Grapesoda

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan ? In a nation thirsting for energy, he loomed like a messiah: a small-town engineer who claimed he could run a car on water.

The assertion ? based on the premise that he had discovered a way to easily split the oxygen and hydrogen atoms in water molecules with almost no energy ? would, if proven, represent a stunning breakthrough for physics and a near-magical solution to Pakistan?s desperate power crisis.

?By the grace of Allah, I have managed to make a formula that converts less voltage into more energy,? the professed inventor, Agha Waqar Ahmad, said in a telephone interview. ?This invention will solve our country?s energy crisis and provide jobs to hundreds of thousands of people.?

Established scientists have debunked his spectacular claims, first made one month ago, saying they violate ironclad laws of physics. But across Pakistan, where crippling electricity cuts have left millions drenched in the sweat of a powerless summer, and where there is hunger for tales of homegrown glory, the shimmering mirage of a ?water car? received a broad and serious embrace.

Federal ministers lauded Mr. Ahmad and his vehicle, sometimes at cabinet meetings. The stand-in minister for religious affairs, Khursheed Shah, appeared on television with him and took a ride in his small Suzuki rental, which was hooked up to a contraption that Mr. Ahmad described as a ?water kit.? Respected talk show hosts suggested he should get state financing and protection.

The country?s most famous scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan ? revered inside Pakistan as the father of the country?s nuclear weapons program and reviled elsewhere as a notorious figure in the international nuclear black market ? gave it his imprimatur, too. ?I have investigated the matter, and there is no fraud involved,? he told Hamid Mir, a popular television journalist, during a recent broadcast that sealed Mr. Ahmad?s celebrity.

The quest to harness chemical energy from water is a holy grail of science, offering the tantalizing promise of a world free from dependence on oil. Groups in other countries, including Japan, the United States and Sri Lanka, have previously made similar claims. They have been largely ignored.

Not so with Mr. Ahmad, even if he is an unlikely scientific prodigy. Forty years old and a father of five, he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1990 from a small technical college in Khairpur, in southern Sindh Province, he said in the interview. For most of his career he worked in a local police department. He is currently unemployed.

But he sprang up at a moment when Pakistan was intensely aware of its power shortcomings. Violent riots erupted across Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Provinces recently as temperatures in some places hovered around 110 degrees amid electricity shortages that stretched up to 20 hours per day. Chronic shortages of natural gas, which powers many cars and homes, result in lines snaking from gas stations. Energy politics are expected to play a prominent role in elections set to take place within the next 10 months.

In another measure of the issue, the United States government has donated heavily to electricity generation projects, hoping to win support from Pakistan?s largely hostile public; last week, Congress authorized $280 million for various hydroelectric projects.

News media commentators said the coverage of Mr. Ahmad?s claims was the Pakistani version of Britain?s ?silly season,? when journalists and politicians embrace the unlikely during the annual lull in politics. But for established scientists, it was a symptom of a wider, more worrisome, ignorance of science.

It shows ?how far Pakistan has fallen into the pit of ignorance and self-delusion,? wrote Pervez Hoodbhoy, an outspoken physics professor, in The Express Tribune, a national English-language daily. He added: ?Our leaders are lost in the dark, fumbling desperately for a miracle; our media is chasing spectacle, not truth; and our great scientists care more about being important than about evidence.?

The ?water car? is not the first unlikely episode in Pakistani science. In 2010 Atta ur-Rahman, head of the state higher education body, aired views that the United States government was financing a covert science project in Alaska that sought to manipulate the world?s weather and that could set off earthquakes, floods and tsunamis.

Dr. Rahman?s article incited a furious public debate with other scientists, notably Dr. Hoodbhoy, who has also sought to highlight a worrisome decline in academic standards in Pakistan.

Stories of widespread plagiarism, fake qualifications and doctorates granted under dubious circumstances have circulated in academic circles for several years. ?We have had a flood of academic garbage,? Dr. Hoodbhoy said. The trend was inadvertently accelerated under the military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, who required all members of Parliament to hold a college degree ? prompting some to acquire fake ones.

Pakistan is not lacking in academic talent. With 68 percent of the population under 30, according to the United Nations, education is a preoccupation among parents across the social spectrum. This year 200 Pakistani undergraduates will start at 50 different American colleges under the government-financed Fulbright educational exchange program.

Yet even the country?s academic achievements are mired in the old problems of politics, prejudice and religion.

The work of a Pakistani particle physicist, Abdus Salam, won him a Nobel Prize along with two others scientists in 1979, and it has been credited with paving the way for the discovery of what appears to be the Higgs boson particle, which was announced July 4.

But Dr. Salam, who died in 1996, is largely ignored in his homeland because he was a member of the Ahmadi sect, whose members suffer state-sponsored discrimination and, in recent years, attacks by violent extremists.

For his part, Mr. Ahmad brushed off his critics, claiming to have run the Suzuki for 250 miles on 10 liters of water.

?I am not concerned with theory. I have given a practical demonstration that a vehicle can run on water,? he said. ?What more proof do these critics need??

