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]

So, assuming the funding problem more-or-less is taken care of, next up is fixing the quality of teachers.

Y'know, there's a funny thing about the current system in the U.S.: there are all these people that really do care about education, and are themselves educated (or at least passionate enough about education to make up for it), and they'd be happy to spend some of their time working as a teacher. Ironically, the teaching requirements are set up here so that those are exactly the sorts of people that aren't allowed to do any teaching. Instead, prospective public school teachers are driven through this horrible, lengthy, expensive training, most of which enforces some of the latest nonsense in educational theory.

Throw all that out. It's idiotic. It's even worse because teachers don't train for specific subjects; instead, you simply train to be "a teacher", and then you get hired to teach history when you really ought to be teaching math.

I think there are just two things you must know in order to be a teacher: the subject material, and how to handle a room full of kids. Let prospective teachers choose which of the basic subjects they'd like to teach -- history, science, math, literature, "physical ed" -- and then test them on it. The testing process itself can be rigorous without becoming terribly expensive. Then, have them spend a short amount of time -- evening classes would be fine! -- getting some tips on handling a large number of students, and then get out of their way! Throw 'em in a classroom as an aide to a more experienced teacher at first.

The thing that makes this work is that any interested parent is allowed -- and encouraged! -- to volunteer in the classrooms as often as they want, and so they get to provide direct oversight on the teachers.

Finally, you have to come up with some standards for what the kids should actually learn in various subjects. School boards do this currently in the U.S., and you need not be in the slightest educated in any of the subjects that you're deciding course material on. Teachers hate that! Throw it out.

Instead, let the teachers themselves work out the course materials. Make it work by having the teachers for one particular grade level meet with the teachers for the two next higher grade levels, and let them work it out. This way, the higher grade teachers can say, "by the time they get to us, the kids should know this, this, and this".

There are a ton of other details that would have to get filled in to make the complete system work. There'd have to be incentives for those that are professionals or retired in various fields to spend some of their time teaching; there'd have to be some standards for evaluation and critique, not just of the students but of the teachers; precise classroom structure; and so on, but I think this basic form could work.

I would certainly pour several years of my own life into making sure it did. :-)

OK you really need to get a Philosophy of Education qualification ASAP, this stuff is excellent

[explodingbat.livejournal.com]

Bringing in parents to act as teaching assistants was a tactic my primary school (in a smallish farming village) used with great success, but it isn't currently allowed for secondary schools (ages 11 to 16, and often up to 18). Your idea of separating the roles of the person who knows what the kids need to learn from those who keep the class in order (with a rapid training/certification system for the latter) is certainly the direction we should be going.

Using social pressure to get the younger kids to want to learn is another stroke of genius. What were the results of the test program you were in? Why wasn't it widely adopted?

And I'm all for transparent accounting: Hackney borough (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Borough_of_Hackney) (where I am) is one of the most notoriously corrupt councils in the country.

| ...history, science, math, literature, "physical ed"...

Does the U.S. system have equivalents to PSE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_and_Social_Education) (aka Politics, Sex and Everything else) and RE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Education) (religious education)? For the longest time I didn't understand the point of the Creationism-in-schools debate because I didn't realise that it was about wanting to teach that stuff as part of Science classes, instead of the humanities where I assumed it belonged.