Geekfoolery

A few days ago I wrote about a way to save gas that involved leaving the truck at home and hooking up a motor to my bicycle to deal with 30 miles across LA (and back again every day). I’m still serious about that one, but with a bit of luck, a man in Florida might have found a way to make all this business about saving gas a thing of the past. He’s found a way to burn salt water.

John Kanzius has a lab in his garage in Florida, and he’s been trying to find a way to treat cancer with radio waves, hoping to find a frequency that kills cancer cells and leaves regular cells intact. As the story and attached video show, his radio waves actually cause salt water from the canal behind his house to burn.

It seems simple enough, and unless the video is a fake (for the moment, I going with that it isn’t) then this could be pretty darn interesting. Salt water is reasonably abundant, the theory here is that the flame produced is burning hydrogen, so emissions should be clean… this *should* be making all of us jump for joy.

And I would, except for my memories of cold fusion. In 1989, two researchers named Fleishman and Pons claimed to created a nuclear fusion reaction at low temperatures, and next thing you know, these guys are on the cover of Time Magazine, and we all imagined the energy crisis was over.

Except it wasn’t. Experimenters couldn’t exactly reproduce cold fusion reliably. Research into cold fusion has continued, but it seems like a phyics parlor trick more than anything else.

Is that what’s going to happen to Kanzius’ flammable water? The one thing that isn’t mentioned in the video is how much energy it takes in radio waves to ignite the water, and how much is necessary to keep it going. I am not a scientist here, but that seems to me that part left out of the report that needs to be answered before we can get excited.

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