2012/02/20

F***ing Thermodynamics, How Does It Work?

So I got a comment—which I deleted, because it was anonymous, and anonymous commenters are not people—on the last post, from someone asserting that no, man, zero-point energy is totally an inexhaustible source of free energy. Like, Nikola Tesla and scalar fields, man. This, like, Canadian inventor named John Hutchison totally demonstrated it.

Look. My sister's a huge fan of Nikola Tesla—she has him tattooed on her arm, for God's sake—and she can tell you horror stories, about these tinfoil-hatted hippies and their Tesla conspiracy-theories. Tesla never discovered a free energy source. He practically rent his garments and cried aloud on God when relativity began to be accepted, do you really think he would've kept quiet if the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics had turned out to have a "free energy" loophole?

No, I know—corporations covered it up, because they wanted to charge people for power. Only, bullshit. Just as significantly as its physical impossibility, that is not how people work: even were electricity free, you'd still need wiring and appliances. Do boat manufacturers try to sell you seawater or sail-wind? And yet they seem to do all right. Besides, a huge proportion of the cost for the corporations themselves is energy infrastructure: remember, they only do the evil thing when it's cheaper. Leaving to one side that nobody, but nobody, is smart enough to pull off cover-ups even one-tenth as major; this is also why the purported 9/11 and Roswell cover-ups are bogus. Any explanation that hinges on thousands of human beings being smart and disciplined enough not to blab, may, with essentially no exceptions, be dismissed out of hand.

Speaking of 9/11 Troofers, John Hutchison is one. He is also an inventor who claims to have produced not only free energy, but anti-gravity, both, he claims, by means of the zero-point energy. Only, he has curiously never done it in a controlled setting—only in a "lab" in his own home...and our only evidence it works even there is his videos. That is a warning sign.

Trust me: if you'd discovered anti-gravity, let alone a loophole in thermodynamics, you wouldn't be putting up free videos on YouTube, you'd be publishing papers in prestigious journals and grant money would be rolling in like a hip-hop video with fewer hoochie-mamas (Robert "Pimp Daddy" Oppenheimer notwithstanding). Or you'd publish the paper, the scientific community would give you a noncommittal "interesting if true", and you'd go off for a few years to collect more grant money, the way Evgeny Podkletnov did when he thought he'd found a way to make anti-gravity with rotating superconductors (nobody's been able to reproduce his results, but you'll notice he took them to the journals, not to YouTube—he may have been wrong, crazy even, but his results were not a hoax).

Not content to merely be a free-energy hoaxer and dabble in 9/11 conspiracy-mongering on the side, Hutchison has combined the two. He claims that the WTC complex was (at least largely) destroyed by the (nebulously explained) zero-point anti-gravity phenomenon he calls "the Hutchison effect" ('nother warning sign: other scientists are allowed to name things after you, indeed if you really discover it they're almost expected to, but no scientist does it himself). Because apparently the Bush administration was hyper-evil and ingenious enough to use a highly experimental super-weapon, using physical processes that are still theoretically impossible, to kill 3000 people and frame Arabs holed up in Afghanistan for it...in order to start a war with Iraq, for their oil...but were not, apparently, sufficiently cunning to show a clear link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, or to plant large numbers of WMDs somewhere in Saddam's facilities, or to ever successfully exploit Iraq's oil in any meaningful way.

That hole in your face just needs to shut, Hutchison. A), you and your vile calumnies can go to hell. But B) and almost as important, I'm tired of being deluged with pseudo-science when I'm trying to find legitimate speculations for my writing. I've had to do I-don't-know-how-many rewrites because I found out that something I'd used in a story was actually bogus, and I'm sick to death of it. I realize scamming ill-educated investors is easier than doing real science, or practically any other form of work (even criminal work—websites to protect you from stock scams are readily accessible, protection from scams relating to quantum physics not so much). But know what? Just because lying to people who don't know any better is a quick route to fame and fortune, doesn't mean it's okay. Especially not if you also impede good-faith efforts to research science fiction—the public's understanding of these matters is tenuous enough, without you deliberately muddying the waters for personal gain.

Finally, if I might close with a quote from Thomas Aquinas:
If anyone glorying in the name of false science wishes to say anything in reply to what we have written, let him not speak in corners nor to boys who cannot judge of such arduous matters, but reply to this in writing, if he dares. He will find that not only I, who am the least of men, but many others zealous for the truth, will resist his error and correct his ignorance.
Or in other words, "Put up or shut up, unlike your usual hayseed audience we actually know what those things you say mean."

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