| The Tom Bearden Website |
| Date: Sat, 15 May 2004
14:00:14 -0500 Dear Conrad, No, we have not filed such proposals. In the case of the MEG, e.g., all five of us have worked extensively in aerospace for many years, and we are familiar with most of the "ropes" -- not just what makes the paper, but what also goes on behind the scene. Simply put, in most cases no inventor with an early invention and any real knowledge at all can afford to work with an agency of the U.S. government. Those agencies all file patents, for goodness sakes! Simply ask Larry Fullerton, of Time Domain, about his experiences, etc. Or try looking at the sly little DARPA contract clause "reserving march-in rights". One bureaucrat issues one memorandum, stating that the inventor(s) is (are) not getting the invention out onto the market fast enough for the government's needs. So the government exercises its "march-in" rights. It seizes the patent, assigns it to a favored big contractor, and away they go. Also, try looking into the cases where that has been done, and try to find any compensation for the inventor! Isn't it odd that government agencies producing WRITTEN intellectual property rights (reports, books, etc.) in their official government capacity, and paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, cannot copyright that work -- and yet they can and do copyright intellectual property rights on INVENTIONS, even though the work was also paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. Think about that for a moment, and one can readily see the possibility of abuse. Government agencies and their staffs are in competition with inventors! Anyone who knows the behind-the-scenes nature of the beast, easily recognizes the wonderful opportunities this gives those bureaucrats seeking personal power (and sometimes even making understood arrangements with their own favored contractor). In short, in some cases it works like this: the bureaucrat has an "arrangement" with his favored contractor, completely under the table. He diverts enough business to this favored contractor, then retires early, goes to work for a contractor -- guess who! That same contractor -- with lucrative stock bonuses etc., and voila! He is an instant millionaire. In many folks' opinion, at least 15% of U.S. government contracting is corrupt, to one extent or another. That should not be a surprise; at least 15% of private contracting is also "dirty". That should surprise no one since the Enron scandal, etc. If one works for a large U.S. contractor with real economic clout, the company is equipped to deal with that situation, and usually can get a fare shake. But if one is an independent inventor or a small group of inventors, forget it. Then that inventor or those inventors are just so much gullible bait for the real piranhas. It's even getting very difficult (and nearly impossible) for an independent inventor to work with a university, unless he just shares his invention rights with them. In short, the university will usually sign an information nondisclosure agreement, but not a noncircumvention agreement. A private inventor has to have both, or he's out of business very shortly. In such a situation, the private inventor is thus essentially compelled to go the "venture capital" route, and seek venture capital. That too is a mixed bag; sometimes the inventor is successful and gets a fair and equitable funding deal; other times he runs into a whipsaw that destroys the project. In the field of "energy from the vacuum", the likelihood of getting a "straight deal" is vanishingly small, unless the inventor has already successfully produced pre-production prototypes and arduously paid for all the research up to that "nearly final" point. Of course, once one gets to that point with energy from the vacuum devices, one could just use licensing with required advances to raise the necessary capital. I personally suspect that the "field that is not yet a field" of overunity EM systems taking their energy from the vacuum, will not succeed until philanthropic financing is forthcoming. Over the last century, e.g., there have been at least 70 legitimate systems of such nature invented. Not one of them has yet made it onto the world market. Understand, any such novel new field attracts con artists also. So the so-called "field" is not pure itself by any means. Another (and the greatest) barrier is the horribly flawed, decrepit old electrical engineering model that power engineers use. Many of the gross foundations errors in it have been pointed out by leading scientists such as Feynman, Wheeler, etc. Yet not a one of those terrible flaws has been corrected yet! The National Academy of Sciences will not do it, the National Science Foundation will not, the national laboratories will not, the universities will not, and the large scientific associations will not. So that is the situation. There really isn't very much a struggling inventor can do about all that. If the NAS and NSF don't give a hoot that the EE model they propagate still assumes the hoary old material ether, more than a century after its falsification in 1887, then the inventor cannot change that. (The material ether assumption is maintained by the false assumption of the force field in mass-free space; force occurs only in mass systems, never in free space.) The archaic EE model also still assumes a flat spacetime (falsified since 1916), and an inert vacuum (falsified since at least 1930). The fundamental basic mechanics model also teaches and assumes a separate force in mass-free space, acting on a mass, and that has been wrong for about 400 years. Thermodynamics also has some hoary old residues that are wrong; e.g., it erroneously equates change of the magnitude of a system external parameter (such as potential) as being work a priori. That is false; work is done only when the FORM of the energy transfer input is changed. Extra energy transfer in the same form, and its collection in the same form, is just regauging and is work-free. If the energy is input by simply flowing in the potential, no work is done. In the real world, one can do it with only a little current, and so one pays only a little work for change of lots of potential energy in the circuit. The hoary old second law of thermodynamics --- which is an oxymoron assuming its own negation has previously occurred --- actually only applies to equilibrium systems. Rigorously it does not apply to nonequilibrium systems, even steady state nonequilibrium systems. "Positive entropy", simply put, is just a measure of the energy formerly possessed and controlled by the system, that has been lost from the system's control. If we are to be consistent in terminology, then "negative entropy" would