the dwarf was twenty feet long? . OK;;; that's an animal
I'd say "sir" to !!! -- j
.

There is reason to believe that a dwarf allosaur survived into the early Cretaceous in a cold climate at the bottom of the world.
It is a certainty that T-Rex saw the sky bomb that wiped out all dinos at the end of the late Cretaceous.

http://www.abc.net.au/dinosaurs/fact_fil...

Hah, yes. What's 90 million years (+ or -) anyway. LOL!

Actually, Allosaur, you caused me to look up the critters again because up until now for some reason I thought the two were contemporary cousins. They definitely were not. It was good reading so thanks for the comment.

I'm not that good for sure. It does drive me crazy sometimes!

I have often wondered if you would create a large Saltwater battery and a large bank of capacitors, could you harness a lightning bolt and then return that stored energy back out in a controlled fashion?

http://www.windpowerengineering.com/feat...
One lightning bolt can product 10 billion Watts.

Next Salt Water batteries are easily created and there is plenty of saltwater on this planet to use.
http://www.nanalyze.com/2013/11/aquion-e...

Large scale capacitors would have to be used to take the instant charge received from the lightning bolt.

Right now only 550 Farad capacitors exist.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news....

There are 500 watts per farad, so the 550 farad capacitor can hold 275,000 watts. That means you would need a bank of at least 37000 of these to harness one bolt of lightning.

Of course one bolt will power 56 average homes for one day.

Reminds me of Neils Bohr's description of the atom. "It is something, we don't know what, somewhere, we don't know where, doing something, we don't know what."

Duh, youse Cretaceous critters wuz mo advanced den us who done went extinct durin' der Jurassic.

I find Moray's concept interesting. It reminded me of another energy concept the Navy confiscated from the private sector several years ago and is giving it back due to lack of funding (Sequestration?). Myself and another Engineer at work followed the progress till the Navy showed up.It's called Polywell. Like Moray's concept, it's not yet proven. But hopefully research is again on it's way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-n...

Howdy, Allosaur. Actually, back when T-Rex walked the earth and I was a young'un, I had a thingy called a crystal set. Made many of my own said contraptions from junk parts. No batteries, no plug-in. Just an antenna (a piece of wire to a clothes hanger), crystal, coil (winding of wire on cardboard), a pin to stick the crystal in various spots to get a signal, another piece of wire to a ground, and headphones. The thing had enough power from radio waves to play a local AM station on the headphones. Yep, you could pick up lightning strikes as static pops from who knows how far away, too. Using this energy for something other than listening to tunes is possible.

Every single radio converts radio waves into electricity. If it couldn't, then radios wouldn't work.

Thanks. And if anyone finds a broken link, let me know. I'll then have to go to the Wayback Machine to find a link that will last.

Yes, what I said applies to your response to.

I subscribe to this You Tube Channel. This should give you an idea of Galts motor/generator. https://youtu.be/xNgpMkwX5qY

Yup, saw that, which was the reason I gave you a thumbs up. Again, well done.

I could have not stated this better myself. Of course the greatest progress is made when we open our minds up to the things we don't know that others pass over.

Thank you. You will notice I included references for everything I said.

Nicely done.

One minor detail: "dark matter" and its corresponding dark energy (though I would ask you to clarify on that one) are referred to as "dark" because they don't interact with normal matter. If you can figure that out you'll have a Nobel waiting for you...

The bigger issue is differentiating the signal you want from background atmospherics caused by storms. These typically drown out weak signals across the spectrum. That's why this device is intriguing - it actually leverages what to any radio operator is just noise!

As an interesting side note, the oldest radio transmitters in use were called "spark gap" transmitters because that's how they generated Morse code signals. The problem is that just like a lightning strike, the generated signal isn't restricted to a specific band, so the signal shows up across the entire radio spectrum, ie as noise! It was due to this reason that spark-gap transmitters were banned from use in the early 1900's and nearly cut off amateur radio entirely!

