Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, kids,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Polatin,
Speaker 1: I'm an editor and how stuff works dot Com. Sitting
Speaker 1: across from me as usual as senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: The most merciful thing in the world, I think is
Speaker 1: the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm just thinking about that that introduction. I've
Speaker 1: been saying that almost four times, four hundred times. Actually,
Speaker 1: technically you've said it more than four hundred times. Well,
Speaker 1: that's true because this is our four episode guys, who
Speaker 1: but explains the streamers in the balloon? Yeah? Yeah, Also,
Speaker 1: why do all the balloons have Josh's face on him?
Speaker 1: Well it was cheaper that way. We ordered way too
Speaker 1: many for south By Southwest, so I just grabbed a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of them. Okay, they're my lard. They'll be
Speaker 1: up for hours anyway. So you guys who have been
Speaker 1: with us from the very beginning might be thinking, Wow,
Speaker 1: four hundred episodes. I can't believe it. And neither can we.
Speaker 1: But technically we've actually recorded more than four hundred episodes
Speaker 1: because back back back in the very earliest days of
Speaker 1: this podcast, we recorded several test episodes that never published. Yes,
Speaker 1: they're buried out back somewhere. Yeah, they And I know
Speaker 1: what you're all thinking. You're thinking, Jonathan and Chris, are
Speaker 1: you telling me that there were some episodes from early
Speaker 1: early on that were even less polished than the ones
Speaker 1: that you actually published. And the answer to that is
Speaker 1: words can hurt. But yeah, those those episodes just really
Speaker 1: didn't work. And so for our four hundred episode, we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about stuff that doesn't work, like never mind. Um, so, hey,
Speaker 1: I I worked hard this week. Don't look at me,
Speaker 1: all right, So let's I was going to make a
Speaker 1: familial joke, and since I don't actually have the relative
Speaker 1: who doesn't work, I won't, all right, So we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about a whole bunch of different things. Some of
Speaker 1: these are going to be hoaxes, so they were never
Speaker 1: meant to work. They were just meant to either fool
Speaker 1: people for fun zies or for financial gain or some
Speaker 1: other reason. Some of them aren't necessarily hoaxes. They were
Speaker 1: things that people have pursued but it just hasn't panned out.
Speaker 1: Some of them are things that might have technically worked
Speaker 1: but didn't actually work in the real world, Like you
Speaker 1: could make it work, but no one wanted it. So
Speaker 1: so but we're gonna start with one of the most
Speaker 1: famous things that just has never worked, which is perpetual
Speaker 1: motion devices. Yeah, this is one of those that's easier
Speaker 1: to sell because people want a machine that can do
Speaker 1: what a perpetual motion machine would do if it actually
Speaker 1: could do it. So let's talk about what perpetual machines.
Speaker 1: And actually there's there's another device, type of device called
Speaker 1: an overunity performance device, which is related to perpetual motion. Uh.
Speaker 1: There is a difference, however. So perpetual motion is some
Speaker 1: sort of device that, once set into motion, will continue
Speaker 1: perpetually without the need for external uh force to come
Speaker 1: into the system to keep it going. So like think
Speaker 1: of a wheel, and once the wheel starts spinning, it
Speaker 1: never ever stops. You never have to reach in and
Speaker 1: give it another push, It'll just keep going forever. Now,
Speaker 1: in that case, you're talking about a a system that
Speaker 1: is generating just enough energy to keep going. So so
Speaker 1: you're not you're not getting excess energy out of that.
Speaker 1: So perpetual motion machine, if you were to be able
Speaker 1: to make one, would be mostly a curiosity. It would
Speaker 1: be interesting to look at, but it wouldn't be useful necessarily.
Speaker 1: The overunity performance type of device that's different. That's talking
Speaker 1: about some sort of device that actually generates more energy
Speaker 1: than is required to put into it, so it's got
Speaker 1: an efficiency that's greater than because at a hundred percent
Speaker 1: efficiency it would just keep running right right, But if
Speaker 1: you had a hundred and then you would be generating
Speaker 1: more energy than you were required to to start that device.
Speaker 1: This is this is the goal of lots of different
Speaker 1: people out there, some of whom are are pursuing it,
Speaker 1: uh sincerely, and others who are trying to pull the
Speaker 1: wool over people's eyes by saying they've got this essentially
Speaker 1: a free energy machine. Um, and you should always because
Speaker 1: there are a lot of different red flags to look
Speaker 1: out for, but free energy is definitely a big one,
Speaker 1: because as far as we can tell, it's not really possible.
Speaker 1: It's that's not to say that it is impossible due
Speaker 1: to the laws of physics, it's just that by the
Speaker 1: by our knowledge, by our understanding of how the universe works,
Speaker 1: and based upon everything that we know about the way
Speaker 1: things behave within our universe, it does not appear to
Speaker 1: be possible. That doesn't mean that one day we don't
Speaker 1: figure it out. It just means that, based upon everything
Speaker 1: we know so far, it's a good bet to say
Speaker 1: not possible. Um. Well, you have to follow the laws
Speaker 1: of physics even when you never studied law. Right, So
Speaker 1: you know, you put your wheel into motion, and you
Speaker 1: have to deal with you know, trifling little things like friction,
Speaker 1: friction and viscosity and things like that. Yeah, Dissipated forces
Speaker 1: is what that's called. These are forces that that end
Speaker 1: up taking some of that energy that goes into a
Speaker 1: system and converting it into other forms, which means you
Speaker 1: have a loss of energy. Now, friction, for example, it
Speaker 1: will convert things into heat, energy and heat, So you
Speaker 1: lose energy through heat through a system. Well, unless it's
Speaker 1: generating that same amount of energy somehow through its operation.
Speaker 1: That means you have a net loss of energy and
Speaker 1: eventually that device is going to slow down. Uh. And
Speaker 1: dissipated forces are include more than just friction and viscosity,
Speaker 1: but those are two that are very easily uh explained,
Speaker 1: So that tends to be the two that most people
Speaker 1: focus on. But there's more than just that. But there
Speaker 1: have been people throughout history who have been trying to
Speaker 1: tackle this, and even from just the perpetual motion machine side.
Speaker 1: Uh The very first documented perpetual motion machine that I
Speaker 1: could find came from an uh an Indian author East India,
Speaker 1: not native American, named Boscara and eleven fifty nine, and
Speaker 1: his proposed device was a wheel. Many perpetual motion devices
Speaker 1: come in the form of a wheel. It's wheel that
Speaker 1: was vertically aligned, so think of it like you know,
Speaker 1: a water wheel, you know, and it had a little
Speaker 1: containers at the end of the around the perimeter of
Speaker 1: the wheel, and these containers were going to contain mercury,
Speaker 1: so liquid mercury, and the idea was that you would
Speaker 1: turn the wheel and the liquid mercury, as it would
Speaker 1: reach a certain point on the trip around, the wheel
Speaker 1: would slide down to the end of its container, and
Speaker 1: that that slide would cause a weight imbalance upon one
Speaker 1: side of the axle of this wheel, and that would
Speaker 1: continue to give it the force needed to turn. So
Speaker 1: the idea was that once it was started in motion,
Speaker 1: it should perpetually turn turns out not so much, uh.
Speaker 1: And there have been a lot of people who have
Speaker 1: tested this with many different variations on this weighted wheel concept,
Speaker 1: including Leonardo da Vinci, and he he had a great quote,
Speaker 1: he said, oh, ye, seekers, after perpetual motion, how many
Speaker 1: vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place
Speaker 1: with the alchemists. That's that's not a high opinion. No, no,
Speaker 1: And it's funny that that he made that comparison because
Speaker 1: as we've been talking, I've been thinking about that very
Speaker 1: same thing. And of course, uh, the most stream prize
Speaker 1: of alchemy would be the ability to transmute lead into
Speaker 1: gold um. And there were very many uh scientists who
Speaker 1: got their start in science trying to solve that problem
Speaker 1: because they realized as they did more experimentation that well,
Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't simply going to work. You can
Speaker 1: you can think of alchemy as sort of a proto
Speaker 1: science and that in that it really didn't follow the
Speaker 1: strict rules of science, but it was something that kind
Speaker 1: of gradually gave way to fields like chemistry and and physics. Well,
Speaker 1: but but in of itself was more of a an
Speaker 1: accult type practice than a science, right right, Well, I
Speaker 1: do believe that the people who or or many of
Speaker 1: the people who were pursuing alchemy um were of scientific
Speaker 1: mind and and we're actually experimenting with the idea that
Speaker 1: they were going to create some greater good. And and
Speaker 1: that's how science was, you know, it's linked to sciences
Speaker 1: is from that. And people like Leonardo da Vinci, you know,
Speaker 1: you would imagine that, uh, well, he's not out to
Speaker 1: defraud people, So he was pursuing this as a legitimate,
Speaker 1: uh scientifical experiment. He wanted to see if he could
Speaker 1: make it work. Da Vinci was was a bit of
Speaker 1: a busy body, and and he also would tend to
Speaker 1: gain and lose interest in things very very quickly, as
Speaker 1: a true polly math often does. And uh he uh
Speaker 1: you know, he he built a weighted wheel. In his version.
