The ‘E-cat’ was a recent device that caught quite a bit of attention online. Like most ‘cold fusion’ devices eventually do this one appears to be turning sour. Invented by Andrea Rossi the E-cat was described as an energy producing device that operates on the cold fusion of Cu and Hydrogen atoms.

I am not going to talk in too much detail regarding the ‘E-cat’ but would like to spend more time talking about the phenomena that surrounds ‘cold fusion’ devices and more generally free energy (perpetual motion, magnet powered motors etc).

The only comment I will make about the ‘E-cat’ is that if you do create a cold fusion device and decide to try to market it, make sure your addition is correct…

Humanity is fascinated by the idea of ‘free energy’ and rightly so. There are two sides to this fascination, on one side we have the inventors and on the other we have the general public. The inventors obsession is driven by one of the following motivations:

A. If I can make ‘free energy’ I can become rich and famous.
B. If I can make ‘free energy’ I can save the world.
C. Science is my life.

Unfortunately for humanity so far most of the claimed discoveries of cold fusion have fallen into category A. People from this category are often self serving con artists or delusional scientists led down the rabbit hole by subconsciously misinterpreting data.

People from category B tend to be chasing the dream without understanding the science, they try to drive the research from outside and place pressure on scientists to work in this field but often don’t have the understanding themselves. Sometimes category B people make wild claims hoping that scientists will try to disprove them but instead succeed in creating a free energy source. So far this hasn’t happened.

Category C people are the real scientists researching energy production for the sake of science and nothing else, sadly most of the time these people don’t take cold fusion or free energy seriously.

Don’t get me wrong, some scientists have made claims of cold fusion based solely on the hard data resulting from their experiments, but then later realised or been shown their experimental errors or error in interpretation and retracted the claim.

The really sad thing is that the idea of any sort of cold fusion or free energy has become Taboo in the scientific world. People who make these claims are almost instantly branded as crackpots, charlatans or liars. I take a different view, we should try to see all science objectively, simply because it won’t work under the physical laws we know right now doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t work. This has been shown throughout history, as our understanding of the nature of atoms has improved so too has the complexity of the theories we use to define it. The emergence of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century is an excellent example of this, people observed experimental phenomena that could not be explained by the science of the time so the developed new approaches to explain them. This was met with great resistance in the scientific community but has now become the accepted model for atomic scale systems.

Science has proven itself wrong many times in the past and the knowledge that something is true doesn’t always mean that it is, Galileo taught us that. Claims of cold fusion and free energy should be approached with careful but open scepticism, we should aim to determine whether the claim is accurate without automatically assuming that it isn’t.

Unfortunately with the invention of the internet people can make whatever claims they like and project them to a large audience without validation or restriction. The sheer number of people making these claims makes it very hard for mainstream scientists to respond to each one carefully and thoroughly. This has led to the current situation, where government funding for these types of projects is gone and any scientist making a claim that seems too good to be true is, more often than not, shunned and rejected without due process. This leads to all of the fake claims being dealt with swiftly, but if ever there were to be a legitimate claim it would fall on deaf ears.

On the other side of the fascination is the general populace. Humanity as a whole often pins its hope on one thing that could ‘fix’ or ‘save’ the world. For many people cold fusion is that saviour. If only we could generate cheap clean energy we could cure all the ails of the world.

In one sense this naive idea is actually true, many of the wars fought in this world are for energy, much of the pollution is created by energy production and almost all processes in the modern world involve the use of large amounts of energy. If we could produce an abundant source of clean cheap energy we could replace all of these things and work towards a better future. However in reality this probably won’t work, sadly we are too greedy and selfish as a race to share the spoils of such an energy source.

The nature of the public’s fixation on these free energy ideas as a saviour is what makes exploiting them so attractive to the charlatans and liars. People dream of such a solution and if you appear able to provide it they will pay for it. Many people throughout history have tried to profit from the idea of free energy and each attempt is met with a mixed response of scorn and acceptance from the public. If we could rid society of the parasites that milk the desires of the masses for money perhaps we could focus on working together to solve some of the large issues of our times.

In the end science wins, this is a view that holds true for me. I see that the slow and argumentative nature of the scientific community in its current form works together to determine the truth eventually. In the end the truth always comes out and science wins.

Leave your opinion on the way science deals with free energy, or your views on the public fascination below. Thanks for reading and the next time you hear about free energy don’t accept or exclude it out of hand.

Cheers,
Daniel