quack science gets picked up by major news outlets

blonde hair.

i wasnt looking at her blonde hair

 

I think Deckard meant the beer.

 

Why are people bringing up perpetual motion machines in regard to this story?

He requires 200-Watts to power the radio waves as input. There is no claim of energy being created from a closed system.

source

 

GEORGE: It's cleavage. I couldn't look away. What am I, waiting to win an Oscar here? This is all I have in my life.

JERRY: Looking at cleavage is like looking at the sun, you don't stare at it. It's too risky. You get a sense of it and then you look away.

 

Which is a greater disservice to scientific progress -- exploring the potential uses of a discovered phenomenon (its not like a huge amount of resources is being dedicated to these studies that this point), or dismissing it out of hand and asserting that its incapable of yielding practical uses?

I mean, I could understand you getting annoyed if this was a huge story in the national media that everyone was covering. It's not, which you've already pointed out. It's a relatively small discovery, and there's a small group of people that think it has the potential to be really significant. There's nothing wrong with that.

 

The more I think about it, I am concerned about the safety of this technology. If I was close to this machine and I wanted to pee pee, would it also burn my pee because, well it is also some kind of salt water?

 

Now THAT would be a torture device! If Kanzius sells it like that, forget NSF funding, it's a lock he'll get a DARPA grant!

 

isn't that what the funding he is asking for?

it doesn't look like he is a quack/dupe. He has applied three patents for treating cancer and is currently being researched in M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. This is just another application of it.

http://www.rexresearch.com/kanzius/kanzius.htm

 

Sounds like NewYorker is mad he didn't think up of this idea first.

Next time mate, next time.

 

a 200watt radio transmitter...

That would require very little energy. 3,000 degree burning hydrogen. That would certainly produce more energy than the transmitter would require.

It seems that the argument against this being possible is that the energy output cannot be greater than the energy input. Of course it can if a good part of that energy is already in a stored state that the input energy is releasing.

According to New Yorker's reasoning a nuclear reaction would be impossible because the input energy cannot be less than the output energy.

The fact is we can make all kinds of things out of water and salt water already. We can use a 12volt dc charge to turn salt water into chlorine. We can release hydrogen and use it for fuel. If a 200 watt transmitter can release hydrogen in water I see absolutely no reason why this couldn't possibly be slightly more than "quack science".

 

From a (would be) physicists point of view, the first claim that he discovers an alternative energy source is completely wrong. What he was doing was to first pump energy into the water and let the water break down into hydrogen and oxygen, and then burn the hydrogen again. As I said in an earlier post, when he burns water, he gets water. This is completely different from burning gas, where you burn gas and get water and carbon dioxide, and release the chemical energy stored in the gas. When you use nuclear reactions, you start with uranium and end with a whole bunch of other atoms, and release the nuclear potential energy stored in the uranium atoms. In this case, you start with water and end with water, with no energy of any kind released. Because there is no energy source, the amount of the output energy can never be bigger than the input, that's one of the most fundamental laws of physics. Basically no matter what he or anyone does to improve his system, it will only dissipate power and never be a power generator, and never be a fuel of any kind.

For his second claim of using radio frequency wave to kill cancer cell, I am also very suspicious if it will work. The wavelength of radio frequency is meters, and the size of the nanoparticles that he uses is nanometers. The scales are off by 9 orders of magnitude, and I just don't believe the nanoparticles are going to absorb a whole lot of energy. The particles absorb energy best when the wavelength is comparable to its size. It's like the waves in the water. Think about a boat in an ocean, and in terrible weather with huge waves, it is going to absorb a lot of the energy in the wave and likely to be damaged, however if it is just a small pieces of wood, no matter how large the wave is, it can never be damaged, because it is just too small compared to the size of the wave. It is the same thing with radio frequency waves and nanoparticles. The scale difference is just too huge.

I am cool with his research topics, everyone does things that later was proved wrong or might be proved wrong. What I am upset about is the way he went to the press before he complete anything that's close to a rough systematic study, before any peer-reviewed papers, or even before talking to some peers about it and ask for their opinion, and make a big buzz about it. That's not the way science is supposed to be done. WHEN (and not IF) his idea of burning salt water is proved wrong, it just makes science looks bad to the general public. I won't be with NewYorker on anything else, but I am with him on this matter.

 

what I guess I am not getting is how hydrogen is not considered an energy source.

if this just turns out to be a relatively efficient way of releasing hydrogen that seems like it could be pretty big news.

 

It depends on how large the flame is. It wouldn't release too much energy even if you have a 10,000 degree flame if it is only the size of a needle tip.

Yes if a good part of the energy is already in a stored state such as gas, but in this case the start and end of the reaction is the same old water. Every water molecule has exactly the same energy, so he is not releasing any kind of stored energy.

For a nuclear reaction the Uranium atoms are turned into a bunch of other atoms that has a smaller mass, and during this process the potential energy stored in uranium atoms are released. That's why we can have nuclear reactors, because it is actually releasing energy.

We can make all kinds of stuff out of water, but all of that requires energy, and we are just converting the energy from electricity into chemical potential energies inside the stuff we create. There won't be any new energy produced, and there will be energy loss during the conversion. I have no problem if he said his technology might be a great way of converting water into hydrogen gas that can be used as a fuel, with lower energy loss than current techniques. But he is suggesting he can directly burn salt water, and instead of losing energy, he can get energy out of it. That's quack science to me.

 

well I'm no physicist...

and you obviously know what you are talking about.

it was my assumption from the outset that he was burning hydrogen. If he is releasing hydrogen from water using a 200 watt transmitter it could be pretty impressive to me.

Maybe this will all boil down to a new way to use rock and roll to power steam engines.

*goes back to the music threads where he stands a chance of being partially knowledgable*

 

No hard feelings, your post was right above mine so that I just replied to it.

I would drive that rock n roll powered car to work anyday of the week.

 

sounds like he just got paid.
I mean . .. the buzz gets some government agencys calling him etc
too Too many thing are shortcutted for the $$$$

That being said
I just don't like folx dismissing it . . .as if it is nothing

NewYorker says it isn't a discovery
I maybe wrong but i was not aware that this was common knowledge a month ago?
If no one else had done it. . .it is a discovery

Like Inventions. . there are lots of them . . most are not feasible
but
they are new and undiscovered previously

Rocket River

 

I guess the saddest part to me is that he could actually get paid. If he did it the formal way of submitting a research proposal that is peer reviewed, he wouldn't get a single penny because they would know he is claiming something that can never be done. When money are spent on something like this, someone that is doing actual science will be shortcutted.

IMHO, it is a new discovery, that water can be disintegrated by radio wave, although it needs further validation to prove that it is the actual radio wave that is producing the hydrogen. But the problem is that he then crossed a line there. Instead of just claiming it as a new way of spending energy and producing hydrogen gas that contains less energy than input, he claimed he could actually get energy out of the whole process. That is the difference between steam engines and perpetual motion machines and he went to the side of the perpetual motion machines. And that's the difference between science and pseudoscience.