Speaker 1: The weighted wheel actually had little uh on the perimeter
Speaker 1: of the wheel. The outside perimeter, there were these little
Speaker 1: uh levers essentially with a weight on the end, and
Speaker 1: they were on a hinge, so that as the wheel turned,
Speaker 1: the lever would move forward and the falling motion of
Speaker 1: the weight was supposed to try and you know, keep
Speaker 1: counteract the wheels tendency to stop. And again Leonardo realized.
Speaker 1: He said, this just doesn't work. He said, as the
Speaker 1: attachment of the heavy body as far there from the
Speaker 1: center of the wheel, the revolving movement of the wheel
Speaker 1: around its pivot will become more difficult. Although the motive
Speaker 1: power may not vary. Essentially, he was saying, it don't work, y'all.
Speaker 1: And and and you know, despite that, we've had numerous
Speaker 1: people trying to create perpetual motion machines since then. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they focus on gravity as being the force that enacts
Speaker 1: the perpetual motion. Others use magnetism, so they try and
Speaker 1: create something with magnets to make something spin and uh,
Speaker 1: and they'll they argue that it will spin indefinitely. Essentially,
Speaker 1: they'll it will continue spinning until someone stops it. But
Speaker 1: that's not that that has never proven to be true.
Speaker 1: It always will eventually come to a stop. It's just
Speaker 1: that sometimes it takes longer than others. And you might think, well,
Speaker 1: if you can extend it so that it's it's a
Speaker 1: really long time, isn't that effectively the same as perpetual ocean?
Speaker 1: But I mean there is a fundamental difference there. So Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the way the way we think about things in
Speaker 1: an ideal situation is that you would have a uh,
Speaker 1: an isolated system, and an isolated system is one that
Speaker 1: has no other forces acting upon it from the external sources.
Speaker 1: And UH, even if you were to have a a
Speaker 1: demonstration of a perpetual motion machine, the problem is that
Speaker 1: any demonstration cannot be an isolated system because you can't
Speaker 1: have that in real life. It's a thought experiment, but
Speaker 1: you can't. There's no there's no way you can isolate
Speaker 1: a system from everything else, right, There's always going to
Speaker 1: be something else that's enacting upon it and um. And
Speaker 1: so there are times where people have shown off devices
Speaker 1: that that to perhaps someone not schooled in this would think, oh,
Speaker 1: that is perpetual motion, but upon closer examination, it tends
Speaker 1: to fall apart. Actually it does fall apart, which is
Speaker 1: part of the reason why the pursuit has gone on
Speaker 1: even to the current day. I mean, there's still people
Speaker 1: trying to make that happen, but I think more and
Speaker 1: more of these days, UH, it's turned out to be
Speaker 1: more of a hoax. Intentionally, you know, somebody wants to
Speaker 1: go down in history as being the inventor of the
Speaker 1: perpetual motion machine and get fame and fortune. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: also there's also a common health belief that the patent
Speaker 1: offices won't accept patents for perpetual motion devices or over
Speaker 1: unity performance devices based upon the fact that our scientific
Speaker 1: understanding suggests that these things are most likely impossible. That, uh,
Speaker 1: that's not entirely true, because just by changing the wording,
Speaker 1: I mean, there are a lot of people who write
Speaker 1: patents who avoid phrases that indicate that that's an overunity
Speaker 1: performance device, for example, That doesn't mean that they can't
Speaker 1: get a patent for it. They can if they word
Speaker 1: it the right way and the person reviewing the patent
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily realize that that's what this is truly saying.
Speaker 1: So there are a lot of patents out there for
Speaker 1: devices that supposedly have over a percent efficiency, even though
Speaker 1: no one has demonstrably proven that such a device is actually, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a real thing. I mean, there's there have
Speaker 1: been a lot of overunity performance devices that have been
Speaker 1: unveiled in places like Australia, in Europe, even the United
Speaker 1: States as well, where uh they've invited people to come
Speaker 1: in and observe them and under casual observation, it looks
Speaker 1: like they're doing the devices doing what was claimed. But
Speaker 1: it seems that whenever there is a legitimate, uh, skeptical
Speaker 1: approach to this, that it then just falls apart that
Speaker 1: you know, people the scientists will say, I can endorse this,
Speaker 1: it doesn't you know, it doesn't seem to work. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's also it can be really tricky to determine
Speaker 1: from some of these devices, uh, where where power is
Speaker 1: coming from, where it's going to and you know, what,
Speaker 1: where's the imbalance coming from? So, for example, if you
Speaker 1: have one that works on electro magnets, but you have
Speaker 1: to supply current to those electro magnets in order for
Speaker 1: them to work and uh. And so if you have
Speaker 1: brought a battery into the system, as soon as you've
Speaker 1: got the battery there, then you've got the question of, well,
Speaker 1: is this battery actually providing some of that power that's
Speaker 1: coming out of the system. Uh. And if so, then
Speaker 1: that may just mean that all we're doing is shifting
Speaker 1: the power from the battery to the output. And it's
Speaker 1: not that the system itself is is super efficient. It's
Speaker 1: just that we've created a circuit and that's all we've done. UM,
Speaker 1: so yeah, this is this is one of those things that, uh,
Speaker 1: that continues to be attempting target for a lot of
Speaker 1: inventors out there and also a lot of hoaxers. In fact,
Speaker 1: you had a story about a perpetual motion machine that
Speaker 1: turned out to not be all that it appeared to
Speaker 1: be on first glance, right right, Well, this was something
Speaker 1: that I uncovered during my research about UM. This person
Speaker 1: named Charles Redheffer who showed up in Philadelphia in eighteen
Speaker 1: twelve with this perpetual motion machine UM, and he managed
Speaker 1: to get an audience with the Philadelphia City commissioners and
Speaker 1: the idea was that he was going to show off
Speaker 1: how his machine worked. And he had this he claimed
Speaker 1: that it didn't really need any any sources of external
Speaker 1: power to run, that it would run on its own.
Speaker 1: So uh and and what it all said another external
Speaker 1: device that it was powering it itself with that was
Speaker 1: using gears to make it work, except they weren't allowed
Speaker 1: to get too close to the machine. Yeah, that's always
Speaker 1: a strong indicator there when when the observation must be
Speaker 1: made at a distance. UM. They they actually they were
Speaker 1: skeptical because they could tell that it wasn't working the
Speaker 1: way it was supposed to. Um that something was off,
Speaker 1: but he wouldn't let them get close enough to really
Speaker 1: determine what was going on. So they hired um an
Speaker 1: engineer that they knew to build a machine like it.
Speaker 1: Um and uh and as a matter of fact, apparently
Speaker 1: the Franklin Institution in Philadelphia still has that machine that
Speaker 1: the other engineer made to work like it. I've been
Speaker 1: to that institute. I don't remember seeing I'm going to
Speaker 1: have to go back now and check that out. Um
Speaker 1: he uh. Redheffer actually uh high tailed it out of
Speaker 1: town when he realized that the jig was up. There
Speaker 1: was time to move on to more fertile grounds, so
Speaker 1: he headed to New York City, where they hadn't yet
Speaker 1: learned of this New York City get the rope um. So,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, a fairly smart guy, Robert Fulton.
