Talk:Water fuel cell/Archive 6

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A conflict with this talk page and WP:Talk page guidelines

I've raised some issues regarding this talk page, how we archive and present our templates, which lead me to believe I'm being harassed. You may find this Here at the Administrator's Notice board. Comments on user conduct are welcome there. --CyclePat (talk) 17:01, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Okay! The new template at the top seems to be a lot better and I believe it's a pretty darn good faith edit which improves our situation. Thank you. --CyclePat (talk) 17:25, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
um dude the talkpage is like blank except for 2 coments from you. whats the "harassment"??? Smith Jones (talk) 01:12, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
T'is currently water under the bridge. (I hope!) But if you're interested you may wish to read the archive #5 regarding perpetual motion device and it's subsections starting at reference verification! Let's just make sure the water doesn't rise (I still want to edit this article and I want to read the "nature" article (ref.#2)) --CyclePat (talk) 22:50, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Weasel words

Media Section

The media coverage section is a direct contrast. person one claims then person two claims. This is conform to Wikipedia standards per Wikipedia:Words_to_avoid#Claim. However I was wondering if there is a way which we could improve the second persons claim by Phil Ball... in short he says the device doesn't work. So we should say it as it is (per Wikipedia:Words_to_avoid#Claim. Right? --CyclePat (talk) 16:07, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Lead section

CyclePat, just because a topic has been archived doesn't mean it has gone away. You're trying to sneak old weasel words into the intro. It is not "claimed" that burning hydrogen and oxygen reconstitutes water, burning hydrogen and oxygen produces water - period. This is grade school chemistry (see, eg, here). Also "opponents" don't argue that cars that run on water violate the laws of thermodynamics, anyone with a background in science knows this to be a fact. Please stop retreading old ground.Prebys (talk) 16:24, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Please WP:AGF and comment on content an not on editors. Thank you. --CyclePat (talk) 16:31, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
Please see the afformentioned statements regarding weasel words. --CyclePat (talk) 16:33, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
We've been through this several times. Please stop rehashing old arguments with no new information. Guyonthesubway (talk) 16:34, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
We have not been through this. Also, please see Wikipedia:Words_to_avoid#Claim. --CyclePat (talk) 16:36, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
I recommend that you read up on WP:FRINGE. You simply can't try to balance the claims of one man (who was convicted of fraud) against accepted laws of physics. Substituting "is said to" for "claimed" does not get around the problem.Prebys (talk) 16:47, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

(outdent) Okay Presby... I don't know how to say this anymore politelly... But if someone is arguing against you, he is considered an opponent. Please consider as I have previously stated the the Wikipedia:Words_to_avoid#Claim, but more importantly the section Wikipedia:Words_to_avoid#Synonyms_for_say. This section of Wikipedia Style Guideline suggest that "When a statement is mostly factual but its importance may be disputed, consider using argue or dispute instead:"

  • "Opponents argue that a requirement to carry an identity card at all times can lead to arbitrary requests from the police."

For this reason I believe that the removal of my recent edit here is invalid and that the content, particularly the statement of "Also, opponents argue that... if the device worked as specified, it would violate both..." Best regards. --CyclePat (talk) 16:51, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

I see where there may be confusion happening. I want to say opponents to Meyer's device... not the laws of thermodynamics. Could that be the confusion? --CyclePat (talk) 16:53, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
There's no confusion. Consensus remains that Meyer's device was a perptual motion device and that the article should state that. Unles you have additional information you are (again) disrupting the article and editing against consensus. Please stop. Guyonthesubway (talk) 17:13, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
You are badgering me again per our previous discussion to which I though was water under the bridge. Do you have anything to bring to this conversation whith regards to the specific use of Wikipedia:Words_to_avoid#Synonyms_for_say or which will advance constructive criticism and eventual amilioration of the article? --CyclePat (talk) 17:40, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
Allow me to rephrase. Consensus is that the lead was correct as it stood. You were aware of it, and made the edits anyhow. Therefore your edits were not in good faith, were disruptive, and should have been removed. Is that clearer? Guyonthesubway (talk) 17:48, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
I'm going to ignore that statment. Otherwise nothing on Wikipedia would see a change... I believe concensus involves discusion of change... which we are doing right now! --CyclePat (talk) 18:43, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
The difference here is that in the example you've cited from the MoS, it's a subjective assessment open to debate. In the case of thermodynamics, etc., it's basic physics, accepted by everyone (not quite in the realm of 2+2=4, but for all practical purposes, it's a closed case). Whilst stating that "Opponents argue..." is valid, it's superfluous, and also contentious because it begs to have a "weasel words" tag placed on it. Oli Filth(talk|contribs) 17:47, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
Correct. "Opponents argue" implies that this statement is produced explicitly to refute Meyer's claims, whereas this is a general statement of physical law, and most people who would make it have never heard of Stanley Meyer.Prebys (talk) 18:19, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
Okay! It feals like we're on the right track. But as I look at this I feal a little dismayed and can't help but think what a vicious circle. Now I understand why you're saying I'm bringing back old discussion. Sorry about that... but that was not my intention at all. The problem, which I can't think of a solution to right now, is that we compare the device. We specifically state that Meyer's device violates the laws of thermodynamics. (that's what the source says anyways.) So, I'm confused when you say this is a general statement. I believe the general statement is the second half which claims it's pseudoscience. (hence: this conversation, now that I think about it, is different then previous conversation.) But I do understand your concerns and frustration (I to am getting frustrated) and do appologize if this appears as beeing disruptive. I hope we will soon be finishing off this discussion with a concensus. --CyclePat (talk) 18:43, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure sure what your issue is. You seem to be having problems with basic logic, so I'll lay it out as simply as I can:
  • General statement: extracting net chemical energy from water violates the laws of thermodynamics.
  • specific case: Stanley Meyer's "water fuel cell" claims to extract net chemical energy from water.
  • conclusion: Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell violates the laws of thermodynamics.
Do you really not understand this, or are you intentionally being difficult?Prebys (talk) 19:54, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Lame excuse

I'm not sure how we can do this but the sentence.... ""lame excuse" on the days of examination and did not allow the test to proceed."... is good. The sentence afterwards doesn't make it quite clear that Meyer's "lame excuse" was that the patent is pending? Any suggestions to improve this to make it a little bit clearer? --CyclePat (talk) 16:29, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Well first of all you'd find a source that says Meyers refused to show the device because the pantent was pending. Of course, you know that already so why would you ask? Guyonthesubway (talk) 16:34, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
Any suggestions to improve this to make it a little bit clearer? --CyclePat (talk) 16:37, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
Find a source that says it happened. Guyonthesubway (talk) 17:11, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
LOL!  :) okay! (headshaking).(pause). Alright. That's good enough for me. What do you think about putting this on a TODO list? --CyclePat (talk) 17:17, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Er, there is something you should all know: if a patent has been applied for, then the invention is covered when you show the machine to people even if the patent has not yet been granted. Man with two legs (talk) 19:49, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Peer Review

Since there seem to be a concensus for Status quo I have decided to implement an independant peer review of our article. Here are the result from an automated script to which I invite everyone to strike out the lines which are non-relevant. --CyclePat (talk) 15:51, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.

  • Please expand the lead to conform with guidelines at Wikipedia:Lead. The article should have an appropriate number of paragraphs as is shown on WP:LEAD, and should adequately summarize the article.[?]
  • If there is not a free use image in the top right corner of the article, please try to find and include one.[?]
  • You may wish to consider adding an appropriate infobox for this article, if one exists relating to the topic of the article. [?] (Note that there might not be an applicable infobox; remember that these suggestions are not generated manually)
  • Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), there should be a non-breaking space -   between a number and the unit of measurement. For example, instead of 83 liters, use 83 liters, which when you are editing the page, should look like: 83 liters.[?]
Complete! --CyclePat (talk) 21:26, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, CyclePat (talk) 15:51, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

The term "purportedly"

"Supposed and purported, like claim, cast doubt upon an assertion: writing "X is supposedly true" suggests that the author does not believe it. On the other hand, supposed can sometimes denote intent, permission, or prohibition. In such cases, the term will often be neutral, but may be too informal." [1] The word purportedly, in the context of our recent edit conflict, I believe is a weasel word and should be removed or at least revised for a better explanation. --CyclePat (talk) 21:35, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the style guide does explicitly mention this word as one to avoid. Still, we need to be very explicit about the fact that there's no independent proof, therefore I'd suggest "claim" as an alternative. However, the previous sentence uses that word, so my suggestion would be to conjoin the two sentences. Oli Filth(talk|contribs) 21:40, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
"Words to avoid" does not mean the word is forbidden, and conjoining the sentences seems to make the resulting sentence too complex for understanding. In fact, the sentence containing "purported" is almost too complex for understanding. Perhaps it could be simplified, and then conjoined. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 21:44, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
"Claimed" is also in WP:WTA, is it not? — Arthur Rubin (talk) 21:46, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
Hmmm. Yes, you're right. However, as you say, WP:AVOID doesn't imply that these words are forbidden. On balance, a subject for which there's been no verifiable demonstration or proof and flies in the face of accepted physics, I don't believe these words are unfair or loaded. If the subject was a matter of subjective opinion, then maybe, but not in this case. Oli Filth(talk|contribs) 21:49, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
I'm sorry, if I can't follow the aformentioned solutions of this conversation right now. (This seems to have just gone a step above my comprehension for some reason. I'll read it over again tomorow.) But, in the mean time, this recent edit, which keeps the term "purported" but seperates the sentence, I believe, only solves halft the problem. Don't quote me on this, but I don't think there is a doubt that Meyer's device seperated water into it's elements. (even if it was a fraud according to the courts). Nevertheless, if there is a doubt that the device actually produced/seperated water into it's elements... then might I suggest that we actually state that as it is and avoid the word purpotted... since Meyer obviously "claimed and (arguably) demonstrated" that it could !!! --CyclePat (talk) 22:50, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
Come to think of it, most of the lede consists of Meyer's claims. Perhaps the beginning of the lead could be written as follows:

The water fuel cell is an invention by American Stanley Allen Meyer (August 24, 1940–March 21, 1998). He claimed that:

  • An automobile retrofitted with the device could use water as fuel instead of gasoline.
  • The fuel cell split water into its component elements, hydrogen and oxygen, which were then burned to generate power, a process that reconstitutes the water molecules.
  • The device required less energy to perform electrolysis than the minimum energy requirement predicted or measured by conventional science.<ref name="Narciso"/>
— Arthur Rubin (talk) 22:10, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

The term "fuel cell"

Just to be clear that we are actually making revisions to the first sub-heading "The term "fuel cell"". This sentence, per the automated peer-review is not conform to Wikipedia's guideline styles. Please avoid the word "The" and "An". ie.: ==The bibliography== should be changed to ==Bibliography==. To date, with the most recent edits, (and perhaps a couple suggestions too which I may have just added right now) we have seen:

  • Term "Fuel cell"
  • "Fuel cell" term
  • Fuel cell term
  • Fuel cell terminology
  • Termninology
  • Terminology of fuel cell
  • "Fuel cell"

Many of the above changes where reverted with the most recent one putting back the "The". Before we get tired and start forgeting which versions we've put... I figure I should post this for discussion. Currently, I've place the sub-heading, since this appears to be another possible solution, to : =="Fuel cell"==. --CyclePat (talk) 01:02, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

I think I'd prefer
  • Teminology: "Fuel cell"
The subheading would make sense if Mr. Meyer used another term in a non-standard sense, but a section consisting only of a single subsection seems wrong. Also, Term "fuel cell" seems incorrect without the article. The section title guideline seems to read that we don't include unnecessary articles. Perhaps
  • Definition of "fuel cell"
would be the best choice. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 01:09, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
Thank you Arthur. I think either one is good! (However, if you look at the FYI table I just provided I think you are correct to say that the second option is best because it does not mimic edit #2 which was reverted by yourself.)
--CyclePat (talk) 01:21, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Arthur Rubin Terminology: Fuel Cell or Defenition of "Fuel Cell" appear to be more appropriate as possible titles for this section.I55ere (talk) 16:54, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
I prefer 'Definition of "Fuel Cell"' Guyonthesubway (talk) 01:09, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
I would go as far as 'Nonstandard definition of "Fuel Cell"', or 'Nonstandard use...' just to make it crystal clear. I only say this because, while it's clear to most people that this is not a fuel cell in the traditional sense of the word, there was a thread a while back where someone insisted on bringing in lots of references to actual fuel cells in support of Meyer's claims.Prebys (talk) 14:09, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
Now that you mention it, that did create a big hoopla. "Nonstandard..." is far more appropriate. I second the motionI55ere (talk) 16:07, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
Works for me. Guyonthesubway (talk) 01:00, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

(outdent). I actually think "The term 'fuel cell'" is best. We're not bound by the suggestions of the automated peer-review bot, and this title is concise while at the same time hinting that Meyer's use of the term was non-standard. If we set the guideline aside for a moment (which only says to avoid the use of "the") and compare the current title to the alternatives suggested thusfar, IMHO "The term 'fuel cell'" is the best. If we must change it, I'd suggest "Meyer's use of the term 'fuel cell'", though it lacks the concision of the current title. Yilloslime (t) 01:13, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

The only problem with that is that we'll have to put up with 10 pages of wikilawyering from CyclePat. I'm tired of reading 2 paragraphs of rambling to figure out that he said 'Yes' or 'No'. Guyonthesubway (talk) 14:39, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
I agree. After all this debate, it's clear that the original wording was the best. The WP guidelines don't really cover the special case of someone using a term incorrectly, or at least in a nonstandard way. I say change it back and batten down for the inevitable storm.Prebys (talk) 19:38, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
Excutive summary: No. I disagree per WP:NPOV.
Reason: Someone once told me, you should explain all reasonings preferably in IRAC. It helps the end reader to better judge and understand the relationship of the principles behind the precedent or the rules. It makes it easier to understand the logic and to weigh or see if it agrees with the conclusion.
Anyways, I remember a previous discussion regarding this section (I believe I had asked for some reference for the idea that the "fuel cell" is not conform to the "standard" definition). In short, this may be a popular point of view for readers... but in reality it's not something that is regularly/properly referenced per the strictest sence of Wikipedia reference and citation rules. Anyways & no matter the case, I would argue that adding "non-standard" promotes a POV (which is more or less well balanced, right now, with the body of the paragrah). Adding this POV to the sub-heading is a no no. As an assumptive example, to balance this out we would need to say "Standard and non-standard definition of "fuel cell". In short: keep the status quo. Also, ask yourself, what is standard? according to who? In our current situation, further discussion and reference should be in the body of the text and not in the heading. (Unless there is a section dedicated to exactly that... and right now... it's dedicated to both and, I think, it would be difficult to comply with NPOV if we had a section dedicated to each one. WP:ASF says "Assert facts, including facts about opinions—but do not assert the opinions themselves." Per, WP:NPOV's, I believe this applies to the subheading because it is stated "All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view." Other wikipedia content includes "sub-headings. Therefore, I do not support the use of "non-standard".
Furthermore, this same reasoning may apply with the status quo (to which I obviously disagree). Yilloslime's aformentionned statement is correct. Keeping the status quo will indeed hint "...that Meyer's use of the term was non-standard". "Hinting", in this case, I believe, violates the principles of NPOV and hence "The term "fuel cell" should be corrected to conformity to Wikipedia Rules and guidelines. --CyclePat (talk) 22:10, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
It's not "hinting" (in a pejorative/misleading sense) if it's a concise summary of what the section is about; by any "standard" that the reader may be used to, Meyer's use of the term was non-standard. Oli Filth(talk|contribs) 22:23, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
Perhaps my Analysis was a little short for the second issue regarding "The term "fuel cell"". The argument for rules that apply in this case are WP:NPOV, I concede, may be weak. Nevertheless, the section of [[
WP:STRUCTURE does state that we should "Be alert to arrangements of formatting, headers, footnotes, or other elements that may unduly favor a particular "side" of an issue, and to structural or stylistic aspects that make it difficult for a neutral reader to fairly and equally assess the credibility of all relevant and related viewpoints". Furthermore, it sends us off to Wikipedia:Manual of Style. The automated peer-review has already suggested that we look into this issue per WP:Head. I have no formal analysis regarding the "hinting" a POV, but merely Yiloslime's interpretation. Furthermore, I must concede the point that the "use" of "The" (per our status quo) and per user andyz's automated talkbot's description of the possible problem is said to be a suggestion. I may concede the point to keep the status quo... however, I do prefer "Definition of "Fuel cell"" since afterall this version appears to be conform and has no current issues (as raised by Yilloslime). --CyclePat (talk) 23:02, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
CyclePat, all of your discussions tacitly assume there's some "debate" about the veracity of Meyer's claims. There's not; they're entirely fraudulent, based on science, the law, and common sense. The purpose of this article is to convey that as succinctly as possible. Pointing out that Meyer's use of "fuel cell" is nonstandard is no more WP:POV than pointing out that his claims violate the laws of thermodynamics. WP:NPOV does not mean that all claims, no matter how crazy, are given equal weight.Prebys (talk) 16:12, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
This comment has absolutely nothing to do with our lack of complacency to properly format subheadings according to Wikipedia widelly accepted format. --CyclePat (talk) 19:22, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

2nd round

Just to be clear: I am actually making revisions. The following table shows the revision history. Some editors have chosen to continue to revert every suggestion back to the original version which is not conform to Wikipedia's Manual of styles. "Definition" is not quite the best word, because it does not concord with the current paragraph. The current paragraph is more or less an etymology... evolution of the term. Just take a look at the paragraph and please tell me what you see. The most prevalent theme is "usage" then we talk about how it's meaning has changed over time. We describe it's common usage (ie.: electrochemical) and current usage as Meyer's cell (ie.: "new meaning"). We even have the circa date, etc... To me that says Etymology all over the place. Etymology is said to be "the study of the history of words -- when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time."... hence etymology is better then "definition" or "The term "fuel cell"". The reason it's better then "The term "fuel cell"" is because it doesn't repeat what is already in the articles title. Furthermore, this section doesn't just talk about "fuel cells" it talks about "water fuel cell" and other uses. ie.: use is the same as usage. It is no longer appropriate for this article to maintain "status quo". Simply put, there are many areas that need improvement and frankly, it is frustrating to feals as though I'm the only one putting forward suggestions (which appear to be continuessly reverted). In short, we better use something else for this article to get any better. I will continue to try and find something else going through many suggestions. ie.: Etymology and usage (per the precedent at the article God.) See current list of uncomplacent reverts:

--CyclePat (talk) 19:54, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Consensus is clearly and completely against you here. You've already shown bad faith in the last discussion of this heading by editing against consensus. I consider the topic closed, and will revert until I see some other editors' opinions change. Guyonthesubway (talk) 20:00, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
Ad hominem --CyclePat (talk) 20:25, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Free Photo on the top right or in the info box

Prior to copying the image I found here, which is supposedly under GFDL. I had some second thoughts. In fact, the quality of the image is low, which makes me question the source. The source appears to be vague and maybe only fair-use of some video? If you agree with me... can you think of any free GFDL images? --CyclePat (talk) 00:36, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

We may have a free picture. We just have to wait for the answer from this ebay item's seller. (So this doesn't seem like advertising here is the link to simply the photo.--CyclePat (talk) 01:20, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
All image licensing issues aside, is there a reliable source attesting that these are images of (the original or reconstructed) "Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell", the subject of this article ? I assume that you know by now that peswiki and a seller on eBay (selling Free Energy Generators, no less!) do not qualify. Abecedare (talk) 05:20, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

