Electrostatic Crackpottery

Back in the last thread where I complained about my current bout of blagger’s block, Skulls/gg tipped me off to a bit of physics crackpottery involving some proposed design for a perpetual motion machine. The writer apparently thinks that he’s found a “glitch” in the “current scientific paradigm” with a little cheesey arithmetic. I gotta tell you, even in the world of crackpot physics, this stuff it pretty low rent. The sheer audacity of believing that you can overturn centuries of scientific progress with some (really bad) back of the envelope calculations is something I can scarcely understand. Nonetheless, that appears to be the case here.

The author starts out thusly:

At first glance the formulas of Coulomb’s Law and Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation appear very similar. Both determine forces present.

“At first glance”? The author acts as though this is a discovery of his. In reality, however, the similarity of the laws is a perfectly objective consequence of both of them being inverse-square laws. Historically, the investigation of quantitative electrostatics was heavily inspired the success in describing gravitation through such a relation, and Charles Augustine Coulomb set it on firm experimental ground in the latter part of the 18th. century. So needless to say, this is not something the physically literate would find all that surprising.

But that sort of grandiosity is mild compared to his claims to another discovery. The author claims to have found a “glitch” because Coulomb’s law defies these two physical laws:

# Nothing can be created or destroyed.
# You can’t get something for nothing.

The first point, which is really the only one of relevance, is nothing but a very common misstatement of conservation laws. Very broadly, conservation laws only state that in an isolated region, the net quantity of something will not alter between a given state and any increment upon that state. Contrary to the author’s claim that Coulomb’s law represents a violation of conservation, electric charge obeys it perfectly.

There really isn’t much more to say about this. The claim that you can get “free energy” in some non-conventional way from electric charge rests entirely upon a very naive understanding of physics. We already use electric charge to generate power for applications, as should be obvious to anyone using a device capable of reading this. Nothing we know about electromagnetism represents a “glitch” in our understanding.

But to leave you off with a funny note, the author complains of patent woes later on:

Included with this page is a copy of the aborted patent application for this device. I screwed up on getting the claims right and this is a copy of the last try.

The past tense is, of course, inappropriate.