Speaker 1: You may have heard of him, Yes, steamboat Robbie. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um he uh he noticed he saw the machine and uh,
Speaker 1: he could tell that it was something was off. It
Speaker 1: wasn't it was wobbling, it wasn't. It wasn't operating at
Speaker 1: a smooth pace. Yeah. Yeah, And he he had the
Speaker 1: feeling that somebody was making it work. Um, so he
Speaker 1: he challenged Red Halfer and said that he could uh uh,
Speaker 1: he could figure out how it was working, and if
Speaker 1: he broke the machine in an attempt, he would pay
Speaker 1: him for the damages. So uh Red Haffer made the
Speaker 1: mistake of accepting that challenge. So he uh he started
Speaker 1: taking boards off the wall near the machine and found
Speaker 1: a a catgut cord that went upstairs to another room
Speaker 1: where they had a an old, old bearded guy sitting
Speaker 1: there cranking the machine with one hand and eating with
Speaker 1: the other. So that's why it was sort of irregular,
Speaker 1: was because he was cranking it irregularly. And uh uh,
Speaker 1: people got upset and busted up the machine and that
Speaker 1: was the end of Redheifer's attempt to prove that he
Speaker 1: had the perpetual motion. Which is really tragic because as
Speaker 1: we all know, in the nineteen century, many of our
Speaker 1: technologies were powered by bearded old men. Yes, that's true.
Speaker 1: Um And incidentally, if you want to read more, that
Speaker 1: was from the Museum of Hoaxes dot com. Very entertaining read. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a there are a couple of interesting there are
Speaker 1: other some other really famous hoaxes. And there's one that
Speaker 1: that Chris and I both looked at because we do
Speaker 1: our our independently on another, so when we get together
Speaker 1: to record a podcast, often the stuff we say will
Speaker 1: surprise each other because you know, we've pursued different paths.
Speaker 1: But one thing that we both looked at was the
Speaker 1: great chess automaton of veteran Wolfgang von Kimberlin. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: k A. The Mechanical Turk, yes, seventeen sixty nine. Alright,
Speaker 1: so imagine this, guys and gals. You've got this, uh,
Speaker 1: this big wooden cabinet, and on the cabinet is a chessboard,
Speaker 1: and behind the cabinet stands a a wooden robot. Essentially
Speaker 1: is what it was that it appears to It looks
Speaker 1: like a turk, that Turkish dress costume, that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: And that was that was supposed to the mystique. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: it was that whole idea of adding Eastern mysticism. Right, So, uh,
Speaker 1: Baron Wolfgang had suggested or had actually claimed, that this
Speaker 1: was a mechanical toy that could play chess, and it
Speaker 1: was so good that it could defeat almost anybody in
Speaker 1: a chess game. And people would go up to to play,
Speaker 1: and what Wolfgang would do is he would open up
Speaker 1: the box and show that they're all these gears inside
Speaker 1: the box, and then close it, and then the game
Speaker 1: would start and the human player would move a chess piece,
Speaker 1: and then after a moment, the automaton would start to
Speaker 1: move and pick up a chess piece and move that
Speaker 1: to a different spot, and they would play a game,
Speaker 1: and more often than not, the automaton one. It made
Speaker 1: a lot of people curious as to how it was
Speaker 1: actually working. There were mani people who assumed that this
Speaker 1: was actually under human power, and that it was not
Speaker 1: truly working with gears, and that it was just being
Speaker 1: It was just a clever trick, and they were They
Speaker 1: actually were right. They just couldn't figure out how it
Speaker 1: was being done. Uh No. No, less of a illuminary
Speaker 1: than Benjamin Franklin himself played against this machine. Yes, and
Speaker 1: Napoleon Bonaparte. Yeah, there were quite a few famous folks.
Speaker 1: One famous person who thought he had come up with
Speaker 1: the way that it worked was almost right, Edgar Allan Poe. Really, yeah,
Speaker 1: Edgar Allan Poe observed this device in in action and
Speaker 1: thought that perhaps there was a person hiding inside the
Speaker 1: turk itself and UM and working the the pieces, moving
Speaker 1: the pieces, and that's not exactly how it worked. So
Speaker 1: what was going on was that the there was this
Speaker 1: there were there were panels inside the the cabinet that
Speaker 1: hid the human operator who was actually inside the cabinet itself.
Speaker 1: He was not inside the turk, but then he had
Speaker 1: he was wearing something that they were calling a pantograph,
Speaker 1: which was a device that would uh mimic his own movements.
Speaker 1: So he was wearing a a kind of out a
Speaker 1: kind of some gear so that when he would move
Speaker 1: his arm a certain way, the automaton would also move
Speaker 1: its arm that way. So it was almost like puppetry. Yes,
Speaker 1: And the the pieces of the on the chessboard were
Speaker 1: had magnets in them which would allow him to use
Speaker 1: There was a magnet in the hand as well which
Speaker 1: would allow him to pick up a piece very carefully
Speaker 1: and move it. And he could also see magnets underneath
Speaker 1: the the board where he could track the movements of
Speaker 1: the chess pieces on both sides. So he's looking at
Speaker 1: the chess game from underneath UM and to the what
Speaker 1: what what the baron did was he would actually hire.
Speaker 1: When it was traveling from place to place, he would
Speaker 1: hire local chess champions to be the guy inside the
Speaker 1: box so that the likelihood of losing was really low.
Speaker 1: And it was in fact a couple of these chess
Speaker 1: champions who later on wrote about their experience working within
Speaker 1: the box that kind of blew the whole thing out.
Speaker 1: And I mean a lot of people had suspected what
Speaker 1: was going on, but no one had really proven it
Speaker 1: until there were these folks coming for and saying, okay,
Speaker 1: here's how it worked. Well, it took him quite a while.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, more than fifty years. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: And what's funny is that the device, according to my
Speaker 1: notes anyway, um continued to tour even after the secret
Speaker 1: was released. Um. I guess people wanted to see if
Speaker 1: they could beat somebody hiding out in a box. It was, well,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a it's about playing though that way
Speaker 1: it's sort of reversed, yes, because you're looking from Underneathan.
Speaker 1: It's it's It was a very clever It was a
Speaker 1: very clever ruse, and I think I think some people
Speaker 1: appreciate it just for the fact that it was so
Speaker 1: clever that it wasn't necessarily that you know, they still
Speaker 1: believed that it was actually an automaton that was doing this,
Speaker 1: but just the fact that someone had managed to build,
Speaker 1: I mean, the fact that they built this pantograph system
Speaker 1: is pretty impressive. You know. You sit there and you
Speaker 1: look at it, like, yeah, alright, so it's not an automaton.
Speaker 1: It's not a it's not it's not an early version
Speaker 1: of a computer. But it's still a pretty impressive piece
Speaker 1: of machinery when you think about what it had to accomplish.
Speaker 1: That that's true, and it really it was really sort
Speaker 1: of a stagecraft. Yeah, yeah, so from a from a
Speaker 1: stage perspective, you can certainly appreciate it. And uh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's one of that that one I think is is
Speaker 1: pretty neat. There was another one, another hoax that was
Speaker 1: not his neat. This one actually is more like your
Speaker 1: perpetual motion hoax that you mentioned. Um. But I was
Speaker 1: going to mention before before we move on too far
Speaker 1: from the mechanical Turk Um that it's still famous today
Speaker 1: inasmuch as Amazon dot com um still uses the name
Speaker 1: mechanical turk Turk. And you might say, well for what, well, Um,
Speaker 1: if you're unfamiliar with this this is their their human
Speaker 1: problem solving UM engine if you will. That basically people
Speaker 1: will get involved to solve problems for other people. And
Speaker 1: uh so it's sort of like that. It is sort
Speaker 1: of a machine powered by people on the back end,
Speaker 1: but it is an opportunity for people to um sort
Speaker 1: of crowdsource problem solutions. I think it's kind of funny
Speaker 1: that Amazon decided to name its uh it's product after
Speaker 1: the famous chess playing machine. Yeah, yeah, it's nice. It's
Speaker 1: it's just obscure enough where where the average person may
Speaker 1: not know what it's referencing. Uh well, I was going
Speaker 1: to talk about John WORL. Keiley from the who founded
Speaker 1: the Keiley Motor Company who lost it ye back in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy five, he created the Keiley Motor Company Mr
Speaker 1: Literal and uh he he had created what was called
Speaker 1: a vibratory generator that used a court of water to
Speaker 1: generate power, and he claimed that it could create the
Speaker 1: same amount of power that would be necessary to pull
Speaker 1: a fully loaded train for more than an hour. And
Speaker 1: uh he would actually show off this device. He would
Speaker 1: pour some water into this this engine looking thing, it
Speaker 1: would start running, and he would do this to people
Speaker 1: who he would court as investors. So he'd bring these
Speaker 1: investors in give him a demonstration of this device where
Speaker 1: water seemingly was all that was needed to create this
Speaker 1: massive amount of power. And it worked. I mean it
Speaker 1: worked in the sense that it got investors interested enough
Speaker 1: to pour money into his uh um, into his invention.