(outdent)Summary: Yes! We have patents. Meandering babble about well referenced and being subjective about the replica. Discussion: You raise a good point regarding reliable sources but we could always use the fair use card (licencing) for a a good image (NOw that I think about it!). As for the eBayb... I think the ebay image could be reliable in regards to it being an eBay item which alleges to be a reproduction (notable enough for inclusion if we talk about it being an eBay item). Actually, the idea is not to have a picture of the original device (most likely imposible really without some Fair-use clipping from a video or the patents... since the device is patented) but the reconstructed devices. I feel a little dismayed to think someone has most likely rebuilt this device but we can't find free images. Argh! Or maybe not... maybe we'll be forced to take a fair use image... Anyways... it's no worse then if I took out my pencil (or computer drawing board) and drew an image of "my conceptualization" of the device according to... the patents. Tada. Anyways, the Eifel_Tower#Reproductions is a good precedent which demonstrates that you can include pictures of a replica. Furthermore, images on Wiki, from what I gather do not require as strict of referencing (Particularly when dealing with peer review or WP:SPS). Anyways, I think the test we could use is Wikipedia:Verifiability#Using_self-published_and_questionable_sources_as_sources_on_themselves which states:

1.the material used is relevant to the notability of the subject of the article; 2.it is not unduly self-serving; 3.it does not involve claims about third parties; 4.it does not involve claims about events not directly related to the subject; 5.there is no reason to doubt its authenticity; 6.the article is not based primarily on such sources;

Humm...Of course, I concede, the origins must be properly referenced... ie.: author. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Box0706_1.jpg (dunno why I put this image here). Now I remember... it's a picture of a porche... but how do we know this is realy a porche? anyways... before I get an anurism for thinking so much... goodnight. --CyclePat (talk) 07:09, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Summary: None of these images are appropriate for the article. Discussion:None of these images are appropriate for the article. Guyonthesubway (talk) 14:48, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
And why? --CyclePat (talk) 18:26, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Noticeboard Filing

Please note: [[9]]

I encourage other editors to include other diffs that they feel may be pertinent. Guyonthesubway (talk) 20:59, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

The above link is dead, and refers to this archived discussion. 70.91.178.185 (talk) 13:12, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Revisions of the article - Origin year - references of the patents - confusion of various patents

There is a possibility to confuse Meyer's patents. I believe that this is happening because we lack inline citations. The most recent edit by Guyontehsubway, reverted attempts to correct this problem. In fact, Guyonthesubway clearly made a derogatory comment regarding my editing. Which leads me to believe this edit is Ad hominem. I undid the edit by Guyonthesubway. Arthur Rubin however reverted it back with this edit. The explanation is unclear, except that it asks that we discuss the edits here on the talk page. --CyclePat (talk) 17:25, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Origin year

The "origyear= 1989" has been remove because there is no inline citation. Meyer has developed various patents and the references at the bottom of the article indicate that he filed his pattents prior to 1989. (Ref# 5. or patent # 4936961). Given the fact that we are all experienced users here, further explanation and an analysis of why this violates Wikipedia rules and guidelines will be supplied upon request only. (In short though : The responsibility for putting information back into an article is that of the one providing the information. (A fundemental rule by Wikipedia)--CyclePat (talk) 16:51, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

1980s

Same as above. Except in this case the content is being removed. "In the 1980s, several patents where filed by Stanley Meyer for a processes and apparatus for producing hydrogen and oxygen." Arthur claims this to be wrong, but in fact, it is true. Simply look at patents per the references (Ref# 5. or patent # 4936961 filed in Aug 1987, or Ref#6 patent# 4826581 filed in Mar 1987 or Patent # 4798661 filed March 25, 1985. etc...) More references upon request. We must not get confused between the dates of official filling, the dates of patent filling, the dates of approval, this is shown in this edit here (line 45). --CyclePat (talk) 17:25, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Confusion of patents

This article has a strong tendency to lean towards one particular item of inventor Stanley Meyer... a term that he used in his inventions called "water fuel cell". In reality Meyer has accomplished (as demonstrated by the aforementioned list of patents) much more than a "water fuel cell". The balance of this article, and the way editor are trying to maintain this balance at all cost is hindering the development to balance the article into NPOV. This, in spirit, violate the rules of Wikipedia... in particular I can't help but think about WP:CFORK... which means a content fork of a main article... however, there is no main article on Stanley Meyer. Biography rules would apply... and what a headache to try and think of another solution. Hence, my proposed solution is to continue history section, which was removed by Arthur. Describe a brief of Meyers patents... what patents where applied to make his device (per some of Meyer's patents he does use other peoples patents properly cited within his patent applications). Unlike right now, where all the patents appear to be a violation (and which most likely isn't the case), the inline citations and further development into the other patents will help readers determine which inventions scientist considered to be a violation of the first rules of thermodynamics. Further analysis of the the rules which apply to this (ie. Bio) may be provided upon request. --CyclePat (talk) 17:25, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

As currently organized, Stanley Meyer is covered by Articles about people notable for only one event. If his activities outside of the water fuel cell have attracted sufficient outside attention that we can write a decent encyclopedia article, then we should do so (including a section with {{main}} to this article). If not, then Meyer and his activities can receive appropriate mention in other articles in context of which they are notable. In either case, this article should focus on Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell, not extraneous details about the inventor or his other activities. - Eldereft (cont.) 19:10, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
Agreed. Until someone finds some proof that anything he's done (outside of the water car) is notable, those sections should be removed. A patent is not sufficient to show notability. Guyonthesubway (talk) 00:50, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
Summary: notability does not apply to content... but only the article. expand it! Long answer: Okay! I might be overextending my inference here, no matter the case, there's a fundamental problem with removing the patents from the article. It's not going to work! "Those sections"(note: a vague statement which requires better precision to remove any ambiguity) are fundamental to the article. Anyways, "the term "fuel cell""... is already in the article so their is no arguing that it's not notable. Hence, I believe, any related supporting evidence should be properly discussed. Currently, we do this by talking about the "Water car" (as Guyonthesubway says), but again... it's confusing because we have patents, patent 2, patent this, which just makes this into something I really don't want to think about but do hands on work to fix right now. Anyways, the patents are really some of the best references we have. One issue I think I see is the debate between "water car" --> "water fuel cell" --> water "other patents". Anyways Notability is not really an issue unless we plan to content fork and I doubt this will happen. In fact, per WP:NOTABILITY, notability "guidelines only pertain to the encyclopedic suitability of topics for articles but do not directly limit the content of articles". So I disagree with Guyonthesubways and believe that "those section" should not only be kept but that they should be developed. Also, if you remove references to the patents, which we've already included, you remove the explanations and perfectly good primary sources. I do not endorse any removal of links or references to the patents. They are currently the most reliable source (if not only) of information that we have to describe the "water fuel cell". If you remove this, I believe, we have no article. Failing to continue to develop these important reference is probably just as bad. (ie. Please take a look at what I did at the article section Electric_bicycle#Electric_bicycle_history. I started out with all the patent information and now it's expanded with collaborative work!!!) :) This is clear precise... our article lack this precision. Right now we can be leaving our reader wondering what patents are a "violation of the laws of thermodynamics", which patents where found to be "fraudulent in court", which ones pertains to the "water car". I believe, vagueness is what's killing this article and killing us to be able to continue expanding the article! --CyclePat (talk) 10:27, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
I dont agree. Anyone else? Guyonthesubway (talk) 13:36, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
There have been attempts to expand the article in the past, or write a separate article on Meyer, and the consensus has always been that this is the only (barely) notable thing about him.Prebys (talk) 17:48, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
The examples you give are irrelevant because they deal with WP:CFORKing. The only concencus I currently see is one to avoid expanding this article and frankly this is disruptive to Wikipedia. Also, as I've already said,WP:Notability guidelines only pertain to the encyclopedic suitability of topics and does not apply to content within the article. If you disagree with this fundemental principle then I fear we will require mediation and further dispute resolution. --CyclePat (talk) 04:27, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
(Edit conflict with Abecedare): p.s.: Nevertheless, just by curiosity, what is your current standard for notability of content within an article? How, have "we" supposedly "always" come to a consensus that this article (which is obviously clearly about Meyer's inventions) should focus on only "The term "fuel cell"" which is used within pretty much all of Meyer patent's (and in this case, at the same time, about "Water cars")? (Rhetorical question -->(Why water cars?)--> Yes notability... but, again, notability, per "WP:NOTABILITY", does not apply to content. Do you have any other reasons which could help clarify this issue because right now I can't help but feel as though some dispute resolution need to place and that perhaps some of us should brush up on Wikipedia's official policy : Wikipedia:Ownership of articles. --CyclePat (talk) 04:54, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
I too agree that the "Later Design" section is not appropriate to this page, since we have no secondary sources on it. This article is on "Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell", which is only notable for (a) its pseudo-scientific claims and (b) the related investor fraud, as is established by the newspaper and Nature articles. Aside: Editors may be interested in reading this Philippines' "Stanley Meyer" story, which also ended in court conviction for fraud. (Note: I am not proposing its inclusion in the article) Abecedare (talk) 04:37, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
Thank you Abecedare. I will look into this. --CyclePat (talk) 04:54, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
Okay. I have looked into the Policy which applies to your conclusion. The rules is WP:PSTS, section "Primary sources". More specifically it stated that :
  • "Our policy: Primary sources that have been published by a reliable source (for example, by a university press or mainstream newspaper)...", (I believe this includes patents, such as the ones we are talking about, which some others are already widely cited within Wikipedia articles),
  • "...may be used in Wikipedia, but only with care, because it is easy to misuse them." I believe this means that to remove the content, you must prove that it is being misused.
  • Furthermore it states "Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation." I believe this section means we can still use primary sources... we just have to be careful and ensure "we" do not make any interpretations.
  • Finally it states "Without a secondary source, a primary source may be used only to make descriptive claims, the accuracy of which is easily verifiable by any reasonable, educated person without specialist knowledge. For example, an article about a novel may cite passages from the novel to describe the plot, but any interpretation of those passages needs a secondary source." Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this section of the rule is the core tenant of your argument, right? Again, thank you Abecedare, this is the section I am looking into. We agree that the disputed content does not have a secondary source. But, please don't trow the baby out with the bath water! (So, I hear they say). The reason I say this is because, I believe the primary source is being properly used to make descriptive claims about Stanley Meyer's Water Fuel Cell. Furthermore, the accuracy of these claims are easily verifiable, as it says, by any reasonable, educated person without specialist knowledge.
Would you care to explain a little further on why you believe the disputed section should be removed? --CyclePat (talk) 05:17, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
Pat, find something that demonstrates that the later work was notable or it shouldn't be there. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy. Guyonthesubway (talk) 00:15, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
Indent reset. I don't believe that Meyer did anything incredible at all, except claim to have a car that runs on water and patent a device which purportedly accomplishes this. My position is that people are going to stumble across Stanley Meyer and the Water Fuel Cell. Eventually they will query it on WP. It is our responsibility to present enought information about the WFC to describe what it is, what it supposedly does and present the fact that it violates thermodynamics.I55ere (talk) 19:57, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Removal of my added citation

I am looking forward to seeing what kind of justification will be used by the resident pseudo-empiricist bigots governing this article, for removing my added citation of PESWiki, which explains that contrary to the assertion within Nature, Meyer's fuel cell does violate the laws of thermodynamics at all.

Although then again, it will probably simply be removed without a word of explanation at all; that, after all, would be the most intellectually/morally cowardly, and arbitrarily fascist option for them to take, and therefore the most fitting.

Petrus4 (talk) 07:00, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

It will probably be removed, and probably because an exceptional claim such as "a machine that generates energy from water doesn't violate the laws of thermodynamics" requires a more credible/reliable source than some Wiki, especially when pitted against an article from Nature. Wikipedia is supposed to be here to provide reliable info, not to provide links to some ad hoc physics-based explanation that some guy dreamt up (especially when that explanation is flawed). Oli Filth(talk|contribs) 10:28, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
It has been. Now I know what it feels like to be an intellectual/moral coward and arbitrary fascist, so thank you Petrus4 for bringing that to my attention.
Meyer's invention is a perpetual motion machine.
PESwiki is written by people who believe in free energy and won't get real which makes it not only unreliable, but wrong.
Man with two legs (talk) 12:14, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
I also feel that this doesn't meet our WP:RS criteria. Verbal chat 12:48, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
Agreed. PESwiki is not a reliable source. Yilloslime (t) 18:23, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
I have not read the source. But, I must assume, if it was removed that indeed it lacked some peer-review. Hence, if there was an article in the news which talked about this wiki-blog or some sort of peer-reviewed document that indicates similar facts then perhaps that would be worthy of mention. In fact, I believe, if you take the Nature article you may be able to find some information which discusses some of the issues raised by Petrus. --CyclePat (talk) 02:39, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Introduction - Revert by user Verbal

Hello user Verbal. What do you mean by your edit summary "Npov, overtagging". Why did you revert my recent edits here http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stanley_Meyer%27s_water_fuel_cell&diff=277944636&oldid=277943649. The reason, I removed perpetual motion from the first sentence of the article is because it is already in the intro, near the end when we talk about the Ohio court case. With the current edition (after you reverted my two edits) we are stating the same thing twice. It is redundant and I personally find it to be insulting towards my intelligence. Furthermore, it is consistent to keep an introduction brief. This would comply with the general principles of "copy editing". Furthermore, user Verbal, you have removed some productive additions which include the Wiki linking to the term perpetual motion. As well as my excellent summary of what and how the term "water fuel" was used by Stanley Meyer. This aspect is presented in the section "The term "Fuel cell", and should be summarized in the introduction. I have copied this conversation from user:Verbals talk page. A response is anticipate on this discussion page. Thank you. --CyclePat (talk) 20:38, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

This sentence "One of Meyer's patents [...]" is followed by this sentence "According to the patent [...], which is cited. Can't believe I have to say this, but simply reading those sentences, one knows that the patent being talked about in the first sentence is the one that is cited in the second. Hence your {{which}} tag for the first is overtagging. The extra explanation of how exactly this thing is a perpetual motion machine is needed because many readers seem unable to recognize it and constantly dispute that it is such a device. Intro should be short, but not to the point of being useless. DMacks (talk) 20:46, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
If you hold true to keeping the status quo for that one sentence, "One of Meyer's patents ...", I will concede. However, as I'm sure you understand, I believe it is best to be more specific than vague and preferably directly within the text. Thank you for your fead back and again, I will concede this one sentence. Moving on then... I have however made several changes in those 2 edits. So, I put the question back at you. The reason is because, I see no extra explanation with the version we have. I see redundancy. In fact, I see removal of the explanation by removing the wiki linking to the article perpetual motion. I also fail to understand why you would remove information which summarized the section "The term "fuel cell". --CyclePat (talk) 21:06, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
No summary of any kind has been removed, merely a redundant tag and the weasel worded lead edits. PM is still wikilinked. No productive edits were removed. I am sorry about your intelligence, no insult is intended. Verbal chat 20:50, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
You are correct about the wiki link. I have stricken it out. The link was already there in both cases. I had placed it at the bottom of the paragraph and you placed it at he top (it was already at the top). So this point is pretty much moot for both sides of the debate. My apologies. However, I cannot accept redundancy because of a few users who cannot understand. Also, I believe it is our job to ensure the article is clear and concise with a minimum of redundancy. I do concede that we need to find a better way to say this is a PM. Also, if you check my last version here, you may notice that the first sentence "Water fuel cell is a term used by American inventor Stanley Allen Meyer (August 24, 1940–March 21, 1998) to describe part of his patented inventions." was removed by your edit. This sentence summarizes the debate within the first section "The term "fuel cell"". This is a summary, because this section talks about the use of the term "water fuel cell". Surely we can think of another way then by removing my summary of the section? --CyclePat (talk) 21:21, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
How about we replace in the first sentence of the second paragraph of the The term "fuel cell" section One of Meyer's patents describes with Meyer describes in a 1990 patent to reduce potential ambiguity? - Eldereft (cont.) 05:39, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
A point of order: Hi user:Eldereft. I believe your afformentioned comment is off-topic because it does not address the problem regarding the changes by user Verbal. More specifically, it fails to discuss the introductory summary. How can changing that sentence in that section help the introductory summary of the article? In fact, I put it to you, that changing the sentence to your version would make no difference and still require a better intro. Asside: I do see some ambiguity in that current section. Your newly proposed section would help clarify this and I do agree with the change. --CyclePat (talk) 05:49, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
The edit in question includes reversion of an inline {{which}} tag, as discussed in the second and third posts to this section. I saw no merit in discussing any of the other points raised in this section, and so refrained. Article changed as discussed, but no worries if anyone would like to revert for fuller discussion. - Eldereft (cont.) 06:57, 19 March 2009 (UTC)


Neutrality

The neutrality of this article is a joke. I quote:

If the device worked as specified, it would violate both the first and second laws of thermodynamics,[1][2] allowing operation as a perpetual motion machine.

"If"? Why is the article speculating on the consequences of the machine working?

The whole article needs rewriting. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Robert Ham (talk • contribs) 01:33, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Quite simply: because his device didn't work. He ended being sued (successfully) for fraud. Yilloslime TC
Because the sources do. WP:DUE requires that we treat facets of the topic in the same detail and prominence as the reliability-weighted aggregate of all relevant sources. In this case, it means that we reflect the perspective that it does not and cannot work - if you can think of a better way to phrase that sentence, then by all means make a proposal. - Eldereft (cont.) 02:46, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
What would help, I believe, is something I have previously proposed for this article. We should ensure that we have properly developed sections in proportion to the information presented in the introduction. The current status of the article has the introducation serving to introduce new material which is not discussed in the body of the article. I believe this creates a perception of undue weight specially, if you consider the afformentioned discussion regarding the introduction and section "The term "fuel cell"". --CyclePat (talk) 23:04, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

As has been discussed many, many times, there is absolutely no reason for this article to be "neutral" wrt to the alleged functionality of Meyer's device. To quote the first line from Wikipedia's WP:NPOV article,

"Neutral point of view is a fundamental Wikimedia principle and a cornerstone of Wikipedia. All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing fairly, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources." (italics mine).

In this case, there are no "significant views" that this device worked - or could work - as specified, only those that say it didn't (according to our legal system) and couldn't (according to the laws of physics). The purpose of this article is to educate the reader that Stanley Meyer committed fraud, not to perpetuate the fanciful myth that he had a car that ran on water.

By all means, if you can think of a better way to word the article, then do so, but the emphasis cannot change.Prebys (talk) 14:14, 23 March 2009 (UTC)


"Because the sources do." - I don't think that just because the source speculates, it's OK for wikipedia to do so. You're misundersanding the problem. Saying "If the machine had worked then ..." is unaccepable for wikipedia. Saying "Joe Bloggs has speculated that if the machine had worked then .." is acceptable. Obviously, presenting facts from sources is not a problem. Speculation isn't the same.

