PSA: Running On Water

[packbat]

From Making Light: A Japanese company, Genepax, has announced and demonstrated a new fuel cell system that runs on water..

Allow me to be careful for a moment. This is important enough - and I happen to be well-trained enough in the relevant field - to make strong statements about, and I do not want to leave a false impression.

*ahem*

It is impossible to make a fuel cell system that runs on water. Further, it is impossible to devise a process for separating water into hydrogen and oxygen that costs less useful energy than the fuel cell produces by recombining the two. Any person claiming to be capable of doing so is, to borrow a phrase, a lunatic, a liar, or Lord of the Cosmos.

I am not even joking. Of course, in this case, I'm betting it's (a) or (b), for a very simple reason: the machine described in these articles violates conservation of energy. To quote Sean Carroll's Alternative-Science Checklist:

Scientific claims — whether theoretical insights or experimental breakthroughs — don’t exist all by their lonesome. They are situated within a framework of pre-existing knowledge and expectations. If the claim you are making seems manifestly inconsistent with that framework, it’s your job to explain why anyone should nevertheless take you seriously. Whenever someone claims to build a perpetual-motion device, scientist solemnly reiterate that the law of conservation of energy is not to be trifled with lightly. Of course one must admit that it could be wrong — it’s only one law, after all. But when you actually build some machine that purportedly puts out more ergs than it consumes (in perpetuity), it does a lot more than violate the law of conservation of energy. That machine is made of atoms and electromagnetic fields, which obey the laws of atomic physics and Maxwell’s equations. And conservation of energy can be derived from those laws — so you’re violating those as well.

Genepax is pulling a scam, intentionally or not. The only possible way their device could work is by annihilating the entire modern structure of physics and chemistry simultaneously, and destroy them far more thoroughly than general relativity and quantum mechanics destroyed their respective predecessors. Do not even dream of betting against those kind of odds.

---

One final note, for those who may be curious: it was not any special wisdom of mine that allowed me to come so rapidly to the above conclusion. It was a simple three-step process:

1. Diagram the claimed process - where the fuel comes in, where the energy and known waste comes out. (You have to have waste come out - that's the second law of thermodynamics.)

                ________________________    _____________
water (fuel) -> | Genepax's MEA system | -> | Fuel Cell | -> water (waste)
                ------------------------    -------------
                                                      L----> energy

2. Add up the known outputs and subtract the inputs. (The inputs are always known. They're the things you have to pay for.) Compare to zero.

(energy + water) - water = energy > zero

3. If the answer is greater than zero, it's a scam. Q.E.D.

If any part of the above is unclear, I will gladly explain in the comments. Thank you for your time.

Comments

[roaminrob.livejournal.com]

Ambitious? Moi? No!

My dad's father often complained about the side effects of grade inflation. He'd learned how to do some pretty extreme maths on a slide rule, and the rest of it in his head, and so he really despised the helpless "calculator generation". I've also seen some of those old subject textbooks, and the difference with the crap taught today.

As to the new system: that's a tough question to answer. It's one thing to pinpoint schooling as the root of so many problems, and another thing altogether to come up with the ideal replacement, especially since there really isn't a broad spectrum of historical models to work off of.

The one advantage in coming up with some new system is that I don't see it as a complete, instantaneous replacement for public schooling. I'd like to see something established in a handful of communities, on a community-to-community basis, alongside the usual public schooling system. I'm not a big fan of privatization in this case.

I can think of three essential problems to be solved: funding; quality of teachers; and the basic structure and standards for the education.

Years ago, I worked for one of the best-funded school districts in California. The amount of waste -- and in some cases misappropriation -- of funds that I saw was staggering. The moneys spent on administrative overhead alone rivaled all of the teachers' salaries combined.

So, throw out the notion of the school "district" altogether. It's too easy to hide bad funding decisions in the budgets for a dozen schools. Set up each individual school with the entire range of student ages, instead of segregating them (I'll come back to this point).

Each school must make its complete quarterly financials publically available. Hold the schools directly accountable for the way they spend their money, and ensure that there isn't ever such a thing as a superintendent making a 6-figure salary. A little bit extra cash could be picked up from parents enrolling their kids in this system, with allowances for low-income families. Again, public schooling as it is now would still be available for anyone that wanted it -- this other system is supposed to be self-selecting for those people that actually want a better education.

Also, the usual notion of small classroom size is one way of solving some problems in education -- but it's not the only one. I was fortunate enough to be a part of an experimental classroom setup during my 3rd through 5th grades, in which there was a fairly large classroom -- 60 to 70 kids as I recall -- of grades 1 through 5, all mixed together, taught by two regular teachers and a handful of volunteers. It was amazing! It was ten times better than the usual way. Here we had this huge classroom size, but it worked great because it was very unstructured, and the use of volunteers helped to take care of a few of the problem kids. With a gentle hand from the teachers, the students did a fantastic job of policing themselves. The younger students would try their hardest to be all-grown-up like the older students, and the older students would act as mentors towards the younger ones.

(Cont'd in a second comment, 'cause LJ thinks I'm long-winded.)