What exactly is electricity?
According to the dictionary, it's a fundamental form of energy. Many describe it as a flow of electrons while scientific circles prefer to refer to it as a moving charge.
In last week's column, Who is "I", I described a basic requirement for the mind as being a place where comparison occurs. If we can recall what we see, then we understand what we see.
When it comes to the Baconian "hidden forces in nature," this feature of the mind results in the production of explanations that don't explain anything. The list is fairly basic: Gravity as a property of matter, the motion of the solar system as the result of a swirling mass of gas, the motion in the universe as the result of a Big Bang, light as a wave/particle, and of course, electricity as a moving charge.
Each of the words we create to describe something that is happening produces recall which satisfies our need for comparison without actually explaining anything. Gravity as a property of matter doesn't describe how this most dynamic force that holds us to the surface of the Earth is generated. Using historical sources for force such as a swirling mass of gas or a big bang don't tell us anything at all, are in fact actually a cop-out, an effort by an empirical science that demands proof to explain away that which it is too lazy to analyze as out of reach, no longer existent. Creating recall for light that is beyond our ability to conceive and ignoring the real nature of the electrical force that drives the motors and generators that power our civilization are disgraceful.
A system of explanation for physical reality that ignores the need for a mechanical description of the forces that produce the motion in our existence can not lay claim to the title science, but falls more easily into the definition of philosophy or even religion. Producing recall that is merely catch phrases to reflect the hidden nature of the forces that underlie our existence covers up our ignorance and leads to complications simply because in order to produce the technology that we need to survive and extend our lives into the future, we need as accurate a picture of reality as possible. Ignoring the mechanical explanation for the forces that operate that reality produces a technology that is cumbersome, a technology that does not reflect reality.
I attended several conferences back in the 80s dealing with possible uses for the patented neodymium magnets, permanent magnets that were artificially made and which were extremely strong. Everyone was casting around for technical applications while I was casting around for theory that would explain how magnets worked and what their relation to electricity was. Several decades later, a lone inventor, as a result of trial and error, produced a way to use these strong magnets on the rotor of an electric motor to replace the electrical driven coils in normal use. The result was an outcry from the empirical community that the inventor was claiming over unity, a state where more power is produced than the electricity that goes into producing the power. In the case of the Minato Motor, about 16 watts of input produces between one and three hundred watts of output.
Because the Minato Motor was simply replacing one technology for another, a permanent magnet for an electrical coil driven magnet, he ended up with a patented product. The question of over unity was buried in the answer of efficiency, the Minato Motor is simply a technology that is more efficient than existing, coil driven motors.
In our attempt to conform technology to reality, the Minato Motor may be a giant step forward, but it begs the question, what is the source of the power that drives the motor? If we know nothing about electricity, then we might as well just blindly tinker hither-and-thon, hoping to come up with improvements by happenstance. Without a clear picture of reality to guide us, we have no idea what we are doing. Saddled with an empirical process that writes off energy as basic forces that need no further explanation, we are crippling our minds, distorting our technology and endangering our survival.
The sequence of the centuries-long discovery of electricity, static generation, lightning capture, the production of a battery using metals with differing potentials and the ultimate discovery that moving a wire through a magnetic field, induction, produced electricity, hid the fact that technology was being created that tapped into some sort of energy that could be harnessed for technological use, the goal of technology being to alter the environment to make it more hospitable to our existence.
No one sat down and attempted to define the nature of the energy's source. Rather, empiricists determined how more force the resulting motors could lift, giving a name for the units of that power that could be placed into recall for computational use, and then equating those units to the energy existing sources of power, mainly horsepower, could exert.
As a result, motors were defined by the new units of the energy that it took to operate them and because empirical science is obsessed with equations at the expense of understanding, the amount of energy in had to equal the amount of energy out. The recall, the names for the units, became the reality, and the source of energy, where the energy came from, simply disappeared from the discussion.
When the electric currents passed through the coils of the rotor of the electric motor, they were drawing electrons out of the environment. But because the energy was a fundamental force of nature, the coils were not conceived of as drawing electrons out of the environment because no one bothered to figure out how those electrons existed in the environment before the motor was turned on. The empirical equation required that the electrons come from the current input into the coils. When the Minato Motor replaced electric driven coils with the new super strong permanent magnets, the non-electrically driven coil still pulled electrons out of the environment. There is no over unity simply because nothing has changed except the need for an electrical driven coil.