"If you can think of a better way to word the article" - Unfortunately, I don't have the time to invest in rewriting the article. I do have the time to invest in pointing out that it should be rewritten. Robert Ham (talk) 15:21, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

"As has been discussed many, many times, there is absolutely no reason for this article to be "neutral"" - Erm.. it's a wikipedia article. It has to be neutral. Perhaps this is the source of the problem; wikipedia has to present information in a neutral way, even if that information isn't itself neutral. You seem to be assuming that because the information is not neutral, there is no need to maintain neutrality while presenting it. This is incorrect and against wikipedia policy. Robert Ham (talk) 15:29, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

You've conveniently clipped my statement before the key phrase. I said "there is absolutely no reason for this article to be "neutral" wrt to the alleged functionality of Meyer's device", and there is not, any more than the article about the Earth must be neutral about its shape. Again, the WP:NPOV policy clearly states the sort of resources which must be treated neutrally, and in the case of Meyer's fuel cell, those resources all lead to the same conclusion: it did not work.Prebys (talk) 16:27, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
You need to be specific as to how the article is not neutral. CyclePat's assertions of non-neutrality have been rejected by reasoned consensus; his complaints do not relate to the article's neutrality. If you have other complaints, let's hear them. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 15:42, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
"If the machine had worked it would ..." is a statement made in a peer-reviewed paper. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 15:43, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
Presby's example of the earth is not as contentious of example as Meyer's Water Fuel cell. This is because pretty much everyone agrees that the earth is spherical in nature and not flat. May I dare to add that over the years of editing this article, I am still not 100% convince (That is, I am split between wondering if the device did or did not work). And, one must admit, there is a possibility that Meyer's invention did work as describe since, as all our previous conversations have lead, most of the peer-reviews of the device do not specifically test the device. In fact, most of them only "believe that if the device..". Notice, the big word if. This is an assumption. I believe, most of the people that come to this article have similar questions. It is important, to ensure that we are givin due credit to where it belongs and that the meaning of this reputable-well source and peer-reviewed information does not go out of context. I digress even more... Asside: May I suggest, again, that a section be dedicated to this contentious subject within the article and not simply within the introduction. Anyways, whereas it comes to the planet earth being spherical, I would assume that more than 98% of the people that read the eart article have an uncontentious understanding that the earth is in all likelyhood spherical. Also, please note the way in which it is written within the Earth article. It states; "In the past there were varying levels of belief in a flat Earth,[159] but this was displaced by the concept of a spherical Earth due to observation and circumnavigation.[160]" Notice, how none of these statements are taken at face value as beeing completly true. They are merely 1) a belief and 2) a concept. User Ham raises a valid point in regards to WP:NPOV, more specifically, WP:DUE. I would argue that due weight and view by most people is split somewhere around the half mark, with some interesting research[10][11] supporting Meyer's device. In fact this survey, in reference to the Genepax water fueled vehicle, indicates that of those surveyed;
  • 41% believe it's imposible because water is already a product of combustion.
  • 18% believe that it's been around for year but has been surpressed by oil companies
  • 46% believe "You shouldn't rush to judgement, there are all kinds of wonderful discoveries yet to be made. This may be one of them."'
  • 5% left their own comment, with the majority indicating that it's not possible with comments such as "do you have a clue about thermodynamics"?"
Though this survey only covers about 1000 people, I believe it is reflective upon what our current society may believe. My recommendation, is that we do not dismiss user Ham's complaint so quickly and consider revising the article. --CyclePat (talk) 19:10, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
This article is more than fair to Meyer and is fully compliant with relevant policies. Meyer's device didn't work and couldn't have worked as he claimed. The survey you quote is a joke. I'll ignore the concept statement. Verbal chat 19:19, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
No... That's exactly the problem. You see Meyer device is claimed to have worked (as demonstrated by the creator). And Meyer's device is claimed to not worked (as per the study of the patent's description (not the device) by scientist in peer-reviewed journal). At Wikipedia, it is improper to state facts as facts within an article. Also, I see nothing funny about that survey and even if it was, it still does not deny my personal opinion or that of about half of the 900 or some others surveyed that believe there is a possibility that such devices may work. This is an important belief which, if I may say, should be added to the article. For arguments sake, if that survey was peer-reviewed, it could be included within the article. What makes me hesitant in adding it is because it does not cover Meyer's device. I would even argue that it should probably be included as primary information. Also, if I may point out, while being discussed on this talk page, the information does not require the same standards of peer-reviewed as material within an article. This is information for us to know and for us editors to assimilate and to use so that we may create an "unbiased" article. --CyclePat (talk) 05:21, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
The beliefs of uninformed members of the public have no bearing on the laws of physics (i.e. whether or not the device worked), even if the survey were peer-reviewed.
I'm not sure why this discussion is even happening; aren't you beating a thoroughly-dead horse? Oli Filth(talk|contribs) 08:17, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

It didn't work, you can't just say everything is an opinion or a claim just because it was said by someone. He claimed it worked, but experts tested it, and after scientific evaluation, refuted his claims. That it didn't work is not a claim. The joke survey could not be used for many reasons, firstly WP:RS, and does not inform the debate here. Verbal chat 08:03, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

I didn't know experts tested his device. If so, this is an important element to put into the article. In fact, I thought Meyer avoided his device from being tests and that the Scientist (such as that peer-reviewed article we cite so often) had to make assumptions on his patent's description. The point is that, at Wikipedia we should report the fact "according to"... and not as if they were true as per user Ham's statement. You may be correct to say that the earth is spherical (per my previous example)... but the way that example is worded is in a fashion which give credit to "the research". Currently for the sentence with the word "if", it feels as though we are asserting a truth as though "we" are discovered it. I understand that's not the case because we have a reliable source, but, that's the way the sentence feels and I, along with I imagine a user Ham, can't deny that feeling. Please allow me to go off a little on a tangent here, for my own thinking purposes...: I could argue, as I believe I may have in the past, that it borders WP:OR because it makes an assumption. If I recall correctly, that sentence is in a merger of several sentences from one original article. In particular, I clearly do not remember the author indicating that the device could operate as a perpetual motion machine. (I'll need to read that again to double check since I haven't read the source for at least a couple months now). More specifically, I could argue that it makes a WP:SYNTH per the classic example given there. But, I don't think that would work. So, what makes this sentence difficult? I believe, it's the way it's written. It is well referenced (asides for maybe the PM thingy, but that's not important right now.) I think, maybe it's because it demonstrates an educated assumption on behalf of the scientists that did the study. This assumption can easily be confused into "us" editors, making the assumption and violating WP:SYNTH. I'm not the first person to raise this issue of confusion and therefore believe it is an issue. I would recommend that, to solve this problem, we place directly within the sentence "according to..." or per my above aside recommendation, that we develop a section on the 'physics', which explains this contentious issue in better details. As for the argument of including the survey I will reserve my comments for that if the time comes whereas we decide we want to include it (but may I add WP:RS is probably not the best argument and that it is important to cover more than just the facts of whether it worked or not... but the social impact, the beliefs of society, history, etc.). Best regards. --CyclePat (talk) 19:21, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

This is a dead horse, stop beating it. This device has had no impact on science or history, and was a fraud. Verbal chat 19:55, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

The more I follow these discussions, the more I have to agree with [[User:Verbal|Verbal]. There is nothing even noteworthy about the device or really even a place for it in an encyclopedia. Meyer's claims are entirely conjectural and is only worth mentioning due to the fact that people are bound to learn of it and may run a query. It is our duty to expose the fraud regardless of Meyer's claims and videos, there is no concrete evidence that anything other than fraud was perpetrated as noted by scientific opinion and thermodynamic laws, which btw, hardly any editor of this article has near the expertise of Prebys and it is totally absurd for many editors here to imagine otherwise. CyclePat please accept that this article has hit its apex and is about as "neutral" as it can ever get in the face of scientific evidence. Until such a time as anything concrete can be placed on the table, I suggest that it be given a thorough once over for grammar and punctuation and let to stand for its already expired 15 minutes.I55ere (talk) 19:55, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
Given that Prebys (talk · contribs) doesn't have a list of qualifications on their user page, I can't say whether I'm more qualified than them or not, but I'm certainly certainly more qualified in mechanical engineering (and motor vehicles) than most here and can unequivocally endorse I55ere's summary. It's getting quite boring. --Athol Mullen (talk) 12:47, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
I think the page is in pretty good shape now. I believe it's a good idea to have these pages (Meyer, Newman, Bearden, etc), because the stuff is "out there" and it's good that people can come somewhere to learn the truth, but it's frustrating how much vigilance it takes to keep these pages accurate. I'm amazed home much people really want to believe this stuff. Given the facts that Meyer never allowed his machine to be independently examined and the drawings don't work and (oh yeah) he was found guilty of fraud, why in the world do people still insist on trying to invent reasons why it "might work"? In Newman's case, he can't even get his units right and people still defend him. Anyway, things seem to have quieted down for a while now, but the true believers will be back.Prebys (talk) 14:28, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
But hey, that’s what makes Wikipedia fun. :) — NRen2k5(TALK), 20:16, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
I expect they'll be back when gasoline hits between $2.25 and $2.50 a gallon. The higher the price, the more desire for a panacea.I55ere (talk) 21:36, 24 May 2009 (UTC)


This whole conversation points out the symptom in its entirety. The basic argument above is "the fuel cell didn't work". The issue that I raised has nothing to do with whether or not the fuel cell worked. The issue is to do with how the arguments for and against it are presented. There is an assumption here that because the consensus in peer-reviewed journals is that it didn't work, it's OK for wikipedia to say 'it didn't work'. This is incorrect and the fact that people misunderstand this subtle point is the problem.

It is not OK for Wikipedia to take a stance on any disputed issue. It is a policy that Wikipedia does not present disputed facts as facts. There are degrees to which an article can waver from this policy. It could inappropriately state flat out 'it is a fact that...' or it could be more subtle. This article wavers from policy. It is not flat out inappropriate but it is not neutral either, nor is it particularly subtle.


Taking as an example, there is the following statement:

his claims have been discredited as ravings in scientific journals.

This is an unsubtle slight. It also violates WP:WEASEL. I note that the sentence uses the plural but there is only one scientific journal actually referenced. It would be more appropriate to directly quote or refer to the journal within the prose itself, rather than attempting to summarise combative views of individual authors in a disingenuous way.


This is only one example but I'm sure I could find many more if I took the time. This is not my purpose here, though. My purpose here is to point out that, in general the article does not present the topic using a neutral point of view and needs a good deal of work to ensure that it does.

And also, once again, the issue is not whether the fuel cell worked. Robert Ham (talk) 11:49, 27 August 2009 (UTC)


To further point out errors in thinking, I quote I55ere:

It is our duty to expose the fraud

No, it is not your duty to expose the fraud. It is your duty, as wikipedia editors, to produce an article that presents information related to Stanley Meyer's Fuel Cell in a neutral way. There is a quote in the article that "Crusaders against pseudoscience can rant and rave as much as they like". Wikipedia is not the place for such a crusade. Instead, it is the place for cool-headed rationalism and consciousness of one's own biases. Robert Ham (talk) 12:37, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Neutral doesn't mean giving each opinion equal validity. There is no dispute about the water fuel cell, it is well recognised pseudoscience and fraud. That some people dispute this doesn't mean we give weight to their opinions or have to balance the scientific consensus in such a poor way. See WP:FRINGE, WP:NPOV (particularly WP:UNDUE), etc. This is an encyclopedia. Giving equal weight to fringe conspiracy theorists is not neutral. Verbal chat 12:44, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
You misunderstand my concern. The issue not the amount of weight given to different opinions. The issue is the biased way in which the differently weighted opinions are presented. I'm not concerned that, for example there may be 5 paragraphs devoted to the critical viewpoint and only 1 devoted to the proponents'. What concerns me is that there is a heavy bias and non-neutral presentation throughout the entire article. Robert Ham (talk) 15:28, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Bias is a kind of weighting. You are saying the article isn't neutral because it is biased/weighted against SM's fuel cell. I counter by saying that wikipedia policy requires this appropriate weighting, as otherwise the article would not be neutral. It would be giving a bias to a minority, fringe, opinion held only by fringe conspiracy theorists and not accepted by the scientific community, and the preponderance of reliable sources, if we presented the fuel cell claims as having any validity or as a scientific dispute. If you have any specific ideas for improvement, then please suggest them in a new thread. What you describe as non neutral appears to actually be accurate. Verbal chat 15:47, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
I am saying the article isn't neutral because it violates wikipedia policy, for example WP:WEASEL. Robert Ham (talk) 15:50, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
I have removed the word "ravings" in the text, and replaced it with a less emotional wording. The phrase about "crusaders" is a direct quote from a highly respectable journal, which is entirely appropriate to this article. This is a VERY old argument. There is no reason for this article to be "neutral" with regard to Meyer's claims, because those claims are not supported by any reliable source. While in some cases, we may argue what constitutes a "reliable source", it's universally acknowledged that physics textbooks and "Nature" are, while YouTube videos and self-published web-material are not.Prebys (talk) 16:02, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
That's one problem solved, what about the rest of the article? Robert Ham (talk) 19:57, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
You seem to be a little fuzzy about the way Wikipedia works. You've complained a lot, but I have yet to see any constructive suggestions ("This article needs to be rewritten" does not qualify). I don't have a problem with the article in its current form. If you do, then it's your responsibility to try to improve it.Prebys (talk) 20:25, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Touché. Although I would point out that the fact that you (and the other long-time editors) don't have a problem with the article in its current form is really the problem. Robert Ham (talk) 21:19, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Look, based on Wikipedia policy, there is no dispute that the device does not work and that Meyer is a fraud. The only thing that even makes this article notable is that so many people inexplicably believe this stuff. Again, if you think you can improve the article, be my guest. I've already made once change because you were too lazy to do it yourself, but that's the limit of my generosity. Prebys (talk) 13:39, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
Cut the drama. — NRen2k5(TALK), 09:43, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Electrolysis

I don’t recall Meyer ever claiming that his invention wasn’t an electrolysis unit at all… more like that what it did wasn’t quite electrolysis as we know it – a “special” sort of electrolysis, if you will. — NRen2k5(TALK), 00:23, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Article belonging to WikiProject Alternative Views

I have attempted to add this article to WikiProject Alternative Views, however, another editor contests this judgment call. I have opened a discussion about this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Alternative Views. __meco (talk) 16:04, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Perpetual Motion Label not supported

I don't know if meyer was a fraud or not but I do feel as though it is incorrect for this article to label his invention as a "purported perpetual motion machine" unless this was the specific claim of the inventor. Such a label is also incorrect because of the subject matter- energy contained in a fuel. For instance, just because it takes much less energy to pump fossil fuel out of the ground than the fuel produces would not make the burning of oil "perpetual motion". Did meyer claim to be breaking laws of thermodynamics? I also note that none of the patent examiners notes on witnessing his device producing hydrogen gas at low amperage were included. The patent examiners positive opinions are just as note worthy as later witness's (that were not impressed with meyers device) and should be included for balance. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.62.23.202 (talk) 15:24, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

This issue is has been discussed at nauseating length. The device purportedly separates water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, and then burns the Hydrogen and Oxygen, which produces water - plus excess energy. Thus, it can be run in closed cycle as a perpetual motion machine (whether or not Meyer acknowledged this is irrelevant). This violates both the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. No patent examiner examined the device. Because the text of the patent does not support Meyers claim that it could be used to power a car on water, the cell as patented was not classified as a perpetual motion machine and therefore did not require a demonstration. Only Meyer's claim that it could produce net power from water (not supported by the patent) make it perpetual motion. The patent is simply for a slight variation on a standard electrolysis cell.Prebys (talk) 16:17, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Perpetual motion not understood

Actually, you are incorrect. For this to be "perpetual motion" in a closed cycle, it would require these four steps:

(1) seperating the water into hydrogen and oxygen (2) Extracting power from these. (3) using some of this energy to recombine the two back into water (4) seperating them again to start the process over to repeat forever.

Water is water. In this case you would have to come up with an argument why the water at the end of the cycle was somehow unusable.Prebys (talk) 16:44, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
Interestingly this -is- addressed [12]. It says that the water mist is 'unenergized' or some such nonsense. Guyonthesubway (talk) 17:34, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Furthermore, the claims of the inventor (whether true or not) are the ONLY claims relevant for an article of this type. Claims by others (positive or negative)are not to be included. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.62.23.202 (talk) 16:00, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Where did that come from? It's certainly not Wikipedia policy. Perpetual motion is an inevitable consequence of the claims of the inventor, and is based on a citation to a reputable journal. Look, this topic is barely noteworthy to begin with, since cars that run on water have been "invented" at the rate of about one per year for close to a century. If you're going to mention it at all, you have to point out just how unlikely it is. That said, if you want to attempt a change where you remove the phrase "perpetual motion", I won't object, provided you leave the part about violating the laws of thermodynamics (which is unquestionable, and actually amounts to the same thing). However, others might disagree.Prebys (talk) 16:44, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
Oh for crying out loud....let see... fuel is water. waste product is water. what part of that -isn't- a perpetual motion engine. Guyonthesubway (talk) 19:35, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
Well, playing devil's advocate, one could argue that if you didn't quite burn all the Hydrogen and Oxygen, you'd eventually run out of water, so it would not run forever. It would, however, continue to violate the laws of physics for the time it did run. However, since science and the courts have both established that this device doesn't work at all, this seems like a rather pedantic distinction to argue.Prebys (talk) 21:19, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't know (or care) if Stan Meyers actually ran a car on water. It is still incorrect to label it a "perpeual motion machine" when the inventor made no such claim. IF he had made such a claim, it would THEN be possible to point out that it did not qualify (because of the absense of the four required steps I just listed- seperation, extraction of energy, RECOMBINATION and more SEPERATION. The writer is trying to ridicule the inventor (POV) with a claim the inventor never made. Meyer's claim was to perform electrolysis using less current. "Perpetual Motion machine" needs to be removed from this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.62.23.202 (talk) 15:31, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

You're separating the claims in his patent from his popular claims (which are both quite relevant to the article). Yes, his patent claims only to perform efficient electrolysis, but he publicly claimed (and sold stock) in a car that would run on water ("efficient" electrolysis doesn't do that). *That* violates the laws of thermodynamics whether he said so or not. Note, the article does not say it was a perpetual motion machine, it says that if it operated as specified it would "allow it to be used as a perpetual motion machine". The text was carefully chosen (and cited to a very reputable journal) because this has been argued about many times before. At this point, there's no further point in arguing it again. If you feel you can improve the article, then by all means do so, but don't be surprised if others disagree with your edits.Prebys (talk) 16:12, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Prebys has made an excellent point and I thank you for the clarification. I must point out that I assumed that the article was about "Stanley Meyers Water Fuel Cell" because this is the title of the article. If the article is about a car powered by his "fuel cell" then the title needs to be "Stanley Meyers Water powered car". As I recall, Meyers did not claim that the car was powered by his patened device but some other method of injecting water directly into the engine. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.62.23.202 (talk) 19:29, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Meyers (like many free energy scammers) was inconsistent and contradictory in his claims. This news clip clearly says his dune buggy ran on his fuel cell (as do several other sources); however here, he says the car would run on some kind of "secret" modified spark plug, BUT he also says the (patented) fuel cell "produces several hundred percent more energy than it takes in" (which violates the laws of thermodynamics and would allow it to power a car). Six of one... If you'd like to sort this issue out in the article, more power to you, but AFAIC, it's too much effort to spend on a pretty run of the mill con man.Prebys (talk) 15:01, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
Meyer was either too dumb to realize his "invention" was a perpetual motion machine, or smart enough to realize that if used the term "perpetual motion" he'd lose what little credibility he had. Either way, nothing in Wikipolicy prevents this article from character from characterizing his machine as such. We are not bound to use only the terminology employed by the inventor. Yilloslime TC 16:21, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
Troll is well fed now. Guyonthesubway (talk) 17:32, 17 November 2009 (UTC)


