Originally posted by: Cogman
People saying this is imposible should reconsider. Im open to the thought that he might have suceeded in makeing such a divice (if so we need to get it down to the size of a batery so I can get one for our Laptop, Endless playing time) But really, in the 1400's the Human race thought that it knew everything about the world, but then some guy, Who was rejected 3 times might I add, Travel into the middle of nowhere and found a Landmass that doubled the size of the earth, (How big the scientists thought the earth was.) We could know comparitivly Nothing about a basic Princable, like gravity. Maybe gravity doesnt alway atract, Maybe sometimes it repels...
Funny thing about science. You can pretty much propose anything you want, and until it's disproved, it is taken as fact. A lot of postulates are shot down right off the bat because they fly head on into the face of proven theory.
However, to disprove something, you must provide a counter proof, and we end up with what would seem to be a viscious cycle until you realize there exist the correspondence principle. All new theories cannot disprove older, established theories, only limit their reach.
That theory about the world being flat... it supposedly "proved", but nobody ever walked to the edge of the Earth and returned to tell the tale. It was just taken at face value, swallowed, and anyone who said otherwise was burned at the stake. We look back now and say it is an outright lie and Columbus' expedition and modern science took the old theory and utterly shredded it. However, I disagree. The way I see it, those old theories are now limited by scale, ablbeit a very narrow scale. Yes, the world IS flat, but only when you're standing on the ground and looking no farther than, say, a few miles, or you're flying above in an airplane looking down and never looking at the horizon. This is similar to how General Relativity works wonders at the planetary scale, but breaks down at the atomic/sub-atomic level where quantum mechanics takes over. Of course, neither does a good job with black holes, so that would require a new theory, and then, eventually, hopefully, the Grand Unifying Theory will encompass all scales.
At any rate, maybe the device does work, maybe it's vaporware, or maybe it flat-out doesn't work. At any rate, one of the foundations of science and especially physics is that any proposed phenomenon must be reproducible under controlled environments. So if it works, someone else should be able to confirm it. Then, there's the First Law of Thermodynamics : energy is conserved. As has been mentioned many times, there is no free lunch. If it works, splendid. Something still gets used up, though, which means it's the same as any other generator or engine. It uses a fuel. Even renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and geothermal use a fuel. If the device doesn't work, oh, well, wouldn't be the first time.
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