It is commonly said by those who don't quite understand that " you can't get more out of a device than you put in "
When I say words like those I'm talking about a closed system. "you" does not mean you personally. It is simply a restatement of conservation of energy.
I presume you don't have a huge problem with that?
Take a windmill. When the wind blows YOU do not put anything into it but can get a lot out. I am not touting a windmill as a free energy device in the sense we are talking about ( although in the true sense it clearly is ) but rather clarifying the issue of what I mean. If you do not have to pay for the input energy and do not have to manually put the energy in then the output is free.
Agreed.
Clearly these devices appear to contradict the laws of physics
I would say "appear" is often the magic word here.
but I have issues with those anyway despite having studied physics. Firstly we do not know the laws of physics,
I'd have to disagree with you there. A "law of nature" is simply a statement based on the observations from repeated scientific experiments.
Knowing what it is doesn't tell us anything about how, why, etc. And a single (OK, a single repeatable) experiment showing something different doesn't break the law, it simply renders the law invalid as there is now a repeatable observation which shows that this particular statement of the law does not hold.
Now, often the change may occur in such weird cases that the new law is effectively the same as the old one for most normal cases (Newton's laws of motion are an example).
we only have models that suit our current understanding.
But laws do not reflect our understanding. Theories do that.
Secondly they are not laws. Laws are for people.
Sure. The universe doesn't care about us. "Laws" are simply how we state and generalize our observations. They're just for us. If we've missed observing something (and it's certain that we have) then our laws will be wrong or incomplete.
There's nothing particulars wrong with that. Science isn't religion -- it doesn't purport to define absolute truth.
The components of our universe have habits of behaviour. tendancies and trends. I have spent three decades thinking about deeper physics and am convinced we have built a house of cards in our rush to understand everything. I will stop there as this could go on for hours. I expect a lot of flac for posting this but I am used to it. Regards .
I'm not sure what alternative there is other than to try to understand everything. In reality every scientist is trying only to understand some small something a little better.
It's not as if people are not trying to design experiments to demonstrate alternative theories. It's also not as if you note disappointment when yet another experiment fails to show results at variance with (say) the standard model.
I'm sure that there will be experiments which will show that today's theories are incorrect, and maybe the next one will provide a result which allows us to show that there are achievable conditions where existing laws fail.
I really hope that one of those things happen (preferably more than one) in my lifetime and that I am able to understand the basics of what has been observed.
All the scientists I know (and most of them these days are in the cell biology area) would love to be able to show such a massive finding.
All of that is not to say that there is no inertia behind the existing status-quo. However one only needs to look at the findings of Pons and Fleischmann and note that there are still people researching and trying to replicate their results.
However the onus of proof is on the one making the claim. My main problem is with people who make the claim, yet go to extraordinary lengths to obscure the purported mechanism and thus prevent its investigation.
