Hi, today I'd like to crush some kids' dreams. Eh no! I'd like to put an end to some kids' future. Argh, that's not good. Lets just say that some kid has made some claims that need rectification. Roll the intro... The Rectifier! Enough with the intro! There is this kid, "Maxwell Loughan" who is seemingly a genius and has invented an awesome free-energy harvesting device. He has been interviewed two years ago by a TV network. Here is his shortened interview... News Anchor: "This is pretty cool..." "A real life Dexter's Laboratory." [Rubik's cube sounds] Reporter: "Dressed in his labcoat..." Max Loughan: "Yeah, I wear this fairly often." Reporter: "Max Loughan sits in his parents old Boiler Room." WHAT!? He solves Rubik's Cubes! Illuminati confirmed. Ha ha! Ugh, he is just a kid...just a kid... Lets just be more tolerant towards kids. And I'm talking to you too! Keep your hate to yourselves! I don't want anybody to harass this kid! Understood? Reporter: "A few months ago Max took the matter into his own hands," "and created this 'electromagnetic harvester' out of" "a coffee can, some wire, two coils and a spoon" Ha ha! And a spoon, "Never forget to spoon..." Max Loughan: "This cost me 14 bucks" Reporter: "The harvester conducts Radio-Waves, Thermal and Static Energy," "and turns it into Electricity!" And thats the lie! Max Loughan: "This wire, takes the energy from the air..." "Down below here, we turn it from AC into DC." Hmm! I presume using my patented "FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER!". Reporter: "So we take the device outside," "and wrap up Max's brother into a string of LED lights" Max Loughan: "BING!" Max's Mother: "Christmas tree!" You know how much I hate free energy claims, and I'll show you why this fake. But obviously this kid has been doing a pretty damn good prank that made him end up on TV... that takes "smarts" Let me quickly show you why this is fake. At least I respect his claim compared to devices with more than "100% efficiency". He is claiming, he is pulling energy from already existing (but never tapped into) source of electromagnetic energy. Discovering new things is always possible, right? To put it simply, what he made including the wire, and the coils, and the bucket... and the spoon! "DON'T FORGET THE SPOON!" would work barely up to 1 MHz from my experience with Tesla Coils. And there is no significant, wireless energy, in those ranges! Lets look at the LED string he turned on... If my estimation is correct, he had 30 strings on the front, which makes it 60 around and there are 6 turns so... 360 white LED's Let's say 300. White LEDs require around... 3 volts (DC) across them to turn on. and lets assume a low current of 5 mA through them, which means each white LED is consuming... 15 mW of power... times 300... it means that the whole string is consuming 4.5 watts of power, pulled from thin air! *Sigh* Now I cut five meters of wire, and I'm gonna put it in a big loop in my room, so it picks up the electromagnetic fields. It's not a perfect antenna, but its kinda similar to what Max used... "Besides the spoon!". Now if I probe one side of the wire, and connect the other side to the probe ground... my loop will pick up the electromagnetic energy in the room. That shows up as this fuzz on the scope screen. Which is made of many different frequencies. But if I measure the maximum Amplitude of all these, it's less than one volt and, actually I noticed that all of these spikes are actually generated by my camera, and go away if I turn it off. So not enough to power sh*t! I hate obvious sh*t claims that everyone believes! Now my scope has a very good FFT function, that shows what that 'fuzzy noise' looks like in Frequency Domain. You want the scope? Fine! I'll give away two of them at the end of the video. Now pay attention! The center frequency is 100 MHz, and since the 'scope and it's probe have a 100 MHz bandwidth, which is way more than