Which leaves the question, how does the electrical coil or the permanent magnetic coil pull electrons out of the environment and how do those electrons exist in the environment?
Later in the 80s, I became aware of one of the many organizations who were set up to create over unity motors. I selected one that was very active at the time and contacted the founder and head experimenter, offering, probably presumptuously, that I might be able to provide some theoretical insight into the apparent results he was obtaining. I was honored with a curt reply that the founder was not interested in theory, he was only interested in fact. The next issue of the organization's newsletter was an eighty plus page of bombastic theory dealing with the biosphere and its dimensional capabilities of transferring energy into our reality.
Following over unity efforts over the last decade and a half indicate to me that these efforts are directed not at producing a useful technology, but rather an effort to use the scientific method, in which theory predicts facts which, once realized, prove the theory to be fact, to prove abstract theories about the source of electrical energy to be fact. Simply producing more output than input is sufficient to prove an experimenter's theories correct, and as that proof is the goal, any attempt to produce a viable technology is abandoned.
Don't get me wrong. Producing theories is my business. Theories, however, have to match the facts at hand, and have to be abandoned in favor of new theories as the field of facts expands. Conducting experiments based on theories grounded in the fantasies of empirical science, fantasies, which because the scientific method turns theory into fact, are fantasies because they are based on nonexistent facts, doesn't get us anywhere.
The interest in over unity devices stems from the need to reduce the amount of energy consumed. With no knowledge of the nature and source of electrical energy, theorists in the field hypothesize vast fields of energy that exist all around us, energy that permeates the universe, energy that is free for all if only we can stumble on the technology that can tap into it. Whether that energy is termed zero point energy or aether, the theories describing it simply do what empirical theories have always done, create something that we can put into recall that we can then recall when we are describing what we are searching for, what our tinkering, our trial and error hopes to stumble upon.
Without knowing where the electrons come from, over unity theorists leap forward to a similar source, equally as mysterious, hoping to tap into another fundamental force of the universe. We are still blind, but we are trying to run through an unknown landscape, hoping against hope that we stumble across something that will help us. We don't take the time to explore the landscape to see what we are already using. Before we understand what we have, we spend our time trying to find more.
The simple fact is that electricity is the process of harnessing electrons that exist in the environment, and about the only thing we are going to be able to do is harness those electrons in a more efficient way. There are only two sources of electrons in the environment. They are either present because they are part of atoms that exist in the environment, or they are a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is produced as a result of cooling, whether it be the visible cooling of the sun, or the invisible cooling of the molten core of the planet several hundred miles below our feet.
The only energy that exists in the universe is the electromagnetic energy that is emitted by the heated bodies that occupy the universe, and the motors we design are the way we harness the electrons that make up this energy, whether those motors are competing with atoms for electrons or with the electromagnetic flows which produce inductive flows of electrons to regulate their uniform expansion and which break down when the inductive flows are robbed of their electrons.
We have no way to produce free energy because we are already accessing the "free" energy that exists in our environment with electric motors and generators. We can only increase the efficiency of capture.
Where, then, does that leave us in our efforts to reduce our energy consumption?
An even bigger area of ignorance, an area where we simply create meaningless recall to describe energy, is in the production of the energy that causes the objects in our reality to drop. After all, many of our motors, much of the energy we consume, is consumed in an effort to work against this force. Believing that this force is merely a property, like the yellow color of gold is a property of gold or the hardness of iron is a property of iron, is ignorance of the rankest nature.
We should be directing our efforts at learning to utilize the force of gravity rather than hypothesizing some vast new undiscovered energy source and spending our time attempting to produce technology to access that nonexistent energy.
Instead of inventing energy, we need to spend our time figuring out the nature of the energy that exists in our environment and then figuring out how to overcome that energy, producing the technology that reflects the reality of that energy, conforming our technology to null gravity. In the next column, I will describe how the misinterpretation of Young's experiment, several decades before the discovery of induction, has led to our continued ignorance of the most prevalent force of our existence, resulting in a distorted technology that is designed to work against that force rather than utilize the force to our advantage.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com