[This message has been edited by Hookt_Un_Fonix (edited January 21, 2007).]
I don't know the first scene so I'm not sure, but I imagine all we need to know is: Jason McAllister, whose qualifications as an inventor are such-and-such, invented a power source too cheap to meter, and gave it away.
Try to think of how you would preface a story that begins with your personal perspective of an historic event that all of us already know about.
Based on what you say, this is all background. OK. See if you can strip it to the bare minimum.
If McAllister were the MC, and you want this to be a scene, we'd want a POV, and we'd want dialog and action, soomething like
quote:
"Here it is," McAllister said. He took the cover off the device."Blah blah," Joe Reporter said.
"Not at all." Such-and-such, McAllister thought. "Blah blah."
quote:
A man by Jason McAllister unleashed a phenomenal invention upon the world.
But since McAllister is off-screen in your story, I don't think you want a scene; you just want him as background.
As for the perceived perpetual motion device, I know the laws of physics concerning the existence of such a device, and I know they are improbable. The machine itself to me is not perpetual, but renewable. The magnets can lose charge, and friction will eventually wear down the moving parts. It does however have longevity, and does not consume non renewable resources. Magnetism is a renewable supply of energy being force created from gravity and polarity, and it has rules that govern the flow of the energy. I am trying to find a way to work this into to a story with out boring readers with techno babble, or at the cost of the story itself. The canvas needs to be laid to paint the picture, but the canvas is not as important to the viewer if you get my drift?
In a fusion reaction, the energy comes from the strong force bond of an atomic nucleus (generally helium fused from a deuterium-tritium mixture). In a thermo-piezoic or thermo-electric material the energy comes from heat (usually from heat transfer, but at the molecular level certain laws of thermodynamics break down enough to allow direct conversion, given the right materials). With a zero-point generator you're mining the energy present in any given patch of space/time. Even that requires that the energy come from somewhere.
If you aren't getting energy from somewhere, then you have to put all the energy that will be released from the device over its lifetime in at the start, like with a battery.
Take a couple of magnets, and push them together north-north or south south. They repel each other. You have to put energy in to push them closer together. The repulsive force is determined by the distance separating them, an inverse square function. When you let go of them and they push each other apart, once again the force is given by the same function. The distance covered is the same. Thus the amount of energy that you get out of the reaction is only the amount you put in by pushing them together, minus friction loss.
It's like getting energy from a weight tied to a pully. You have to put energy in by lifting the weight to the top before you can get energy out by letting it pull down on the pully, and you can never get more energy out than it takes to lift the weight from the bottom back up to the top. The fact that you're using magnets doesn't bypass this fundamental principle of conservation. It isn't a matter of making more powerful/resiliant magnets, it's a fundamental princple of physical law that energy is conserved. If you're getting energy, something has to lose that energy.
We were able to make a magnetic pin wheel that moved rather fast, and we did apply it to a rough generator of shorts. It was from an old electronics discovery kit that I got as a boy from radio shack. It took some doing and it was not very stable, but we did get a small light bulb to light up.
I am sure with the proper knowledge of mechanics and chemistry a person could apply themselves to making something like this work. It would not be easy, but I think it could be done, and account for the laws of physics and magnetism.
Hell I might work on this myself in my limited free time so I can have a working model to satisfy my own need to prove it lol. I mean if a person that is mechanically inclined as I am can get a light bulb to go, I am sure someone with more knowledge and dedication can get several light bulbs to go, and stay on.
You might be under the impression that the induction represents free energy, but in fact the induced current generates a slight back-lash magnetic field which is slowing down the magnets on each pass (in addition to friction loss), so unless you keep putting energy in the system has to run down, even if you managed to keep it frictionless.
Thinking about this, I'm tempted to go with a thermo-electric material...perhaps an organic semi-conductor that incorporates something similar to a simple form of chlorophyl. You can mix it up in a kitchen out of the right chemicals...then you cure it by exposing it to a mild reagent while forcing current (DC, naturally) through it. After that, it becomes a sort of permanent battery, it continuosly absorbs heat energy and turns it into electrical potential.