Speaker 1: And the scientific community said, this doesn't sound too likely
Speaker 1: to us. But that didn't really matter so much because
Speaker 1: you know, this was an era where engineers were coming
Speaker 1: up with really interesting inventions and sometimes as inventions were
Speaker 1: working for reasons that the engineers couldn't really explain because
Speaker 1: O our scientific knowledge had not reached the point where
Speaker 1: we could really comprehend everything that was going on. Didn't
Speaker 1: mean that the inventions weren't working, or that they were
Speaker 1: they were fake or whatever. It just meant that we
Speaker 1: didn't know why they worked. Well, that's what these investors
Speaker 1: were hoping for back in the seventy five. It really
Speaker 1: helped Keeley too, that he was a charismatic person that
Speaker 1: you like to use a um scientific sounding jargon to
Speaker 1: confuse those investors. And yeah, he sounded like he knew
Speaker 1: what he was doing, and he uh um, he had
Speaker 1: the stage presence to pull it off. You know, he
Speaker 1: looked and sounded like he was the real deal. Well
Speaker 1: that's and and that's that's still that's still common today
Speaker 1: where you'll have some hoaxters out there who will use
Speaker 1: pseudo scientific terms in order to baffle their their audience
Speaker 1: into thinking that they know what's going on. Stop, I
Speaker 1: don't believe you. So then there's a well let me
Speaker 1: talk about what happened with this motor here. Um, So
Speaker 1: he was showing this engine, I should say, he's showing
Speaker 1: off this engine over and over and over again and
Speaker 1: kept getting investors. Well, then Keiley keeled over and see
Speaker 1: what you did there? Yeah, he shuffled off the mortal coil,
Speaker 1: he joined the choir invisible, he rolled ran up the curtain.
Speaker 1: This was an X, This was an ex Keily. And
Speaker 1: so when he died, some investigators started checking out his
Speaker 1: stuff because hey, you know, there's this engine that he
Speaker 1: had been working on for for more than a decade,
Speaker 1: for more than two decades, and it would still be
Speaker 1: a very valuable contribution if it actually worked, even though
Speaker 1: he just kept on getting investments and never really produced anything. Well,
Speaker 1: the investigators discovered that there was a secret to this
Speaker 1: engine that in the basement of his house. He had
Speaker 1: a compressed air machine, and he had a hose going
Speaker 1: all the way up to the engine that was hidden.
Speaker 1: The hose itself was hidden from view. The engine, by
Speaker 1: the way, was two floors up from the basement, so
Speaker 1: it was a pretty long hose. But it turned out
Speaker 1: that the compressed air was what was making the engine run,
Speaker 1: not the water. The water had nothing to do with it.
Speaker 1: So there was another external power source that was coming
Speaker 1: in doing work on this engine, making it move, and
Speaker 1: that the whole thing, the entire time, was a complete hoax.
Speaker 1: It was just a way of building money out of
Speaker 1: gullible investors, which at that point the scientific community uh
Speaker 1: managed heroically to resist the urge of saying, ha, ha
Speaker 1: told you so. Well, it's less satisfying than the person
Speaker 1: that you tell is dead. Yeah. Well the people and
Speaker 1: the investors, yeah, they were probably poorer for it. But
Speaker 1: and you know, again, there a lot of other interesting
Speaker 1: kind of hoaxes out there. There was one that was
Speaker 1: really recent as of the recording of our four episode
Speaker 1: Spectacular by a fellow named Yarno Smeets sat Yeah. Smeets
Speaker 1: released a viral video that you guys may have seen.
Speaker 1: It got a lot of attention very early on, and
Speaker 1: a lot of critical reception as well. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think every single discussion I saw had at least a
Speaker 1: few people specifically saying something's thinky here, well, how long
Speaker 1: have people been trying to do what Smeats in the
Speaker 1: video allegedly did when you know, he strapped a set
Speaker 1: of wings on himself, you know, flapped his arms and
Speaker 1: took off. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. Want to do
Speaker 1: that in the video? He had this in the video,
Speaker 1: he had this large set of wings that were that
Speaker 1: were a match to his back, and he had these um,
Speaker 1: these handles that he could hold, and when he pulled
Speaker 1: down the handles, the wings would flap and he would
Speaker 1: He ran down a field and seemingly took off from
Speaker 1: the field and started to fly around just by flapping
Speaker 1: his wings. And meanwhile all of his cohorts are whooping
Speaker 1: and hollering and and celebrating down below. And a lot
Speaker 1: of people were, uh, let's say, skeptical for about this,
Speaker 1: and reasonably so. Well, you have to if you're going
Speaker 1: to do this, just remember well, first of all, don't
Speaker 1: try this at home. And second of all, don't fly
Speaker 1: too close to the sun because it will melt the
Speaker 1: wax that hold your feathers. Okay, lists, I'm okay, I'm
Speaker 1: going to I just want to. I want to point
Speaker 1: out the thought process that the skeptics took. So in
Speaker 1: order to fly, you have to have enough lift to
Speaker 1: counteract your weight. Yes, the force of gravity pulling you
Speaker 1: down right, So the lift has to be equal to
Speaker 1: or greater than the force of gravity pulling you downward.
Speaker 1: And lift is generated by a couple of different things, uh,
Speaker 1: including the angle of attack for your wings, also the
Speaker 1: shape of the wing itself, different scenair pressure there. There
Speaker 1: are multiple things that go into it. It's pretty complicated, actually,
Speaker 1: but you have to be able to counteract that gravity
Speaker 1: with these these other factors in order to fly. And uh, really,
Speaker 1: the the math just doesn't work out when it comes
Speaker 1: to human powered flight like in this way. Um they
Speaker 1: figured one one estimation I saw was that the fellow
Speaker 1: weighed probably around eight hundred Newton's when Newton is a
Speaker 1: point to to five pounds it's often used in these
Speaker 1: sort of physics uh calculations, And that the the gear
Speaker 1: they estimated to be at another three hundred Newton's, which
Speaker 1: means they have uh, they would have even newtons of
Speaker 1: lift would need to be generated in order to take off,
Speaker 1: and it just doesn't appear to be physically possible. So
Speaker 1: just based on that alone, the video was called into question,
Speaker 1: and Sweets, to his credit, did eventually say, yeah, it
Speaker 1: was you know, it was it was a it was
Speaker 1: all a ruse. It was a hoax. It was a joke.
Speaker 1: It was a video that we did. Ha ha ha ha. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he explained the whole thing. Yeah, um, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: slightly different approach than the ones are, the one taken
Speaker 1: by the he needs back when the balloon Boy episode
Speaker 1: went up. Balloon Boy, we'll talk about him in a second. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just reminded me of that. Yeah, we'll have to
Speaker 1: We'll have to talk about balloon Boy because that's a
Speaker 1: great hoax story, great especially because as no one at
Speaker 1: the end of it was hurt physically. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So he he actually just came clean and said, you know,
Speaker 1: and and unashamedly so that this was you know, kind
Speaker 1: of a uh, this was kind of just a joke
Speaker 1: and um, and it was an effective one, effective enough
Speaker 1: so that some people I know we're posting this, and
Speaker 1: you could tell that they were kind of skeptical, but
Speaker 1: they were also really hoping it was real, which, you know,
Speaker 1: you can't blame him. That whole idea of flight has
Speaker 1: always been something that humans have been interested in and
Speaker 1: and the thought of being able to fly under your
Speaker 1: own power is very, um is a very alluring idea.
Speaker 1: But uh, I don't know that I knew anyone who
Speaker 1: bought it hook line and sinker, but there were quite
Speaker 1: a few people who were obviously hoping it was true
Speaker 1: not true, and sadly balloom Boy was gladly not true.
Speaker 1: So ballooon Boy. If you do not remember balloon Boy,
Speaker 1: I remember I was. That was when we were working
Speaker 1: here already, because I remember work in the office. Stopped
Speaker 1: to find out about more about this balloon Boy thing. Um.
