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Explain Bedini's free energy machine to me

Juustin

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Juustin
Joined
Dec 19, 2006
Messages
501
Last night I was at a family function of my wife's. A friend of their family was talking to me, and he's actually a nice guy that I've met a few other times. We talked about the usual stuff, eventually getting to high gas prices. He then started explaining to me how there are already people who know how to create energy and they're being suppressed.

He mentioned he picked up a DVD online that explained Bedini's free energy machine. He said "obviously I can't say 100% that they're right, but all the people talking on the DVD said they've seen it first hand, and no scientists have been able to explain where the energy is coming from.

This was the first time I had heard about this particular machine, but I suspected it may be getting hyped mostly by a conspiracy crowd, since the later part of the conversation turned into oil companies having people assassinated for threatening their business with free energy devices.

So that's the long and the short of it. If someone who's good with this stuff wants to give me a reader's digest version of how it's said to work and what's known about it, that'd be great. I suspected it sounded fishy, but without having any background I didn't have much to say.
 
That's wierd, because I was visiting my nephew a couple weeks ago and, during our conversation, he started in on this very topic. He indicated that he is trying his hand at building the "over-unity" machine and started talking to me about how Ohm's law is not a real law (apparently there are things that don't behave in accordance with Ohm's equation [wikipedia indicates this is true, but it is a well known and understood phenomenon]). I immediately referred him to this site to ask his questions (as I'm not an electrical engineer - just a geologist) as there are generally lots of knowledgable people here.

He said that he's listened to both sides of the over-unity issue, and wants to test it for him-self. I told him that he should be prepared to accept that his machine will not work.
 
This is the guy who made the CD clarifier, which bathes CDs in a beam that cleanses them, improving the audio quality?

Who would even believe this quack? How dumb do you have to be?
 
GreyICE said:
This is the guy who made the CD clarifier, which bathes CDs in a beam that cleanses them, improving the audio quality?

Who would even believe this quack? How dumb do you have to be?
Click to expand...

There are lots of people "dumb" enough to believe it. No, I don't get it either.
 
Direct Quote from his (Bedini) website...

This system, if properly built and tuned, will furnish "free shaft energy" continually, without violating conservation of anenergy. Remember that the del-phi condition across the battery terminals means that spacetime is suddenly curved there, and conservation of energy need no longer apply.
Click to expand...
 
Juustin said:
Last night I was at a family function of my wife's. A friend of their family was talking to me, and he's actually a nice guy that I've met a few other times. We talked about the usual stuff, eventually getting to high gas prices. He then started explaining to me how there are already people who know how to create energy and they're being suppressed.

He mentioned he picked up a DVD online that explained Bedini's free energy machine. He said "obviously I can't say 100% that they're right, but all the people talking on the DVD said they've seen it first hand, and no scientists have been able to explain where the energy is coming from.

This was the first time I had heard about this particular machine, but I suspected it may be getting hyped mostly by a conspiracy crowd, since the later part of the conversation turned into oil companies having people assassinated for threatening their business with free energy devices.

So that's the long and the short of it. If someone who's good with this stuff wants to give me a reader's digest version of how it's said to work and what's known about it, that'd be great. I suspected it sounded fishy, but without having any background I didn't have much to say.
Click to expand...

From Bedini's site:

"It is running off the principles of electromagnetics that Nikola Tesla discovered shortly before 1900 in his Colorado Springs experiments. It is running off the fact that empty vacuum - pure "emptiness", so to speak - is filled with rivers and oceans of seething energy, just as Nikola Tesla pointed out.

It is running off the fact that vacuum space-time itself is nothing but pure massless charge. That is, vcuum has a very high electrostatic scalar potential - it is greatly stressed. To usefully tap the enormous locked-in energy of that stress, all one has to do is crack it sharply and tap the vacuum oscillations that result. The best way to do that is to hit something resonant that is imbedded in the vacuum, then tap the resonant stress of the ringing of the vacuum itself"

Signs of woo are here.

Naming of a prominent dead scientific authority.

Using terms in ways that make no sense. vacuum oscillations, ringing in the vacum, ect, ect, ect.

It looks to me like he has invented the electric starter bet the car companies will pay bigtime for that.
 
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It may also be worth noting that his website looks much like one I "designed" when I was 16 on geocities. It seems like all of the kooky CT nuts use the most simple web design interface possible...

