Free Energy, or The Laws of Thermodynamics are bunk

Don’t worry, I’m not a cold fusion quack. I just like sensationalist blog titles. I’ve been keeping up with the claims of a certain company, Steorn, who hopes to cash in on solving the world’s energy crisis. Their claims and the discussions that follow have got me thinking about the whole of scientific knowledge that we as humans have grown to posses over the years. Please read this whole article before passing judgement on me.

Now, I fully appreciate science. This method of “organized curiosity” as we have developed it over the centuries has led to amazing discoveries. I love keeping up with what the Hubble Space Telescope has turned up next. The efforts to miniaturize technology boggle me more and more. Stuff gets faster, hard drives get smaller…it’s pretty darn amazing. From the vastness of space to the microscopic arrangement of atoms, we’ve uncovered more than Archimedes, Gallileo, or Aristotle could have ever dreamed!

And yet, for all we know, we keep uncovering so much more we don’t know. There were those back in the flat-world days who made reasonable assumptions about the nature of the world as they saw it.

“What?”, you ask, “a flat world seeming reasonable?”

Well, yes. Remember that those early scientists had never sailed around to the other side of the world. Based on the facts they had, it was a reasonable assumption. They can’t be faulted in their logic, only their premises.

But then consider the sailors out to sea noticing that masts of distant ships come into view before the rest of the hull when on course toward them. Mountains peak above the horizon before their base when heading towards land. This seems odd to our pre-modern popeyes so they add this to their list of evidences and over time we figured out that the world was round long before we took pictures of it while in orbit.

This is the nature of scientific curiosity. If done right and done with integrity, it’s a great idea and worth spending time and money to do.

My beef is not with science, but with our arrogance that spices our scientific language. Case and point are the Laws of Thermodynamics. There’s nothing wrong with them or what they state. The first law says that you can’t get something for nothing. You want energy to come out, you have to put it in or change matter to energy somehow (like burning it). No free lunch. You know what? We’ve seen and documented this very thing over and over and over. We have no reason to think otherwise, so as a well established assumption it stands. But a “law”?

The very word “law” seems absolutely definite. Imposed from an outside source. Universal in all areas and under all circumstances. But this “law” was not written down on tablets of stone and divinely imparted to a tribe of white-coat natives dancing around the fires of a bunsen burner. This law was made up by a mere human to describe what we he saw. Our laws of physics are not laws but descriptions that we made up! Granted, many of them are well thought out and it’s hard to imagine a world without them, but they are merely our descriptions nonetheless.

The farther we look out into space, the more we wonder how it works. You may have read about Dark Matter. Or Dark Energy. Remember Black Holes? We made up these things to fill in the blanks in our physics equations. We just don’t know yet why stars and galaxies orbit the way they do! They may turn out to be real…or our “laws” may need to be re-evaluated.

So what are we to do? Change the name to “the First Well-established-assumption of Thermodynamics”? That’d be a pain to write down all the time. Keeping the word “Law” is probably fine as long as we accept the limits of our knowledge.

Back to Steorn. They claim to have a device that generates more energy than what you put in it. They want to generate as much publicity as possible so that respected scientists can sit on a 12 seat panel to oversee experiments checking whether this is bogus or not. I’m curious about it, not because they’ve given any good hints on how it works, but because of the way they’ve brought it up.

They’re not acting like your average pseudoscience quacks who hide behind rhetoric alone. These people claim to want real scientists to check them out and report back to the rest of the world. That’s brave. If they’re right, then our beloved “First well-established-assumption of Thermodynamics” may need to be re-evaluated. Not to mention that this could put an end to world hunger (after the patents expire, of course).

It’s interesting to note that if the Laws of Thermodynamics are shown to be inadequate, scientists aren’t the only ones who will be scrambling around trying to change their textbooks and such. Young Earth Creationists embroiled in the Intelligent Design debate here in the US depend on our current assumptions of thermodynamics as a key basis to their scientific arguments. Kent Hovind would have to change quite a bit of his rhetoric.