graphic system and I’ll switch back again. There’s just no need for it.
These are fairly old but I only just stumbled upon them. Some good insights from David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, Richard Leakey and Jane Goodall on the environment and the future of our planet.
Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe — ninety-six billion planets — into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.
Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment’s silence he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”
“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”
He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.
“Yes, now there is a God.”
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.
In 1973 the BBC released a TV documentary series in 13 episodes by mathematician Jacob Bronowski called The Ascent Of Man. 35 years later I purchased it as a DVD box set on the recommendation of a fellow science documentary aficionado.
It’s extremely good! And I’m not just saying that in the context of the era in which it was produced. Sure, some of the music grates on the nerves and some of the graphics don’t compare to what we are capable of these days but overall it’s got a depth that is often missing from the kind of documentaries found on the Discovery Channel. Actually, I take back my comment about the music; it features music from Meddle – my second-favourite Pink Floyd album – which, for me, redeems a multitude of musical sins.
Bronowski is thoughtful, poetic and very deliberate in every sentence. He gives you the feeling that he is treating you, the viewer, as an equal throughout and he conveys a sense of awe that is impossible to resist.
Most moving for me was a scene where Bronowski is visiting a Nazi concentration camp where many of his relatives were murdered. According to the interview with Attenborough in the bonus material the entire scene was spontaneous and filmed in a single take:
Bronowski died a year later of a heart attack at the age of 66.
