Okay, but you're not arguing about whether or not Tom Bearden has any idea what he's talking about, though, right? I was just on his website, and there are certain things he just doesn't understand. I mean, they're simple misunderstandings, and this is coming from someone who only did two years of physics (and I wasn't exactly an all-star). If I can spot the misunderstandings right off the bat, that's a bad sign. He seems to have misinterpreted some basics. That's problematic.

Not much danger of that!

Honestly, now. Electromagnetics is all math. I looked on the site, and all I could find is cryptic nonsense like "virtual photon flux density", without any math to show me what that could mean. Yes, there can be virtual photons, and yes, one might consider the flux of virtual photons, but how could I know what is meant by the phrase without at least a few Greek letters and some integrals? Throw me a bone, here.

Jeb is clearly needling you -- even if you could (big if) harness that energy, the energy output would be nothing like the energy put into setting up the mechanism involved. I at least see now how Bearden could be confused, having checked out the math they have about it on Wikipedia. I think this is another case of extending the description of the math beyond what is said in the math itself. Jeb would be right in saying that Bearden's madness is founded in the tiniest bit of truth (that there is, in fact a Casimir effect), and maybe we could harness it, but even then, how would that be a significant improvement over how we produce electricity from force applied to normal electromagnets?

I mean, aren't we doing much better with plain old electromagnetics in terms of power generation? There are modern generator designs that achieve a greater optimization over older generators than any theoretical harnessing of the Casimir effect could, but Bearden's claiming to have access to HUGE optimizations, which couldn't be attributed to a numerical association with the Casimir effect, because he doesn't have one.

Yah well the free energy people I deal with have not mentioned the Casimir effect to me or if they did, it was under a different name and I just missed it (gotta love how those guys will refer back to some other dude for his “discovery&rdquo. In any case, I have essentially the same objection here as I do to the claims of free energy from permanent magnets.

Casimir plates sitting on an experimenter's bench and no more useful to anyone than permanent magnets sitting on my desk. It does not matter “how much energy is there” or where it is sourced from. When all is said and done, is there a plan to get the energy out of the system in such a way that meaningful work may be done?

There are any number of youtube videos purporting to “get energy from permanent magnets” and they are all a sham. We know how to do that. It is called a generator and it is fairly old technology. The magnets do not cause energy to exists, they are just a necessary part of the generator. The energy came from getting the generator to spin.

I can think of Casimir plates in the same way. If you connected them to some form of mechanical oscillator, then you could probably produce a current at the back end of the system. However, the plates are performing the same role as the magnets in a traditional generator. You would still be converting the energy from the mechanical oscillator into useful power. The Casimir plates would only be a part of the system.

Update:

I start shooting (hopefully) on Monday. My firewire card hasn't shown up yet though, which is no suprise given that I picked the cheapest shipping route.

Now I just have to figure out where I'm going to put everything. I'd rather not use Youtube since the quality is kinda crap and they've been pretty bad about other stuff. Episodes will be somewhere around 20 - 30 minutes, depending on how much there is to cover, so wherever I put things it should probably be liberal about how much time is allotted. Blip.tv looks pretty good.

Any suggestions?