be just the "negative" of positive entropy. It would be a measure of the energy previously not possessed by the system and controlled by it, that has now become possessed and controlled by that system. Energy input and collection, by themselves, then become negentropic. Every time one throws a light switch to potentialize the light circuit, one actually applies excess input energy to that "circuit" or system, so that the system itself has a negative entropy input (of potential, in the same form it uses). It thus acquires some new energy under its control, negentropically, and it can then dissipate that controlled energy (entropically) to illuminate the lamp. Actually we just described Prigogine's "dissipative system" in simple terms. In this highly simplified view of negative entropy, any steady state nonequilibrium working system is receiving input negative entropy at the same rate that it is producing (outputting) positive entropy. Hence the system continuously just remains energized to the same degree, while steadily performing work and steadily receiving and processing the required energy. Note that it doesn't matter what inputs the required energy/negative entropy. The operator can do it from the power line and pay for it, or he can let a windmill-driven generator do it and not pay directly for the energy. He will, of course, have to pay for the maintenance and upkeep of that "converter" that freely inputs the basic environmental wind energy, because the converter has to perform work in order to change wind energy into electrical energy. But the operator doesn't have to pay for the fundamental input of the energy --- just as he doesn't have to pay for the solar radiation energy that is freely input to a solar cell in this same "negentropic" input fashion (simplified view). Anyway, so long as our major power engineering models remain terribly flawed, and as long as the organized scientific community adamantly propagates them and vehemently attacks any student, post doc, etc. who tries to make corrections to them or point out their errors, then we will continue to have flawed power systems which actually already take their local energy out of the local vacuum, but which insanely use half that freely collected "energy from the vacuum via the charge converters" to destroy the dipolarity of the distant generator in the power system, thereby requiring that mechanical energy constantly be fed into the shaft of the generators to restore the dipole. Again, we simply pay the power company to engage in a giant wrestling match inside their generators and LOSE. So long as the academic community ignores the long-suppressed source charge problem (how it provides the energy to make and replenish its associated EM fields and potentials), just so long will the academic community adamantly attack and oppose any invention proposing to take its energy from the vacuum. Note that EEs do not calculate an actual E-field, e.g., and they never have --- though all purport to. Rigorously, they calculate the intensity of the ongoing interaction of the "force-free E-field as it exists in massless space", with static charged matter. Simply examine the "definition" of the electric field intensity: E = F/q. That at best is a "measure" of the intensity of that ongoing interaction of the "real" force-free E-field; it has NOTHING to do with the so-called "magnitude of the E-field itself". Actually, a field or potential is also a set of free energy flows (as shown by Whittaker in 1903 and 1904), flowing freely from their source charges which also freely extracted all that energy from the seething vacuum in the first place. So the EE calculates what rigorously is called "electric field intensity", never realizing that the same "E-field" will have a different "electric field intensity" if it interacts with self-oscillating particles with charge. The latter case changes the intensity of that actual interaction, and so it yields the well-known "negative resonance absorption of the medium" effect, where the thermodynamic COP = 18. But I've not yet found a single paper that discusses the THERMODYNAMICS of that question. Those scientists keep very conservative in their use of terms, hence using "negative resonance absorption" and seldom mentioning that it is really "excess resonance emission". That way they do not seem to pose a "threat" to the great vested interests of the energy domain. So they can "keep on doing their thing", and the system lets them do it. Anyway, hope this sheds a little light on your question and why we haven't bothered very much at all with approaching such government agencies. We do have one U.S. government agency we would very much like to work with, but that will only be possible after we ourselves have gotten venture capital research funding and finished the project to the "ready-for-production series of prototypes" stage. Then a legitimate program can be funded and conducted. It's that year of very hard and expensive work we need to get to that point, that is the problem! The science and government communities give lots of lip service to "innovative thinking and approaches". In actual practice, the system tends very much to destroy most innovation, because it would be a serious threat to the status quo (and therefore to the rice bowls of many of those directing the upper levels of projects). And as we pointed out in our book, Energy from the Vacuum, sadly it's always been that way in science (any historian of science can give you many examples). Max Planck summed it up nicely when he stated,
The scientific community has been doing that suppression for a long time. E.g.: "Every great scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next they say it had been discovered before. Lastly they say they have always believed it." [Louis Agassiz, 1807-1873]. It's a human psychology trait to suppress innovation: So Freud stated:
Roger Bacon said it a LONG time ago, back when "scientists" were still called "natural philosophers"! He stated:
Arthur C. Clarke stated it very beautifully:
Anyway, if and when federal agencies such as NASA will and do provide protection for the inventor to retain his invention, by giving a noncircumvention clause, then perhaps inventors will be able to work with agencies of the federal government. In the background experience of our group of five, we have not found that such protection is reasonably offered, nor is it granted in practice. Best wishes, Tom Bearden Have you guys tried applying for funds from the NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts? Your work sounds like the sort of thing they might fund - sort of in the "so crazy it just might work" category :) http://www.niac.usra.edu/ Regards, Conrad R |