I CAN VIOLATE THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY BUT I CANT FIGURE OUT HOW TO WORK THESE INTERWEBS!
 
tsig said:
From Bedini's site:

"It is running off the principles of electromagnetics that Nikola Tesla discovered shortly before 1900 in his Colorado Springs experiments. It is running off the fact that empty vacuum - pure "emptiness", so to speak - is filled with rivers and oceans of seething energy, just as Nikola Tesla pointed out.

It is running off the fact that vacuum space-time itself is nothing but pure massless charge. That is, vcuum has a very high electrostatic scalar potential - it is greatly stressed. To usefully tap the enormous locked-in energy of that stress, all one has to do is crack it sharply and tap the vacuum oscillations that result. The best way to do that is to hit something resonant that is imbedded in the vacuum, then tap the resonant stress of the ringing of the vacuum itself"

Signs of woo are here.

Naming of a prominent dead scientific authority.

Using terms in ways that make no sense. vacuum oscillations, ringing in the vacum, ect, ect, ect.

It looks to me like he has invented the electric starter bet the car companies will pay bigtime for that.
Click to expand...

Tesla... /sigh

Another hallmark of the free energy nutter is a deification of Tesla.

I have seen this upwards of ten times on websites such as this.
 
Gate2501 said:
It may also be worth noting that his website looks much like one I "designed" when I was 16 on geocities. It seems like all of the kooky CT nuts use the most simple web design interface possible...

I CAN VIOLATE THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY BUT I CANT FIGURE OUT HOW TO WORK THESE INTERWEBS!
Click to expand...

There seems to be a negative correlation between the craziness of the woo and quality of the websites.

Or the more earth shaking the idea, the more eye searing the website.

At least he could have hid the battery. I wonder why does a free-energy device need a battery? A brake I could understand.
 
Gate2501 said:
Tesla... /sigh

Another hallmark of the free energy nutter is a deification of Tesla.

I have seen this upwards of ten times on websites such as this.
Click to expand...

They wave his name like a magic wand.

This whole thing is just another version of "let's take an electric motor to run the generator then feed the generator output to the motor"
 
JoeEllison said:
I suspect that he understands what he's talking about even less than we do.
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But he used big sciency words and invoked Tesla. Psuedoskeptic!!! Science ahs been wrong and they lauged at Galeleo. Help we are being oppressed be the establishment of athiest scientists.!!!

(should have used caps and colors)
 
canadarocks said:
He indicated that he is trying his hand at building the "over-unity" machine and started talking to me about how Ohm's law is not a real law
Click to expand...

In one sense, it's really more of a definition of what resistance means than an actual law.

(apparently there are things that don't behave in accordance with Ohm's equation
Click to expand...

When you think about Ohm's law as a definition of resistance, then what you find is that for some things, resistance isn't constant as a function of applied voltage, but you can still use that equation to define a resistance for anything, even if that value is only valid under specific conditions. Diodes and transistors are rather important examples of where the resistance defined by Ohm's law is not constant (current can vary exponentially with applied voltage).

He said that he's listened to both sides of the over-unity issue, and wants to test it for him-self. I told him that he should be prepared to accept that his machine will not work.
Click to expand...

Not only that, but he needs to be prepared to be mistaken. With electronic equipment, it's not hard to screw up your measurements so that you think you've gotten over-unity when you haven't. For example, it's easy to make an oscillator circuit which can output more voltage than you input, but it won't output more power.

My guess, if he's talking about Ohm's law violations, is that he may have stumbled on the idea of a diode current ratchet: get a big array of diodes set up to only allow current to flow one way through the circuit, then let thermal noise drive the current around the circuit. Looks on paper like it might work, if you treat diodes as perfect one-way valves, but in practice it doesn't (plenty of people have tried) because the're not perfect valves. It's essentially a solid-state attempt at Maxwell's Demon, but it doesn't work.
 
Juustin said:
So that's the long and the short of it. If someone who's good with this stuff wants to give me a reader's digest version of how it's said to work and what's known about it, that'd be great. I suspected it sounded fishy, but without having any background I didn't have much to say.
Click to expand...


