• determinism2 [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I had a hippy bus driver who would blow our minds talking about this guy. He would also watch all of our games and hit on our moms in the stands.

  • SacredExcrement [any, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    While I don't buy that he was killed, this is pretty goddamn funny for just one line alone tbh

    In an email to PolitiFact, a Pentagon spokesperson said the agency doesn’t have any information on Meyer or his death.

    Great work there Politifact

  • RNAi [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    There's these things called "thermodynamic laws"...

    • garbage [none/use name,he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      what about hydraulics? i feel like there's probably a way to make water push a piston. i'm not extremely versed in thermodynamics except for a general gist, but if hydraulic fluid can be used to lift massive amounts of weight in a forklift, i feel that some genius could probably figure out a way to make it move a fucking piston.

      • RNAi [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        Molecular hydrogen (H2) and molecular oxygen (O2) are more "energetic" than water (H2O). More exactly, their molecular bonds have more "stored energy" than the molecular bonds of water. When you mix the two they fucking explode and form water. Then, you can turn water into H2 and O2 again, but for it to happen you need the energy back. If you used it to move a piston, that water is gonna be water.

        Energy needs to come from somewhere.

        "Oh but the material of the 'water fuel cell' use Nanotechnology(TM) to split H2O into H2 and O2". Ajah, the only way for that to happen is the material providing the energy to "split" the water and then form the energetic bonds H-H and O=O. In that case the material would be the fuel, (and will of course be finite), not the water.

        "Oh but this nanomaterial is actually a catalyzer of the reaction of water splitting". Yes, that exists and is well known, but no matter how good the catalyzer is, you still need the energy back.

        • garbage [none/use name,he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          i'm really not enlightened to this kind of shit and you'll be wasting your time trying to explain it to me. but from my understanding, hydraulic fluid is locked into a tube. there is not much chemistry to it. all i know is that it can create a lot of pressure, enough to lift thousands of pounds.

          feel like someone smart could maybe be able to slowly release that pressure into moving pistons efficiently.

          • RNAi [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            Yes, that's steam power, or just hidraulic transmission of force. Water and vapor are good to move energy, but you won't get energy from the molecules like you do with gasoline. Unless you make the atoms explode, but that's atomic energy. And it's particularly "un-practical" to get atomic energy from water.

            For example, the energy of a sea wave is just the water being moved by the wind, which is caused by the sun heating up the atmosphere unevenly, and the wind is actually just molecules distributing that thermal energy as evenly as possible.

            The energy of a river, is just water going downhill, "liberating" gravitational energy, again molecules distributing energy as evenly as possible. How did the water got up? It was heated and/or evaporated thanks to the sun and wind (aka the sun) and rained on top of a mountain. So the source of energy is again the sun. Why not saying gravity is the source of energy? Cuz gravity is a really fucking weird thing and you might think the smart nerds have it figured it out, but you go to college and in every new Physics semester you keep learning the smart nerds actually don't have it figured it out completely, FUCKING SHIT MAN. But anyways, gravity is not the source of energy.

        • garbage [none/use name,he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          water comes out the tap though. fo free. even if you only get like 3 miles a gallon or so, it seems like it would be more efficient than having to invade and colonize countries, go to war, drill into the earth, and destroy the atmosphere... right?

      • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
        ·
        3 years ago

        If you heat it up a lot so it turns to steam, the expansion absolutely can move pistons. That's how coal fueled trains work: they boil water by burning coal and the steam moves pistons.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        i feel like there’s probably a way to make water push a piston.

        Okay yes, but you can't carry an entire river around just to run your car off of.

        There is a thing where solar power is used to run a pump and water is pumped uphill or in to a tank during the day. Then when the sun is off the water is allowed to flow downhill over a hydroelectric generator, allowing a system that provides steady power all day and night without relying on really complicated shit like batteries.

  • aaro [they/them, she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Meyer's_water_fuel_cell

    It looks like he just invented a perpetual motion machine :thinking-about-it:

    additionally:

    Stanley Meyer died suddenly on March 20, 1998, while dining at a restaurant. His brother claimed that during a meeting with two Belgian investors in a restaurant, Meyer suddenly ran outside, saying "They poisoned me." After an investigation, the Grove City police went with the Franklin County coroner report that ruled that Meyer, who had high blood pressure, died of a cerebral aneurysm. Some of Meyer's supporters believe that he was assassinated to suppress his inventions. Philippe Vandemoortele, one of the Belgian investors, stated that he had been supporting Meyer financially for several years and considered him a personal friend, and that he has no clue where the rumours came from.

