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Comment by uvdiv | Hacker News Reader

There's no point in reading the paper, it has near-zero information value. All it contains is as an assertion by the authors that the electric resistance heater (nice photo attached) emits more heat than it draws from the electric outlet it was plugged into. That one assertion, embellished with tables of numbers showing the claimed temperatures of resistance heaters and computed thermal radiation and so forth.

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Isn't the purpose of the paper to document just that? Not explain the device itself, but rather that the claim that the thing outputs power?

If you're going to complain about it, fuss over the setup or errors, not the tedious details that document the experiment (and provide a way for others to cross-check their practice and results later). Certainly there's the possibility for burying the truth in mounds of irrelevant data, but if your experiment hinges on showing that a resistor's load is larger than expected, I would expect to see some heavy details on how that was monitored.

Emitting significantly more energy than it consumes in steady-state operation as measured on multiple occasions by independent reputable scientists is a pretty big deal.

But extraordinary claims and all that. It could be still be some sleight-of-hand fraud, though concealing a power source of such energy density or fooling those instruments would be quite a trick.

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