Yilloslime is right- in fact Meyers was SO dumb that he didn't realize that his invention was really a "Cold Fusion Device". Therefore, we should lable it a "Purported Cold Fusion Device" since thats what WE think it would have been if it had worked!! Please. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.62.23.202 (talk) 19:41, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Its a pointy sharp metal thing with a handle...but I dont call it a knife. Guyonthesubway (talk) 22:42, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Infobox

If you are not happy with a personal infobox, can anyone show me a neutral infobox? I cannot find one. Thank you. --Big wheels keeps on turning (talk) 15:38, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

The article is about a device, not a person, so a bio-infobox is not the right kind of thing to have. DMacks (talk) 15:40, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
What is non-neutral? Oli Filth(talk|contribs) 15:42, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
The article forwards from a topic for the person. Where are the alternative infoboxes? --Big wheels keeps on turning (talk) 15:49, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
Category:Infobox templates. Oli Filth(talk|contribs) 15:53, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Wholesale changes

@User:Big wheels keeps on turning,

You have not discussed a single one of your extensive changes. I've started this thread as an opportunity for you to do so before I report you for violating the 3-revert rule. Could you please provide an explanation for each of the non-trivial changes that you have made. Note that it would also be worth perusing the talk archives for this page (see links above), to ensure that you're not making changes that have been discussed and rejected in the past. Oli Filth(talk|contribs) 16:01, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

I have read through them. You obviously have some kind of axe to grind but your modus operandi is clear and it is not honest.
To establish your credibility, show me one proper reference where it states Laughton was to appear at the Ohio court case.
Or perhaps you would care to contact him via the University of London? --Big wheels keeps on turning (talk) 16:07, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
I do not need to establish my credibility nor my "modus operandi" (see WP:AGF); it is not necessary. Again, please could you list justifications for each of your changes.
With regard to your specific question, my assumption (which is possibly unjustified, given no free copy; however see [13]), is that this is backed up by the referenced article. Oli Filth(talk|contribs) 16:11, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
Big wheels keeps on turning, some of your proposed changes may well be reasonable, some of them are clear violations of WP:NPOV. When your block expires, I strongly suggest that you get consensus for your desired changes one at a time- start by choosing one factual error, explain the change you want to make on this talk page, with confirming reliable source, and make the change when you have consensus- then move on to the next. It will take longer, but you will be more likely to improve the article. You can see WP:DISPUTE for more advice on dealing with content disagreements. Thanks -FisherQueen (talk · contribs) 16:14, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
The cited reference says that "The car was a wonderful, if unlikely, dream while it lasted, offering a pollution-free future powered by a limitless source of energy. But the dream was shattered when Meyer was found guilty of fraud after his Water Fuel Cell was tested before an Ohio judge ... One of the experts due to examine the car was Michael Laughton, professor of electrical engineering at Queen Mary and Westfield University, London, but he was not allowed to see it. 'Although Meyer had known about our visit weeks in advance, when we arrived he made some lame excuse about why the car wasn't working, so it was impossible to evaluate it,' said Laughton." This seems to confirm that "His car was due to be examined by the expert witness Michael Laughton... " Yilloslime TC 16:40, 6 April 2010 (UTC)


Michael Laughton's visit happened in 1990 and was with Admiral Anthony Griffin's group, as documented elsewhere (Electronics World & Wireless World, January 1991).

He had nothing to do with the court case in 1996 as the topic implies. He was not a witness to the court case which were according to the court papers; Michael Leverich, Rick Schneider and Ron Dockweiler.

Please contact him here to confirm for yourself: M.A.Laughton@elec.qmul.ac.uk

http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/department/staff/academic/mal.htm

Please confirm if this is true. --Big wheels keeps on turning (talk) 07:16, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Is that you Gaby? Guyonthesubway (talk) 15:58, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
OK ... so, quite rightly, no objections? I'll give it another day and correctly remove it then.
Thank you. --Big wheels keeps on turning (talk) 16:24, 9 April 2010 (UTC)
No, that isn't quite how it works, Big wheels keeps on turning. Yilloslime has already confirmed that the fact you object to is indeed in the published source; no one is likely to contact Laughton, since the information is already available in the source, and since Wikipedia doesn't permit original research. Is it your claim that this information is not in the published source, and that Yilloslime lied? -FisherQueen (talk · contribs) 16:30, 9 April 2010 (UTC)
FWIW I can confirm that Yilloslime quoted the source accurately, which verifies the statements in our article. Guess we can move on now. Abecedare (talk) 16:42, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

The Sunday Times article does not actual state that Laughton was an expert at the court case. He was not. He was not involved in it.

The Sunday Times article does state that Laughton was allegdly to inspect the car and this is correct. That inspection was as part of the Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin visit in 1991 as refered to in a 1991 edition of Electronics World.

You are miss reading the article adding 2+2 to make 5 according to your POV.

FYI, Tony Edwards was part of the "Infinite Energy" Cold Fusion proponent associated with Jed Rothwell (banned of the Wikipedia Cold Fusion topics) and Eugene F. Mallove. His credibility is not great. He did not have sufficient qualifications to judge such work.

The Times article was part of their stitch up of Meyer. --Big wheels keeps on turning (talk) 03:38, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

You are removing sourced information and adding unsourced information. The fact that some of the unsourced information (that the device worked) is totally bogus is not fully relevant. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 05:06, 10 April 2010 (UTC)


  • I am not removing any sources. I am not disputing the controversy around his work.
  • Simple fact checking is not "original research".
  • The deliberately vague Times article does not state Laughton was a witness to the court case. He was not. You are making a false assumption.

When he claims he was to have inspected the car is during the Griffin Committee's visit. This is accurate and his comments are fair.

Friends, you are also mistaking my intentions. I am not making claims that the device worked. I am merely balancing from its current extremely NPOV state to one that reflects all available sources, including those relating to Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin.

I should point out that Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin was the Third Sea Lord, Controller of the Royal Navy. That is the rank in charge for procurement and matériel in the British Royal Navy (research and commission of new technological developments and weaponry). Further more, was in charge of the British Navy's research into the state of art hydrogen technologies and its potential adoption during the 1970s following the Oil Crisis.

This would make him a reliable source. --Big wheels keeps on turning (talk) 13:39, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

That might - maybe - make him a reliable source for the operations of the Royal Navy and naval warfare in general - but it gives him no qualifications whatever for understanding how the laws of thermodynamics should be applied - or how electrolysis works - which are the principle matters at issue here. However, that's not the issue here.
We need you to cease removing sourced, referenced material and replacing it with unsourced material. Any changes of that nature are controversial in the extreme and should be discussed here first - without a strong consensus, this stuff should NOT go into the article. When something is clearly non-controversial, by all means go ahead and edit it - but when your changes are reverted over and over again - the answer isn't to simply shove it back into the article again and hope that it 'sticks' this time. Trust me - it won't. That's why we have the "three revert rule" - when something has been reverted a couple of times, you MUST NOT put it back in a third time...that's not allowed. When this kind of revert-replace-revert-replace thing happens, you're supposed to back off, come to this talk page and start explaining why your version is better than the original version. We discuss - and hopefully some kind of consensus view emerges. At that point, we all agree to abide by the consensus - whether we personally agree with it or not.
That's how Wikipedia works - and you don't have some special dispensation to ignore that time-honored process. SteveBaker (talk) 01:33, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
Rereading the Times article at the digg link posted above (and other archived copies, that are the same content...see /Archive 1 for previous discussions), I'm not 100% sure the Laughton (non-)analysis was specifically done as part of the Ohio court case, or whether it was much earlier (and if the latter, whether it was relied on in the court case). The article definitely mentions it in connection with the case, and intersperses the topics which suggests it's related (vs other discussions clearly outside the scope of the trial), but I guess it could just be "here's more evidence from a different analysis that it's crap" rather than "here is some play-by-play from this specific legal action". If the dispute is really just whether this was part of the case or done at an earlier time, I don't object to moving the statement to one of the other analytical sections rather than the lawsuit section (the actual timing of this analysis with respect to the course case does not have much impact in my mind). However, the only WP:RS we do have at this time about the Laughton analysis does appear to make the connection to the trial, so we need at least some other WP:RS with some other timeframe specified if we want to go against it. DMacks (talk) 07:09, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
The whole issue with Laughton is really rather irrelevent to the article (which is about this "invention" that proved to be fraudulant). If we're not 100% sure what happened and when then I'd be more than happy to simply delete the two sentences that refer to Laughton and leave it at that:
"In 1996, inventor Stanley Meyer was sued by two investors to whom he had sold dealerships, offering the right to do business in Water Fuel Cell technology. His car was due to be examined by the expert witness Michael Laughton, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Queen Mary, University of London and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. However, Meyer made what Professor Laughton considered a "lame excuse" on the days of examination and did not allow the test to proceed.[3] According to Meyer the technology was patent pending and under investigation by the patent office, the Department of Energy and the military.[14] His "water fuel cell" was later examined by three expert witnesses in court who found that there "was nothing revolutionary about the cell at all and that it was simply using conventional electrolysis". The court found Meyer guilty of "gross and egregious fraud" and ordered him to repay the two investors their $25,000.[3]"
We can always come back and fill out the detail if we find more solid references.
Bottom line - the device was found to be nothing special and Meyer proved to be an outright fraud. We don't need to dilute those two facts and give the conspiracy nuts more fodder by adding debatable details about who did or didn't examine the machine and why and when. The conclusion of the court case (and our references to it) are plenty good enough to tell our readers that this machine was fraudulent.
SteveBaker (talk) 12:54, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Fine with me to remove them. DMacks (talk) 17:08, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
I think the statement about Laughton is well supported by the cited reference. The Sunday Times article says:

One of the experts due to examine the car was Michael Laughton, professor of electrical engineering at Queen Mary and Westfield University, London, but he was not allowed to see it. "Although Meyer had known about our visit weeks in advance, when we arrived he made some lame excuse about why the car wasn't working, so it was impossible to evaluate it," said Laughton.

My reading of the article (which can be accessed here) is that the proposed inspection was in context of the lawsuit, but I can understand that out of abundance of caution, if there is any doubt we should not claim that explicitly. If so, we can move the statements from Lawsuit section or attribute it explicitly to Sunday Times ("A Sunday Times article reported that ..."). However, I don't understand the reason for the proposing deletion simply because the latest true-believer on this page disputes (without evidence) a solidly cited and accurately paraphrased statement. Abecedare (talk) 18:15, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
I would agree with you - except that User:DMacks is an experienced and well-respected editor who has credible reasons to believe that the Sunday Times article may have misstated the facts (or perhaps we are mis-reading them). So we aren't just dealing with a disruptive editor here. These two sentences simply aren't important to our article and it's better to simplify it and say nothing than to say something we aren't 100% sure about. That doesn't make User:Big wheels keeps on turning right. All of the other edits (s)he made were entirely incorrect and the edit-warring we saw was unacceptable behavior. Having a debate about these editing matters is the right way to approach this kind of thing - and that's the debate we're having right now. SteveBaker (talk) 02:37, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

No consensus to move. Vegaswikian (talk) 02:31, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell → Water fuel cell — Per WP:COMMONNAME. Water fuel cell was a redirect to the current title for over two years; it's currently a dab for only two pages, which could be easily handled by a hatnote. The current title appears to be due to a misunderstanding of our naming guidelines, which do not require names to be accurate (so the device not actually working is irrelevant) but simply widely-used and succinct. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 10:07, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

I have reverted water fuel cell from a dab and put it back to a redirect. The term "water fuel cell" is NEVER used to describe any kind of fuel cell so the first meaning in the dab was incorrect. Only the second meaning has a reference - and that is to link it here. Since there is only one use of the term (and even that is incorrect), there is no longer anything to disambiguate. QED. SteveBaker (talk) 13:53, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
Best I can discern the history here, the article itself was originally at Water fuel cell. It was later moved to the Meyer's-named form with the explanation that there was other meaning to the term, and a disambig page was created. It was later converted into a redirect with no explanation/discussion (but also no vocal objection) that I see. There may have even been a page about Meyer himself that got merge/redirected at some point. DMacks (talk) 12:40, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
Strong oppose:
  1. "Water fuel cell" is a meaningless term. A fuel cell extracts energy from combining some fuels without burning to produce electricity. Water has no free energy - therefore none can be extracted from it - and you cannot make a fuel cell using water as the fuel. Contrast with hydrogen fuel cell. Writing an article about something which patent nonsense is not allowed in Wikipedia - and misusing scientific terms is also unacceptable.
  2. This is not a real device - it's a fraud - and we must not give it undue emphasis by making it seem like it is. People trying to discover if there is such a thing as a 'water fuel cell' should not properly be directed here - they should find a red-link just as they should if they were to search for 'purple aardvark'. I'd actually argue for removing the water fuel cell redirect for that reason.
  3. If it was a real device, it would be called an 'electrolytic cell' not a 'water fuel cell' - so even if you believe Meyer's crazy claims of violating the laws of thermodynamics, 'water fuel cell' would be the incorrect article title and we would be advocating that this become merely a section of the 'electrolytic cell' article. Meyer's was not a scientifically trained man and didn't know the correct term for what he was claiming to have invented - which would be properly called an "Electrolytic cell" because it is claimed to be a new way to split hydrogen from oxygen using electricity - which is what an electrolytic cell does. Meyer's claim is to have invented a way to split water electrolytically using less electrical energy than he got out. That's impossible - but even if it were possible, it would still be an electrolytic cell...albeit an amazingly efficient one!
  4. This device isn't mentioned in electrolytic cell because it's:
    1. Fringe theory -- in that no reliable scientific sources accept that it's possible - and mainstream science proves that it's impossible due to Thermodynamics/Perpetual-motion, etc)
    2. Fraudulent -- in at least the legal sense of having been proved to be fraudulent in a court of law
    ...so it's not even a 'real' electrolytic cell and shouldn't be given undue weight per WP:FRINGE.
  5. In previous discussions here, the consensus compromise was to call it "Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell" because that's what Stanley Meyer's called it and putting his name in front of the term makes it clear that only he said that!
  6. Through various previous merge and deletion debates, we agreed merge a previous article about Stanley Meyer's himself into this article (because this is all that he's notable for) and the consensus to do that rested on retaining his name in the title so that people looking for information about the man would still be able to find it and recognise that they'd reached the correct page.
So...strong oppose...this is a very bad idea indeed and needs to go down in flames! SteveBaker (talk) 13:35, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
Playing devil's advocate for a moment... "Water fuel cell" is no more meaningless as an article title than (for instance) "Perpetual motion machine". Both are impossible! Equally, calling it "Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell" wouldn't fix the title-feasibility mapping that you object to. I don't believe the article title should hinge on whether such a thing exists, merely on whether the term is used. Oli Filth(talk|contribs) 13:38, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
Not really. Perpetual motion machines are impossible only because they don't work - many people have designed them, only to find that they failed. Water fuel cell is actually a meaningless thing - even in principle - and nobody (not even Stanley Meyer) has even attempted to do so. Meyer's attempted to build an over-unity electrolytic cell - and was too dumb to know the correct name for it. We shouldn't perpetuate his error by inflating the term to more than something he dreamed up - hence the title of this article. SteveBaker (talk) 13:45, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
Oppose per above. Yilloslime TC 14:32, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
Oppose Ditto. Guyonthesubway (talk) 17:55, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
So, just to clarify, all three of you are opposing based on precisely the misunderstanding of our naming guidelines which I mentioned in the proposal? Are you aware that the arguments used would apply equally to every other fraud / quack science subject on Wikipedia, none of which have an absurd constructed title? (Cold fusion, for instance.) Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 11:41, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
I don't think you read my arguments. Cold fusion is indeed a great example. It is the correct term for a hypothetical fusion cell that operates at low temperatures - which is what it would have been had it ever worked. The fact that it didn't work doesn't matter so much - the name is still correct. However, in the case of the Meyers cell, even if it had worked, it wouldn't be called a 'water fuel cell' by anyone other than Meyers himself because he simply didn't understand the terminology. It would have been called something like "The Meyers electrolytic cell" (or possibly "The Meyers electrolytic process"). It's wouldn't be a 'fuel cell' even if it ever worked because a fuel cell generates electricity from chemical processes - which is the precise OPPOSITE of what the Meyer's device claimed to do (use electricity to create a chemical change - vis the splitting of water). If Meyers had invented a flying car but had mistakenly called it "The Meyers "submarine" - would we be suggesting redirecting or dabbing "submarine" to point at the article? No! We'd either call it "flying car" or we'd say "The Meyers 'submarine'". That's what's going on here. I understand perfectly what you suggested in the proposal - I simply don't agree with your premise. SteveBaker (talk) 15:01, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
I did indeed read your arguments. #1 is irrelevant, as articles are not titled according to "correctness" but according to common use. #2 violates WP:NPOV as it implies that the purpose of Wikipedia is to debunk junk science rather than describe it neutrally. #3 is original research, as we are supposed to use the names that others use for subjects rather than inventing our own based on our knowledge of the underlying science. #4 is irrelevant, because having the words "fuel cell" in the title is not intended to imply that the device is a functional electrochemical cell. #5 falls under #3, because it is unlikely that the term in most common use for the subject has the author's name attached in that format. #6 is not the correct way to disambiguate readers, and the logic behind inserting someone's name into an article title because he isn't notable enough to be independently described is false. So your arguments don't really have any appeal to our naming conventions, but instead are primarily weighted towards the fringe view that Wikipedia should go out of its way to emphasis the scepticism of junk science at the expense of neutrality and style. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 17:37, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
Support per Chris' response above. Oli Filth(talk|contribs) 19:44, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose There is no such thing as a "water fuel cell", and it is claimed not to be a Electrolytic cell but something completely different. There is a person called Stanley Meyer who says that he has made one. All designs seem to be based from the design of this person and claim to do the same thing. None of the copies actually to work like an actual water "fuel cell" would work. This is not a "fuel cell". --Enric Naval (talk) 21:46, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
    Again, filed under "arguments against the common name which have absolutely nothing to do with our naming guidelines". Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 22:29, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
Correct me if I'm misinterpreting, but your argument for renaming seems to be that "Water fuel cell" is "common usage", therefore per WP:COMMONNAME that's what we should call this article, right? The problem with that argument is that "Water fuel cell" is not in common usage. Some crackpot may have built an electrolytic cell in his garage and decided to call his contraption a "water fuel cell," but that doesn't make it common usage. Furthermore, this page isn't about electrolytic cell or hydrogen fuel cells in general, it's about one specific contraption--Stan Meyer's contraption--so the present name makes much more sense. Yilloslime TC 22:56, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
Chris, please find sources that talk about "water fuel cell" without prefixing it with "Stanley Meyer's", or that aren't a specific reference to Meyer's "Water Fuel Cell technology (note the caps, it's a noun) "Meyer holds some 25 patents on various devices involved in what he calls Water Fuel Cell technology"Smothsonian. Note how books specialized in fuel cells don't list any "water fuel cell" anywhere because such a thing doesn't exist [14][15]. And, of course, in free energy circles it's not known as just as any random "water fuel cell", it is always known as Meyer's water fuel cell (or Stan Meyer's or Stanley Meyer's), so that would be its common name. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:49, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
If the common name uses capitals as a proper noun then great, let's move it there. Every argument in opposition to that is tinged with a heavy tone of "we must not let our users be deceived!!!", as if we have to treat our readers as so stupid as to require disclaimers in article titles. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 07:03, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
You mean moving it to Water Fuel Cell? (it already redirects here). Wouldn't that be confusing with the non-capitalized name? Seriously, I don't see the problem here, the free energy websites have no problem calling it "Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell" and similar names, it's not like we are using a made up name that nobody has heard of before.
Also, we are not talking about a generic fuel cell that happens to work with water, we are talking about a perpetual motion machine that consumes no fuel (all input water is outputted as water vapour, an actual fuel cell has fuel as input and it has energy and waste as output). Meyer named the technology "Water Fuel Cell", but it's not actually that, it's no wonder that free energy websites feel the need to specify Meyer's.
Also, sources that don't use "Meyer's". --Enric Naval (talk) 21:51, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
Given that no device which would most accurately be called a "water fuel cell" actually exists, there is no ambiguity here. That is why both water fuel cell and Water Fuel Cell are uncontroversial redirects to this article. The point is that for the term "water fuel cell", the primary topic is this junk science subject. Therefore, there is no need to insert random pieces of additional disambiguation, such as the main proponent's name, into the article title. This is all covered by our naming conventions. Insisting that the article not be at water fuel cell because it isn't actually a fuel cell is absurd, and the "precedent" that SteveBaker imagined above is in fact already set in both the naming guidelines and broadly across the naming of practically all of our articles. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 09:16, 27 May 2010 (UTC)
looking at the history of the first redirect, it's not an uncontroversial redirect. It's a long-time disambiguation page that has been recently made into a redirect, provoking a revert, a speedy deletion tag and a message on the talk page. The "Stanley Meyer's" part is not a random disambiguation since it's used in the sources. You need to show sources for the common usage that you are claiming, and are trying to use a succint name that the sources don't use. No sources -> no name change --Enric Naval (talk) 14:11, 27 May 2010 (UTC)
So far as I can see, none of the article's present sources use "Meyer's water fuel cell" in preference to "water fuel cell" (the only one which uses "Stan Meyer's Water Fuel Cell", title case, is the "waterpoweredcar.com" link, hardly a reliable independent source). It seems absurd to request that sources be found which never juxtapose "Meyer's" with "water fuel cell", as putting the two together is as much a matter of indicating possession as coining a name. And the construction "Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell", the present title, is not used at all. I'm not given to believing that anecdotal "free energy circles" use a term which isn't used in any of the current sources. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 10:04, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
Well, there are four sources on the article that are not US patents (self-published) or free-energy websites (not reliable?) or the PESwiki (wiki):
  • focuses on his "water fuel cell" invention. Columbus Dispatch
  • it involved a fuel cell that was able to split water using less energy than was released by recombination of the elements. and on the sidebar Meyer's 'water fuel cell'Nature
  • Water Fuel Cell (note the caps) Sunday Times
  • Meyer's invention Action 6 News (wmv video)