enough for the test, higher than 100 MHz frequencies would be filtered. If I turn on my power supply... *Click* you see some strange noise that is radiated from the supply and, picked by the wire, so I turn it off. We have a block of higher level signals here... let's zoom in on them. There are a bunch of energy spikes between 80 MHz, and 110 MHz. Could these puny spikes be the source of the mysterious energy? Fu*k no! First of all, these are around 100 MHz. Way above what the magic bucket can handle! And second, for example this peak is at... 98.3 MHz. *Static* *Tunes smartphone radio to 98.3* *Static* *Radio Chatter* It's an FM Radio station. Or for example... this one at 99.3 MHz. *Static* *Music* Another FM Radio Station. *Music* These are the FM Radio channels in my area. There is some energy in the lower frequency, let's check that. There is a bunch of other spikes between 18 MHz and 30 MHz... probably a bunch of other local channels. And this bump around 9.5 MHz is the noise coming from the camera I was talking about. Then around 1 MHz I'm picking up some weak AM Radio stations. Then for some reason when I disconnect the ground connection, I get huge energy spikes at low frequencies! Could this be the source of free energy? Let's zoom in! Here they are, and the biggest on of them is right at 60 Hz! Could it... never-mind it's just the city power frequency picked up by my wire... I'm paying for it. So you see there is no significant energy anywhere close to where the 'magic bucket' can operate. What you saw in the scope where these microwatts of power we put in the air and nothing else. Look at this table. This is the American frequency allocations I found on Wikipedia showing all frequencies DC all the way up to 300 GIGAHERTZ And how they are all known and allocated for a purpose. Like radio, TV and mobile stations. Here is another spectrum. The table you saw was from zero all the way to around here And above that we have far IR, thermal IR, IR and the visible light is a narrow band here. And above that we have ultraviolate he he ULTRAVIOLATE X- rays and gamma-rays. Which brings me to the point that yes, in fact there is electromagnetic energy around us, so powerful that we can run our entire world from it, and THATS THE LIGHT FROM THE F*CKING SUN. When we have such a huge known source why are you going after magic buckets? *sigh* In order for the magic bucket to work we need a magic sun that radiate HUUGE energy at low frequencies And no, earth is not doing it. The magnetic field of the earth is DC, the same as gravity. The only way we can pull energy from it is to, put energy in it first, like a spring. We can of course harness this weak energy around us with a circuit like this. Just look at Ludic Science's video in my description. He used the same circuit to capture enough energy to turn on one LED for a fraction of a second. I would connect this part of the circuit to ground though. Two years ago I cut Max some slack hoping that he would come clean. Now after two years that he's 15, let's see if he has come clean
[spoiler: no] "TEDx: our resident science expert Max Loughan poses a simple yet profound question... Max Loughan on global green USA Who would imagine a teenager could put together some wire and other... Max Loughan meets the cast of Tron An extremely smart kid thinks CERN shifted us into a parallel universe
[wut o.O] 13 year old physicist's new theory on God Max Loughan speaks at Nexus Global Youth Summit" Oh come on Max, how far do you want to pull this prank? I understand that you want to get into MIT, but if you really want to make a difference, you have to be honest Stop it! Stop it now! I want your next video to be an apology and how it was all a trick. But point I don't think there's many people who understand this other than you, Max Loughan
[/r/punchablefaces] Oh I see, I don't understand it because I'm a common idiot. Thanks for the clarification Dad.
