Thread: More snake oil?

I believe that the only outstanding theory of a famous scientist is that of relativity (sp?)

Just because we have not been able to (yet) travel fast enough to prove/disprove this theory does that mean he is wrong??

This theory also helps explain the phenomenum (sp?... Incis when are we getting spell check???) that astrologists have seen in relation to black holes.

By the way for those who don't know the scientist is Albert Einstein

Re the Prius:

Originally Posted by cookiesa

Ummm actually it runs on electricity. And the petrol engine is not the only source of power generation it uses

Sure if the minute amount of power that is fed back into the sytem while braking etc is counted. It runs on petrol BUT does get reasonably good economy (as long as you dont talk about diesels in the same sentence!)

Let alone the massive environmental cost of manufacturing and later disposing of, all those batteries in the darn thing.

The REAL issue is - it's a PRIUS for gawd's sake ! Who give a **** ?

I don't disagree with you... the whole concept is really flawed. The same vehicle less all the battery and motor weight fitted with the a new generation diesel would no doubt be more fuel efficient and more recyclable.

Priced a set of new batteries for a Prius lately


Even the electricity generated by regenerative braking still came from the original energy source - petrol.

Originally Posted by cookiesa

Ummm actually it runs on electricity. And the petrol engine is not the only source of power generation it uses

How do you think the electricity gets into the battery?
Oh wait, it's from recovering kinetic energy, which was created by the petrol engine.



The prius is not a plug-in hybrid.

Originally Posted by cookiesa

I don't disagree with you... the whole concept is really flawed. The same vehicle less all the battery and motor weight fitted with the a new generation diesel would no doubt be more fuel efficient and more recyclable.

Yes, but not as marketable to dumb celebrities.

[QUOTE=abaddonxi;671892]I'd call steam water.

ID call it the gaseous form of water.....

Originally Posted by Dougal

Steam engines run on coal. Water is just the transport medium.

they also run on any other energy source that can heat water past its boiling point at various pressures

Originally Posted by CraigE

Um there is something wrong with that statement. The coal is burnt to heat the water to create steam to create pressure/energy.

Theres nothing wrong with that statement, you need outside energy to heat the water so all your doing is changing the energy from one medium to the next which isnt really all that effecient as everytime engergy changes mediums you loose some to entropy (which is typically identifiable as heat or light or sound).

on the prius front........

there are several prius's that have been hacked to allow external charging so its achievable... all you need now is a windmill and an alternator to charge it or a biiiiiig set of solar panels so you can trickle charge off of moonlight. (or become nocturnal so it can charge during the day)

Ive seen at one of those royal show type affairs an engine running on water, aparently.......

in reality what it was running on was a battery. Battery voltage was used to crack water (via inverters to make it semi effecient into its component elements of hydrogen and oxygen this was then plumbed back into the carby to be drawn into the engine and burnt. Looked good, untill you looked closely and watched for more than 20 minutes or so. the engine was started and run up to a fair clip on petrol (and that took a while as apparently the engine had been tuned for hydrogen) then turned over to the new hydrogen system.

It ran, right up untill the battery went flat and had to be taken off the engine for charging. to make it interestng the engine had no cooling system so that you could see the whole engine and know that nothing sus was going on. for safety the flywheel was housed in a big metal shield to prevent people from putting their hands on it...

what was actually happening...

the engine had a temp cut out on the head so when it overheated it shut down removing the need to expose the fact that once the battery went flat the engine would stop. inside the flywheel housing was a gargantuan flywheel which had to weigh at least 150kg which to my way of thinking would store a fair wack of energy once run up to speed on the petrol side of business and then when it was up to speed it was switched over to the hydrogen.

when the engine shut down an small brake was automatically applied to the flywheel to make it stop like a normal engine that had run out of fuel at speed.

but if you only watched it once maybe a second time later in the day to prove it was repeatable it looked the goods.

Originally Posted by cookiesa

I believe that the only outstanding theory of a famous scientist is that of relativity (sp?)

Just because we have not been able to (yet) travel fast enough to prove/disprove this theory does that mean he is wrong??

This theory also helps explain the phenomenum (sp?... Incis when are we getting spell check???) that astrologists have seen in relation to black holes.

By the way for those who don't know the scientist is Albert Einstein

The General Theory of Relativity has stood up very well to all practical testing.

It has real applications too. Your GPS uses lorenz transformations on the satellite signals to compensate fro relativistic effects.

If you want to get down and dirty with this type of physics in laymans language, try posting a question here:

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