Bribes at the Supreme Court for Thermodynamics

Spending two days in Hilversum (Netherlands) at the Global Breakthrough Energy Movement Conference provides ample cognitive deuterium to power cold fusion reactors for the foreseeable future.  All kidding aside, Global BEM did a phenomenal job of doing something I last saw elegantly executed by John Petersen's Arlington Institute.  With an aptitude somewhat unique to the Dutch, they assembled one of the most improbable of audiences from all corners of the globe and exposed them to content as dimensionally complex as the attendees.  Under the moniker of "Breakthrough Energy" - a more suitable term than the ecosystem disrespecting term "Free Energy" which fails to account for the constituents contributing to the system - they appealed to an expansive consideration of how we animate our future.

I couldn't help but marvel at the allegedly uninvited guest that seems to haunt gatherings such as this.  From Foster and Kimberly Gamble's Thrive: The Movie to the coffee breaks in Hilversum, the ghosts of Bretton Woods, the IMF, and David Rockefeller were running amok again.  The evidence of the homicide of alternative energy efforts seen to threaten the global financial system was presented by speakers ranging from Canada's Honorable Paul Hellyer to George Bush's Former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Housing, Catherine Austin Fitts.  While in years past, these voices were seen as fringe and discounted as conspiracy theorists, in the wake of the continued accountability and performance failure in the global financial sector, current headlines lent a certain credibility to what is very old news.  This post is NOT about the fact that, since 1913 and unquestioned since Bretton Woods cum International Monetary Fund, the current monetary system is controlled by and for private interests at the expense of public interest.  Rather it is about the apparent cognitive dissonance that should disprove the First Law of Thermodynamics.  By observation, in an isolated system (the passionate advocates for alternative energy paradigms), energy expended in blaming the global financial cabal for non-adoption of vital technical solutions is infinite. 

Why the title for the post?  Well, for a bunch of reasons. 

First, according to the practice of law in the U.S. and its thermodynamically constrained allies, perpetual motion isn't.  In one of the landmark cases that struck down perpetual motion as a "violation of the first and second law of thermodynamics" and therefore an "incredible utility", the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit actually did not conclude that Joseph Newman concocted a scam.  To the contrary, the actual case recites a report stating that, "evidence before the PTO and the district court is overwhelming that Newman has built and tested a prototype of his invention in which the output energy exceeds the external input energy; there is no contradictory factual evidence."  But, it goes on to say that since the evidence "seems contrary to recognized scientific principles" the results are "impossible".  Cold fusion researcher Dr. Mitchell Swartz's patent application efforts have been held up as irreproducible and therefore added to the Hall of Infamy by those who accept that science articulated in 1850 is the constraint with which we should all be hobbled today.  Having reviewed neither of these actual devices or the data associated therewith, I have no ability to comment on what the individuals did or didn't do.  What I can say is that the adherence to an 1850's mathematical assumption conveniently cloaked in the ominous designation of "Law" doesn't auger well for our social or scientific "advancement" illusions.  And to declare violations of thermodynamic "laws" to be "incredible" (in the pejorative use of the term) is incredible.

But equally incredible is the insistence that, with adequate financing (do we recall that the money is distributed by private institutions for the benefit of their shareholders?) we would be able to unleash alternative energy that would economically harm the shareholders that actually mint the thing that we "need" to destroy them.  If this sounds like the convoluted logic replete in the iocane powder laced Vizzini scene from The Princess Bride, good.  It should.  Because it is.  If we need distributed power available at each home, office, and human point of electrical consumption to rid ourselves from our vampirish monetary overlords, asking them for permission is more illogical than, "getting into a land-war in Asia or matching wits with a Sicilian when death is on the line." (For those of you who haven't seen the movie, you won't get this but you can click the link above and catch up.)  Which is only slightly more illogical than our continued addiction to our 60 Hz matrix unto which we've sworn unqualified allegiance.  We're blaming the poppy grower while the diacetylmorphine (a.k.a. heroin; a.k.a why we're really still fighting a land-war in Afghanistan…Asia?) needle is pumping the drug into our arm at our own hand.  If I were James Carville, I'd probably say, "It's the electricity addiction, stupid."  If we're serious about cutting the literal and metaphoric cord, we need to examine all of our dependencies we've placed on our electrical grid and figure out how to amend our technological entitlements which reinforce the incumbent system. 

If we spent as much of our time coming up with empowered appliances which actually address human needs and desires as we do trying to force gravity, fluid dynamics, toroidal fields, magnetism, light, and biodynamics into the 19th century utility grid, we may find that we need a lot less of a lot - including conflict metals, scientific ego reinforcement for "finally being recognized", money, and corporatization of energy.  We say that we want humanity, justice, peace, liberty, and countless other aspirations.  We say that these ideals can be achieved with distributed energy (or free software, or free medicine, or any of a number of other 'causes').  Yet we pave the road to our own demise with the sticky sludge of our refusal to emancipate ourselves from our reflexive preconditions that keep us enslaved to the very system that we claim is harming us.

The only perpetual motion machine that has clearly violated the Second Law of Thermodynamics is our fractional reserve currency system in market application.  What we've seen is clear evidence that trillions of dollars representing the notional value of hypothetical credit default and other synthetic instruments actually moved into dis-entropy between 2007 and the present.  This phenomenon, by the way, actually challenges Newton's Laws of Motion as money in motion actually suspended in an invisible cul-de-sac in the face of the clear violation of the Antoine Lovoisier Law of the Conservation of Mass in which the isolated system actually just created more ex nihilo.

Let's review.  You don't use the only perpetual motion machine that is embraced by governments and private elite alike (fiat, debt-based currency) to replace coal-fired electrical generators with gyroscopes, water screws, photonic or acoustic cavitation, and the like.  You start with what the Global BEM did well.  Bring together an eclectic, yes, at times, somewhat erratic crowd.  Let them share perspectives and interdisciplinary thinking.  And then, after all the energy condenses into infinite mass in infinitely small space, you spark the birth of a star by changing the paradigm that you perceive to be your principle constraint.  This cosmic process is, by its very nature, volatile.  But what you know is that somewhere on a planet far, far away, what will be seen is Light.  And that is what I wish for us all!  Pure, undefiled, LIGHT.