The 1990s were the golden age of free energy: Technologies that, through new or underappreciated physics, generated abundant and clean electricity. It wasn’t about boring old ideas like wind or solar, but about exciting new inventions like zero-point energy and cold fusion. There were books that described how Nikola Tesla had built a device that generated power without requiring fuel. In my native Austria, people talked about the miraculous energy-creating turbines Viktor Schauberger had invented.
I read everything related I could get my hands on. Some of the “books” were pages of photocopies that had been stapled together. The authors typically explained that they had to self-publish since their inventions were being silenced by the establishment. A common refrain was “The oil companies will do anything to suppress free energy research.” Often, they also happened to have titillating views about aliens or politics. They never had an advanced physics or engineering education, but of course this was an advantage since it meant that their minds were free of pre-conceived notions.
I have since gone on an acquired some of those pre-conceived notions in the shape of a formal education. It’s not in engineering but in human genetics, a field that also attracts its fair share of amateur interest, some of it unfortunately misguided.
Mathematician Stephen Wolfram, because of his visibility, attracts a lot of this sort of interest. Here’s what he has to say about it:
Several often arrive in a single day. Sometimes they’re marked “urgent”. Sometimes they’re long. Sometimes they’re short. Sometimes they’re humble. Sometimes they’re conspiratorial. And sometimes, these days, they’re written “in collaboration with” an AI. But there’s a common theme: they’re all emails that present some kind of fundamental theory invented by their authors (or perhaps their AI) about how our universe works.
At some level it’s encouraging to see how many people find it interesting to think about fundamental questions in science. But at some level it’s also to me very frustrating. All that effort being spent. And so much of it so wide of the mark. Most of the time it’s based on at best high-school physics – missing everything that was learned in twentieth-century physics. Sometimes it’s easy to tell that what’s being said just can’t be right; often things are too vague or tangled for one to be able to say much.
Most physicists term people who send such theories “crackpots”, and either discard their missives or send back derisive responses. I’ve never felt like that was the right thing to do. Somehow I’ve always felt as if there has to be a way to channel that interest and effort into something that would be constructive and fulfilling for all concerned.
Nehaveigur 