Aesop Institute’s Perpetual Flimflam Machine, Mark Goldes, now claims to be prototyping a heat engine powered purely by ambient atmospheric heat. This is pure fraud.
Mark Goldes claims that “Patent pending desktop piston engines that will run 24/7 on the thermal energy in atmospheric heat are being prototyped.”
In fact, the worthless ambient heat engine concept at the center of Goldes’ flimflam is a certain utterly ludicrous exercise in silliness, produced by Kenneth Rauen, that does not have any “patent pending” and never will. It consists of nothing more than several cylinders containing pistons connected to a crankshaft, with various open channels between some of the cylinders. There is nothing to make the pistons move or the crankshaft turn. Rauen has written many pages of tedious nonsense attempting to argue that the engine would work. It certainly will not work, and Rauen certainly knows that it will not work, and so does Goldes.
At any given time and place, the atmosphere only provides a single heat reservoir at a single temperature. In order for a cyclic heat engine to do any work, it must be provided not merely with a single heat reservoir, but with two heat reservoirs, at different temperatures. This is an inescapable consequence of one of the most well-established principles in all of physics: the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
To people who have never studied thermodynamics, it might seem that nothing more should be needed to power a heat engine than a reservoir of heat. However, that is not so. In order to do any work, a cyclic heat engine must utilize not just one, but two heat reservoirs, at different temperatures. This has been understood at least since 1824, when Sadi Carnot presented an equation relating the maximum possible efficiency of a heat engine to the temperatures of the two reservoirs. When the two reservoirs are both at the same temperature, the maximum possible efficiency is zero percent: the engine can do no work at all.
Goldes falsely claims that “Two decades of physics research indicate not only that this [single-reservoir atmospheric heat engine] may be possible, but that there exist exploitable exceptions to the current interpretation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”
This false and baseless flimflam comes from the very same person who has actually spent the last two decades claiming year after year that his make-believe “room temperature superconductors” would be validated “next year,” that his make-believe “Virtual Photon Flux” engine would be validated “next year,” that his make-believe energy-multiplying horn-powered-tuning-rod “POWERGENIE” engine would be validated “next year,” and that his make-believe “Collapsing Hydrogen Orbits” “fractional hydrogen” engine would be validated “next year” – not to mention various other make-believe marvels. In fact, after a forty-year career in flimflam, Goldes has presented and validated a grand total of zero fulfillments of his endless claims regarding his make-believe “revolutionary breakthroughs.”
Mark Goldes’ proofless claims regarding his make-believe strictly ambient heat engine do not represent any new technology, or even a new pretense – they merely represent a rather old pretense.
“Before the establishment of the Second Law, many people who were interested in inventing a perpetual motion machine had tried to circumvent the restrictions of First Law of Thermodynamics by extracting the massive internal energy of the environment as the power of the machine. Such a machine is called a “perpetual motion machine of the second kind”. The second law declared the impossibility of such machines.”
“A perpetual motion machine of the second kind is a machine which spontaneously converts thermal energy into mechanical work. When the thermal energy is equivalent to the work done, this does not violate the law of conservation of energy. However it does violate the more subtle second law of thermodynamics (see also entropy). The signature of a perpetual motion machine of the second kind is that there is only one heat reservoir involved, which is being spontaneously cooled without involving a transfer of heat to a cooler reservoir. This conversion of heat into useful work, without any side effect, is impossible, according to the second law of thermodynamics.”
Goldes’ make-believe strictly ambient heat engine would be a perpetual motion machine of the second kind, as defined above. Goldes is not developing any such engine; he is merely developing a pretense – as usual.
Goldes’ strictly ambient heat engine would not merely “circumvent” the Second Law of Thermodynamics – it would actually DISPROVE the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
An engine using nothing more than the single heat reservoir of ambient heat would need to be able to DECREASE the entropy of the universe. The Second Law tells us that we can never decrease the entropy of the universe, or of an isolated system.
As a consequence of this law:
“It is impossible for any device operating on a cycle to produce net work from a single temperature reservoir; the production of net work requires flow of heat from a hotter reservoir to a colder reservoir.”
