26 March 2012
The Latest Perpetual Motion Fraud
Posted by Dan Satterfield
I spotted an advert on the MSNBC website over the weekend that had all the signs of an “energy fraud”. These outfits promise you can outwit the high prices of fuel, electricity etc. and make your own energy for next to nothing! This one is much the same as all of them. These type of hoaxes tend to always have a few things in common.
This is the advert for the so-called Johnson Motor. It promises to cut your electricity bill by 70%! Trust me, it won't.
1. An inventor has discovered some fantastic new method of making energy, but the big oil companies, government, or some other conglomerate is trying to keep the word from getting out.
2. They almost always invoke the little guy versus the big guy, and talk about a conspiracy by the government against their product.
3. Many, and this one included, claim to have invented something that uses perpetual motion.
4. The people behind these hoaxes produce a ton of blogs, and fake websites that will pop up if you google their product. They even produce reassuring sites that pop up if you put the word hoax or scam in front of the name!
5. Most importantly of all, almost all of these hoaxes fail the requirement of the second law of thermodynamics.
These fraudsters know their demographic. Males with lower than average formal education who have a very strong distrust of government. People like your Uncle Charlie who’s building a new fall out shelter, and does a web page on chem-trails. He is just the guy these folks are looking for!
I googled "Johnson motor scam". Only 2 sites had the real truth on page one.
In other words, the conspiracy theory types who believe climate change and the moon landing are government hoaxes.
To understand why these perpetual motion machines cannot and never will work, you need to consider the second law of thermodynamics. The easiest and most simple way to state it is:
1. You can’t win
2. You can’t break even.
3. You will always lose and you cannot get out of the game.
Seth Lloyd a professor of thermodynamics at MIT wrote the following in Nature: “Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don’t have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0NBosKaznA
A good primer on the second law is here. I did not know until today that some people believe the second law makes evolution of species impossible.
ROFL.
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.
Just another get-rich-quick- scheme— the economy is so bad, these people think of only themselves and try to relieve everyone else of their money… Sadly, lots of people will believe them..
Any time an ad starts off with “X hates this” or “X doesn’t want you to know about…”, where X = doctors, real estate agents, scientists of various types, corporations etc, then you can be pretty sure it’s a scam.
I am seriously into this controversial business. Not selling any books, videos, nothing.
There are many honest people trying to debunk perpetual motion. They have no leg to stand on, except political or religious one. Suppose they are corect. Still, they cannot be trusted because they select the supporting evidence very selectively. very few have no axe to gring, which includes favours from the scientific establishments and bosses of Universities.
I do not claim, in the same fashion, omnisccience.
You may be curious, visit section “perpetuum” in my web site, PDF books
Regards,
Oldrich
This most definitely IS a scam.
I decided to give it a shot to see if it could actually work even to a small degree.
Their videos proved to be totally misleading and when contacted with a question about it, they provided zero support and were completely deflective in the only answer they would give.
They do however put you on their mailing list to try and suck you in to even more of their scam but I sent them a notice that they might as well remove me from their list, and that I would put the word out to all those that I personally know who were interested in this project and post a notice about this fraud on the web as well.
The picture in the ad is of a WarP11 Series Wound DC Motor designed for electric cars. They are about $3,000 and useful for making your own SMALL car run on electric power. There is no documentation on using them as generators.
Looking for info on Richard William Johnson, who invented and patented a device also called the Johnson Motor – obviously not a perpetual motion machine, but something else.
Has anyone actually tried it?