Energy, Physics, and Soda
Pop
May, 1999
BETHESDA, Maryland -- David Wallman deftly slides the
dark glass shield into place in front of his carbon-arc machine and
tells his audience to step away. "Don't look directly at it from the
side," Wallman warns.
He flips a switch. The light is blinding. The machine
begins to bubble and froth as 40 amps of current leap the gap between
two carbon rods and electrify the sugar water that fills the tank.
Those very special bubbles -- Wallman calls them
carbo-hydrogen gas -- will, he hopes, change the world.
When burned, the gas produces much less pollution than
gasoline, and it may prove cheaper to manufacture. The former
Hewlett-Packard electrical engineer rattles off a laundry list of
possible uses by consumers and industry. A clean new fuel for cars.
Revolutionary power generation. A supplement to solar panels for
remote homesteaders.
But the most intriguing result of Wallman's
demonstration is that it seems to violate the laws of physics by
generating more energy than it consumes.
As any college chemistry student knows, that should be
impossible. Your car's internal combustion engine wastes about
three-quarters of the energy in the fuel it burns when you drive down
the road. And it guzzles even more when you step on the gas. It never,
ever creates more energy.
If Wallman's calculations are correct, the only
explanation is that some form of a small-scale nuclear reaction is
taking place inside that bubbling tank.
Serious scientists have admitted they can't explain the
results in any other way, especially the presence of helium in the
gas -- an element that didn't exist in the sugar-water solution. If it
works, Wallman's process would not quite be cold fusion, since the
temperatures in that brilliant carbon
arc reach 7,200 F. Perhaps it's cool fusion instead.
Wallman is one of a legion of garage researchers who
gathered Saturday in a ramshackle Holiday Inn in Bethesda, Maryland,
at the first Conference on Future Energy. Some presenters are careful
engineers hoping to attract investors. Others ooze the unwholesome
patina of snake-oil salesman hoping to make a fast buck. Cold fusion
advocates hope vindication is
finally about to arrive. All believe the media, government, and
academia ignore, either accidentally or deliberately,
honest-to-goodness scientific advances.
Paul Pantone is more convinced than most. During his
presentation he drops hints of a tenebrous conspiracy that has barred
him from marketing a revolutionary power source that looks just like a
metal doughnut wrapped in black electrical tape.
It can power a normal light bulb using "the energy
around us," Pantone says, but "there's a specific pattern of
north-south" with which it must be aligned. If there's anyone in the
audience who wants to sign up as distributors, Pantone seems willing
to talk. But there's a catch: To sell this new power source, you first
have to sign up as a distributor and sell
other Pantone products until it becomes available.
The other products? Well, there's Pantone's GEET engine.
He says it runs off "junk fuel" -- various slurries of paint thinner,
crude oil, gasoline, Sprite, or Mountain Dew. If you yank your
carburetor and replace it with a GEET device, you may double your
car's gas mileage, he says.
With the fervor of a reborn religious leader, Pantone
denounces the powers that be that bar him from spreading the gospel of
GEET beyond lectures at public schools near his Salt Lake City home.
"In the Christian community, you know what? They welcome
you," Pantone says.
Someone who has followed Pantone's US$75 step-by-step
conversion instructions has wheeled their GEETized lawnmower into the
small hotel conference room. Copper tubing races crazily around the
engine, dips into the exhaust pipe, and ends in a Mason jar stuffed
with steel wool and gasoline. Pantone claims the hot exhaust creates a
magnetic field and
a "plasma reaction" that eliminates pollution.
He asks his wife Molley to explain the details of his
discovery. She volunteers that she took a college-level physics class
and received a C+. Then she realized that everything she learned was
upside down. "These laws that are in our physics books are truly
wrong," she says.
The audience is suitably impressed. "I am in awe!" one
person exclaims.
Pantone stresses the virtues of his ostensibly
pollution-free contraption. "We've got some vehicles where we have
cleaner exhaust than the air around the vehicle," Pantone brags.
Then comes the demonstration. The lawnmower rattles and
roars to life, belching fumes into the enclosed space. Mountain Dew is
poured into the Mason jar, and the beleaguered motor splutters but
keeps on running. The stench worsens, and some people cough and leave
the room.
Much of the audience, though, is undeterred. They gather
around the stinking, wheezing mower and stare at it as if it were an
alien artifact recently recovered from Area 51. They are the
perpetually hopeful, the uncritical -- the groupies of the future
energy movement. Driven by a deep-seated conviction that officialdom
is denying them the truth, they have become evangelists of better
living through better energy. And if it
stings when their ideas are ignored or ridiculed, they've found their
own ways to cope.
Les Adam is a practical businessman, and his solution is
as elegant as it is simple: Ignore the naysayers in the United States
establishment. Other countries are more accepting.
Adam's company, AZ Industries, is gearing up to make a
dirt-cheap electric car, and smog-plagued Mexican cities may be big
customers. "If they don't do something in the city of Mexico City
pretty soon, everyone will be dead there," Adam says.
His SKUUTR car resembles a slant-nosed dresser on
wheels, with a frame built of lightweight-aluminum honeycomb covered
by a composite shell. Inside are three pairs of off-the-shelf
batteries in series that pump out 36 volts to the car's four motors
mounted on the wheels. It will have a 200-mile range at speeds up to
80 mph, Adam says. The probable price tag: Just
$15,000.
If that sounds too much like a golf cart with a
windshield, Adam also is working on a vehicle powered by hydrogen
peroxide. The engine relies on the heat produced when turning peroxide
into water -- a simple process that happens every day when a bottle of
the stuff is left uncapped. Adam
says he's figured out how to speed it up with a ceramic-based
catalyst.
The audience wants to know if he's encountered
opposition from the military-industrial complex that relies so heavily
on petroleum products. One member asks, "How would you dismantle the
New World Order?"
It's a common theme at the conference, which has a short
but unusual history. The event originally was going to be sponsored by
the US State Department, then the Patent and Trademark Office. Both
backed out at the last minute.
To some attendees, that was proof positive that Official
Washington didn't want the discussions to take place. In one of the
most popular sessions, called "Evidence for Free Energy Technology
Suppression," veteran UFO-hound Steven Greer laid out the case for a
widespread government coverup.
He said the same forces -- NRO, NSA, CIA, DOE -- that
have hid evidence of UFOs also try to thwart new energy technologies.
"It really is the same thing. They are identical issues.... The
implication of having this information released is so vast, profound,
and far-reaching that no aspects of life on
earth would be unchanged." Greer said.
The relevance of all this to future energy? Not much.
Greer just seemed glad to have an excuse to talk about the UFO
coverup.
With the pride of an art collector showing off his
Picasso collection, the former physician played a selection of fuzzy
videotapes that purported to show spacecraft buzzing around. "There's
a nice one in Ecuador," he said. "This is one that landed in Ontario."
A conference that includes Greer's conspiracy theories
must seem like a recurring bad dream to engineers like David Wallman,
who has carefully documented an apparently inexplicable process with
results that any scientist can verify.
"It is repeatable 100 percent of the time," Wallman
says. Unlike, one gathers, UFO sightings.
by Declan McCullagh