In the make-believe strictly ambient heat engine there are not two heat reservoirs at different temperatures; no reservoir would be available at any temperature other than the ambient temperature. No matter what cycle we design with this constraint, we will find that the cycle would have to be able to decrease the entropy of the universe in order to do any work.
The formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a constraint on entropy change is one of the most beautifully simple, and well-established, laws of physics.
The Second Law tells us that we can never build an engine that does some work with heat taken from a heat reservoir, without also transferring some heat to another reservoir at a lower temperature.
An equivalent statement is that we can’t decrease the total entropy of an isolated system.
The entropy change differential due to heat transfer to or from a reservoir is inversely related to the temperature at which the transfer occurs. The consequence is that transferring heat INTO a cold reservoir produces a larger GAIN in entropy, than the LOSS of entropy that occurs due to transfer of the same amount of heat FROM a hot reservoir. This noteworthy and remarkable inequality enables a heat engine to use some heat to do some work without violating the Second Law – as long as it can make use of two different heat reservoirs, at different temperatures. The ambient-heat-powered engine only involves a single reservoir, at a single temperature (at any given moment). When it reduces the entropy of the reservoir by using some of the heat to do work, it has no way to compensate by increasing the entropy anywhere else. Therefore we know for certain that the engine will disappoint us. It will never be able to do any work.
In Mark Goldes’ patent application for his “POWERGENIE” horn-powered tuning-rod engine, he described the tuning-rod as “an energy transfer and multiplier element.”
But of course, for the tuning-rod to “multiply” energy, it would need to disprove the law of conservation of energy. (Obviously the Patent Office should never have allowed such a description.)
Goldes’ use of the term “energy multiplier element” reflects his pretense that the “revolutionary breakthrough” of the amazing “POWERGENIE” could disprove the law of conservation of energy, by presenting the world with a working “energy multiplier.”
Goldes even claimed in 2008 that the POWERGENIE had been demonstrated already in an electric car, driven 4800 miles by his energy-multiplying horn-powered tuning-rod.
But it seems that most people, for some reason, had difficulty accepting the notion that the law of conservation of energy could be proven false.
And Goldes no doubt noticed that the Second Law of Thermodynamics – that “the entropy of an isolated system tends to increase with time and can never decrease” – is much less clear to most people than the conservation of energy.
So now, after leaving aside the pretense that he could somehow “multiply energy” with a magnetized tuning-rod, Goldes has chosen to focus, instead, on the pretense that he can disprove the Second Law with an engine powered by ambient heat.
There is no “new science” in any of Goldes’ “revolutionary breakthroughs.” There is only pseudoscience and pretense – and nothing new, at all.
2008: Mark Goldes Claims MPI’s “Patent Pending” Ambient Heat Engine Has Already Powered A Car For 4800 Miles; Claims MPI Will Earn One Billion Dollars Annually By 2012
In his “Executive Summary” for MPI of June 2, 2008, Goldes states:
“The company is now involved with a revolutionary, patent pending, technology, which converts ambient heat into electricity. This non-magnetic breakthrough has the potential to go to production in the near future. The system has proven capability to recharge batteries from heat extracted from the air; an alternative to the need to plug-in…
“Prototypes of the non-magnetic [ambient heat engine] system have been in operation for more that one year and successfully run an electric car for more than 4,800 miles with no need to plug-in.”
It is possible for a heat engine to be powered by ambient heat – as long as it can also utilize a second heat reservoir at a lower temperature. But Goldes’ countless descriptions of his imaginary ambient heat engine have always envisioned a single-reservoir heat engine. Such an engine can do no work – as physicists have understood at least since 1824. This fact is known as the “Kelvin-Planck Postulate.” Notice that Goldes pretends that there is a “patent pending” for his imaginary invention. Of course, he has never provided any Patent Application Publication Number by which we could confirm that there was any “patent pending” as he claims. Just like the single-reservoir heat engine itself, Goldes’ patent application for it is evidently purely imaginary.
In the same “Executive Summary” for MPI, Goldes claims that MPI’s array of imaginary engines will earn the company one billion dollars annually by 2012:
“Revenues from licenses and Joint Ventures are conservatively projected to exceed $1 billion annually by 2012.
“2008: $25 million; 2009: $100 million; 2010: $300 million; 2011: $600 million, 2012: $1 b[illion].