It is the same old story for most of these “free energy” devices. The readers digest version is a misapplication of Zero-point energy or Vacuum energy, these charlatans explain the over unity (more energy out then in) they erroneously calculate as resulting from the tapping into this energy. But that application is in direct conflict with principle they are trying to invoke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy


Because zero point energy is the lowest possible energy a system can have, this energy cannot be removed from the system. A related term is zero-point field, which is the lowest energy state of a field, i.e. its ground state, which is non-zero.[1]
Despite the definition, the concept of zero-point energy, and the hint of a possibility of extracting "free energy" from the vacuum, has attracted the attention of amateur inventors. Numerous so-called free energy devices, exploiting the idea, have been proposed.[citation needed] As a result of this activity, and its intriguing theoretical explanation, it has taken on a life of its own in popular culture, appearing in science fiction books, games, movies and TV series (such as Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis).[2][3]
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So if one was to able to extract energy from a zero point field (lower the energy of that field below it’s lowest possible value) it would just force the field into a negative energy state and it would have to take the energy back. Due to the uncertainty principle a zero point field can fluctuate below its zero point value but only for a brief instant or by a small energy fluctuation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

The gist being that any energy that can be “barrowed” from a zero point field must be paid back. The more energy “barrowed” the quicker it must be paid back. So tremendous amounts of energy can be “barrowed” but just for an insignificant period of time and only insignificant amounts of energy can be “barrowed” for any significant period of time.


The apparatus detailed on the web page shows a simple battery-motor-flywheel-generator configuration. Just like the battery stores electrical energy the flywheel stores mechanical energy. A lot of energy is taken up spinning the flywheel up to speed some of which (but not all) can be recovered as the flywheel spins down. If the start up energy used to spin up the flywheel is not correctly accounted for it could seem like you are getting extra energy as the flywheel spins down.

Most of the over unity calculations of such devices are due to appallingly or intentionally bad math. Not accounting for all sources of energy input (spinning up the flywheel) or counting energy losses of the system (heat and back EMF) as additional intended energy outputs (negatives becoming positives)
 
tsig said:
But he used big sciency words and invoked Tesla. Psuedoskeptic!!! Science ahs been wrong and they lauged at Galeleo. Help we are being oppressed be the establishment of athiest scientists.!!!

(should have used caps and colors)
Click to expand...

Yes, well... I got your point, so I appreciate you skipping the caps and colors! :D
 
The sad part is that I really love Tesla. He was a genius, a very interesting man, who discovered some very neat effects that were way ahead of his time. The induction motor, AC power, fluorescent bulbs, the spark plug, so many interesting things. When his circuits in Colorado were reproduced from his notes, they had features that weren't rediscovered until much, much later.

Unfortunately the latter half of his life was characterized by wild claims, OCD disorders, and general signs of insanity. This makes him a magnet to woo, because you can find the wildest claims in the latter half of his life, and use the genius of the former half to support them.
 
tsig said:
"It is running off the principles of electromagnetics that Nikola Tesla discovered shortly before 1900 in his Colorado Springs experiments.
Click to expand...

Hey that's wild. I just watched a DVD the other day where Tesla's Colorado Springs experiments produced a machine that not only would teleport matter, it would replicate it... even living beings!
 
So why Tesla? I think it's because our kooks are English language kooks and his name brings a hint of Eastern European mysticism... vampires... etc.

I wonder if Transylvanian kooks (for instance) invoke Edison.
 
TheDaver said:
You mean a quote misattributed to Einstein.
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You are right, that makes it even more authentic.

Is this the machine we are talking about?

from above link said:
This is a free energy device which an ordinary person, who knows a little electronics, can experiment with in the basement. To develop it, one is talking several thousands of dollars and a lot of persistence and tinkering; one is not talking millions.
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Bolding mine.

If it doesn't take a multi-billion budget, nor a rocket surgeon, can I see the actual device anywhere? No?
 
wahrheit said:
You also forgot to add an out of context Einstein quote. :eusa_snooty:
Click to expand...

"Einstien". How many times do I have to repeat this?
"If it's a woo, it's Einstien."*

* apologies for the bungled "Miracle Pictures: If it's a good picture, it's a Miracle!" quote. :)
 
Is this Bedini thing just another case where someone has computed input power from current and voltage, but completely ignored power factor?
 
TheDaver said:
You mean a quote misattributed to Einstein.
Click to expand...