Or you could go with a ceramic conductor that "catalyzes" fusion, anyone here remember the Fleischmann and Pons thing with the pallidium reactor? The theory looked plausible, even though nobody was able to get it to work (there are still people trying, because the theory still looks attractive). Just use a new ceramic instead of pallidium and say that fixes the problem (apparently, the process only worked in "bursts" when the pallidium became "saturated" with deuterium, but these bursts would inflict some kind of damage on the microstructure of the pallidium either due to heat or neutron radiation causing the pallidium to decay into some other element, so that any given cell stopped working fairly quickly). The pallidium cathodes used in those reactors couldn't be made without special manufacturing capabilities because they required a very precise microstructure...besides which, pallidium is rather expensive. Say that your ceramic is relatively cheap and can be baked in an oven, like your magnets.
The zero-point angle...I'm not really coming up with anything for that one. A zero-point energy extractor would require certain critical components to be manufactured with extraordinary perfection, you just can't get away from that. And, thinking about it, ZPE is pretty exotic compared to thermo-electric organic semi-conductors and cold fusion electro-cells. I think that the cold fusion idea has the best legs, even if it is generally believed to be discredited. You just specify that the pallidium cathodes were the failure point, that a novel yet inexpensive microporous ceramic cathode actually gets the process to work well enough to be a reliable source of energy...um, the downside is that you still need deuterium for fuel.
Okay, I'm for the thermo-electric organic semi-conductor then. that seems the most plausible to me, at least. I mean...it really isn't something anyone could seriously cook up in a kitchen out of readily available chemicals, but you can gloss over the exact composition, throw in a comparison to explosives recipies as a story justification for attempts to suppress it and to kind of create the impression that it would be possible. To bad, because there are actually web sites that describe how to make a Fleischmann and Pons type CF reactor, but none on making thermo-electric organic semi-conductors that I know about.
Kidding, though not so much, since I do happen to be related to the writer who first brought "flubber" into the national consciousness. Of course "flubber" is quite fanciful, it doesn't quite qualify as science fiction. But there were stories in which a thermopeizic material related to rubber are posited. The material absorbs heat, but compresses or tenses up in response. A shock or impact can cause the tension to be released, so that when you make a ball of the stuff and bounce it, it goes higher on each subsequent bounce...at least until the temperature drops to the point where it lacks the elasticity/energy to keep up the trick. As long as there is enough heat to keep the material pliable, it will provide "free" kinetic energy.
The problem with such a material is that it would be hidiously dangerous, and not at all as funny as it is in movies like Men in Black.
Recent science has confirmed that, at the nano-scale of molecular interaction where "heat" becomes discretely vectored kinetic energy, some of the laws of thermodynamics break down a bit, which is how complex organic molecules are able to perform a lot of the tricks that make us associate "organic" with "life". I don't own the science, and I didn't invent the idea. I did come up with generating an electrical potential as a safer mechanism than bouncing insanely at ever increasing velocities, though
But that's easy enough that other people have probably thought it up independently.
This idea is good because it potentially doubles as a mechanism for catastrophe, if it turns out that you can force a reaction to go "critical" by applying really high voltages to the ceramic cathode once high-intensity fusion is underway. In short, it's not just a cheap fusion reactor, it's also potentially a nuclear bomb that almost anyone can make at home. That gives governments a realistic motive to try and suppress the technology and also gives you a realistic mechanism for release of the technology to directly contribute to widespread (and very messy) social collapse. It also better necessitates the emergence of a radical new philosophy to deal with the implications of nuclear bombs that even a bright (well, perhaps not so bright) ten year old can make in the garage.
The "SF" change is simply that you replace the expensive and failure prone palladium cathode with a fictional ceramic (of unknown composition) which is (somehow) able to use lithium-7 (the most common isotope) instead of deuterium as a source of neutrons. Of course, it wouldn't really be possible for just anyone to cook up such a ceramic in their kitchen, the real deal would probably require a bunch of different rare metals measured with ultra precision and baked using special processes...but we're just going to say otherwise. That's why it's science fiction. Using fusion makes it plenty sciencey (as long as we don't do something kooky like having a nuclear reaction that can derive energy from iron ).
http://jlnlabs.online.fr/cfr/html/cfrpd.htm has a number of pictures of few very homemade looking rigs, some in action. It also has some graphs that illustrate just how far the palladium cathode is from being a viable "catalyst". http://www.lenr-canr.org/Experiments.htm has a lot of pictures of more...less French looking devices. You know, things that look like part of an actual laboratory. There are plenty of other articles, but the basics are very simple.