The linked free-energy websites do use the term:

--Enric Naval (talk) 12:52, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Exactly; the sources use a variety of different titles, but the common part is "water fuel cell". Whether to capitalise it or not is certainly a good question (I'm trending towards believing that this is the case, as it's the self-coined name for the device), but there doesn't appear to be a strong argument that the current title is the most common name for the subject. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 16:12, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose, but for a different reason. The term "Water fuel cell" is commonly used by many of the redacted people who claim to have an engine that runs on water. Just because Wikipedia doesn't have anything on any of the other redacted people, doesn't make this the most common name for this concept. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 17:27, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
    If there are no other notable uses for the term, then there is no ambiguity. Unspecified anecdotal concepts unlikely to ever have articles here are not notable other uses. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 10:35, 29 May 2010 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Laws of thermodynamics

Meyer's system did not violate any laws they just took energy from an open system called the universe. It just shows there is excess energy present that not everyone is aware of. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.177.239.168 (talk) 00:01, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

No - that's not true. If it worked the way he claimed, it would have violated the laws of thermodynamics. This has been discussed here a million times and the answer is always the same. Furthermore, if I may direct your attention to the banner at the very top of this page, this is not an appropriate place to have this kind of discussion. You could ask whether this is possible on: Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Science where there are a number of competent physicist who can explain to you why what you suggest is impossible. But here is not the place. Please let it end at that. SteveBaker (talk) 01:20, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

142.177.239.168 is correct and you want to suppress the truth — Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.158.92.249 (talk) 23:51, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Theoretical explanation

I have added a part about my own theoretic explaination. It was removed within 4 minutes because it was "fringe science". Come on, guys, you're awfully good if you can conclude that this fast. Now I don't mean wikipedia to say my theory is correct, so I added it as an "alleged theory". Seems fair enough to me. This is an encyclopedia and IMHO that means it cannot conclude itself which theory is correct and which not. IMHO the fact that someone claims to have formulated a theoritical explanation, based on the work of a professor and that someone holds a Masters Degree on the subject at hand, is relevant to be mentioned in this article, regardless of wether or not you want to label it as "off", "fringe" or whatever. This is an article about Stans WFC and a published theory about this should be mentioned, IMHO. So, please at least have the decency to leave the references to the relevant articles in there. Thanks in advance. Arend Lammertink, MSc. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 145.69.42.253 (talk) 14:21, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

"my own theoretic explaination"? Seems like that says all we really need to know here (see WP:RS vs WP:NOT). If the fundamentals of physics as they are generally understood (and as clearly cited in this article in specific relation/application to the topic at hand) say one thing and someone says "no no, it's not that way at all", that's pretty much the definition of WP:FRINGE--don't even need to read a single detail of it or its support. Rather, the burden is on the proposer to get the idea published in a reliable/reputable third-party source (again, WP:RS/WP:V policy). DMacks (talk) 15:00, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Basically, we've got bogus articles from unreliable sources supporting this "theory". As is the norm for con artists, these authors/inventors/theorists (criminals), point to an academic source as their "evidence" and hope that the reader isn't able to understand that the academic source doesn't support their conclusions in the least. That's why we use reliable sources throughout. Now, as far as working inventions go, there aren't any. None, zero, zilch, nada. As for your own expertise (masters degree) - great. Use it. Get your ideas published in a peer reviewed journal and we'll cite them here. Until then, they're out - and that's not negotiable. We've been doing it this way since the start, and we're now the world's #1 information source. In fact, the main criticism against Wikipedia is that it isn't reliable enough - and we're not going to overcome this problem by publishing poorly sourced crap. I hope you understand. Rklawton (talk) 15:13, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
To put a finer point on it "either all three inventors were incredible frauds, or my theory explains how they did it." is a false dichotomy...they could have just been mistaken or your theory could be mistaken. But...didn't a court even rule that for the Meyer's case is was fraud? DMacks (talk) 15:21, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
OTOH: One can put a question mark next to how reliable reliable must be. Of course, when you publish factual information about science, then that should be covered by reliable scientific sources. But, if you only publish "proven science" then you can't publish for example the opinion of an opera singer about wether or not he likes Picasso. If he/she said somewhere "I like Picasso", then that's a fact, regardless whatever someone else may think of Picasso. So, there are two kinds of "facts". Proven science can be considered "fact" if backed by scientific journals. But someone claiming something else is a fact in itself, which has nothing to do with what he claimed. So, then a "self published" journal is a proper reference for establishing the fact wether or not someone claimed something, not for establishing wether or not his claims make any sense or not. L4m4re (talk) 15:49, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
In such a case, we would also consider notability. In short, we don't care what cranks have to say via unreliable sources about Stanley Meyer's fraud. Rklawton (talk) 16:28, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
notability "On Wikipedia, notability determines whether a topic merits its own article. [...] The notability guidelines are only used to determine whether a topic can have its own separate article on Wikipedia and do not govern article content. The question of content coverage within a given page is governed by the principle of due weight and other content policies." - So I guess I'll have to read those other policies, too... L4m4re (talk) 18:01, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Due and undue weight : "In articles specifically about a minority viewpoint, the views may receive more attention and space. However, such pages should make appropriate reference to the majority viewpoint wherever relevant, and must not reflect an attempt to rewrite content strictly from the perspective of the minority view. Specifically, it should always be clear which parts of the text describe the minority view, and that it is in fact a minority view. The majority view should be explained in sufficient detail that the reader may understand how the minority view differs from it, and controversies regarding parts of the minority view should be clearly identified and explained." L4m4re (talk) 18:03, 23 September 2010 (UTC)


All right, we'll see what comes out. This is not fringe science. It is basically straight forward electrical engineering, wether you like it or not. And Turtur is a reliable source. He's a professor, for crying out loud! And this is not a perpetuum mobile, to. You got that wrong, it's using an energy source you can't see. Everyone agrees you can put a solar cell into the sunlight and tapp of energy, so why oh why is using a different kind of energy source to tap the electric field suddenly impossible? But, enough for now. We'll meet again later once this stuff is really out in the open. Cause that's what's going to happen no matter what. —Preceding unsigned comment added by L4m4re (talk • contribs)
OK, we can wait. It's been over a decade so far, but we can wait. Note: Professor's can be cranks, too - that's why their papers are peer reviewed before respectable journals will publish them. In Turtur's case, his "paper" was "published" in a "journal" that specifically eschews peer review. In short, we have no means to determine its reliability as there is no group of peers out there that says it is. Rklawton (talk) 15:30, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) The sources were:
These don't look like reliable sources in general.
Also, the text claims an important flaw that could invalidate all investigation in electromagnetic fields/AC-DC circuits/induction/etc. You know the tune: "extraodinary claims require extraordinary evidence", etc. There is some comment at WP:REDFLAG. --Enric Naval (talk) 15:32, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
I understand, too much, too early. See you in a couple of weeks/months. L4m4re (talk) 15:34, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
What flaw are you referring to? As far as I am aware, I don't claim any flaws. It's just that in Electrical Engineering we don't consider the electric field in detail when designing our circuits. When we do, we can exploit the fact that the electric field contains energy. It is not static, it is radiating with the speed of light. So, it is an energy source. L4m4re (talk) 15:37, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Turtur is definitely not a reliable source for something as profound as this. He's a professor of Electrical Engineering at a small college ("Hochschule"; calling it a "university" is inaccurate, in that it does not award advanced degrees). He is not a physicist and indeed the school has no physics department. Although he's an electrical engineer, he seems to spend all his time hawking free energy ideas. He's written a book and (of course) produced a YouTube video. None of his stuff appears in refereed journals. We can safely discount it.Prebys (talk) 16:58, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
This is about electrical engineering. All I used from him is his derivation that the electric field is an energy source, because it travels at the speed of light. And that is not fringe science, that is well established in science: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations "Heaviside worked to eliminate the potentials (electrostatic potential and vector potential) that Maxwell had used as the central concepts in his equations;[6] this effort was somewhat controversial,[9] though it was understood by 1884 that the potentials must propagate at the speed of light like the fields, unlike the concept of instantaneous action-at-a-distance like the then conception of gravitational potential." —Preceding unsigned comment added by L4m4re (talk • contribs) 18:53, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Maybe I should add this: what Meyer was doing, without realising it himself, was to tap power from the electric field, which is an energy source and available everywhere. So, there is nothing unusual about his electrolysis. He was using the same principle as Edwin Gray, who had a "fuelless engine": http://fuel-efficient-vehicles.org/energy-news/?page_id=955 This made several headlines in the 1970's. Numerous people have broken their head about how this could work, including Gray himself. The real inventor of his stuff was Marvin Cole, who disappeared after he produced the first prototype for Gray and was the only one who knew how it worked. After Cole left, they weren't even able to turn their own prototypes into production types. When you compare Grays patents with Meyers and Puharichs, who also had a water powered motor cycle, and you look really careful at the dirty details of the electric field, then you come to the conclusion they all used the same principle to use the power from the electric field. You see, every atom in the universe emits an electric field, which is spreading with the speed of light and contains energy. So, it is not a question of if, but of how to use that energy. And that is not straightforward, but also not that complicated. It's about as complicated as how they built radio's in the 1930's. So, it may be a bit controversial, but it's really not that far fetched at all. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.75.56.191 (talk) 19:18, 23 September 2010 (UTC)


To me, from a WP point of view there is only one established fact: somebody claimed to have published a theory about how Meyers WFC works. All the references put up here about WP:REDFLAG and the like are guidelines on how to establish the reliability of the content of what is claimed. And it is clear that that is not reliable according to the guidelines, so you can't write "Meyers WFC works such and such". All you can say is "somebody claimed that Meyers WFC works such and such". And then the question is: is that relevant information that should be in this "minority view" article. Of course, as the author of the claims, I say "Yes", but as a wikipedian I also think there are good arguments to also say "Yes", but that is for you guys to judge. L4m4re (talk) 18:08, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Even an open encyclopedia has standards. This article only marginally notable as it is, in that engines that claim to run on water have been appearing at a steady rate since at least the 19th century. The only reason the article hasn't been deleted is the somewhat inexplicable amount of press coverage he has gotten over the years. If we also included every fringe theory that claimed to "explain" it, the article would quickly grow to an unwieldy length.Prebys (talk) 18:33, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, and it even has a fundamental standard: WP:NPOV. "Neutral point of view (NPOV) is a fundamental Wikimedia principle and a cornerstone of Wikipedia. All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing fairly, proportionately, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources. This is non-negotiable and expected of all articles and all editors." So, you may not intend to do so, but by labeling someones point of view as "fringe" and therefore unfit for Wikipedia you are violating WP's fundamental principles. Please do realise that. L4m4re (talk) 18:59, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
The WP:NPOV is often incorrectly interpreted to mean that all views, no matter how absurd, must be equally represented. However, it clearly says "all views that have been published in reliable sources". The "theory" in question has been self-published on the web and in un-reviewed journals, so it doesn't even come close to qualifying. The label "fringe" did originate with me;it's an evaluation based on the WP:FRINGE guidelines, which are crystal clear in this area. In particular, I suggest you review "Unwarranted promotion of fringe theories". Prebys (talk) 19:21, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
From that page: "Pseudoscience generally proposes changes in basic scientific laws or reality in order to allow some phenomenon which the supporters want to believe occurs, but lack the strong scientific evidence that would justify such major changes. Pseudoscience usually relies on attacking mainstream scientific theories and methodology". From my article: "So, all things considered, the Newtionian analogy we use in electrical engineering is perfectly valid and applicable. Except for one tiny little detail." And once again, these rules talk about wether or not an article can be written about a subject: "A Wikipedia article about a fringe theory...". What it does say about *mentioning* is this: "Ideas that are of borderline or minimal notability may be mentioned in Wikipedia, but should not be given undue weight. ... However, ideas should not be excluded from the encyclopedia simply because they are widely held to be wrong." 82.75.56.191 (talk) 19:30, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
So, I don't ask to be equally represented. I understand that that is not what Wikipedia is for, and I agree with that. All I ask is to be mentioned as a minority view according to the guidelines. L4m4re (talk) 19:34, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
You proposed a whole section devoted to your theory, effectively making this an article "about" a WP:FRINGE theory. That's only allowed if it meets the WP:NOTABILITY guidelines, which it doesn't. As support for Meyer's claims, it would have to qualify as a WP:RS, which it clearly doesn't. Any way you look at it, it fails.Prebys (talk) 19:51, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Okay, a whole section was probably a bit too enthousiastic from my side. Sorry for that. Will look into what RS means. L4m4re (talk) 20:17, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
WP:RS does say this: Self-published or questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, especially in articles about themselves, without the requirement that they be published experts in the field, so long as:
1. the material is not unduly self-serving;
2. it does not involve claims about third parties (such as people, organizations, or other entities);
3. it does not involve claims about events not directly related to the subject;
4. there is no reasonable doubt as to its authenticity;
5. the article is not based primarily on such sources.
So, IMHO, my article over at peswiki is in accordance with this. I mean, if you really want to base an article about Stan Meyer on stuff that has been trough the whole peer-review established science mill, you won't find any source. I read this part as saying: you can use a "questionable source" up to some degree, but certainly not to base a whole article on. Note that WP:RS explicitly refers to WP:V and says that one is more important: "In the event of a contradiction between this page and our policies regarding sourcing and attribution, the policy takes priority and this guideline should be updated to reflect it." And WP:V begins with this: "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—whether readers can check that material in Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is true." It also says: "All self-published sources, whether experts or not, are considered reliable as sources on themselves, especially in articles about themselves, subject to certain criteria, though no article should be based primarily on such sources."
And then we're basically back to the beginning: you can write "person X claimed this is such and so" if you think it is relevant within the context of an article based on a self-published source, but you can't write an article saying "this is such and so", because the source can be considered to be reliable to be able to verify what is basically a quote, a "source on themselves" but cannot be considered to be reliable to back a whole article with. L4m4re (talk) 20:40, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Our basic triad is this: Reliability, Verifiability, and Notability. In the case at hand, we have a virtually unknown theory published by entirely unreliable sources. The fact that we can verify that this theory exists isn't sufficient, so there's absolutely no need to publish it here. Rklawton (talk) 21:13, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Of course there is no need. There is no need for publishing anything on WP. IT's there because people want to share their knowledge with one another. Noone needs to do this. This is not a question of need or no need, nor of can or cannot. This is a question of wanting to or not wanting to. There is nothing in the quidelines that forbids anyone from posting a reference to a self-published article he/she thinks is relevant in the article at hand, provided it is not WP:UNDUE That is the only hard criterium, the rest is a matter of wanting to or not wanting to. L4m4re (talk) 21:24, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Let me finish this discussion for now with a quote: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/even_if_you_are_a_minority_of_one-the_truth_is/216587.html

“Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.” Mahatma Gandhi L4m4re (talk) 21:27, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia is WP:NOT the place to publish personal opinions. That's what blogs are for. You are a novice editor - please trust us and learn from this. Rklawton (talk) 22:23, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Yep - I have to back up what others here have said. When you said "I have added a part about my own theoretic explaination." you confirmed that this is "original research", when your references were blogs and wiki's (neither of which are allowed as references for Wikipedia articles), you showed that you do not have "reliable sources" for these claims. That this "theory" is unpublished in mainstream, peer-reviewed scientific literature shows that it is "fringe science" or possibly even "pseudo-science". That the theory is (to say the least) highly controversial means that utterly impeccable references would be required for it - and you don't have that. The "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence" idea is most applicable to what we do here. The idea that there is 'free' energy of any kind whatever would totally overturn the laws of thermodynamics - which are truly solidly tried and tested - that is perhaps one of the most extraordinary scientific claim one could possibly make! It is (remotely) possible that something could come along that would do that - but to claim it without a small mountain of rock-solid, peer-reviewed, widely discussed evidence - without armies of researchers having repeating the experiments and getting the same results and getting their confirmations printed in peer-reviewed mainstream journals - nobody is going to take this kind of thing seriously - and therefore we simply can't publish it here. We quite literally aren't allowed to do that!
It was easy to see that this was a wildly inappropriate edit for such a solidly, dead-center-mainstream encyclopedia such as Wikipedia. As I read your edit, it didn't take 4 minutes for me to realize that. I could tell that it was appropriately deleted after reading the first three sentences!
Since you are a beginner at editing Wikipedia, it's quite understandable that you don't understand the complex set of rules under which the most controversial edits are judged. To avoid an unfortunate recurrence, I strongly recommend that you discuss any future 'dramatic' additions to articles on their respective talk pages. Wikipedia doesn't require you to do that (we even encourage people to "Be Bold" and to "Break All Rules") but if there isn't some kind of agreement that the information passes the various validity tests then you shouldn't be surprised when other editors are equally bold and simply delete all of your hard work without further discussion. It goes both ways.
Another thing to consider is that Wikipedia isn't a news outlet. It's an encyclopedia which we expect people to still be reading 50 or 100 years from now. We have the luxury of time. If a major new breakthrough in energy research comes along, we can happily ignore it for months or even years while we wait to see whether it gains mainstream acceptance. It is much better that we omit to discuss something new - than to imply that something novel is true when it turns out that it's not. In this case, the odds of this (frankly, crazy) theory gaining mainstream acceptance is approximately zero. But if it ever makes it into the pages of "Nature" - we'll be here eating humble pie and the theory will demand several articles of it's own!
SteveBaker (talk) 01:46, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
I don't know if it will make "Nature" some day, but I do know this is not about violating thermodynamics. That is a misunderstanding, because the whole idea is to tap an energy source that is available everywhere. And it is a known energy source that has been overlooked, because everyone yells "law of conservation of energy" and looks no further then the end of his nose. But you are right, WP has the luxury of time. Time will tell wether or not we can finally have clean and cheap energy, wether mainstream science likes it or not at this moment. Looking forward to those several articles of it's own. There is no doubt in my mind these will be there some day. L4m4re (talk) 06:17, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
Well, that is a good attitude! I disagree about your energy source though. You are making the absolutely CLASSIC mistake of confusing a 'force' with 'energy'. Nearly every free energy proponent makes the exact same fundamental error. These fields that you're talking about are forces - and conflating force with energy is a "physics 101" kind of a boo-boo. So I'm very confident that you're wrong. However, that's my personal view (and is likely to be that of mainstream physics) - it doesn't alter the situation with Wikipedia in general and this article in particular. SteveBaker (talk) 15:22, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
The point is that this field is propagating with the speed of light, otherwise you would have instantaneous action-reaction. So, the force is not a static force, it flows. That makes that the Newtonian analogy, considering the force being static, is only valid up to a certain degree. It works fine in any normal engineering exercise, but it does not describe the whole situation for the full 100%. But let's not go to deep in that discussion here, this is not the place for that. L4m4re (talk) 09:45, 25 September 2010 (UTC)
Let me add that if you're interested in this, IMHO Turtur did a very good job describing this. And while he may be labeled as an unreliable source because of where he published his stuff, in my opinion as an Electrical Engineer, he did describe the energy ciculation between the electric field and the vacuum correctly. I did not study the whole paper, so I can't say wether or not the rest of it is correct, though. Still, it is an interesting question why this was published the way it was and why it did not make "Nature", so to speak. L4m4re (talk) 10:46, 25 September 2010 (UTC)
Ah - now I see your next error. So if some new 'thing' were to spontaneously appear in the universe - the field it induces (be it electric, gravitation or whatever) would indeed propagate outwards at the speed of light just as you describe. An electric field, propagating outwards is...what?...Electromagnetic radiation: Light, radio waves, etc. A varying electromagnetic field is precisely what light is. That's an entirely mundane thing that we know all about and can certainly obtain energy from. But once the field is established at some point in space, it's not moving - it's a simple static force - from which no energy can be extracted. It's kinda like if this spontaneously arriving object were a rock dropped into a pond. The ripples caused by its sudden arrival spread outwards - gradually dispersing - but once that ripple is gone, the pond is again still - even though the rock is still there. The level of water in the pond is a little bit higher - and that's analogous to the field making the force exerted at some point in space a little greater - but Force is not Energy - so that's not very interesting.
So, you're STILL utterly wrong - which should come as no surprise because an awful lot of very clever people have thought long and hard about this and concluded that mainstream science is correct. The people (like Meyer) who claim to have done something incredible are ill-educated scam artists. There is a reason for that! Have you never wondered why not ONE of the hundreds of free energy devices ever comes to market? Why aren't we all driving Meyer's water cell powered cars? The reason is because the guy was a fraud...just like every single one of the other people who claim to have invented these kinds of devices. SteveBaker (talk) 15:06, 25 September 2010 (UTC)
I'm afraid we will just have to agree to disagree for this moment, cause this is not the place to discuss this out to the bottom. I am with Turtur, and Tesla too for that matter, you're not. And that is totally fine, because at some point either you or me will be proven right and so sciences progresses as it should. And even though you do have main stream science at your side at the moment, that does not mean this is settled in stone forever. After all, Gray, Meyer and Puharich did make some very bold claims which can IMHO be explained if the field indeed is not static. So, IMHO either all three were incredible frauds, or the field indeed is not static. And if it is not static indeed, as Tesla claimed, then my point of view does promise us the luxury of free energy, and that is what drives me to research this out to the bottom. Bur let me thank you for your seriousness in this discussion for now and time will tell who is right. If you want to discuss this further, you are welcome to mail me at lamare over at the gmail dot com domain. But let me warn you: there is only one thing in between you and the crackpots now and that is the question wether or not the electric field is static or dynamic.... L4m4re (talk) 18:35, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Let me add one more thing to the discussion about what this is all about, cause in the end this is not so much a scientific or technical issue. It's really the same thing as what we are doing for ages. At some point, somebody thought "hey, the wind is blowing and delivers energy. Can't we use that to get power?" Good idea, let's make a windmill. Next thing, hey, water is flowing in a river and delivers energy. Good idea, so we got the watermill. Hey, the sun is shining light to the earth, which delivers energy. So we got solar panels. Hey, there is heat in the earth, can't we use that? Good idea, so we got heat pumps. And now someone comes along and says: "Hey, the electric field spreads with the spead of light from every charge carrier in the universe and delivers energy. Can't we use that to get power?". And all of a sudden that is "fringe" science, "impossible" and the like, while it's really the same thing. The difference is not a so much technical issue, but a political issue, because this energy source is so cheap and readily available that it will put a whole lot of companies out of business and frees the people of the earth of the burden associated with the need for energy. And that is why the whole scientific community acts like a bunch of religious zealots, as if it were written "Thy shalt not use an energy source that is cheaper than oil". And that is also why this technology will not be introduced to the people of this planet trough the scientific community, but it will be introduced bottom up, it will be a grass roots movement which is unstoppable now the knowledge how to do it is out in the public. L4m4re (talk) 09:21, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Again - you are talking about an "electric field" - and in the same breath start talking about energy. That, right there, is the single error that all of the crazy nut jobs like Meyer ALWAYS make! Every single freaking time! One good equation to remember is that E=F.d - energy is force times distance moved. It's not "E=F" OK? If you have a fridge magnet stuck to your fridge door - the magnet produces a magnetic field which exerts a force against the door...but no ENERGY is involved. The magnet doesn't "run down" like a battery. It'll stay stuck to that door, exerting a force, until doomesday. If you pull the magnet a half inch off of the door, you have to expend energy to move that force through a distance (E=F.d). When you release the magnet, it snaps back against the door, using the potential energy you just put into it. When it hits the door, that energy turns into sound and heat. But the force...the field...generated by the magnet has nothing whatever to do with energy. Another example is gravitation. Gravity is a field - and it exerts a force. If you place a book on a table, the molecular forces in the table will work against the gravitational forces to keep the book stationary. No energy is created or destroyed and again, the book stays where it is until hell freezes over. If you drop the book from the height of the table onto the floor, the force of gravity acts on the book to move it - the book loses potential energy and gains kinetic energy as it falls - the more height it loses, the faster it moves (because potential energy is turning into kinetic energy) - then the book hits the floor and again that kinetic energy is dissipated into heat and sound. But the force is not involved in the energy exchanges. Forces can act forever - so long as they don't do any actual work by moving something. The same thing is true of your electric fields - you can't extract energy from them! So, I think you need some remedial physics training before you go any further with your theory because right now, you're definitely out there with the crazy guys. SteveBaker (talk) 15:22, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

And one final issue to finish my point: in the Maxwell equations the scientific community says that it is the matter that creates the electric and the magnetic fields, while in Quantum Mechanics they say it's the fields that create the matter. It is so obvious that one of the two is incomplete, that this issue should have been solved 50 years ago. The fact that it is not says enough about how independent the scientific community really is these days. L4m4re (talk) 11:19, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Nobody says that "it's the fields that create the matter" - you are making the exact same "physics 101" error again. Einstein said: E=m.c2...nobody said: F=m.c2. Matter may cause a field to be present (a magnetic field or a gravitational one or whatever)...but the matter isn't consumed by so doing. A field isn't energy. Period. SteveBaker (talk) 15:22, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
There is no evidence that your explanation is Meyer's. If it were, we could use it in this article, regardless of whether it has any scientific justification.
There is no evidence, other than your word, that your explanation has been used in regard Meyer's "invention". If it had been noted in a WP:RS source, then we could use it, whether or not it has any scientific justification.
If your explanation had been referred to, even in the notable fringe press, we could use it in perpetual motion article. (If your theory had merit, that article would be misnamed, but that's a matter for another day and another talk page.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 12:50, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
I know, I don't dispute that anymore. You took the right decision at this moment. The evidence will come over time, there is too little at this moment for it to be included in the article. With the above statements I just wanted to give my opinion about what this is about, because the discussion also went into a direction that my work as such was being labeled "questionable". So, as far as I am concerned, the discussion is closed for the moment until the evidence shows up. L4m4re (talk) 14:32, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
On a related note, he's posted this same carp(!) on the Dutch wiki for water engines[19]. Anyone know a Dutch admin who'd be interested? Rklawton (talk) 14:39, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
May I make the note that it is not very polite to call the work of someone that should IMHO be considered to be an expert in the field, given he owns a Masters degree in the field at hand, carp? I mean, that is a bold claim, too. L4m4re (talk) 16:30, 25 September 2010 (UTC)
Dutch Wikipedia operates under the same rules as the English one - they won't (or at least SHOULDN'T) accept your contribution - and it would be very wrong of you to try to make that happen. Now that you know you aren't allowed to do this - to willfully violate our community rules could invite big trouble from the Wikipedia admins. SteveBaker (talk) 15:22, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
I see it has been removed there, too. I would have done so myself, given the discussion here. WP has the luxury of time and indeed, if I'm right, I can look forward to seeing a whole lot of complete articles on this in time to come. And that's more than fair enough to me. L4m4re (talk) 09:52, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

I propose we declare this issue resolved. I think we have established beyond any reasonable doubt that references to this "theory" are not appropriate for the article, and that's pretty much as far as the discussion page should go. As entertaining as it is to beat a dead horse, it should probably move to an appropriate blog or newsgroup.Prebys (talk) 16:26, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Agree. This is not Talk:Free energy suppression. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:33, 25 September 2010 (UTC)
It ain't no dead horse, my friend. It's a Phoenix rising from the ashes, and believe me, it is awesome to be a part of that. It is an honour and a privilege to finally be able to give Nikola Tesla the credit he deserves. There simply is no physicist neither alive nor dead that can come even close to standing in his shadow, but we have allowed him to be almost forgotten and allowed the oil companies to strip us naked. Now their days are numbered, so let me leave a message to whom it may concern:
Sehr geehrte Herr Wissenschaftfuehrer,
You can fool all of the people some of the time,
You can fool some of the people all of the time,
But you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
- Abraham Lincoln -

L4m4re (talk) 05:26, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Tesla was never a proponent of free energy. Tesla believed in the wireless transmission of energy (among other things), and we're using that technology today. It's no mystery. Given you already admitted you didn't understand the non-peer reviewed article you cited, you're far too sure of yourself. Rklawton (talk) 12:53, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
Of course I'm sure of myself. You don't make claims like this until you are absolutely sure you are right and know that you are ready to stand the heat. As for the non-peer reviewed article, I said I only studied part of it, the part about the energy circulation of the electric field, and I can stand for that part being correct. However, I cannot stand for the rest of it, because I didn't study that to a degree necessary to be able to say that it is correct, even though I have no reason to assume it is not. And as for Tesla's wireless transmission, that appears to be widely misunderstood too. Eric Dollard wrote an excellent article on that, already in 1986: http://www.tuks.nl/pdf/Eric_Dollard_Document_Collection/Theory%20of%20Wireless%20Power%20by%20Eric%20Dollard.pdf Once again, not peer reviewed, so not useable for an article in WP, but an interesting read nontheless. 82.75.56.191 (talk) 07:06, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Interesting article. There's not a bit of truth to it, but it is interesting, and probably should be in Tesla's article. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 11:43, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Hmmm... it looks like someone caught him breaking into an office to use the IBM Selectric typewriter after page 33 and he had to finish the rest by hand. Besides the fact that all free energy claims eventually eventually reference Tesla, would someone please tell me what the hell this paper has to do with the Stanley Meyer article? This thread seems to have gone wildly off topic.Prebys (talk) 15:12, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Just a heads up. After a week of silence, an anonymous IP (from the Netherlands, surprisingly enough) tried to quietly put this nonsense back in. Must have assumed no one was watching.Prebys (talk) 15:20, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Brutal inaccuracy

How is it a "perpetual motion" engine about this when you use both initial electricity from a pre-charged battery and one that is continually recharged from both the energy of the momentum of a rolling car (kinetic energy)(through it's dynamo). A momentum that is getting fed by a known external power source/fuel: the burning of hydrogen, getting more than the electricity needed to perform electrolysis from the burning of a external energy source: the water containing the hydrogen that is being burned, as well as the momentum and kinetic energy of the car once it is in motion??? This is the most in(s)ane and asinine screamingly obvious attempt at diverting humanitys attention away from doing new research I've ever seen.Nunamiut (talk) 22:44, 13 June 2010 (UTC)


And considering:

And probably several thousand pages on working versions of the invention.

Learn some science. Oli Filth(talk|contribs) 23:00, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
I'm curious about the working versions of this invention that you mention; what reliable sources verify that a working version has been built? -FisherQueen (talk · contribs) 23:04, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
Hydrogen is not an external fuel source because the energy to make it isn't coming from the water, it's coming from the car's electrical system. You do not get more energy from the electrolysis than you put into it. And the car's momentum is not free energy either. You need to burn fuel to build that momentum. — TheHerbalGerbil(TALK), 01:30, 14 June 2010 (UTC)
As HerbalGerbil says, the car used water as fuel, as its waste product is also water. It has to spend energy to split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. When it burns the hydrogen to make water it will produce the same amount of energy as the amount needed to create it in the first place (because of the first law, you can't create or destroy energy, you can only transform it) and you won't be able to recover all the energy spent (because of thermal losses due to the second law). And the car can't recharge its battery indefinitely via solenoids and magnets because of the same reason (the first law says the energy recovered from the movement can't be greater than the energy spent to move it, and the second law says that you won't be able to recover 100% of that energy). Meyer never kept the car running long enough to show that he was really violating those laws. The energy necessary to move the car along that period of time was consistent with the amount of energy stored in a big battery inside the car.
(comment: any process that violates the laws of thermodynamics can potentially be exploited to build a perpetual motion machine. Any machine that actually violates those laws is a perpetual motion machine in the sense that you can feed its output to its input so its keep running forever with no external input of energy. If Meyer's car worked as advertised then you could connect the exhaust tube to a condensator, and recover most of the water to keep it running without re-fueling. And the energy spent moving the car could be used instead to cool the exhaust and recover 100% of water. And anyways, any process that consummes a matter and then outputs the exact same matter and still manages to produce energy is violating the first law in the first place.....) --Enric Naval (talk) 10:48, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

There are working versions (in vehicles) displayed all over the net, there are a hundred videos on youtube, I have friends who are auto engineers and auto engine repair people who install the hydrogen producing fuel units in their cars all over the place. I'm sorry, but the cat is out of the box on this one. Government cant stop it. It's all over the place.
Here is one example:

Nunamiut (talk) 23:10, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

There are no working versions of a water fuel cell that produce more energy than consumed. There are, however, numerous con artists willing to scam people out of their money, and that's probably what you are seeing on the internet. Rklawton (talk) 23:37, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
How do you know that your "friends" are actually improving fuel efficiency on the cars they work on? Furthermore, if there is an improvement, how do you know it's because of the hydrogen, and not because of other things like changing the burn ratio? Sure, you can tweak gas mileage on a car easily enough, but it tends to come at the cost of performance, engine lifespan, pollution, or all of the above. — TheHerbalGerbil(TALK), 01:30, 14 June 2010 (UTC)
I didn't mean youtube videos when I said reliable sources, I mean... you know... reliable sources. As you can see from the discussion above, a working model would be an amazing scientific breakthrough- I'm sure at least several serious science journals would have published the details. Youtube videos, though... I don't think I would have too much trouble creating a YouTube video showing that I can power my television by plugging it into the cat, but that wouldn't make it true- videos are unfortunately easy to fake. Your confidence that there are working models, to me, indicates that you must have a better source of information than YouTube, since you have been on the internet long enough to know how unreliable unsourced information is. -FisherQueen (talk · contribs) 05:47, 14 June 2010 (UTC)
I agree - YouTube "science" videos not only could be faked - they ARE faked...regularly. Take (for example) the "Water balls" thing - these people claim that by adding a few simple household chemicals to water, you can get it to turn into these perfectly round 1/2" beads...for example. There are dozens of movies submitted by people claiming to do this - every single one of them is utterly bogus. Not one of the many 'recipies' for doing this actually works.
Given that track record, the probability of any convincing 'new breakthrough' being reported solely on YouTube is zero. When there is a peer-reviewed article in 'Nature' - I'll believe it...not before. Fortunately, that's also the standard for Wikipedia. For controversial statements of a scientific nature, especially those that go against mainstream science and violate fundamental principles (such as the way that Meyer's contraption violates the laws of thermodynamics) - we require the strongest sources. So - when there is a paper in 'Nature', we'll write about it. YouTube videos are laughable - they count for nothing - actually, less than nothing. If something is claimed by some crackpot inventor, I'm skeptical. When half a dozen YouTube videos show up - and nothing else is reported about it - then I'm convinced it's crap because the people who make those fake science videos love nothing more than to convince gullible people that untrue things are true.
Meyer's machine (if it had worked) would indeed have been perpetual motion. The car (it is claimed) does the following:
  1. Uses electricity from a battery to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
  2. Burns that hydrogen in an internal combustion engine to produce four kinds of energy:
    1. Heat (the car still needs a radiator to dissipate that heat).
    2. Sound (we can hear it making a noise as it runs).
    3. Kinetic energy (the car rolls along the road).
    4. Sufficient electrical energy to keep the battery charged.
  3. The combustion of hydrogen (either in air taken into the car's air intake - or in the oxygen produced by electrolysis) produces water - which comes out of the exhaust pipe.
Now - if we take the additional step of connecting the output of the exhaust pipe back into the water "fuel" tank then every molecule of water that was split by electrolysis is converted back into water in the engine. Hence, the water tank would never run dry.
The claim is that enough electricity is produced by the engine to keep the battery charged.
Hence, the car would run forever without running out of either electricity or water. So this is a perpetual motion machine "of the first kind" - one that produces energy (kinetic, acoustic and heat) from nothing.
Since the laws of thermodynamics preclude this as a possibility - and those laws are probably the most solid piece of science we have - it is much MUCH more likely that Meyers was a lying, cheating, fraudulant bastard than it is that every scientist since Rudolf Clausius has been wrong!
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you are claiming to produce a car that runs on water - you'd better have a lot of very serious scientists (a) examining the car in great detail and (b) reproducing that experiment and writing up the results in "Nature". Meyers didn't do that - he produced a couple of easily faked videos and showed the car to a couple of gullible journalists on a slow news day - then parlayed that into a means of convincing gullible investors to part with tens of thousands of dollars. The man was a thief.
SteveBaker (talk) 11:38, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

May 2011 Additions

With all respect to Arthur Rubin and Steve Baker, whose work here and opinions I respect, in light of recent, reputable research, it is not at all unbelievable that Meyer had indeed invented a machine capable of producing work from the electrolysis of water through use of an unpublished (or even unknownst to him) catalyst. The London Times article appears to be inaccurate and misleading on several points, and where it can be used, it is superfluous. Certainly, Meyer's own statements on the matter deserve scrutiny, but his patents are themselves his own statements and claims, therefore I treat them with equal weight.

