Have you encountered Perpetual Motion Disease (PMD)?

[DaveC426913]

The great thing about Joe Newman is that he's basically an "official" crackpot in that he sued the USPTO for refusing to grant him a patent for his PMM and lost. So his crackpottery is officially recognized by the US justice system. He can argue his device isn't a PMM and should be patented and all he wants, but unfortunately in order to fight his fight in court, he needed to deliver a functioning prototype for testing and analysis.

Yeah, I read that. That's heartening. I did not know a patent could be refused because a contraption does not work. So many patents are on little more than designs.

 

[zoobyshoe]

What is the publish date on the book? Perhaps he has he updated it to back off the overunity claim?

I don't remember the publish date but it was after he tried to get a patent, because some of the book was a rebuttal to the patent denial. "Overunity" if I understand the term, means greater than 100% efficient, which is a different claim than "perpetual motion". The latter would mean a thing runs literally forever with no input. The former simply means you get more out than you put in, but with no claim it will run forever.

Because if it were as you described, there would be no reason not to grant him a patent.

You're missing the fact it doesn't fulfill the claim: it is NOT more than 100% efficient, not over unity. The extra running time comes from a reasonably clever way of recycling electrical energy that is usually allowed to go to waste. It does not come from the mass of the copper, or anything like that. Any careful measurement would reveal that what the motor does in no way exceeds the energy in the battery. As I said, the motor is never made to do anything: it just runs. All it's ever doing is overcoming mechanical and air friction and bleeding a little energy into heat loss in the coil. By recycling the switching surge, he makes it do that longer than a conventional motor would.

He does not claim it will do anything perpetually, and can't, therefore, be refused a patent based on it not being perpetual motion. He can only be refused based on it NOT producing more energy than is put into it, the latter being something he does claim.

Either way, guys, I'm not very interested in nitpicking the demented rantings of a madman.

You have to debunk what's claimed. If a guy says "I saw a ghost!" you can't shoot him down on the basis he didn't see an extraterrestrial.