I mean what is this Nexus thing... well, it looks like a credible conference or something "There is a gentleman named Nikola Tesla and he started creating a tower on Long Island to try and figure out harvest wireless electricity" Come on host, Tesla made that tower to transmit wireless power - his intention was never to harvest free energy. Max Loughan... and he had also just invented a new kind of wireless energy harvester Max [ugh]: I had invented a device that extracts elctromagentic energy from all round us and transfers it into electrical here's how it works. [Mehdi coughs] You put the energy on one side of the device which is then amplifed that energy is then polarised and then integrated to opposite poles and semiconductors
[please slow down] where you put a coil around between and on each side the electromagnetic module collects energy. Wah, free energy" Well, he speaks pretty well and "knows" scientific terms and spits them out pretty well with confidence. But his scientific theory and explainations don't make sense - just search for his name and his channel and watch his videos yourself. I think it's the dad encouraging this. He seems to be in on the pranks. Let's read some of the comments under Max's videos. Ok. Let's see. "Reading some of the comments, I detect lots of jealousy out there. My goodness people, some of you sound like you might be Marconi or Edison! He made a crystal radio. I agree with you. Pretty sad when people want to shame a child for wanting better for this planet. Mehdi: Well you can't want good for the world when you're lying. Ooh, and here's the dad - Robert Loughan Proud dad! He is hiding something in the bucket... Robert is saying max is planning to make this bucket available as a kit. There are no hidden batteries! He is a REALLY good kid with nothing but GOOD intentions. Sorry, but I can't really believe that. So, Mr. Robert, you know there is no battery in there, eh? I see science blood on your hands. Stop it! There must be a battery in there or it's plugged in somewhere. Mehdi Chorus: GIVEAWAY TIME I have two of these keysight scopes to give away. This awesome baby is a 100 MHz, 2 channel scope that has a 20 MHz function generator, a frequency counter, a frequency response analyzer, a digital volt meter, and much more! It's like a WOW! at low cost. And if you want to be in more keysight giveaways, they have this WAVE 2018 coming up in march, when they give away tons of these cool tools. Just follow the link in the description and sign up. But for my giveaways, please don't write anything in the comments below. I realize that method is masking useful discussion. But instead, as usual, my patrons at patreon.com are automatically in the draw. For everyone else, I created a google form with the link in the description where you can go and say 'yes, I want it' or 'no, I don't' But why bother with no? Do you want your voice heard or something? Also, don't forget to subscribe to keysight labs channel for great knowledge on scopes Outro
How is nobody busting this kid's bubble like is highschool science teachers?
The comments on his channel are mostly all praising him for saving the planet and being a genius except for one person who tells the truth and gets attacked!
I detest "genius kid" stories because they almost always perpetuate the myth that somehow raw intelligence is a substitute for the years of study and collaboration that real discoveries take. Yes, this child discovered something with $14 worth of materials that the last 6 generations of scientists and engineers all missed out on in their lifetimes of work. Real geniuses don't draw out electrical diagrams on napkins for products they don't have patents for.
From video: “Here’s how it works. You collect the energy on one side of the device where’s it then amplified then polarized and the energy is then integrated in the opposite polar semiconductors where you put a coil around, between and on each side of the electromagnetic module and collect the energy.”
Collect the energy: you have something on the order of uW’s or nW’s.
Amplify it: will lose net energy in transistors here, amplifiers don’t increase power, just change voltage or current
Then polarize it: really not sure what he means by this? Maybe rectify it? So then there is loss in the diodes.
Energy is then integrated in the opposite polar semiconductors: I suppose he means a bipolar transistor, or maybe two diodes? Either way we lose more power here to losses and maybe potentially fill a capacitor with power?
Where you put a coil...: we lose more energy to winding resistance
The biggest problem here is that the energy even on the order of 100uW is not great enough to run any sort of semiconductor device alone. You would expend energy at a much greater rate than you returned it.
And that’s not to mention that as you said, this is being transmitted from a tower, so somebody is paying and there are massive losses.
If anything I think this kid is learning very dangerous lessons about how easy it is to fool “smart” people by talking techno-babble nonsense at them.
The only legit free energy - tapping into your neighbour's electricity line
They should classify the term "Free Energy" as a banned offensive word... Ah no, that would just make it more mysterious and interesting!
Thanks for posting these videos to promote science literacy. My brother is a jr. high science teacher and he spends at least one lesson each month showing kids how to approach science critically, and he's used these videos to do it.
Oh man, watched the video of his Nexus talk. While that video is cringe itself, try reading the adult conspiracy theorists in the comment section defending this genius. Apparently the oil industry is trying to destroy this kid.
Oooh, this makes me really want a Captain D/ElectroBOOM collab