Miracle Cures

I want to believe. I really, really do. But I can’t. I can’t believe that water can be converted into energy without some external energy source being involved. There have been stories recently about cars that run on water. I try to have an open mind and stay optimistic about these things, but after I conduct a little research, I am inevitably disappointed. Then I end up passing the bad news back to you. Sorry about that.

Hydrogen-powered cars are also a bit of a miracle cure, although there is a scientific basis to the way those can work. Hydrogen-powered cars use hydrogen to store energy (which means you need to get the energy from somewhere else).

Popular Mechanics (Nov 2006): The Truth About Hydrogen

At first glance, hydrogen would seem an ideal substitute for these problematic fuels. Pound for pound, hydrogen contains almost three times as much energy as natural gas, and when consumed its only emission is pure, plain water. But unlike oil and gas, hydrogen is not a fuel. It is a way of storing or transporting energy. You have to make it before you can use it — generally by extracting hydrogen from fossil fuels, or by using electricity to split it from water.

And while oil and gas are easy to transport in pipelines and fuel tanks — they pack a lot of energy into a dense, stable form — hydrogen presents a host of technical and economic challenges. The lightest gas in the universe isn’t easy to corral. Skeptics say that hydrogen promises to be a needlessly expensive solution for applications for which simpler, cheaper and cleaner alternatives already exist. “You have to step back and ask, ‘What is the point?’” says Joseph Romm, executive director of the Center for Energy & Climate Solutions.

Fuel cell vehicles require hydrogen, and that means hydrogen stations replacing or coexisting with gas stations. There are three seemingly insurmountable problems: production, storage, and distribution. But at least it’s real science.

Water-powered vehicles claim to avoid the production, storage, and distribution problems faced by fuel cells. When your car runs out of fuel, simply drop in a bottle of Poland Spring. That’s the claim made by Genepax, which recently demonstrated a prototype of a water powered car for Reuters.

There is not a lot of information to go on here. Because there is so little information, I won’t be conclusive that it doesn’t work as advertised. But it does seem that there has to be something else to the energy-generating water system. Here is PhysicsForum.com commenting on the Reuters Genepax video.

What is claimed is a direct violation of the first law of thermodynamics. Any claim of using water as a fuel (with no other source of energy input) is a claim of perpetual motion. (russ_watters on PhysicsForum.com)

There are other companies selling conversion kits that you can use to run your car with water. Go ahead and click on that link. When you’re done listening to the pitch and reading the page, come back here.

Here’s a little bit from that page:

Our easy conversion guide will show you how to use electricity from your car’s battery to separate water into a gas called HHO (2 Hydrogen + 1 Oxygen). HHO, also called Brown’s Gas or Hydroxy, burns smoothly and provides significant energy – while the end product is just H2O! HHO provides the atomic power of Hydrogen, while maintaining the stability of water.

HHO is H2O. Water in gas form is steam. You can get hydrogen and oxygen from water through electrolysis, but you need more energy for that reaction than the energy you get out of it. Where does that energy come from? Most likely, it comes from a battery. If you can put water into a box, get energy out of it, and end up with water as a waste product, without using a battery or other compound, then you will have invented a perpetual motion machine. The only neater trick would be to pull energy out of a box, without putting anything in or taking any waste products out.

CORRECTION: HHO is not H20. But “the energy required to generate the oxyhydrogen always exceeds the energy released by combusting it.”

Miracle cures play on our hopes and fears. Here’s another link for you to visit. Please do, and come back when you’re done listening to the pitch and reading the page.

Miracle diets are among the original popular cures. This one may be more legitimate than others, but I did like how this site had a person standing up on my computer screen, talking to me, just like the water car site. He’s a doctor, or maybe just an actor, and not as pretty as Rachel from RunYourCarWithWater.com.

There are countless other examples of miracle diet cures on the Internet, just as there are plenty of “water your car” or male virility or hair growth or hair removal or cancer cure sites. They are all based on the same mechanism, the one that all miracle cures are made of: taking your hopes and fears, selling you an empty box, and separating you from your money.