'Balderdash' on physics schedule

Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News

Published March 9, 2007 at midnight

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Roy Masters has been a diamond cutter, a talk-radio host and a hypnotist.

Now the 79-year-old British- born Oregon resident is tackling theoretical physics.

He says he's discovered a limitless source of free energy - gravitational force - that will illuminate the world's cities and power faster-than-light spaceships to the stars.

A yet-to-be-built "electromagnetic vacuum engine" will harness gravity and supply "an endless, clean supply of energy that would free us from foreign oil," according to Masters.

The American Physical Society says Masters' theory is bunk.

Yet it's allowing him to present his ideas today at its Denver meeting, which has drawn more than 7,000 physicists.

Why would a pre-eminent scientific society, whose 46,000 members include Nobel Prize winners, permit a presentation it considers nonsensical?

"It's part of APS' long-standing policy of openness in science," said society spokesman James Riordon. "APS lets anyone present (at its annual March meeting), and so we probably have a dozen or so crazy people out of 7,000 every year."

You don't have to be a physicist, or even a physics student, to make a presentation at the meeting. All you need is an APS membership card, and anyone can join the society, founded in 1899.

So each year, the annual March meeting includes a handful of presentations about: the merits of cold fusion, interpretations of the fossil record that allegedly support Noah's flood, "free energy" sources similar to Masters', why Einstein got it all wrong, and "perpetual motion machines," devices that purport to produce as much, or more, energy than they use.

In 2003, the American Physical Society issued a policy statement saying it "deplores attempts to mislead and defraud the public based on claims of perpetual motion machines or sources of unlimited useful energy, unsubstantiated by experimentally tested, established physical principles."

Even so, presentations like Masters' continue to pop up.

"It's a very small price to pay for this great, long-running tradition of openness," Riordon said.

Masters will deliver his presentation, titled "Electricity from Gravity," at 9:36 a.m.

He said Thursday that critics don't intimidate him and that he's ready to "wrestle every physicist to the ground, because they only know what they've been told."

"There's not a creative brain among them," said Masters, who hosts the Advice Line radio program, which he said is broadcast on 133 stations.

Masters was trained as a diamond cutter but later sold the business to become a full-time professional hypnotist.

In 1963 he founded the Foundation for Human Understanding.

He holds no physics degree.

Physicist Reinhardt Schuhmann read the abstract Masters' submitted for his "Electricity from Gravity" presentation.

"It's balderdash," said Schuhmann, a senior editor of Physical Review Letters, an APS publication.

"It doesn't make any sense."

The main problem with Masters' concept is that it violates the law of conservation of energy, he said.

Though energy can change forms - electrical energy into heat energy, for example - it cannot be created or destroyed.

"You can't get energy from nothing, and that's basically the problem with all these schemes," Schuh-mann said.

Nonsensical findings

The American Physical Society's annual March meeting includes a handful of presentations that event organizers acknowledge are either scientifically suspect or outright nonsense. Year after year, a handful of researchers present findings on:

• "Free energy" sources that will solve the world's energy woes.

• The merits of cold fusion.

• Einstein's major blunders.

• Geological evidence for Noah's flood.Source: American Physical Society

ericksonj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5129

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