You don't even need a quote. The Crackpot Index awards 30 points for "suggesting that Einstein, in his later years, was groping his way towards the ideas you now advocate." On the other hand, this version may be a bit out of date in that it does not award any points at all for claiming that one is working with ideas proven by Tesla; surely that should be worth at least 22.75834 points
 
TheDaver said:
You mean a quote misattributed to Einstein.
Click to expand...

Jest a-workin' in a quotemine.

I guess I am not worthy of woo. I lay down my miner's lamp and leave the ddark side to those better able to do the woo.
 
jsfisher said:
Is this Bedini thing just another case where someone has computed input power from current and voltage, but completely ignored power factor?
Click to expand...

Looks like he just invented the motor-generator, what's next, the Ward-Leonard system?
 
Direct Quote from his (Bedini) website...

Quote:
This system, if properly built and tuned, will furnish "free shaft energy" continually, without violating conservation of anenergy. Remember that the del-phi condition across the battery terminals means that spacetime is suddenly curved there, and conservation of energy need no longer apply.
Click to expand...
It is doubtful that anyone who buys into this will ever see the "free" part, but you can guarantee the "shaft" ;)

I invented a perpetual motion machine when I was in first grade. It was made out of clay, had a central tower with a pour spout, with a base shaped like a moat that was supposed to catch the water, returning it to the tower through a hole in the side. Voila! continuous waterfall!

Fortunately, nothing was damaged as I received a lesson on how water flows down hill and seeks its own level. I remember being tremendously embarrassed at the time, and throwing it out. My parents, I suspect, were proud. Not too many first graders forge their own scientific apparatus.

I wish I had kept it. So much of science I must take on faith, not having, for example, my own particle accelerator.
 
Beausoleil said:
So why Tesla? I think it's because our kooks are English language kooks and his name brings a hint of Eastern European mysticism... vampires... etc.

I wonder if Transylvanian kooks (for instance) invoke Edison.
Click to expand...

I think it's because Tesla was a genius, had some very good and practical ideas, but also struggled to gain approval for some of his more ambitious/theoretical stuff. He was robbed of the "inventor of the radio" title, Edison punked him, and his giant generator was torn down by a fearful government (as a woo person would say). He was a man who could have changed the world except the old conservative powers conspired against him. A decent role model for modern woo artists, unfortunately for his legacy.

The comparison fails in that these folks' ideas aren't good or pratical. Not just free energy, but they haven't built a history of good, functional work that Tesla did before embarking on his giant energy theories. They want to skip ahead to the "conspired against/misunderstood/underfunded" aspect of Tesla, without first establishing the "genius" part for themselves. Any fool can do that.
 
Dragoonster said:
A decent role model for modern woo artists, unfortunately for his legacy.
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You forgot the part where he essentially became woo. Tesla claimed that he could do stuff that is impossible. That's why his name is bandied about so much by crackpot loons. He turned into one.
 
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I made a YouTube video about the Zero Point Field, explaining why it is impossible to get energy out of it--- but the free energy cultists just called me nasty names. Sheeeish.

As for the Bedini prank motor, it is possible he really believes his claims.

In the year 2004 "MythBusters" did an episode wherein an MIT engineer attempted to examine a "Bedini Motor." MythBusters and the MIT person failed to find any magic energy being created; however, Bedini claims the MIT person did not make a "Bedini Motor" and therefore the test was not just an error, but a deliberate lie on the part of MythBusters.

I have not found any statement by MythBusters answering the charge of deception on their part. If Randi would ask MythBusters to address the charges I would love to read it.

Bedini claims that MythBusters refused to talk with Bedini before, during, and after the examination; Bedini claims that the episode was a deliberate sabotage of him and his miracle device; Bedini claims there were no magnets on the flywheel, which would make the device not function the way Bedini claims it will function.

My questions to MythBusters would be:

1) Did you try to get a Bedini motor from Bedini?

2) Did Bedini try to contact you?

3) Did you try to contact Bedini?

4) Did your MIT person fail to build a Bedini motor?

Make no mistake: the Bedini motor does not work: there is no such thing as "free energy," nor is it possible to get "vacuum energy" from the Zero Point Field, nor do magnetic fields contain energy that can be used to perform work. I just wish to clear up the facts of the issue, and I suspect James Randi would be far more successful at getting answers from MythBusters than I have been.
 
