Tech pioneer weighs future of energy
Date: Tuesday, July 03, 2007 @ 23:15:48 UTC
Topic: Testimonials
Overtone writes: Energy related extracts from an interview with Lee Felsenstein in the San Jose Mercury-News July 1, 2007 (also a brief bio).
Lee Felsenstein might be best known for his role in the 1970s and 1980s as the legendary Homebrew Computer Club's master of ceremonies.
"My talents are day dreaming and explaining - neither of which requires a computer," said Felsenstein, a 62-year-old designer and developer of analog and digital products.
Still, a Hewlett-Packard laptop sits on his desk in a cluttered and humble one-room office tucked behind a home-style Mexican restaurant in Palo Alto's California Avenue neighborhood. His workbench overflows with his preferred productivity tools: soldering iron, cable press, heat gun, volt meter, digital storage oscilloscope and a half-dozen brown paper lunch bags filled with spare batteries, nails, transistors and connectors.
He's a tinkerer and a thinker.
In the '70s, the son of a photographer and commercial artist was thinking about how to shake technology free from big institutions' clenched fist.
Today he's contemplating how to power computers and other electronics with new kinds of alternative energy.
Felsenstein discussed these topics last week with Reporter Nicole C. Wong. Here is a transcript edited by Wong and shortened by MPI:
Q What other things have you seen or been thinking about in terms of how technology can address society's needs?
A I've gotten interested in alternative energy. . . . I've been helping out a bit on a couple of projects. One of which might turn out to be exceedingly important, but I can't be sure. It sounds like it's impossible, and I like those kinds of challenges. But it involves the creation of electric power from static magnetic fields, meaning that you get a flow of electricity out of it without the magnetism decreasing. That's not supposed to be possible, according to our rules of conservation of energy. But where do these rules come from? They come from observation. . . . If engineers can create a phenomenon that hasn't been seen before, the physicists' job is to explain it. It doesn't work the other way around. We don't say we can't work on that because the physicists don't have an explanation for it. So I'm assisting some of the work that's going on in this area. It all has to be done under non-disclosure. . . . It's in the comparatively early days. But I think that it's possible. I believe that there is evidence and I haven't been able to find a fault in the methodology.
Q If this project succeeds, how would that change things? Whom would this help?
A Everybody. It's the battery that never runs out. You can power a whole society with this. And it would change an awful lot of the rules. I don't know what all of the implications are. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be an overnight transition. . . . Devices would be built with their power generators inside. You wouldn't worry about it. This is all pretty speculative right now, I must admit. But if it happens, the whole economy of energy has to shift accordingly. These energy economies have shifted before. It has happened over time, say with the introduction of petroleum vs. whale oil. It will continue to happen.
Lee Felsenstein – Electrical Engineering Consultant - Earned his BSEE at UC Berkeley. His first employment was with Ampex. Lee was the Moderator for the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, for more than a decade. Twenty three companies were begun by members. They included Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who co-founded Apple. From 1992 to 2000, he was a Senior Associate with Interval Research, a Palo Alto, California, computer lab funded by Paul Allen, designed to help create and support future computing technologies. Lee earlier designed two computers that now reside in the Smithsonian Institution. He received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1994 and was inducted into the Computer Museum of America Hall of Fame in 1998. On April 3rd, 2007, Lee received the Editor’s Choice ACE Award by Electronic Engineering Times magazine. In this short video interview, he talks about our breakthrough (without mentioning MPI, which has permission to use the clip below). Lee is a consultant to MPI. He authored the Summary of our energy breakthrough that appears on the MPI website: www.magneticpowerinc.com
http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=379134&fr=yvmtf
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