Claims that Meyer's invention is pseudoscience might indeed be true, but those claims were themselves not verified. The use of the court case showing Meyer was a fraud is usable only in the context in which the court case was filed: that he represented his invention as original, patentable and marketable. It appears that the court found in favor of the plaintiffs because his invention used electrolysis, thereby making it not-so-original. (Presumably, such investors were worried that even if the Patents successfully filed, which they did, they would not be backable in court if they chose to pursue litigation against others.) However without more documentation, the Readership cannot benefit from any of this without introducing my own POV.

And the basis for the claim that his engine is a perpetual motion machine simply doesn't make sense unless you weigh the Times article more heavily than Meyer's claims himself. Since he indicates in several places that the engine indeed consumes water, there is indeed claimed a conversion from mass to energy that does not violate the First Law. --Otheus (talk) 18:25, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

So, what is this reputable research of which you speak? Rklawton (talk) 18:30, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
I also want to know about this research. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:38, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
Indeed - I too am deeply skeptical of any results that would give even a hint that Meyer was on to anything. He was a fraud - and someone who has discovered a totally new branch of physics, overturning two centuries of mainstream science does not have to resort to defrauding investors! There would be much easier and more lucrative ways of making money honestly. We have labored long and hard to get this article to the state it is, we can justify every word in it. Efforts to change it into a glorious pro-Meyer article are going to be met with exceedingly stiff resistance unless this research to which you refer is deeply serious stuff, acceptable in every way to WP:RS, WP:UNDUE and WP:FRINGE...and I know it isn't going to be because we'd have heard about it all over the scientific press if it were even remotely true.
The argument that the mass of the water itself is somehow "consumed" by the Meyers' process is so spectacularly unlikely that the only safe course is to presume that it's bullshit until solidly proven otherwise. If his process were a form of matter-to-energy conversion process then we'd certainly expect to see lethal levels of neutron and other radiation coming from his electrolysis cell. Since nobody has dropped dead from radiation poisoning as a result, we may safely conclude that this is a wild and desperate effort by Meyers' proponents to rescue his work from the oblivion it so richly deserves. If this is some kind of cold-fusion spin-off, then I for one am deeply sick of hearing about it. If your 'new research' is a self-published web page, or a YouTube video or an article in some 'free energy' magazine - then we're going to ignore it. If you have a solid reference to a peer-reviewed, paper published in a mainstream journal - then let's see it and we can move forward with the discussion. SteveBaker (talk) 19:25, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

(I have reverted Otheus' edits pending the arrival of his/her new evidence. Meanwhile, I don't think it's right to remove references such as the journal "Nature" which is pretty the ultimate gold-standard for Wikipedia's "reliable sources" guidelines.) SteveBaker (talk) 19:32, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

I have reverted to my edited version because, frankly SteveBaker, reverting my edits en mass was not justified. First, None of my edits added original research nor removed any properly-sourced claims. I took great care to keep the language neutral. Second, my edits per se were not based on the new research, but rather an attempt to de-polarize the pernicious wording of the article. The new research (which I'll get to in a minute) brought my attention to the article and the need to revise it to neutral language. The new research does not change any of the facts that happened in the past, obviously, nor does it change that Meyers lost a court case. It may very well be that he rigged his devices with some kind of battery to introduce electrolysis, but this is not proven. Thus, we must provide the readership what can be known about this device and yet also, without editorializing. As scientists, we also want to rebut his claims, but we as good wikipedians and journalists we must do so carefully and precisely.

On to some specifics:

"We have labored long and hard to get this article to the state it is"
I appreciate this and so I assure I was not frivolous in my edits. Does Wikipedia still have a strong stance on "owning" articles?
"we can justify every word in it."
No doubt you can, but the tone was a tad polemic and tendentious. We can make it better.
"Efforts to change it into a glorious pro-Meyer article are going to be met with exceedingly stiff resistance"
good. I have no intention on doing that.
Meanwhile, I don't think it's right to remove references such as the journal "Nature"
This is an injurious and misleading statement. I 'did not remove the reference to Nature. First, the reference is still there in the body of the article. Second, as a minor point, the reference is to an editorial column by Dr. Bell and published in Nature. I don't think this counts under reliable sources with the same weight as a published news story; the editorial process is different and further, the actual news articles are based on immediate research, whereas Bell's column is his opinion (certainly as his status as a PhD in physics and as a columnist in Nature his opinion on scientific matters such as this is much better than mine). Third, but most importantly, Bell's reference to the laws of dynamics is to another inventor and another device, and is not referring to Meyer or his device; Bell does not mention Meyer for another few paragraphs. It may be that Bell's opinion of Meyer's device is the same, but you'd have to be doing OR to determine that.
The argument that the mass of the water itself is somehow "consumed" by the Meyers' process is so spectacularly unlikely ... the point is that this is what Meyers -- not his his proponents -- claimed. Somehow I think your science is a bit off. Electrolysis does indeed consume water and produce the "Brown's gasses". I don't see why this is such a problem. Since he claimed it 'consumed' water (by whatever means), it has (by some means) converted mass to energy and therefore he is not claiming it is a perpetual motion machine.
If your 'new research' is a self-published web page, or a YouTube video or an article in some 'free energy' magazine - then we're going to ignore it. If you have a solid reference to a peer-reviewed, paper published in a mainstream journal - then let's see it and we can move forward with the discussion.
Here you go. Again, the research is not directly related to the article nor my edits. It is the topic at large that called for this article to be revised more neutrally.
I don't get how your link supports what you are saying. The device you link to gets its power from the sun and the resulting hydrogen couldn't be burned to release more energy then was absorbed by the solar cell. Meyer's device purports to produce more energy then it consumes. --Daniel 00:35, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
I'm going to explain my reasoning a little more clearly. Otheus is removing several reliable sources which discuss how this concept violates the laws of physics as they are currently understood. His reasoning as far as I can tell is that someone made an electrolysis device that uses solar cells. This in no way invalidates what the reliable sources say. --Daniel 00:43, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
This is a gross and unfair mischaracterization of my edit. I rather ask politely you take the time to actually look at what I changed and as to the why, mentioned above.--Otheus (talk) 01:24, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
This is not a valid reference (blogs are specifically called out in our guidelines) - it says nothing whatever about Meyers electrolytic processes - it's a photosynthetic process. So it's off-topic as well as unacceptable. So we re-revert these changes pending a valid reference. SteveBaker (talk) 00:45, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
SteveBaker, so you agree that commentary and opinion from Nature has no place in the article? Good, then I can remove the entire reference by Bell.... (that was sarcasm, I have no intention of doing that.) Seriously, I provided a link to "the gold standard" of scientific sources and you dismiss it out of hand? Oh, and did you miss the point about the researcher being the chair of a department at MIT? But to the actual point...
The Nocera research uses photovoltaic processes and a catalyst to perform electrolysis. Need a non-blog link? Fine: From Nature News. Nocera develops catalyst to electrolyse water. There. This merely demonstrates that electrolysis may be possible in the context of a "water fueled engine". (It of course does not mean this is what meyers did, only that it's possible he stumbled on it and didn't know it.) --Otheus (talk) 01:24, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
The blog cites an "announcement" - "announcements" are frowned upon in academia because they prefer research to go through a peer-review process prior to publication (remember last century's cold fusion announcement fiasco?). At any rate, even if we take the blog at face value, the new invention is solar powered and not at all like Meyer's device, nor does the blogger make the claim that it is. Therefore, using this blog here would be entirely inappropriate for two different reasons. As far as the tone of the article is concerned, it simply can't be helped. Meyer's was a failed inventor and failed businessman, and his work has been used as the basis for numerous, ongoing frauds. Wikipedia has been caught up in these frauds previously whereby the con-artist edits an article, takes a screen capture, and then uses the screen capture on his or her website to help con people.
See my response, above. --Otheus (talk) 01:24, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
As a result, it's important for us to use unambiguous language to make it clear to all who seek information about this invention that these claims are physically impossible and in the domain of con artists. Anything less would be a disservice to the reader and scientifically unsound via WP:UNDO. Rklawton (talk) 00:58, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Unambiguous yes, but untrue and opinionated, no. Did you actually read my edits? What did you have a problem with? --Otheus (talk) 01:24, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Guys, you're assuming bad faith on my part. I'm sorry that I chose this article to be the first in 2 years to have significant dealings with.  :( --Otheus (talk) 01:24, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

One more comment/question - Regarding User:Daniel J. Levick's re-revert and edit-comment for [20]: "but you have no consensus for this on the talk page, this is psuedo science as reported by every reliable source)". In what way do my changes invalidate that this is pseudo science? Since when do I have to have consensus to make edits? --Otheus (talk) 01:29, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Rklawton's response to Otheus

Editors maintaining established or hotly debated articles generally insist on consensus for significant changes. Rklawton (talk) 02:25, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
How did your changes invalidate the fact that this device encompassed "pseudo science"? Well, for starters, you removed "perpetual motion machine" and its link from the lead - a very precise and clear explanation of the fundamental problems with this device. Next, your claim that the judge ruled on "originality" rather than the merits of the invention wasn't supported by your source. Furthermore, if the judge had found the machine worked as claimed, then it would have been original. Instead the judge found it to be a very ordinary and very unoriginal water electrolysis device. Next, it's not up to you to critique The Times' analysis of the case. It's a reliable source, and if you'd like to impeach the article, you'll need another reliable source that does so directly. The fact that Meyer's failed to cooperate with testing serves as further evidence against him. Overall, your edits comprised primarily your own opinions and served to whitewash demonstrably bogus science and a con artist. Given the number of similarly fraudulent devices now being foisted on the market, this does a significant disservice to our readers. Lastly, your attempt to assert that Meyer's could have found some secret science based on unrelated claims by an MIT research comprised the worst sort of WP:SYNTH and is simply not tolerable. As an experienced editor, you should know this - and know that the reversions of your edits do not imply the assumption of bad faith but instead embrace our long-standing desire to present reliable, verifiable information to our readers free of POV, OR, UNDO, and SYNTH. Rklawton (talk) 02:25, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Otheus' response to Rklawton

Rklawton, I greatly appreciate your clarifications here. You make some good points, which I will admit to as follows:
  • "As an experienced editor, you should know this" - I've been basically inactive for two years, and disengaged longer than that. If I may excuse myself for my mistakes, I do so out of "rustiness". WP:SYNTH is new to me.
  • "Next, your claim that the judge ruled on "originality" rather than the merits of the invention wasn't supported by your source." - You might be right. This is actually what is mentioned in the Times article, which I discounted (see below). The article (allegedly) states: "They decided that there was nothing revolutionary about the cell at all and that it was simply using conventional electrolysis." So I may have made some logical steps here that amount to OR (but I don't believe so): Since the device was simply using conventional electrolysis, and since conventional electrolysis is not original to the patent, the patent is worthless. Now, when you say "if the judge had found the machine worked as claimed, then it would have been original" I'm thinking you agree with me, but I'm not sure.
  • "perpetual motion machine .... a very precise and clear explanation of the fundamental problems with this device." - Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what you're basing this on is connecting (1) The Time's author's assessment of the 1996 judgement that found the device to be 'an ordinary electrolysis device' and (2) Bell's assessment (Nature commentary) that such a device would be the basis of a perpetual motion machine. Am I right?
  • "Overall, your edits comprised primarily your own opinions and served to whitewash demonstrably bogus science and a con artist". - Okay, I see where you are coming from. Please allow me to convince you otherwise.
  • "Given the number of similarly fraudulent devices now being foisted on the market, this does a significant disservice to our readers. " I see your point. However, overstating and erroneously stating the case does a similar disservice because it sends said readers to other, less reliable sources than WP. Can you agree with that?
As for your other points, I strenuously disagree.
  • "your attempt to assert that Meyer's could have found some secret science based on unrelated claims by an MIT research comprised the worst sort of WP:SYNTH and is simply not tolerable. " - This is not really germaine to the article, but it is an example of the bad faith I refer to above. "Attempt to assert" and "secret science" and "unrelated claims" and "simply not tolerable" are tired ways to bully me into submission. This kind of behavior disgusts and infuriates me. But again, it's not germaine to the article, so let's drop it and try to avoid it.
  • "it's not up to you to critique The Times' analysis of the case. It's a reliable source," -- first of all, the Times article is not available online. We have an alleged transcribed portion posted in a newsgroup. You call that a reliable source? No sir, it is not. I realize not every source need be found on the web. If someone here is willing to vouch for having seen and read the article and the accuracy of the transcription, I'm more than willing to retract my objection.
  • The Time's article adds little or nothing to the Wikipedia article. The two exceptions are (1) the $25,000 judgement claim mentioned, (2) that Prof Laughton was involved in the 1994-1996 court case. Of the first, I view it as a trivial point and easily omitted. Of the second, the article does not claim that Laughton was involved in the 1994-1996 court case. The Times' article (as transcribed) states "One of the experts due to examine the car was Michael Laughton, professor..., London, but he was not allowed to see it." (emphasis mine) Laughton did not nor could not legally testify or be an expert witness on something he did not see. In the next paragraph, the author begins discussing the 1994-1996 court case: "However, the one thing Meyer had built that appeared to work was his Water Fuel Cell, and it was this device that the Ohio judge called as evidence in the recent lawsuit." The "However" and "this device" are two rhetoric elements used to distinguish the Laughton non-examination from the 1996 judgement. So in the end, the Times' article adds nothing of worth to the wikipedia article.
  • "perpetual motion machine ..." and later "first and second law of Thermodynamics" - I assume for this you are not referring to the Narciso article in which he (humorously, being the scientific juggernaut that he isn't) states: "Meyer's work defies the Law of Conservation of Energy, which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed." Rather, you are referring to Bell's commentary in Nature where he states: "But making hydrogen from water takes more energy than you can ever recover from burning it. Extracting net energy from this total cycle is impossible, if you believe in the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Otherwise, you have the basis of a perpetual-motion machine." However -- and this is an absolutely important point -- Bell is not referring directly to the Meyer invention. He refers to that later and has a different argument against Meyer's invention.
So in summation, tell me which points you agree or disagree with.
  1. I'm not intending to whitewash Meyers or his inventions.
  2. I'm not intending to introduce OR or POV
  3. The Sunday Times article is not a reliable since it was sourced as a transcribed copy on usenet (I will retract the objection if on good faith someone here says the the transcription is accurate based on first-hand knowledge of that article.)
  4. Professor Laughton, as referred to in the Sunday Times piece, had nothing to do with the 1994-1996 court case nor judgement against Meyers.
  5. As Laughton never examined Meyer's device, it's not really relevant (except perhaps to build a case as Meyers being a fraud)
  6. The Bell commentary in Nature is reliable insofar as it is opinion of one scientist (ie, another scientist with similar credentials should have equal weight.)
  7. Bell does not specifically point to the Meyers device as being a perpetual-motion device.
  8. Bell does refer to an engine based only on electrolysis as forming "the basis of a perpetual-motion device".
  9. Meyers claimed to have made a device which converts pure water into component gasses which are then used as fuels for an engine.
  10. In order for such a device to work, it would either use conventional electrolysis (requiring an external energy source) or a catalyst or some other fuel.
  11. In the 1994-1996 civil court case, expert testimony found that the Meyers device used only ordinary electrolysis (nb: this is also noted by Meyers himself, elsewhere)
  12. There is (as of 2011-05-10) no source, aside from the court case, indicating that a person of relevant expertise and familiarity with the Meyers design has refuted Meyers claim regarding electrolysis.
  13. The judge ruled that based on plaintiff's expert testimony, Meyers deceived the investors about the nature of the device.
  14. Meyers appealed the judgement.
  15. After the judgement, Meyers maintained that the plaintiff's experts were not sufficiently qualified (this, according to the "NEN" source, point 7)
  16. After the judgement, Meyers maintained that the device did not use ordinary electrolysis (this, according to the "NEN" source, point 8)
Now, as an aside, but with no intent to introduce this into the WP article...
  1. Some professor at MIT claims he's found a catalyst that allows water to break down into component gasses.
  2. Such a catalyst would make the first- and second- laws of thermodynamics inapplicable to such a device
  3. If some guy at MIT did, it's highly unlikely that Meyers did it
  4. But possible.
  5. It's also possible Meyers found another way to do it that has yet been discovered except by him.
  6. It's also possible (and highly probable) Meyers did not make a device that he claims to have made.

--Otheus (talk) 05:48, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

"Some professor at MIT claims he's found a catalyst that allows water to break down into component gasses" The artificial leaf article does say this, but you misunderstand the implications. A low "voltage" electrolysis system is -not- the same as a low "energy" electrolysis system. I rather like this explanation: [[21]] Guyonthesubway (talk) 15:42, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Otheus Response to SteveBaker

User:SteveBaker: The point in the WP article whether or not Meyer's "water fuel cell" amounts to a perpetual-motion machine appears to be a key and sensitive one with you. In an earlier passage in this talk page, you stated the following:

Meyer's machine (if it had worked) would indeed have been perpetual motion. The car (it is claimed) does the following:
  1. Uses electricity from a battery to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
  2. Burns that hydrogen in an internal combustion engine to produce four kinds of energy:
    • Heat (the car still needs a radiator to dissipate that heat).
    • Sound (we can hear it making a noise as it runs).
    • Kinetic energy (the car rolls along the road).
    • Sufficient electrical energy to keep the battery charged.
  3. The combustion of hydrogen (either in air taken into the car's air intake - or in the oxygen produced by electrolysis) produces water - which comes out of the exhaust pipe.
Now - if we take the additional step of connecting the output of the exhaust pipe back into the water "fuel" tank then every molecule of water that was split by electrolysis is converted back into water in the engine. Hence, the water tank would never run dry.
The claim is that enough electricity is produced by the engine to keep the battery charged. - Hence, the car would run forever without running out of either electricity or water. So this is a perpetual motion machine "of the first kind" - one that produces energy (kinetic, acoustic and heat) from nothing.

For the record, I agree with your analysis here. However, your point here addresses the design for his car, and not for the fuel cell in isolation. This article is about the fuel cell. Is it the case that his fuel cell also amounts to a perpetual machine as you described above? If so, what is the source for that description? Such a description/outline is not given in any of the sources - Bell/Nature, Edwards/The Times, Narciso/Dispatch. IF not, is there any other case made that his machine is a perpetual-motion engine?

(update 08:22, 11 May 2011 (UTC) ) Actually, I'm not sure I agree with the idea of "connecting the output of the exhaust pipe" back into the resevoir is a fair analogy. I'll have to get back to you on that.

