Apathy Sketchpad

I use Google Sidebar, and I have the Web Clips gadget hooked up to my Google Reader feed, so I get all my Google Reader items in little letters at the side of my screen throughout the day. It’s rather neat, but it does mean that everything comes up as “Andrew Taylor’s Google Reader Items” and I can’t tell what website they’re from. As well as a couple of news feeds, I have The Daily Mash and The Onion. Sometimes it’s worryingly hard to tell which headlines are real and which are from satirical websites. A good example of that was this page:

Inventor Doesn’t Dare Say ‘Perpetual Motion Machine’

That’s clearly an Onion headline. Short of putting the word “Area” in front of it it’s hard to see how it could be more Onionesque. It’s an Onion story about an inventor who’s made a perpetual motion device but insists on calling it something else to avoid looking like a crank. Right? Wrong. It’s a real story along much those same lines.

Thane Heins knows the track record of inventors that claim to make breakthroughs in power generation methods, especially when they claim to defy the second law of thermodynamics. Every so often, a (usually untrained) scientist comes along with a machine that supposedly creates more energy than is put in. Every time, the ideas have been rebuked by real scientists.

That’s why 46-year-old Heins, a college drop-out from Ottawa who’s been working on his project since 1985, is being very cautious. He is the first to admit that he doesn’t know how his machine works from a physics standpoint. He just hopes that someone else might understand.

Okay. So it’s a scientist who’s built a machine and got a surprising result. It looks like a source of free energy, which of course it can’t be because that’s impossible. He doesn’t know what’s going on and wants someone to have a look. It can’t really be generating energy from nowhere, and he just wants someone to figure out where this energy is coming from. Right?

“What I can say with full confidence is that our system violates the law of conservation of energy,” he says.

Wrong. It’s a bit pathetic of him to so loudly avoid calling it “perpetual motion” if he’ll “say with full confidence” that he can break the conservation of energy. That’s not just a bit impossible. Most claims of perpetual motioninvolve magnets, which is odd because you can start from the equations that govern magnets and prove the conservation of energy from there without too much hassle.

He calls his system “Perepiteia,” which in Greek means an action that has the opposite effect of what is intended. But he will leave it to others to decide if the technique can be described as “perpetual motion.”

In 2005, Heins formed a company called Potential Difference Inc. to develop and market his invention.

Oh, how much I would love to see someone pitching a perpetual motion machine on Dragons’ Den. But it gets worse…

Due to his obsession with his machine, he has suffered a failed marriage and lost custody of his two children, and is currently unemployed. He doesn´t believe that his idea is a scientific breakthrough of any kind - he just thinks that it deserves to be investigated. MIT´s Zahn agrees.

What the hell? The man’s an idiot. He says he’s broken the conservation of energy law, but it isn’t “a scientific breakthrough of any kind”, and as fun as it is to laugh at him, he’s lost his family to develop a device that cannot possibly work. I can’t believe MIT would encourage this — he doesn’t need help with his research; he just needs help. He’s delusional and it’s wrecking his life.

Still, he insists it’s real. They all do, don’t they. And we haven’t heard much of anything from Steorn lately.