Above Unity - The Rabbit Hole

As I was doing my research into above unity devices, that is devices that produce more energy than they take in, I kept falling into rabbit holes. It appears that the appeal of free energy draws in hucksters, lunatics and sociopaths.

Cold fusion, the hope of a table top power generator that uses LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) has been bound to improper science and crackpots for so long that scientists had to rename the field to keep them from being ridiculed. According to the New Energy Times, Andrea Rossi, inventor of the E-Cat device, has been in serious legal trouble several times for swindling people. He was sent to prison twice and convicted of financial fraud. His first conviction was for promising to extract oil from trash. He never did. His second run-in with the law was with the U.S. Army. He claimed he could produce a new type of thermocouple with tremendous efficiency. He never did. Bad place to start. Even if the E-Cat were real, would you trust someone who has such a checkered past? He has been sued by his main investor, Industrial Heat, for failing to produce substantive, reproducible results in three years.

When I was researching BlackLight Power now renamed Brilliant Power, I discovered that they have not produced a working or deliverable device yet. The purported hydrino creation was discovered in 1991 yet here we are 25 years later and still nothing has been put in the field. Dr. Mills was unable to obtain a patent on his device because the Patent Office felt it contradicted known laws of physics.

I reported on the Shockwave Power Reactor but no one involved will admit to it being an above unity device. In theory, multiple people have measured this gain yet it has not found its way very far outside of Rome, GA as a super-efficient source of heat. You would think that a heating device that is 150% efficient would have become more widespread.

Every time I type these search terms into Google, I get redirected to web sites about free energy, cars that run on water and so on. One of the most professional sites is PESWiki.com but not one of the sources they cite have been absolutely or independently confirmed. I've watched videos of these magical devices yet not one of them has found their way into commercial distribution. There is even this thing called a Joe Cell which generates anti-gravity and free power called Orgone Energy from water using magnetism.

My one conclusion is that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. So far, nobody has produced an above unity device that you or I can get our hands on and produce energy. I've decided I am going to stay out of the rabbit hole for a while and watch the Chinese launch the EmDrive in space. It, too, has not been proven but if it ends up being real, maybe some of the backwash of the physics will shed light on the above seemingly impossible devices.