Speaker 1: So there was this, uh, this family that had a
Speaker 1: a saucer shaped balloon. Some people might say UFO shaped balloon,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't make any sense unidentified flying objects shaped
Speaker 1: balloon balloon. By its definition, he's identified, so it can't.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying flying saucer. Yes, it was more like
Speaker 1: a flying saucer with a little basket thing underneath. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that um that the family said that they could
Speaker 1: not locate the youngest boy in the family and falcon,
Speaker 1: and they feared that falcon was flying and this balloon
Speaker 1: thus the balloon boy and it had broken loose from
Speaker 1: its tethers, and they thought that perhaps he wouldn't he
Speaker 1: might be aboard, and news helicopters took off because it
Speaker 1: was flying by itself, you know, just wandering as balloons are, right,
Speaker 1: And so you had all these law enforcement agencies trying
Speaker 1: to figure out how were they going to try and
Speaker 1: bring the balloon down to in a way that would
Speaker 1: get that would most guarantee the boy's safety, because um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's you could shoot it down. Flooding plummeting
Speaker 1: from the sky is not the best way to preserve
Speaker 1: a little boy's uh physical health. So there was a
Speaker 1: lot of discussion about what they needed to do, and
Speaker 1: at the same time, you had a lot of critical
Speaker 1: thinkers out there saying, hang on, this balloon isn't really
Speaker 1: behaving the way it would if there were a little
Speaker 1: boy aboard there. I mean, the little boy would have
Speaker 1: to weigh nothing for this balloon to be behaving the
Speaker 1: way it is which is true. The little boy wade
Speaker 1: nothing because there was no little boy inside the balloon.
Speaker 1: It was not behaving as it would if it had
Speaker 1: a weight inside it, and uh, and so it still
Speaker 1: was a very dramatic, uh event. You know, people were
Speaker 1: really following it closely. And then the balloon did crash
Speaker 1: and people went there and looked, and there was no
Speaker 1: boy within the balloon. Then there was a worry for
Speaker 1: a while that perhaps the boy had fallen out of
Speaker 1: the balloon sometime midflight. I remember the news reports showing
Speaker 1: the map of the area that it had traversed, and
Speaker 1: how they were discussing how they were going to uh
Speaker 1: conduct the search and things. Speaking of conducting searches. Uh,
Speaker 1: it turns out when the law enforcement authorities conducted a
Speaker 1: search of their home, they found the little boy upstairs,
Speaker 1: hiding in the attic. And then they just they were
Speaker 1: all relieved because, oh, we thought you were on the
Speaker 1: They just they just had to lean on that little
Speaker 1: boy a little bit and he he cracked like a peanut.
Speaker 1: On National TV. He said, you guys said, we did
Speaker 1: this for the show. Apparently they were trying to get
Speaker 1: themselves a TV show, and um, they got themselves. Apparently
Speaker 1: they got themselves legal charges because they had expended a
Speaker 1: lot of manpower and fuel trying to figure out what
Speaker 1: was going on with this balloon. It's not nice to
Speaker 1: full mother nature or law enforcement. Yes, yes, yeah, they
Speaker 1: they were. They did not get a deal out of that,
Speaker 1: not a good one anyway. Um, yeah, that was. That
Speaker 1: was one of the more famous hoaxes there. There's some
Speaker 1: other ones. Um, liquid mountaineering, you remember that, not really so.
Speaker 1: There were these viral videos that came out a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago and they were called it was it
Speaker 1: was a new sport air quotes called liquid mountaineering, and
Speaker 1: the idea that was perpetuated in these videos was that
Speaker 1: if you were to generate enough speed in your run
Speaker 1: and come down towards a water surface at a weird angle.
Speaker 1: Usually you'd have to run down like the banks of
Speaker 1: a lake or a river u but not straight at
Speaker 1: the water. You're coming in at from an angle that
Speaker 1: you could supposedly make it out three or four steps
Speaker 1: across the water before you fell through the idea somehow
Speaker 1: that you're moving fast enough where you are skipping across
Speaker 1: the water, you you don't break that surface tension of
Speaker 1: the water itself, which is ridiculous. It's just it absolutely,
Speaker 1: patently ridiculous. The first time I saw it, I thought, well,
Speaker 1: that's that's a clever hoax, and I knew exactly how
Speaker 1: it had to have been done, and it turned out
Speaker 1: that is exactly how it was done. So in the
Speaker 1: videos it does look pretty convincing. You see these people
Speaker 1: running at a weird angle and they get like three
Speaker 1: or four steps out before they fall in. And the
Speaker 1: the idea that everyone was saying was that if you
Speaker 1: were able to keep up the speed, you could perhaps
Speaker 1: go indefinitely. That if you were really super fast, you
Speaker 1: could Remo Williams style run across the water. Service have
Speaker 1: you seen Remo Williams uh? Nor have I seen Jaws?
Speaker 1: So I imagine that running across the water could get
Speaker 1: you eaten by a shark. Well, but Remo Williams is
Speaker 1: a is a fantastic documentary. You have to go watching
Speaker 1: h so anyway, Actually, fantastic documentary is probably going a
Speaker 1: bit far, but it's fun. It's kind of in the
Speaker 1: same It feels like it's in the same universe as
Speaker 1: Buck rubans Eye. Did you see Buck RUBANSI? But I
Speaker 1: read the comic book Oh No Palette, episode four hundred
Speaker 1: and my illusions are all shattered. Um, well, we'll have
Speaker 1: a movie marathon of Jaws, Rema Williams and Bucka Rubansa.
Speaker 1: How about how a big trouble little China? Have you
Speaker 1: seen that? Can we get back on the top because
Speaker 1: that's also in that universe? Oh no, well, there's moving
Speaker 1: marathon's getting longer and longer anyway. So the running, well,
Speaker 1: the way this was actually accomplished was very simple, and
Speaker 1: sometimes those simple ideas of the best. They had a
Speaker 1: clear platform that was under the surface of the water
Speaker 1: by you know, like half an inch, so clear platform
Speaker 1: under the water. You can't see it. It looks like
Speaker 1: there's nothing there. There are actual gimmicks out there for
Speaker 1: certain magic tricks that work on a similar idea, where
Speaker 1: you've got you actually have a divider within a container
Speaker 1: that when you've got the water in the container, you
Speaker 1: can't tell that there's a divider in there at all.
Speaker 1: It just blends right in same sort of thing. This
Speaker 1: platform was under the surface of the water. You could
Speaker 1: not see it from the surface, especially at the angles
Speaker 1: they had picked, because you know, clearly didn't want to
Speaker 1: make sure that it looks as good as possible, And
Speaker 1: so when people were running across the water, they were
Speaker 1: actually running on a platform and when the platform ran out,
Speaker 1: they went through the water because it doesn't work. You
Speaker 1: can't do that. And it turned out the whole thing
Speaker 1: where it was a sort of an advertisement campaign, that
Speaker 1: was this viral advertisement attempt and it worked. You know,
Speaker 1: it's hard to engineer a viral video, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that usually a viral video
Speaker 1: happens just on its own. Its not like if you
Speaker 1: try to push for a viral video often that fails.
Speaker 1: In this case, it worked. But it was one that
Speaker 1: was funded by a company called High Tech Sports that
Speaker 1: made sport equipment, sport gearling shoes and things like that,
Speaker 1: and everyone in the video was wearing that kind of
Speaker 1: equipment and uh yeah, and so it turned out that
Speaker 1: it was really just sort of a clever viral ad
Speaker 1: and uh it did you know they that game worked
Speaker 1: for quite a while. It took a while before anyone
Speaker 1: really tackled it and uh and showed that it was impossible. Um,
Speaker 1: have you heard of the Pogue carburetor? Is this one
Speaker 1: that was supposed to go like a hundred miles or
Speaker 1: something more than that two miles three miles on a
Speaker 1: gallon of gas, invented by a theoretically invented by a
Speaker 1: Canadian guy named Charles Nelson Pogue. You wanted me to say,
Speaker 1: Riley Uh Nelson really? Um who? Yes? Unbelievably, Charles Nelson
Speaker 1: Poe apparently never appeared on the match game. Um no,
Speaker 1: he he had. Again, this is the same kind of
Speaker 1: thing kids. Um so yeah, Apparently if you uh operated
Speaker 1: this carburetor at a a certain temperature, and you added
Speaker 1: the fuel in a vapor state rather than a really
Speaker 1: a wet state where the part the droplets of water
Speaker 1: I mean sorry, droplets of gasoline were introduced into the carburetor,
Speaker 1: then you could get a much more efficient reaction. Uh,
Speaker 1: of course you This is one of those things that
Speaker 1: uh uh you can be skeptical of when you start
Speaker 1: to hear that he really didn't let people get a
Speaker 1: close look at what he was doing. Um, he didn't.
