Date: Ever since the industrial age
Location: Worldwide
The Conspirators: Governments, energy companies, regulators
The Victims: Consumers worldwide
If you are an authoritarian government, one easy way to control a population is to make them dependent upon a base necessity, like electricity. If people were able to generate their own electricity for free, and no longer had to buy it to heat their homes, drive their cars, get their news, or do almost anything else, they would no longer be dependent upon the establishment and would thus be more difficult to control.
Given this certainty, it is no surprise that a very vocal community of conspiracy theorists believes that this is exactly what has happened with electrical power generation and transmission. Many theorists believe that electricity can easily be generated for free, but that governments and industry suppress that knowledge for fear of losing their control over the population.
Free energy machines do not and cannot exist, as the laws of physics make them impossible. Specifically, the laws of thermodynamics state that when energy is drawn from a system, the system is left with less energy. You can’t drink water from a glass and have the glass still remain full.
Free energy is a compelling proposition. We all wish we could power our homes and cars with free, limitless electricity. The culture of crankery has responded, with centuries of proposals for free energy. Today these proposals often take the form of theoretical high-tech concepts, but for most of history, the idea of free energy has been based on mechanical perpetual motion machines.
The quest for perpetual motion has been around as long as humans have been using machines to do work. The first known concepts were called overbalanced wheels intended to spin forever all by themselves, and these were imagined in many different designs. One had spokes filled with mercury, curved in such a way that the mercury flowed outward as each spoke moved over the top of the wheel to provide more leverage on the downstroke. The mercury flowed back inward as the spoke moved under the bottom of the wheel to provide less leverage on the upstroke. Others used hinged levers to move weights in the same way. The idea was that if a wheel could be made to turn all by itself, it could be connected to a machine to do work, or to a generator to produce free electricity. No design has ever worked, but that’s never stopped amateur engineers from trying.
Today the most common free energy device is a magnetic motor, with some arrangement of permanent magnets intended to keep a rotor always spinning, a ball always moving around some track, or some other mechanical action. No magnetic motor has ever been able to maintain its movement.
The term perpetual motion has gone somewhat out of favor for describing free energy machines, as it seems to suggest old-fashioned contraptions and clunky spoked wheels, rather than the finely machined devices that believers design today. These believers often cite complex mathematical concepts, or terminology from quantum physics, that they think might make their particular machine the first one to actually work. So the term generally used today is an over-unity device, suggesting that more energy comes out than goes in. This is exactly what perpetual motion means, but the new term sounds a bit more sciencey and promising to some in their quest to create a device to produce free energy.
Terminology has, in fact, played a significant role in the modern perpetual motion community. Because many of those who tinker with this stuff are nonscientific amateurs, some can be easily tempted by words that sound like support for their concept. One great example is the term zero-point energy, which suggests an untapped energy source sitting out there in space, just waiting for someone to come along and build the right kind of device to suck that power out and put it to work. The phrase “zero-point energy” can often be found in descriptions of today’s free energy concepts.
One company in recent memory that gained a surprising amount of traction with a blatant claim of free energy production was called Steorn, formed in 2000 as a web design company. In 2006 they announced they were developing a “microgenerator.” They named their device the Orbo but would say very little about how it worked, other than to say it produced free, clean, and constant energy. They asserted that it had been validated by eight independent scientists, but (unsurprisingly) would not name them or present them to the media for interviews.
Steorn did challenge an actual independent jury to test its device in 2007, but in 2009 the jury came back and announced that the production of energy had not been demonstrated. It soon became clear that the Orbo was simply one more attempt at a magnetic motor.
The free energy community today is tightly wrapped up with the conspiracy theory community, and interestingly, with the UFO community as well—both communities sharing a belief that governments are keeping enormous secrets from the people. For a long time, UFO proponent Steven M. Greer has promoted what he calls the Disclosure Project, whereby he expects to compel governments to disclose all sorts of secret information about UFOs that he believes they are withholding. Increasingly he promotes free-energy technologies as well, and also calls on governments to disclose the devices he believes they are suppressing.
The fundamental reason that free energy machines can never work is hinted at in their name. They produce something from nothing. The way the universe works is defined by physical laws—and those laws don’t work that way.
The first law of thermodynamics says that the energy level of any closed system remains constant. If we take energy out of it to do some work—for example, spinning a rotor—then we must put an equivalent amount of energy back in. (In point of fact, we must put more energy back in, because the act of doing these things would have consumed some energy as well.)
The second law of thermodynamics says that systems seek thermal equilibrium. Basically, heat energy will never flow on its own from a region of lower temperature to a region of higher temperature. If some of that heat energy is converted to work (spinning that rotor again, or some other job), energy from some other part of the system must flow to it as the system seeks equilibrium. You cannot extract work and still have the same amount of energy left. No way, no how, can any perpetual motion device (or any other “over-unity” claim) ever be possible. Physics is physics, and whether your device is an overbalanced wheel or the most precise magnetic motor yet derived, it can never work.
Of course, any company that could design and patent a functional free-energy machine would become fantastically wealthy, which is the basic logical reason that the conspiratorial claim of suppression is nonsensical. Why would anyone keep something that would make them rich under wraps?
Another reason that suppression can be trivially dismissed is that there does not appear to be any sort of suppression campaign in place. One need only glance at the Internet, especially YouTube, to see that free-energy devices are widely and freely discussed. They are most obviously not suppressed.
Zero-point energy—on which so many of these claims depend—is a real term, but it does not refer to a source of energy. It’s a term in physics that refers to the minimum possible energy state of a system. Such a system is said to be at its ground state. Logically, energy could never be drawn from such a system, because it is already at its minimum. The example most often cited is so-called vacuum energy, which refers to the ground state of a pure vacuum, such as in outer space. The ground state of a pure vacuum is non-zero, because of quantum fluctuations—constant, minute changes in energy levels which are part of the universe’s basic nature. That energy, which is vanishingly small, cannot ever be extracted, because doing so would leave the vacuum with an energy level that is less than its ground state, which is an impossibility. Yet, nonexperts will sometimes look at the words used and misconstrue that they mean a source of energy. You can’t take speed away from a stopped car, and you can’t take energy away from a system that is at its physical minimum.
Unless the fundamental laws of the universe are proven to be dramatically wrong, which seems unlikely, it’s equally unlikely that we’ll need to worry about governments suppressing perpetual motion machines.