Gate2501 said:
Tesla... /sigh

Another hallmark of the free energy nutter is a deification of Tesla.

I have seen this upwards of ten times on websites such as this.
Click to expand...

As far as I know, what Tesla claimed to be able to do, based on his Colorado Springs, was transmit power wirelessly. His Wardenclyffe project, on Long Island, was an attempt to implement this and also create a worldwide communications network. The wierless power transmission was apparently a mistake, and would have been problematic had it worked, as it would have been difficult to impossible to ensure that consumers of power paid producers.

After Tesla ran out of funding for Wardenclyffe, he pretty much became a crackpot. He made wild claims for "inventions" that existed only on paper or in his head, and the newspapers loved to interview him, but he produced very vew useful inventions in this time period (the Tesla turbine being perhaps the major exception to this). Unfortunately, the "free energy" and "over-unity" crowd worships the crackpot, and misinterpret his "wireless transmission of energy" claims as "free energy" claims. The Tesla who deserves to be worshiped (if anybody does) is the young Tesla who invented the polyphase AC electrical power system that we are still using more than a century after he invented it, not the pathetic crackpot he became later in life.
 
I invented a perpetual motion machine when I was in first grade. It was made out of clay, had a central tower with a pour spout, with a base shaped like a moat that was supposed to catch the water, returning it to the tower through a hole in the side. Voila! continuous waterfall!
Click to expand...

It works great on paper. At least it did for Escher.
 
I made a YouTube video about the Zero Point Field, explaining why it is impossible to get energy out of it--- but the free energy cultists just called me nasty names. Sheeeish.
Click to expand...

Well of course. Don't you know that the so-called laws of thermodynamics are lies invented by the oil companies? What oil company do you work for?

Excuse me. I have to go figure out why my HHO generator quits working after the gas (petrol) tank goes dry.
 
I suspect Bedini is making his money not from the motor but from sales of the DVD. Really old, white-hairded scam: Hey everyone! Want to know how to make a million dollars? You each send me $10 and you can find out! The Nigerian scams are a variant, and even Dogbert has sent them up more than once.
 
CORed said:
As far as I know, what Tesla claimed to be able to do, based on his Colorado Springs, was transmit power wirelessly. His Wardenclyffe project, on Long Island, was an attempt to implement this and also create a worldwide communications network. The wierless power transmission was apparently a mistake, and would have been problematic had it worked, as it would have been difficult to impossible to ensure that consumers of power paid producers.

After Tesla ran out of funding for Wardenclyffe, he pretty much became a crackpot. He made wild claims for "inventions" that existed only on paper or in his head, and the newspapers loved to interview him, but he produced very vew useful inventions in this time period (the Tesla turbine being perhaps the major exception to this). Unfortunately, the "free energy" and "over-unity" crowd worships the crackpot, and misinterpret his "wireless transmission of energy" claims as "free energy" claims. The Tesla who deserves to be worshiped (if anybody does) is the young Tesla who invented the polyphase AC electrical power system that we are still using more than a century after he invented it, not the pathetic crackpot he became later in life.
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Also, you have to remember that at that point in his life, Tesla was wildly paranoid, having been deliberately targetted and sabotaged by men paid by Edison, and also having invented several pseudo-enemies that were more figments than anything else (Edison really was out to get him though).

Therefore in his latter years he tended to make **** up just to confuse people.

He also was slightly unhinged. We're talking about the man who, for fun and intellectual curiousity, developed the first viable method of killing every vertebrate on the planet. The next serious contender was the Manhattan project (it was slightly more discriminant, Tesla's weapon would have killed EVERYONE).
 
GreyICE said:
He also was slightly unhinged. We're talking about the man who, for fun and intellectual curiousity, developed the first viable method of killing every vertebrate on the planet.
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Where do I get one?
 
gdnp said:
Where do I get one?
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Dynamite. virtually any country could make one. Nowadays you could just use simple nukes. You'd need probably a dozen, two dozen, I haven't done the math. Could be less. And he did it all, energy dissipation, everything.

The trick is you'd need a day or two to shatter all the continental plates, and given that we'd all detect what you are doing long before then, you'd get a kindly greeting from intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Assuming you planned adequately though, and used orbits to get the timing down, you could do it though.

It was easier back when he figured it out because interrupting you was impossible, from a purely physical standpoint.
 
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