Speaker 1: From what I've read, he didn't seem to uh try
Speaker 1: to capitalize on this too much. He it sort of faded.
Speaker 1: But uh, people started talking about some units that were
Speaker 1: smuggled out of the laboratory and you know that they
Speaker 1: could put in your car. Um. And this this is
Speaker 1: one of those things that I think sort of on
Speaker 1: its own, would have died out if not for the
Speaker 1: rumors about it. And there's still some that that are
Speaker 1: out there that say that the uh that, um, the
Speaker 1: gasoline industry doesn't want people to know about this because
Speaker 1: it's a hidden technology that would make them obsolete. So
Speaker 1: they they're hushing it up um. And there are people
Speaker 1: promising that they could they could get it out there
Speaker 1: and uh um there that they can give this to
Speaker 1: you if you'll just you know, fork over some money,
Speaker 1: will help you out with this. But the whole conspiracy
Speaker 1: angle is a very very popular one to play when
Speaker 1: you're running a hoax. Oh yeah, because all you have
Speaker 1: to do is is suggests that there are other people
Speaker 1: who do not want this to go out because it
Speaker 1: would ruin their businesses. And then you immediately give your own,
Speaker 1: your own efforts sort of credibility there, because you're saying, look, clearly,
Speaker 1: it's in their best interest to prevent this from ever
Speaker 1: coming out. Yeah, why would they be trying so hard
Speaker 1: to defeat me if I weren't right? Right? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that plays into something else I'll talk about in
Speaker 1: a second. I was I just wanted to mention that no, cool, cool, No, No,
Speaker 1: I was going to talk about fusion and cold fusion. Now,
Speaker 1: now this is a little different, but it has some
Speaker 1: similarities to what you were just talking about. First of all,
Speaker 1: fusion is real, all right, we're not We're not saying
Speaker 1: that fusion does not work. We talked about it in
Speaker 1: our nuclear weapons podcast about how the fusion bomb works,
Speaker 1: right right, Yeah, and how you take two atoms and
Speaker 1: put a tiny little drop of superglue in there so
Speaker 1: they gloom together. Yeah. That superglue is called a neutron anyway,
Speaker 1: So in a fusion reactor would be phenomenal if we
Speaker 1: could get one to work, because we fusion is what
Speaker 1: the Sun does. That's that's how the Sun generates energies
Speaker 1: through fusion. It's fusing hydrogen into helium and a temperature
Speaker 1: millions of degrees do. But but yeah, the the energy
Speaker 1: released when when two atoms fused together like that is amazing. Yes,
Speaker 1: And but the problem is that in order to achieve fusion,
Speaker 1: from what we know right now, what is required is
Speaker 1: huge amounts of pressure and temperature. Actually Uh, if you
Speaker 1: had a temperature high enough, the pressure wouldn't be as important.
Speaker 1: But pressure higher pressure means that the temperature requirement starts
Speaker 1: to drop. But you need an incredible amount of both
Speaker 1: in order to achieve fusion. And that's been one of
Speaker 1: those problems that scientists have been trying to tackle for
Speaker 1: more than a decade as they try to create a
Speaker 1: fusion reactor, because nuclear reactors work on fussion, not fusion,
Speaker 1: but the right right. But there are a lot of
Speaker 1: different labs across the world they're working on trying to
Speaker 1: create fusion, and they're doing this through things like using
Speaker 1: high powered lasers to initiate that first reaction to create
Speaker 1: the conditions necessary to have fusion. But uh, there's a
Speaker 1: joke within nuclear physics that fusion reactors are thirty years away,
Speaker 1: and ten years from now they will be thirty years away,
Speaker 1: and twenty years from now they'll be thirty years away.
Speaker 1: That's just gonna be a moving goalpost that that we
Speaker 1: never achieve. Now, that may not be true. We may
Speaker 1: tackle that and and and beat it. We may figure
Speaker 1: out how to create a fusion reactor that is reliable
Speaker 1: and does not require so much energy to initiate it.
Speaker 1: That it is that it is not impractical, right, because
Speaker 1: that's the other problem is that you know, you've got
Speaker 1: to have a practical reactor doesn't If it works, but
Speaker 1: it takes way too much energy to get it going,
Speaker 1: then it's not really practical. So those are the two goals. Well,
Speaker 1: cold fusion is this idea that you are able to
Speaker 1: create fusion reactions and generate energy, but at a temperature
Speaker 1: much lower than a typical fusion reaction would require. So
Speaker 1: we're talking not necessarily room temperature, still telling in temperature
Speaker 1: in the hundreds of degrees, but not millions of degrees. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now I remember, of course the thing that you're about
Speaker 1: to talk about, uh, in just a moment here um,
Speaker 1: because I was in I think high school, um, and
Speaker 1: uh yeah, that was it was. It caused a sensation because, um,
Speaker 1: there were a couple of scientists who said, hey, we've
Speaker 1: managed to create fusion at room temperature. That would be
Speaker 1: Ponds and Fleishman. Very famous, uh, famous for both the
Speaker 1: the hoopla surrounding the announcement and the fallout that followed
Speaker 1: because it was it was ugly, I mean in scientific circles,
Speaker 1: it was about as ugly as it could get. So
Speaker 1: Ponds and Fleishman had done this experiment and they were
Speaker 1: they discovered that there was this this heat that was
Speaker 1: being generated in the experiment that they could not explain easily,
Speaker 1: and so they were trying to find the source of
Speaker 1: this anomalous eat and in part of their their experiments
Speaker 1: and then their observations, they determined that it must have
Speaker 1: been the result of fusion, that that the elements within
Speaker 1: their experiment were fusing together, and that the heat was
Speaker 1: a byproduct of that, which was phenomenal because at those
Speaker 1: temperatures that was unheard of. Uh. There were other labs
Speaker 1: that tried to replicate their experiments, and some of the
Speaker 1: early attempts appeared to at least lend some credence, including
Speaker 1: one that happened at Georgia Tech. However, then there were
Speaker 1: later experiments done with really well calibrated equipment that showed
Speaker 1: no replicability this experiment. And by the way, in science,
Speaker 1: that's really important. You have to if you have an
Speaker 1: experiment and you've come to a conclusion that experiment needs
Speaker 1: to be replicable, you need to be able to repeat
Speaker 1: it and have the same outcome each time. Otherwise it's
Speaker 1: not it's not worth anything scientifically because if you can't
Speaker 1: predicted and you can't replicate it, then there's nothing there.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that's the way science works. So the future
Speaker 1: experiments seemed to negate Ponds and Flishman's um findings, and
Speaker 1: Ponds and Flishman both continued to work in the field
Speaker 1: and receive funding from various sources, including I think it
Speaker 1: was a university in Utah that was funding some research
Speaker 1: for quite some time, but then eventually they cut it
Speaker 1: off because after years and years of research, there was
Speaker 1: still no measurable impact. There was nothing that had really
Speaker 1: come out of it. And uh. And so even to
Speaker 1: this day, there are plenty of scientists out there who
Speaker 1: are trying to find out if cold fusion really does,
Speaker 1: like if if it really can't exist, And there's there's
Speaker 1: nothing necessarily in physics that says it's impossible. It's just
Speaker 1: that based upon everything we've observed, it seems very improbable
Speaker 1: and that it would take extraordinary proof to counteract that.
Speaker 1: I've actually read some very interesting thoughts from various physicists,
Speaker 1: including skeptics of cold fusion, who think that the scientific
Speaker 1: environment surrounding cold fusion is um counterproductive because what what
Speaker 1: cold fusion proponents would say is that the scientific community
Speaker 1: is biased against cold fusion, right, that that they they
Speaker 1: believe that that they're being dogmatic, that they believe without
Speaker 1: without reason, that cold fusion is impossible, and they dismiss
Speaker 1: it out of hand, and they will refuse to publish papers,
Speaker 1: peer reviewed papers about cold fusion and peer reviewed journals.
Speaker 1: So they're essentially saying that we're being ostracized by the
Speaker 1: scientific community. Well, there's some people within the scientific community that,
Speaker 1: you know, the consensus, the people who actually say that
Speaker 1: cold fusion probably can't work, who say, you know what,
Speaker 1: they've got something there. Because if we do not allow
Speaker 1: them to submit papers to peer reviewed journals and actually
Speaker 1: have peer review and undergo a strict scientific examination of
Speaker 1: their processes, all we're really doing is reinforcing their belief
Speaker 1: that they are right. So that maybe what the best
Speaker 1: thing to do is open up a little bit more.