--Otheus (talk) 07:46, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

If the fuel cell can power a car perpetually, then the fuel cell itself is MORE than capable of being a perpetual motion machine. SteveBaker (talk) 21:56, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Replacing "perpetual motion" with "free energy"

Could this entire huge debate be avoided by substituting "purported Free Energy Device" for "purported perpetual motion machine? APL (talk) 08:29, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Good point. I suggest we do that and move on.Prebys (talk) 08:42, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
I've made this change, which I think is the best way to characterize the device. Referring to it as a "purported perpetual motion device" wasn't really grammatically correct. The inventor never referred to it that way, and the rest of us know it never worked anyway. The general discussion of perpetual motion in this context belongs in the water-fuelled car article.Prebys (talk) 10:53, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
I have no problem with this change. --Enric Naval (talk) 17:36, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
They both link to the same article, so I have no problem with it. Rklawton (talk) 18:12, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
The "huge debate" cannot be completely avoided by this one change, but for clarity and readbility, I have changed it to "a device purported to have the attributes of a free energy device." --Otheus (talk) 18:21, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
ie, "a purported free energy device". Why use extra words? Also, I suggest you look up electrolysis before making further edits.Prebys (talk) 21:53, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Patent citation in the article

Since this article is directly related to Meyers' patents, to what extent would the "consensus" be okay with citations directly from the article? Have any of you bothered to go through the patents? --Otheus (talk) 19:49, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I have. It's essentially an ordinary electrolysis cell, driven by a waveform complex enough to fool someone who doesn't know very much about physics.Prebys (talk) 21:55, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
Patents are primary sources. We don't use primary sources - especially for patents. Why? Unlike the FDA, the Patent Office does not guarantee that a patent works as advertised. The Patent Office essentially guarantees the originality of the idea without regard to its feasibility. In short, if I proposed to generate electricity by stretching a new type of rubber band between here and Mars, I would likely get the patent. This says nothing about my ability to actually do so within the limits of physics. Our readers, on the other hand, may not be aware of this. Thus the link might be misleading. A link, on the other hand, to a scientific review of the patent, would be appropriate. If none such exists, then there's no harm in omitting the patent link. I happily concede that some patents are historic and well supported, and in such cases, links to those patents for illustration purposes would be acceptable. Rklawton (talk) 23:27, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
Actually, I'd go much further. For at least the last 50 years, the patent office guarantees the date on which the patent was filed, the name of the inventor and that the requisite fee was paid. Nothing else! These days, nobody knows whether a patent is meaningful - or even valid at all - until it's tested in court and gets proper scrutiny. On average, the patent office spends less than five minutes examining each patent...and when you consider that some of them run to thousands of pages, you should realize that most of them get a cursory glance and a rubber stamp with almost no consideration of reasonableness, novelty or anything else. Two patents that I filed were screwed up by my patent attorney and ended up with each other's diagrams! Nobody even noticed and that's how they are on record today!
In Wikipedia, a patent is good for referencing only two things:
  1. That the patent exists.
  2. That the author made the claims (s)he made
We already stated that the patent exists - and we have consensus that we don't need to quote every single thought that drifted through Meyer's head (per WP:UNDUE). Our readership can go and read the patent for themselves if they wish - we only need to state a few salient points and move on.
SteveBaker (talk) 00:50, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
My objection was to including a link to the patent for reasons I've already noted. Rklawton (talk) 00:59, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Actually, all of Stanley_Meyer's_water_fuel_cell#The_term_.22fuel_cell.22 seems to be based in original research. No secondary sources that directly analyze Meyer's design. Maybe we can reuse one of the existing sources or find new ones... --Enric Naval (talk) 11:11, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

I disagree. Wikipedia requires strong sources when the material involved is likely to be contested. All we are discussing here is the definition of a commonly used word. We have references to say that Meyers used the word to mean an "electrolytic cell" and references to say what a "fuel cell" is. It isn't WP:OR to connect the blindingly obvious dots. If this were a problem, it would fall under WP:SYNTH, combining two sourced statements to come to a third conclusion. In this case, however, we have a third source for the definition of the term "Fuel Cell" and we provide sources to say that Meyer's used the term in other ways. Insisting on the degree of referencing that you imply would reduce Wikipedia into a place where we could only quote sources verbatim - and that's just silly. It is essential to have this section in the article because the very title of the article is horribly misleading. A student, asked to write a term paper on fuel cells would come to entirely the wrong conclusion from reading this article without that clarification. Rather than misleading the reader, we must carefully explain that Meyers mis-named his device. SteveBaker (talk) 15:47, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
Agreed - we don't need a reference for "the sky is blue on a clear day". In the case at hand, we need only a source that describes this "fuel cell" as a free energy device (perpetual motion machine, etc) and we're absolutely free to damn Meyers as a charlatan and his device a failure. Any editor who would argue that a free energy device "could" work should be set straight or topic banned from all physics related articles. Rklawton (talk) 16:06, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
  • I realize the above sounds a bit harsh. But consider this, I've read that the U.S. Patent Office accepts all applications - except for free energy devices. In those cases, the inventor must produce a working model, and that model must run without additional inputs for the period of one year. They instituted this rule in order to cut back on the volume of applications for fraudulent devices. Naturally a few congressmen argued against this special case as it upset a few constituents, but I believe they were soundly laughed at. Come to think of it, if we can source this it might make a fine addition to a U.S. Patent Office related article or to the article on perpetual motion machines... Rklawton (talk) 16:09, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
In practice, I think that if your patent application avoids the words "Perpetual Motion Machine" and "Cold Fusion", it'll slide right through the system without anyone noticing or caring. APL (talk) 22:45, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
This is true. You'll notice that in almost all cases, the claims in the patent application are quite different from the claims made in public. There's absolutely noting in the Meyer's patent application to indicate he's claiming you could actually run a car purely on water. On the other hand, sometimes really stupid patent applications are approved. For example, I think most of us with technical ability "invented" the motor->generator->motor idea sometime before we were 12, but it was actually patented in 2006. It you read the text and images in the application, there's simply no getting around the fact that this is a patent for a perpetual motion machine. The only conclusion is that you don't have to be a rocket scientist to be a patent clerk.Prebys (talk) 17:43, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Stanley Meyer WFC

The link to Recreating the Stanley Meyer WFC seems to be removed. It seems like a very useful paper, so I'm not sure why it's been removed 91.182.132.198 (talk) 09:26, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

It's not from a reliable source, and it's self-published. Rklawton (talk) 12:26, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
I removed it. Panacea "University" is just a portal for self-published nonsense.Prebys (talk) 14:12, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

Thermodynamics revisited

Just a heads up. There seems to be an edit war going on with an anonymous editor who is trying to remove the comments about the laws of thermodynamics and perpetual motion. He'll probably get himself blocked soon, but in the mean time, keep an eye out.Prebys (talk) 21:35, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

He just broke WP:3RR - I put a warning up onto his talk page. If there is an admin handy...you know what to do. SteveBaker (talk) 21:41, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

oh my god I'm being stalked. Let's settle down people; I'm just questioning Phillip Bell as being knowledgeable on anything to do with water fuel cells in relationship to thermodynamics and perpetual motion. Why he is used as a "reliable source?" I am in contention with that and I think it that should be stated in the article. Who could complain with that? Why would anyone complain about that? (122.57.57.246 (talk) 01:49, 9 November 2011 (UTC))

You can question anything you like on your own time, but here on wikipedia, we follow WP:RS. That means we presume top-tier peer-reviewed academic journals are fairly reputable and we can therefore generally follow what they publish. And conversely, we can't just say "I don't believe it" or "there is disagreement", but instead need similarly strong sources that actually write those other views. WP isn't a place to use our judgement or analysis, but only to write what others say, in accord with their acceptance and prominence. DMacks (talk) 02:12, 9 November 2011 (UTC)
(ec) :YOU do not get to question if a recognized authority is qualified. You are, however, free to introduce reliably sourced experts with opposing views and bring them up here. Until you do, do not remove reliably sourced information from our articles. In this particular instance, a water fuel cell (one that generates the electricity necessary to turn its water into fuel to power itself) is needed a "perpetual motion machine" and would (if it worked) violate the laws of physics. As a result, you will find zero reliable experts that disagree, and quite a few cranks, kooks, and con-men willing to defraud the public who don't. Rklawton (talk) 02:16, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Oh! calling people cranks and con-men now are we? Look who's taken over the show at wikipedia - Rklawton! lol — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.57.57.246 (talk) 02:27, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

That they include con-men and various rantings of pseudoscience are both supported by WP:RS cited in the article. Again, we can say it because it's verifiable, regardless of our own feelings. DMacks (talk) 02:49, 9 November 2011 (UTC)
No, you only say that because you read something in a magazine that you consider holds some authority. I don't actually hold to that notion that being in a peer-reviewed journal is a standing of any repute. There is plenty of argument over the validity of journal peer-review anyways. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.57.57.246 (talk) 03:12, 9 November 2011 (UTC)
First, I say that because a court has found them guilty of fraud. You seem hung up on the whole idea of WP:RS vs WP:FRINGE that has wide acceptance. This talk-page is not the place to contest that. You're welcome to (as you were already advised) take it up on one of the wider discussion pages. But here...here you're not going to accomplish a change or exception to long-standing wikipedia policy and guidelines, it's not how things work on this website. If you don't intend to discuss this in the proper places, you're wasting your and our time. DMacks (talk) 03:18, 9 November 2011 (UTC)
Nah that's alright. I'm only here for the day to see how the place works. Wikipedia is not the place for me. Have a nice day though (122.57.57.246 (talk) 03:31, 9 November 2011 (UTC))
You say "I don't actually hold to that notion that being in a peer-reviewed journal is a standing of any repute.". Then I strongly recommend that you go and find some other encyclopedia to edit. Wikipedia stands at its' very core on the principle that we'll trust things written in peer-reviewed journal. That's our standard for "truth" and one of the five pillars upon which Wikipedia is founded. Pillar number two says "All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy: unreferenced material may be removed, so please provide references. Editors' personal experiences, interpretations, or opinions do not belong here. That means citing verifiable, authoritative sources, especially on controversial topics and when the subject is a living person." If you can't accept that pillar then you'll be incapable of functioning as an editor at this website - and it would be better for all concerned if you went someplace else that has (for you) more acceptable standards for "truth". SteveBaker (talk) 13:12, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Slanted editing

I've just undone a slew of edits by 118.173.88.234 (talk · contribs · WHOIS) that involved the systematic removal of properly-sourced, properly-weighted material critical of the fuel cell, and its replacement with unsupported and poorly-sourced statements. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 15:45, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. If they persist, I'll put a stop to it. Rklawton (talk) 16:05, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. You forgot to mention the god-awful spelling and grammar. Anyway, if history is any judge, he may make a couple more attempts and then get bored. Everyone should just keep an eye out.Prebys (talk) 17:43, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

No mention of his patents?

Why is their no mention of his patents? Wiiztec (talk) 16:29, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

What are you talking about? His patents are mentioned in the article and several are cited as references.Prebys (talk) 16:55, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Not a Perpetual Motion Machine

It states this in the article. It is no such thing. This should be removed ASAP. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.194.102.190 (talk) 10:04, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

Please see the archives. This topic has been discussed at nauseating length.Prebys (talk) 13:02, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

Article Title

Why is this article title "Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell" and not "Stanley Meyer"? I'm just asking. Maybe this was already decided on for good reasons (person not notable enough, just invention notable). Maybe those reasons no longer apply (if new sources have been found in the mean time). As far as I can see, Meyer wasn't just notable for the water fuel cell, but also for it's utilization in the dune buggy and his death. I think this has already become a article on "the person" instead of just that invention, therefore I think it would make sense to change this. A note for the various editors concerned with the controverse of this "free energy" topic: I don't intend to misuse such a change to fill this article with irrelevant info about Stanley Meyer.FrankRadioSpecial (talk) 15:52, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this is an old topic. There was a major clean up a few years ago, where people who were notable for one thing were merged into a single article about that topic (the same thing happened to Tom Bearden and the Motionless electromagnetic generator). Originally, there were two articles, but the dune buggy supposedly ran the fuel cell and there's nothing notable about dying from an aneurism, so it was all merged into one article.Prebys (talk) 19:30, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
Looking back on it, I think that was a good decision. Rklawton (talk) 21:00, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
There is a conspiracy theory about his death. The theory is notable enough to be mentioned here. But it's very related to the fuel cell (allegedly, he was assassinated to prevent the fuel cell from taking off). --Enric Naval (talk) 21:20, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Date of death

This article says he died on March 21, 1998. However, [22] “Stanley Meyer” says he died on March 27, 1998. Which is correct?--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 23:08, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Well, the local newspaper says he died in March 20, not 21 [23]. I'll change the date to 20, until a better source is found. projectcamelot.org doesn't look like a reliable source, I can't trust their date of March 27. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:19, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
Okay, if the source cited said March 20, let it be stated so.--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 21:28, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

Removed citation

The citation to New Energy News (http://www.padrak.com/ine/NEN_4_11_1.html) contains nothing about the Department of Energy or the military. (I only searched for ‘military’ and ‘energy’, couldn't face actually reading the whole thing.) The fact that he actually received patents (!) shows patent-office involvement. Therefore, the citation was pointless, regardless of its reliability. Max Hyre (talk) 14:52, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Porque

At the top of this article it says, “Porque no esta Stanley Meyer en ESPAÑOL en wikipedia???????? porque lo borraron?????” This text should be moved to the talk page, else it is ugly and vandalism-like. By the way, borraron I think means “deleted”. This may be part of a phenomenon of article related to perpetual motion being deleted, as i complained about on Category_talk:Perpetual_motion.--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 21:22, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

Cluebot reverted that pretty quickly but it took a null edit to refresh the cache. --NeilN talk to me 21:28, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
Thank you. Nonetheless, can someone please restore the Spanish Wikipedia article?--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 21:35, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
@Solomonfromfinland You'll have to bring it up at the Spanish Wikipedia. English Wikipedia admins can only restore articles on the English Wikipedia. --NeilN talk to me 23:48, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

I am not good at these forums apparently but all I want to say is where they claim that Meyer's device did not work is a lie. He proved it worked over and over again.

Also he had patents. The US Patents office does not issue patents unless it does work. So that brings into question the causation of his death?

He was claiming he was poisoned as he was running from the restaurant.

What I question is if this is a government backed cover up would not a news article say otherwise? Your quoting news articles in here and I have been a Intervenor in Power Plant Siting cases and when I present news articles in my case on medical information and pollution the California Energy Commission declared it hearsay. Yet your sticking to it like it is glue. I honestly believe he was poisoned. I know his vehicle worked and I understand the principals behind it somewhat.

What Meyer's did would not be hard to do since I learned recently that water, even without any outside influence, is always having free hydrogen and oxygen atoms for pico seconds.

All Meyer's did was find the right pulsating frequency to keep those lose atoms from re-attaching to other atoms while they where in flux. To do that he may have changed the polarity of those atoms electrically speaking?

Just because someone does not understand how something works does not mean it does not work. Like I said he proved it over and over again. And his patents where granted which never would have happened if it did not work.

The trial he went through had experts on the other side tamper with his device making it not work when they added a additive to it trying to make it like normal electrolysis. His device did not need any electrolytes. It was basically a capacitor and the side affect just like that of a car battery was hydrogen and Oxygen, but a lot faster than a car battery releases these gases.

Just for you super supposedly intellectual types out there. This is very simple common sense. It may be beyond your comprehension because you are so high intellectually speaking. Many of you believe in certain theories or formulas that are constantly being up dated and changed such as Thermodynamics itself. There are experiments that have no clue as to how they happened but they happened. Because you have no scientific explanation to verify how it happened does not mean it did not happen.

A layman type person with common sense is not going to care how it happened as long as they can have it happen for themselves. Meyer's would have eventually shared everything with everyone which is why he was killed.

You telling me chemicals can not cause aneurisms from contact? I have personally been injured by chemicals but I have talked to Bio-engineers and they told me there are chemicals that go right through you and straight to your bones and eat them up. There are also some that can cause heart attack or stroke on contact so I am sure there are some that cause aneurisms so unless you know what chemicals to look for they will not be found. That was the case of Meyer's and there is a obvious coverup still in affect or their would not be all this false accusations on his patented inventions. (HawkNo1 (talk) 21:07, 19 April 2014 (UTC))

This is not a forum for rambling discussion of Meyer's claims. If you have suggestions to improve the article, please state them.KaturianKKaturian 20:32, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

The US patent office issues patents regardless of the functionality of the patent. Countless nonfunctional patents have been issued. It is not their responsibility to test if the patent works as described because if it was then all a person would have to do is create a patent and let the patent office do all of the expensive work of testing and evaluation. His patent is also publicly available and anyone who wishes can get that patent and try to create his device. Anyone who believes that his device functions as describes can test it if they so choose. 108.180.37.82 (talk) 19:30, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Since when is Stanley Meyer's devices perpetual motion? They're not running anymore since his death? Nor is my car whenever I remove the key from its ignition switch....

I object to the presumption that any device must be perpetual motion if all of its energy sources have not been accounted for.

In other words, if I drop a twig onto a snow laden slope sufficient to start an avalanche after first constructing a series of devices beneath said slopes able to harness their raw power to perform useful work, I could be heralded as a wonder worker, scam artist, or trouble maker. I got more energy out than I put in; natural forces made up the difference. But if I had made the mistake of miscalculating the slope's propensity to slide into an avalanche, then all that trouble I went to build those devices intended to harness imaginary raw energy of a presumed propensity to avalanche will have gone in vain worse than the inefficiency of any internal combustion engine! But if I get lucky most of the time by making smart decisions about when and where to place my energy capture devices, then I'll always come out ahead so long as the snow falls.

Perpetual Motion is always perpetual until acted upon by an opposing force. Normally, a good example of an opposing force might be inertial mass acting against acceleration, but in this article's case, it is something else called 'Twinkle'.

Vinyasi (talk) 06:57, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

They were claimed to be perpetual motion machines. Or they were described in such terms that they fit the description of a perpetual motion machine. --Enric Naval (talk) 10:41, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
If you check the archives, this topic has been discussed to death. Meyer wasn't claiming a hidden source of energy. He claimed his device used electrolysis to separate water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, and then burned the Hydrogen and Oxygen, which again produces water - ie, a closed loop cycle which produces energy, ie "perpetual motion". This is nothing new. All "water burning cars" are variations on the Garrett Carburetor, patented in 1935. They've been "invented" every year or so ever since. They all have two things in common: the principle of operation, and the fact they don't work.KaturianKKaturian 18:00, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
Except that Meyer was not using electrolysis, and in that misconception alone, or the inability to discern the difference and scale of difference, you discredit your opinions entirely.
Meyer's WFC was not a scam. He had invented a considerably novel process of gasifying water* using far less energy than electrolysis does. All he was guilty of was being in an impossible position with a bad business model, and handling some bad investors unwisely.
Since when do county courts and high school teachers get to decide the nature of scientific developments? If you read the accounts, the case was not about whether the device worked or not. It was about an investor seeking to break a business contract that he had entered into with Meyer and its conclusion was ongoing at the time of Meyer's death.
I removed the "perpetual motion machine" out of the lede as it's both incorrect and not supported by the reference it relates to. A reference which it must be said is just a blog post, not a proper paper or article. And one written by an author who must consider themselves to have psychic powers as it proposes a conclusion based on no direct examination of the cells.
What the reference says is not that it was but that it would "form the basis for". Which, of course, it was not and could not be.
I removed it and correct the introduction as it is used inaccurately, and is deliberately snarky and immature.
* I am using such a descriptive term as neither did the Water Fuel Cell separate the H and O2 in the same way as electrolysis.
The most outstanding elements of Meyer's work was rapidity of which gases were produced and the lack of energy it required. The cells ran absolutely stone cold with none of the heat loss/generation of standard electrolysis.
Thank you — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.255.232.124 (talk) 00:13, 20 February 2017‎ (UTC)
Of course it was a scam! It is physically impossible to split a water molecule using less energy than is released when recombining the hydrogen and oxygen back into a water molecule. Antred (talk) 14:16, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
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