BTW - if you are caught knowingly generating interference using such techniques as spark-gap transmissions you can be fined heavily by the FCC. If you happen to live near an airport you can get sent to prison - interfering with aircraft is a felony.

See these links:

http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parse...

https://www.google.com/patents/US2008019...

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/2008019...

You are correct, and this is one of the reasons we have not developed a Grand Unified Theory yet - we can not understand the differences between gravity and magnetism sufficiently.

Very insightful description, thank you!

It's a shame your patent was so willfully rejected and abused.

The idea of dark energy and matter should be thought about even though Ayn Rand did not know of these recent concepts. If the dark energy could be caught by a. device of real matter then it's solved. As a very bright young physicist told me dark matter and dark energy are all around us in massive quantities...but know one knows why we cant sense them or what they are. Good ideas and history on this thread.

Tesla was able to create thunder storms in the streets of New York City. No one understood how he did it because he didn't try to explain it--he just did it. I read one piece that offered the idea that Tesla purposely did not leave behind any clues, instructions or instruments that could be used to figure out what he knew, because he didn't trust mankind. Who knows? He also, tragically, ended up a person who was compelled to count every piece of food and order his plate into sections with 3 peas, etc. Mark Twain was a frequent visitor to Tesla's NYC workshop--a testimonial to his fame, and supporting the idea that Rand knew of his work and based the idea of the motor on it.

When Ayn rand wrote AG it was after the invention of Dr T. Henry Moray had been refused a patent at the US Patent Office (even with a working model that produced 5kw continuously for 159 hours.

Ayn would certainly have heard about the work of Moray in the circles she ran in. His "free" energy device was covered in the news for over thirty years prior to her writing A.G. It was the perfect model for John Galt's primary power supply for the valley.

The interesting thing is that Moray's device did exactly what John Galt detailed. It drew electricity out of the air with an antenna.

As a long-time researcher into Moray's device I am very close to duplicating his wonderful invention. Moray could not explain the source of the electricity from his device and that is (ostensibly) why the US Patent Office denied his application. He described its characteristics in great detail. I talked with his son John but found he did not pay enough attention to his father's research to be able to duplicate it.

However, I have identified the source of the energy that Moray's device converted to electricity. He gave enough clues to make this possible now. The ultimate source of the energy is the Sun and it's solar wind. As this 'wind' of protons etc constantly bombards the planets of our system, it is a source that is tied to the behavior of the Sun.

What Moray's device did was to convert the mechanical vibrations created in Earth's charged upper atmospheric layers into voltage variations on a charged antenna. He then trapped these voltage changes into a series of step-down Tesla coils.

To illustrate the method he used, visualize a comb stroked through the hair and then brought close to a small piece of paper. We all know that at a certain point the paper will jump onto the charged comb. What we have all seen but not dwelt upon is that by moving the comb away from and then back toward the paper we cause the paper to wave back and forth toward the comb. In the case of our charged atmospheric layers they are the 'paper' and the solar wind is the 'comb.'

Moray charged an antenna with high voltage. Then as the solar wind compressed and decompressed the charged atmosphere all around us the field around his antenna would also compress and decompress. As the antenna was capacitively linked to the charged atmosphere the oscillations of the atmospheric charges made voltage variations occur between the antenna a the ground. Moray made crude, high-voltage diodes to allow some of the increased voltage to be trapped into his step-down Tesla coils.

Knowing where the energy comes from allows mankind to develop methods to trap that energy and utilize it. I, too, filed a patent application for the basic circuit and concept and the patent office refused it saying that it could not work. Then, they released my application over the internet which was a direct violation of the security promised to all inventors who file.... If the application is denied the USPTO is supposed to keep the application in a secure place to allow the inventor to make changes to his application to make it more acceptable to the reviewers. By releasing my application they did one good thing though. They made the basic concept available to the world so that others might build upon my work and that of Moray.