Speaker 1: Take in these proposals, take in these studies, really take
Speaker 1: a look at them, try and determine if there is
Speaker 1: in fact anything there before just dismissing it, because otherwise,
Speaker 1: all we're doing is creating this subculture that could very well.
Speaker 1: They might be onto something, or it might be that
Speaker 1: they're chasing a pipe dream. And if we were able
Speaker 1: to say, look, we really did give this our full attention,
Speaker 1: we really did listen to you, and this is what
Speaker 1: we found, maybe those people would redirect their efforts into
Speaker 1: something else instead of chasing something that isn't working. In
Speaker 1: either case, it's a win, right. If if they're right,
Speaker 1: If the if the cold fusion people are right, then
Speaker 1: we've suddenly got an avenue to amazing ways of generating
Speaker 1: energy that are potentially eco friendly, are totally renewable type
Speaker 1: of sources. It would be almost endless energy. So that's
Speaker 1: a great dream. Um. And if they're wrong, then we've
Speaker 1: got all these really smart people who are otherwise following
Speaker 1: a fool's errand moving on to something else. So either
Speaker 1: way we win, right, And science is supposed to work
Speaker 1: that way too, And you're not supposed to make a
Speaker 1: decision on uh, the outcome until you've seen the results
Speaker 1: of the experiment. Um, So it should be that you know,
Speaker 1: people are getting a fair shake. Um, you know, once
Speaker 1: they actually see the results of the experiment, not before
Speaker 1: they've had an opportunity to try it out. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I and I want to go on record about the
Speaker 1: whole cold fusion thing. From my perspective, I am very
Speaker 1: skeptical that cold fusion works. But I don't dismiss it
Speaker 1: out of hand because first of all, my my knowledge
Speaker 1: of physics is limited, so and and chemistry as well.
Speaker 1: This chemistry really plays a huge part in cold fusion.
Speaker 1: In fact, that's what a lot of cold fusion uh
Speaker 1: proponents say is the problem is that it's physicists who
Speaker 1: are poo pooing cold fusion, and it should be chemists
Speaker 1: who talk about it. Um. I admit that my knowledge
Speaker 1: on both of those subjects is limited, so uh so,
Speaker 1: I could you know it could very well work, but
Speaker 1: just based upon the information I've read from scientists whom
Speaker 1: I respect, I am, I am skeptical of it. Now.
Speaker 1: If it does turn out to work, that is awesome
Speaker 1: because it will be, and it will it would change
Speaker 1: the world unlike anything else, Like I can't imagine any
Speaker 1: technology changing the world more than cold fusion would. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree with you there, I just don't think it's
Speaker 1: going to happen Unsunfortunately, uh so, we had some other
Speaker 1: kind of hoaxes that would be interesting to talk about
Speaker 1: like you had a certain certain certain autopsy. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember, yeah, yeah, I was watching an episode of
Speaker 1: X Files. I remember, um yeah it was in the
Speaker 1: ES when Fox here in the United States was showing
Speaker 1: these uh the special on uh an alien body that
Speaker 1: had been discovered. UM and uh you know this was
Speaker 1: supposed to be uh footage video footage shot after the
Speaker 1: Roswell supposed alien landing in Roswell. There's problems New Mexico problem,
Speaker 1: no one. Those were those were spy balloons essentially um
Speaker 1: crashed in Roswell as it As it turns out, UM,
Speaker 1: they were actually using animal organs and raspberry jam inside
Speaker 1: these supposed alien bodies. And the the camera camera person,
Speaker 1: who was an Englishman named Ray Santilly, actually admitted to
Speaker 1: it in two thousand and six. So the whole uh
Speaker 1: scientific alien uncovering apparently not too much scientific. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: remember seeing uh skeptics talk about that. I mean, obviously
Speaker 1: they're going to as soon as that video hit the
Speaker 1: airwaves and uh, and one of those skeptics was Rick Baker.
Speaker 1: Do you recognize that name? Hollywood? Uh special effects and
Speaker 1: makeup artists. He's He's done some amazing amazing work in
Speaker 1: Hollywood on various documentaries and uh, and so he had
Speaker 1: to throw that one in there too. But uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: he said he just felt it was just a model puppet.
Speaker 1: That's all it was was. It was not anything truly
Speaker 1: organic in the sense of like this was not actually
Speaker 1: a creature. Also reminds me of do you remember here
Speaker 1: in Georgia we had the big foot bigfoot hoax? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there were. I wish I didn't pull this information up
Speaker 1: because I didn't think about it, so it doesn't really
Speaker 1: fit with technology. But there was the hoax that a
Speaker 1: couple of guys had had managed to either I can't
Speaker 1: I guess they either killed the bigfoot or they came
Speaker 1: upon its corpse, one of the two, and that they
Speaker 1: had it preserved and they were going to show it off.
Speaker 1: And it turned out that all it was was a
Speaker 1: big foot costume and some meat that have been stuffed
Speaker 1: into a like an iglue ice chest or something, and
Speaker 1: it still managed to cause quite a stir before before
Speaker 1: anyone said hey, so yeah, I remember that. Um, but uh,
Speaker 1: the I only have one other big um hoax that
Speaker 1: I was going to talk about. Is there anything else
Speaker 1: you wanted to chat about before we move into things
Speaker 1: that make Jonathan's head explode. See you didn't when you
Speaker 1: said that about the big foot. It reminded me of
Speaker 1: the chupacabra, the one that washed up on which turned
Speaker 1: out to be a hairless wolf. Yeah. Now, there there's
Speaker 1: been There's been a few cases of animals that have
Speaker 1: probably suffered something like mange that their their bodies have
Speaker 1: washed up on the shores of various lakes. That always
Speaker 1: end up starting off some discussion about here too for
Speaker 1: undiscovered animal like a chupa cabra um, but not so
Speaker 1: much chupa thinging. It's got a nice ring to it.
Speaker 1: So did you have any other ones who want to
Speaker 1: talk about? All right, so we're gonna segue into the
Speaker 1: one that that gets me insanely angry. Should I get
Speaker 1: the fire extinguisher you might want to, Okay? So, I
Speaker 1: mean I get angry when people pull hoaxes on on
Speaker 1: other folks for financial gain. If it's like a harmless
Speaker 1: joke type thing, where the whole purpose of it is
Speaker 1: just to say ha ha, I'm clever and and teach
Speaker 1: you a lesson about critical thinking. That that can irritate me.
Speaker 1: But I understand that and if it actually does serve
Speaker 1: a purpose in teaching people to think critically, that's that's
Speaker 1: a positive outcome. In my book, people who are uh
Speaker 1: leveraging other folks vulnerability and pulling the wool over their
Speaker 1: eyes in order to make money and potentially harming countless
Speaker 1: people in the process get me so infuriated that it's
Speaker 1: hard for me to form complete sentences. One of those
Speaker 1: people for us, one of those people is Jim McCormick. Now,
Speaker 1: Jim McCormick created something called the a d E six
Speaker 1: five one bomb Detector. Now, this bomb detector, what it
Speaker 1: looked like was that you had like a kind of
Speaker 1: a thing that would clip onto your belt and there
Speaker 1: would be a cable that would run from that to
Speaker 1: a handheld device that had this antenna looking thing that
Speaker 1: came out of it. And supposedly this device was capable
Speaker 1: of sniffing out a bomb as far away as a kilometer,
Speaker 1: so that you could actually detect bombs even if they
Speaker 1: were underground or flying overhead or whatever. You would be
Speaker 1: able to detect these bombs. And McCormick ended up selling
Speaker 1: these at around forty dollars of pop to the Iraqi
Speaker 1: government after the the the United States got involved with
Speaker 1: with trying to deal with all that. So you had
Speaker 1: this very vulnerable population, and you had a very solid
Speaker 1: need for bomb detection equipment because there were a lot
Speaker 1: of improvised explosive devices i e. D s that people
Speaker 1: were worried about. You had folks who were willing to
Speaker 1: be a suicide bomber. So there were a lot of
Speaker 1: reasons why you would want this, and it would help
Speaker 1: a lot with things like roadblocks and and you know,
Speaker 1: vehicle checks and all this kind of stuff that most
Speaker 1: of us, thankfully don't have to worry about, all right,
Speaker 1: but for the people who do have to worry about them,
Speaker 1: it is a very real concern. And so they had
Speaker 1: a true need and we're very vulnerable. And McCormick came
Speaker 1: up and said, here's this device. It can detect things
Speaker 1: from up to a kilometer away. Um, it's completely reliable.
