Why Must They Keep Toying With Me?
First, there came the promise of perpetual motion. About 2 years ago, this company called Steorn took out a giant ad in The Economist saying they’d developed a machine that generated more energy than it took to run, thereby providing a solution to all of our energy needs. They said they were going to have some scientists look at the technology they developed, and then they were going to have a demonstration to prove to the world that their technology worked. There appeared to be a lot of money behind the company and it seemed like the founder of the company actually believed his claims, even though perpetual motion is, according to all we know about physics, impossible.
Well, they held the demonstration, it was a miserable failure, and we haven’t heard a lot from them since. (Although I just went to their website, and it appears they’re still insistent that they have the solution.) At any rate, it seems like if you’ve got a machine that creates more energy than it needs, you wouldn’t have to spend 2 years trying to get it verified … it would just work.
I followed the news and was pretty excited about the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there are things going on in the universe that we don’t fully understand. I don’t know why the thought that there’s some mystery left in the universe makes me happy, but every time, I’m waiting patiently with my fingers crossed. And every time, it seems like these claims turn out to be hoaxes or mistakes or something that is considerably less thrilling than what I would like it to be.
Recently, we’ve had the guy with the alien footage … a guy shot a video of an alien that he was going to show to the world, and for whatever reason, he decided not to show it. There was the Montauk Monster, which apparently, really was viral marketing (damn you Gawker!) We’ve got dozens of reports of UFOs in Stephenville, Texas, which, although they haven’t really been explained, still have not led to the alien/human cocktail party I’ve been awaiting.
And now Bigfoot. Three guys in California claim to have the body of a sasquatch that they’re going to unveil to the public in, I’m sure, some overly convoluted way that will be retracted at the last minute.
I’m not asking for much here, people. Just give me something that doesn’t fit neatly into our rational worldview. Bigfoot, Nessie, aliens, mothman, anything. There has got to be something weird out there just waiting to be discovered, right?
August 14th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
There are plenty of places to look for “the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there are things going on in the universe that we don’t fully understand.” A few places to watch for some of it:
* http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod
* http://www.newscientist.com/home.ns (they have tons of stuff that doesn’t pan out, too, but I don’t think they’ve run anything as bas as an “ohmygod those physics eggheads were wrong, perpetual motion works!” article yet)
* http://science.slashdot.org/ (they sometimes misinterpret what the science means, but they’re mostly good for pulling out the cool stuff)
Yes, I’m a skeptic jerk ruining everyone’s fun, but I wouldn’t hold my breath over this bigfoot reveal. Watch real science for the exciting stuff that we don’t understand yet, there’s tons of it all the time… and, even better, occasionally someone figures some of it out!
August 15th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Hmm, what the heck? I wrote a comment on this yesterday, but it’s nowhere to be seen. Was I screened out as spam???
ANYHOO, basically… there’s plenty that’s still mysterious, but two guys in California pre-announcing a photo op aren’t the ones who are going to present it to you. I recommend starting somewhere like newscientist.com or science.slashdot.com. Both over-sensationalize things occasionally (and get things flat-out wrong from time to time), but at least it’s based in reality, which is way more mystery-filled than anyone’s imagination… and occasionally there’s even a payoff, when we find something new and totally awesome.
For example… did you know they might have found a new class of elements, past all the radioactive stuff and not all that radioactive, that might be naturally occurring? If confirmed, and we find a way to make them in larger quantities than the one-in-a-bazillion they are thought to exist at naturally, it could result in completely new materials, with properties that… well, that we have a pretty good idea about already, actually, thanks to physics and chemistry predictions, but probably some things we haven’t figured out yet.
August 16th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Properties? What kinds of properties? This could be just the thing I’m looking for!
August 16th, 2008 at 10:04 am
And P.S. I checked the spam filter and you were nowhere to be found … if it happens again please let me know!
August 16th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Doesn’t a waterwheel generate more energy than it takes to run? Who’s the president now, bitches?
August 16th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Hmm, I may have spoken too soon on that particular example: http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2008/May/02050802.asp
It’s still a maybe, and some day element 122 *will* be discovered, it just *might* not be naturally occurring/long-lived like the early reports claimed.
As for the properties… I’m not sure what they’d be. Elements have similar properties based on what energy level their outermost electrons occupy, with blocks on the periodic defined by those energy levels (s block, p block, d block, f block being the ones that all known elements fit into). 122 would be the first-discovered element of the *g* block, so, though physicists could probably tell you expected properties for that block, I don’t know what they are. A lot of the rarer f-block elements are used for specialized purposes in electronics (and, again, I don’t really know exactly what properties of those elements are so useful in electronics, but they’re needed in trace amounts to enable the technology we have)…… so, in other words, if 122 turns out to be real (or we find another element in the predicted “island of stability,” where very heavy/man-made elements start to become stable enough to work with), it could open up some new sort of device that had previously been impossible (and possibly unimagined). And that’s just awesome.
And a waterwheel generates more energy than the operator puts in, but it ultimately is using solar power (from evaporation of the water to move it uphill). That doesn’t count as free energy in the way Jeff meant… but you probably knew that
August 18th, 2008 at 11:46 am
This is a better way of saying what I was trying to say: http://cectic.com/036.html
August 19th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Sadly, this Fox article is the only source I can find to confirm the firing… but, assuming for the moment that Fox didn’t totally screw this up (a big assumption, I know)… not only is the bigfoot thing a hoax, but one of the guys who perpetrated the hoax got canned for it. I hope they didn’t/won’t make enough money off of it to make up for that; it’d be nice for hoaxers to lose for a change, instead of get nothing but gain.
October 15th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Dunno if you get notified of new replies, but this was the best place to put this, and I thought you’d enjoy it (and/or be greatly annoyed by it): http://wigu.livejournal.com/165176.html