In a word, more. ?Water car? jokes have circulated widely on Twitter, while an Internet comedy group, The Naked Tyrant, rolled out a spoof video featuring a religious man who claimed to make his car run on ?pious deeds.?

And, as a reader of one newspaper noted in a letter to the editor: ?What is odd is that the only specimen so far on display is the one fitted in his own car.?


Salman Masood contributed reporting.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/wo...-pakistan.html

DWB

Drone strikes in 5...4...3...2...

BIGTYMER

I stopped reading once I noticed it was a book.

Harmon

...tl;dr...

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Sunny Day

I have a machine that runs on ONLY air. Send me all your money and hopefully I can get it to the people before THE GOVERNMENT & BIG OIL find out.


Are you people really that fucking stupid??

Yes.

Just send me all you're money

See, I just saved you from a rambling 20 minute video, of how you'll make money & get energy Independence, only to be billed $29.95 for life.

Vapid - BANNED FOR LIFE

Yes they tend to kill off people inventing up any freedom.

mikesouth

Are people this stupid really? Even a basic physics class demonstrates that the energy required to separate the Oxygen and Hydrogen in water is greater than the energy that can be gotten by burning both in controlled explosions.

Therefor a car that runs on water would have to have an additional energy source just to maintain the energy required to separate the two hydrogen atoms and the one Oxygen atom into combustible fuels.

You can't get something from nothing.

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Mike South

It's No wonder I took up drugs and alcohol, it's the only way I could dumb myself down enough to cope with the morons in this biz.

AdultKing

People are this stupid.

Example is the Howard Johnson motor. Lot's of Clickbank merchants sell "plans" to this oddity which slipped through the US Patents office years ago.

2MuchMark

Exactly.

I used to do this experiment myself when I was 7 years old - no kidding. I used to play with batteries, 200-in-1 electronic kits and even a basic chemistry set.

I put 2 test tubes in a plastic bucket of water, turned them upside down, and inserted a single wire into each tube, connecting the other end of the wires to the + and - of a battery.

After a while, bubbles appeared on the wires. One was oxygen bubbles, the other was hydrogen bubbles. It produced Hydrogen twice as fast as oxygen (Can anyone guess why?). It took forever but eventually I got enough to make a POOF when I took a match to it.

Anyway, there is too much energy loss and therefore not efficient. Pure water doesn't conduct electricity well. Saltwater is better but it would wreck a car or parts of it very fast. There are much cheaper ways to get Hydrogen.

This Indian guy? He's a scammer.

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Coup

Great. He should release his findings publicly so that they may be tested independently to see if his claims are verifiable. Until then its nothing more than bullshit.

mikesouth

Thats exactly what Im talking about I did that in 5th grade science class....and my little old grey haired teacher then asked the class why it wouldn't be practical to use water as a fuel for a car

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Mike South

It's No wonder I took up drugs and alcohol, it's the only way I could dumb myself down enough to cope with the morons in this biz.

shake

Even a tiny bit of effort and one could come up with a better scam than that.

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[ Nate ]

Stan Meyers...

Water Car

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Ecchi22

In Macedonia, we have a guy (local policeman lol) who claims that built two "perpetuum mobile" machines and can create energy from the earth spin around its axis..
He claims he can build a bigger version of his machine and power the Europe with it. It would just cost 22 million dollars.
The second one is a bit cheaper 2.2 million dollars (I know right) and it works by creating a "vacuum" and "harvesting the energy from it". With that one, we would supply all the fields with water, using free energy.

He patented his discoveries and have certificates.
When asked (in a morning tv program) how he did this, he answered that "he can connect all the planets in our solar system in a ring, and use that force that already exists out there to have unlimited energy".

So, we have genius minds who can "roll the planets" with their finger and produce unlimited energy whenever they want out of barely nothing, but somehow they can't make enough money. Now that is some great bullshit.

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Matt 26z

No invention useful to the world has ever come out of Pakistan. Nothing. Of course, the same can be said of the entire middle east and Asia (minus Japan).

19teenporn

The whole fucking universe started existing from nothing dude...

mikesouth

No it didn't...you completely do not understand the big bang theory or divine creation

Think of it more as a null value in a mathematical equation, just because you don't know what it is doesn't mean it is "nothing"

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Mike South

It's No wonder I took up drugs and alcohol, it's the only way I could dumb myself down enough to cope with the morons in this biz.

Chosen

Interesting

DBS.US

I made a car engine that ran on sea water, it worked great but just I couldn't figure how to stop the engine for getting rusty.

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2MuchMark

How can you believe in both the Big Bang theory AND divine creation?

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mikesouth

I never said that I do but of the origins of the Universe these are the two leading theories, only the third, "string theory" holds that a universe can "spring from nothing" but in reality even that isn't correct in that string theory holds that universes are more likely created when two or more universes "collide". I know this is a generalization but I don't want the scope of this thread to get out of hand.

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Mike South

It's No wonder I took up drugs and alcohol, it's the only way I could dumb myself down enough to cope with the morons in this biz.