Speaker 1: You should buy them. And so the Iraqi government purchased
Speaker 1: for around eighty five million dollars worth of these things.
Speaker 1: M hmm. Here's the problem. They don't work. There's nothing
Speaker 1: in them. If you were to open up the the handset,
Speaker 1: you would just see that the antennas just screwed into
Speaker 1: a little plastic casing. It doesn't have anything in it.
Speaker 1: The cable doesn't carry any information to it. You would
Speaker 1: have these little cards that would supposedly help you sniff
Speaker 1: out different types of bombs, that should slide into a slot.
Speaker 1: The cards did nothing. The slot did nothing. Inside the
Speaker 1: the the belt case was you know, useless stuff like
Speaker 1: you might find some wires and things, but they weren't
Speaker 1: connected to anything. It was just and it was really
Speaker 1: just a case and a bunch of unconnected wires. So
Speaker 1: there was no physical way this thing could work. There
Speaker 1: was just nothing that would give it any sort of functionality. Um.
Speaker 1: And it turned out that apparently McCormick was also a
Speaker 1: believer in dowsing, which makes perfect sense because dowsing is
Speaker 1: again something has no evidence. There's no evidence at all
Speaker 1: to support dowsing. Dowsing is more of a of a
Speaker 1: video was it called It's the it's the effect that
Speaker 1: you have where you cannot you know, you make small,
Speaker 1: tiny little emotions with your hands that you don't consciously detect,
Speaker 1: but you're making them, and as a result, things in
Speaker 1: your hands might move around a little bit, and you
Speaker 1: may think they're moving on their own accord or some
Speaker 1: other external forces acting on them. But really it's just
Speaker 1: you doing it. And I know our listeners probably know
Speaker 1: the term for that. It just escaped my mind. So
Speaker 1: feel free to write in and let me know, because
Speaker 1: I'm sure that after about fifty of those, I'll never
Speaker 1: forget again and you'll be doing me a service. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so McCormick had sold millions of dollars of these.
Speaker 1: He eventually was taken into custody and uh and and
Speaker 1: charged with fraud. Here's the other tragic part of this.
Speaker 1: The Iraqi government acknowledge that some of the devices would
Speaker 1: not work, but did not discontinue using the as devices
Speaker 1: because well, I can't really say why, because because I
Speaker 1: don't know, right, I'm not probably the Iraqi government, I
Speaker 1: would suspect that part of the reason was that it
Speaker 1: was trying to save face, because to admit that they
Speaker 1: had spent eighty five million dollars on a fraud would
Speaker 1: have been deeply embarrassing, and so maybe they weighed that
Speaker 1: against like do we want to lose that much face
Speaker 1: or do we want to just quietly keep using this
Speaker 1: knowing it doesn't work with the with the with the
Speaker 1: knowledge paired with that knowing that people could die as
Speaker 1: a result. If someone has given a piece of equipment
Speaker 1: and told that this is what it does, and he
Speaker 1: or she truly believes that that's the case, then you
Speaker 1: have just put that person at risk and they could
Speaker 1: lose their lives in the process. And to me, that
Speaker 1: is just so reprehensible, both on the part of McCormick
Speaker 1: and on the part of the government that I knew
Speaker 1: that it was a fraud at that point but refused
Speaker 1: to get rid of it. It's unthinkable to me. I
Speaker 1: can't I can't imagine being so so uncaring as to
Speaker 1: be able to perpetuate that sort of crime on people.
Speaker 1: And this is where I get angry. I mean, I've
Speaker 1: done talks about critical thinking and technology a couple of times.
Speaker 1: This is always the piece that I end on and
Speaker 1: the reason why I end on this pieces. I think
Speaker 1: it is so important to illustrate why critical thinking is
Speaker 1: fundamental in everything we do, not just technology. And I
Speaker 1: will be the first to admit that I have I
Speaker 1: have had lapses in critical thinking myself. There are times
Speaker 1: where I will see something and I accept it, and
Speaker 1: then later on I see that I was wrong, and
Speaker 1: I think all the indicators were there, And if I
Speaker 1: had only paid attention and thought about this for more
Speaker 1: than a second rather than just accept it, then I
Speaker 1: could have I could have been free of being fooled
Speaker 1: of it from the beginning. And it's good to have
Speaker 1: those moments and to realize that we're all fallible and
Speaker 1: we can all make these mistakes, and if we're just careful,
Speaker 1: then we will make fewer of those mistakes in the future. UM.
Speaker 1: But that's why I always end with this piece, because
Speaker 1: I think I think our listeners are the smart kind
Speaker 1: of people who know that if they're just if they're
Speaker 1: careful and they think about things, and they really say,
Speaker 1: based upon all the information that we have so far,
Speaker 1: is this really likely? Or could this just be a
Speaker 1: scam or a trick or someone who has deluded themselves
Speaker 1: into believing that something that is impossible is possible. UM.
Speaker 1: I recommend everyone out there just follow that that sort
Speaker 1: of philosophy. You know, Skepticism doesn't mean that you are
Speaker 1: dismissing something out of hand, because to do that is
Speaker 1: to be dogmatic, and that's not what skepticism means. Skepticism
Speaker 1: means that you are examining things, you're looking for evidence.
Speaker 1: You are looking for that causal relationship that is necessary
Speaker 1: to say that this one thing makes this other thing happen.
Speaker 1: You're using science. Science is a process. It's not a
Speaker 1: philosophy necessarily. It's it's a process of observing our universe,
Speaker 1: drawing conclusions, and making predictions based on those conclusions that
Speaker 1: should come true based upon what we know, and if
Speaker 1: they don't come true, it means we have to re
Speaker 1: examine what we thought we knew and try and come
Speaker 1: up with new sets of rules and guidelines and so so, guys, Um,
Speaker 1: I think, I think everyone who listens to this show,
Speaker 1: everyone who has written into us, shows that they have
Speaker 1: this capability, and I encourage you to continue to develop it.
Speaker 1: And just know that even the smartest people out there
Speaker 1: can be fooled into these the stuff that doesn't work
Speaker 1: right right well, and there's there's just going to be
Speaker 1: more of it, um, whether it's you know, got good
Speaker 1: intentions behind it, like um, the scientists trying to create
Speaker 1: perpetual motion machines in the past, or uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the cold fusion experiments or which who knows, maybe they'll
Speaker 1: turn out yep, yep, well, it's it's worth investigating on
Speaker 1: a scientific basis. Um. And uh, you know, then there
Speaker 1: are the others where people are intentionally trying to defraud others.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's we're never going to be uh
Speaker 1: in a world where people don't try new things, whether
Speaker 1: it's for good or or still cash. Um, there are
Speaker 1: plenty of plenty of people out there who are ready
Speaker 1: and willing to prey upon those who are willing to believe.
Speaker 1: So maybe for our eight we'll tackle a whole new
Speaker 1: set of tech that doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, I think yeah,
Speaker 1: that'll be our our four hundreds. Every every multiple of
Speaker 1: four hundred, we'll just do new stuff that doesn't work.
Speaker 1: All right, I'm okay with that. But by episode that
Speaker 1: might be us. So it's the guys, thanks so much
Speaker 1: for listening to our show. We don't say it often enough.
Speaker 1: We love you. Guys. Were so glad that you listen
Speaker 1: to us. We hope that you've been enjoying our show
Speaker 1: so far. We plan on doing this as long as
Speaker 1: they led us to do it. We're not We're not
Speaker 1: going anywhere unless uh, well, you know, unless there's something
Speaker 1: that we just can't can't control. Because sometimes that we
Speaker 1: don't work either. Well, there was that one day when
Speaker 1: we came into record and we couldn't because the text
Speaker 1: just didn't work. That's true. There are those days actually happen.
Speaker 1: That does happen even to the best of us. But
Speaker 1: if you guys have any suggestions for future episode topics
Speaker 1: you would like us to tackle, let us know. You
Speaker 1: can email us our addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com,
Speaker 1: or you can send us a message via Facebook or
Speaker 1: Twitter or handle at both of those is text stuff
Speaker 1: h sw and Chris and I will talk to you
Speaker 1: again or hundred freaking times really soon. Be sure to
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