    And here's the URL from the watermark :cringe:

  • Vampire [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Gonna take this as ironical coz it's posted in /c/memes , but I see some comments aren't getting it so I'll mansplain:

    Hydrogen is an energy storage mechanism, not a source of energy. You can use energy to split the h2o in water into hydrogen and oxygen, and use that hydrogen to run a car, but the energy had to come from somewhere. The hydrogen serves the role of a battery; a car that runs on a battery is powered by the energy it gets from the charger, not by the battery itself.

    • Commander_Data [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Plants use energy from the sun to split H+ ions and O2, maybe he invented a photosynthesis car?

      • RION [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        Broke: fossil fuels

        Woke: plant fuels

        Bespoke: plant cars

        Baroque: fossil cars

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          They're really good at running on sunshine and very bad at all the things you would want a car to do.

        • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I mean, you don't really want a solar powered car. You want a battery powered car that's charged with solar energy collected on a prior day.

          That said, vehicles like the Sunswift lay the groundwork for efficient transfer of solar energy into mechanical energy. And there's definitely value in further researching this field of study for - say - building scale solar powered air conditioning or portable charge pads.

    • mao_zedonk [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      That might be a little confusing - the hydrogen is no more a "battery" than diesel is a battery that stores the energy from the sun - like that's indeed what the molecule does but not really what people tend to think of when they think of a battery.

      Like it's probably simpler to explain that hydrogen is a fuel, but to make that fuel from water you had to put more energy into splitting the water than you get out of the burning of hydrogen as a fuel.

      Also hydrogen is explosive as fuck, so hydrogen-powered cars spook me out.

  • CarsAndComrades [comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    There's a bunch of urban myths with similar stories, and lots of scam artists will sell you gadgets that install on your car and claim to improve mileage. We talked about a few of them in this podcast episode.

    • Saint [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Or in this case, come up with a bunch of baloney

      • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        But think how great the water car would have been. You get to drive (bad) but not pollute (good) and you can take a sippy of some water at the pump while filling up. It's a win/win honestly.

        • TankieTanuki [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          The Tupolev Tu-22 had a cockpit air conditioner that literally used vodka as its coolant. Its pilots got drunk all the time.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        People do invent shit tho. If you don't keep engineers overworked and underpayed they'll start taking apart the fridge to build flying machines.

  • newmou [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I am wondering what would happen to global drinking water resources if all our cars ran on water lol

    • hypercube [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      in that new Mad Max, there's a really funny bit at the start of a newscaster going "latest update on the oil wars-" "new water fueled car technology-" "Now there's the Water Wars"

        • TankieTanuki [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          The official explanation is that it's essentially a lost art, and that the existing blueprints are insufficiently detailed to actually build them again.

          An analogy that I've read is "staring a fire with a bunch of sticks gets harder once you've invented lighters." It makes sense to me that older technologies would be lost to the ages once advances make them obsolete, but in this case the F-1 engines remain to this date the most advanced and powerful piece of rocket technology ever put into operational status. It's as if NASA forgot how to make lighters because they were content with using sticks.

          Rocket Year Thrust (MN)
          Saturn 1B 1966 7
          Saturn V 1969 40
          Falcon Heavy 2018 15
          NASA SLS Block 1 Planned (Not Operational) 39

          Edit: I was going to look up more info here but Google Translate no longer works on this page for me for some reason. Can any other comrade get it to work? It's fucking strange because I swear to god it used to work for me. Now it just says "oops! Technical difficulties." I can translate text excerpts but it won't do the whole web page.

          Edit2: I got the translation working with a browser extension.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Your video says they did create an equivalently powerful liquid fuel engine, though. Less "We couldn't re-make it" and more "We looked at this hand made hand fitted bespoke grandfather clock manufactured by a guildmaster in Prague in 1845 and we built something that works the exact same way but uses modern construction and design principles."

            Like, if you wanted to build a 1953 Chevy Corvette obviously the old tools and dies and assembly lines are gone, but you could build a frame and an engine and body and so on using modern techniques and it would look the same and do the same thing.

            • TankieTanuki [he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              Your video says they did create an equivalently powerful liquid fuel engine

              That would be the F-1B engines for the SLS rocket that I included in my table. They have never been built or tested, much less used.

              The Soviets built and tested an equivalently powerful engine for their N1 rocket in the 1960s, but it failed. Creating a design is no guarantee of success.