The Smug Baldy Speaks

Inventor Joseph Newman appeared in today’s Mobile Press-Register, demonstrating his amazing new “Alternative Energy Machine” at the Greater Gulf State Fairgrounds. Among claims that Newman makes are the following:

• The device will rid the world of pollution and our dependence on oil
• The government has tried to stop his invention because officials are controlled by payoffs from the oil industry
• The latest version of the machine is more energy efficient than ever before because of a “new scientific principle that God has given me in the past four months”
• The machine uses a negligible amount of energy as a catalyst to harness energy in “gyroscopic particles inside atoms”
• It will cost between $25 Million and $100 Million to obtain worldwide patents and manufacture the device

Apparently, Newman has been working on his energy machine for quite some time, and even though he has video evidence of the device in action, many in the scientific community, including middle school science teachers from the Mobile County School District, remain unconvinced. Much of the skepticism appears to come from a conventional understanding of the principle of conservation of energy, in which the energy of any closed system is generally accepted to remain constant. Newman, however, claims that his machine produces more energy than it consumes, which flies in the face of what most scientists understand as an implication of the first “law” of thermodynamics.

This appears to me to be a proposal to replace our reliance on foreign sources of oil with a new reliance on domestically produced snake oil. Joseph Newman has some interesting ideas, but they apparently don’t hold up under scrutiny. James Randi exposed Newman as a somewhat self-deluded naif in 2000, the US Patent Office has denied his patent application, and the National Bureau of Standards reported that Newman’s machine operates between 27% and 67% efficiency – much lower than the 100% and higher figures that he claims. Newman claims that a government conspiracy is behind the patent issue. He claims God revealed a new scientific principle to him. I suspect that he’s wrong at best, and his machine, rather than saving us from our dependence on fossil fuels, is more likely to be pig in a poke – which coincidentally appeared to produce more methane than it consumed. That is, until after the pig passed away and finished decomposing.