>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.

If you'll have a brief look through cheniere.org, the inventor's website, you'll find some pretty complicated mathematics going on there. Traveling down the path for a moment that this is a hoax, and given the head-spinning formulae, it probably wouldn't take much of that to pull the wool over the patent-man's eyes <g>

But then again, if he simply set the thing on a table and used it to power up his radio, that'd be pretty hard to dismiss. (Naturally the patent process is more trying than just that—I'm only using a figure of speech.)

BTW, do you have any links for "inconditional data compression?" I ran a Google search just now and didn't find anything. You've got me curious :-)



>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).

Re: 1) — I don't see it as being in violation at all (assuming for a moment that it's true). I see it as redistributing energy that's already there, just not in a form that we've previously been able to recognize.

Re: 2) — Building on my reply to #1, if the energy is in a form heretofore invisible, how can we assume entropy isn't increasing?

If this guy's running a scam, he's got all the bases covered <g>

And oh... not only is the world flat, but FoxPro is dead as well ;-)



>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.