Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!killer!ames!ncar!gatech!rutgers!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!uvicctr!collinge From: collinge@uvicctr.UUCP (Doug Collinge) Newsgroups: sci.electronics Subject: Re: Free power from 'whispering wires' ?? Message-ID: <449@uvicctr.UUCP> Date: 10 Jul 88 01:51:14 GMT References: <3170@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM> <1310011@hpcilzb.HP.COM> Reply-To: collinge@uvicctr.UUCP (Doug Collinge) Organization: University of Victoria, Victoria B.C. Canada Lines: 29 In article <1310011@hpcilzb.HP.COM> eric@hpcilzb.HP.COM (Eric Novikoff) writes: >You CS types need to take an E+M class!!!! Listen politely but do not accept the assurances of an scientist or engineer who says something cannot be done. They seem to be highly inclined to invoke their intuition and call it science, extrapolationg wildly or applying formulae while not accounting for unknown variables. I don't know why this is but it certainly gives science a bad name. How often do you hear scientists say "We really don't understand much about this..."? A wonderful example: I was watching some show, 60 Minutes or somesuch, listening to a hydrogeologist laughingly put down water diviners, saying that "it just doesn't work" and so on as if he knew BECAUSE HE IS A HYDROGEOLOGIST. Well, I know it works because I use it to find buried pipes. I don't know if it works for digging wells but I certainly would not claim it is impossible. Anyway, in the case of the farmers stealing power from transmission lines, I'd take the one guy's word that he'd seen it done over dozens of EEs waving transformer equations proving that it can't be done. -- Doug Collinge School of Music, University of Victoria, PO Box 1700, Victoria, B.C., Canada, V8W 2Y2 collinge@uvunix.BITNET decvax!uw-beaver!uvicctr!collinge ubc-vision!uvicctr!collinge