>Well, there's enough material there that it'd be a pretty stiff project to go through it all and substantially rebut. If nothing else, it's fun to fantasize about it :)
>
>He's apparently got a patent on it, though, which surely must mean something. Just because a thing may sound fantastic doesn't necessarily mean the thing's not true.

For comparison, if you investigate a little on data compression, you will find that there are several patents that claim to do inconditional data compression. While it is relatively easy to prove that this is a mathematical impossibility (the "counting argument"), the people at the patents institutions aren't necessarily experts on the respective subjects. Not that I blame them: how could they, if there are patents on the most diverse topics - many of them quite novel. And perhaps they simply consider that it is the responsibility of the inventor to decide whether his invention has any merit, or not; the main responsibility of the patent office being to protect the intellectual property involved.

Back to energy: there are two fundamental laws of energy, known as the First and Second Law of Thermodynamics. 1) Energy can't be created out of nothing, nor destroyed. 2) Entropy increases (for practical purposes, usable energy is continuously converted into unusable energy; this can't be reverted).

There is simply no known physical (or other) process that violates either of the two laws on a large scale (the Web site in question seems to be about the first law). Modern physics (Relativity Theory, and Quantum Theory) hasn't changed this, either.

Exceptions are possible on a small scale; for instance, "virtual particles" appear out of "utter nothingness", and soon disappear again; the product of their energy and the amount of time they live can't surpass a certain (very small) constant.