Mark Goldes
Mark Goldes | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1932 |
| Residence | Sebastopol, CA, United States |
| Nationality | USA |
| Known for | New Energy |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Entrepreneur |
Mark Goldes (born 1932) is an American entrepreneur and self-described inventor known for founding a series of companies devoted to alternative-energy research. He is the founder of the non-profit Aesop Institute and has been associated with Magnetic Power Inc., Room Temperature Superconductors Inc. and Chava Energy. Goldes is best known for promoting proposed "fuel-free" generators and engines said to draw on vacuum or zero-point energy, claims that are widely regarded as unproven and outside mainstream science.
Biography
Goldes served as an officer in the U.S. Air Force Reserve from 1953 to 1960, seeing active duty in North Africa and Germany from 1954 to 1956, where his principal assignment was as a senior director of the Berlin Corridor Control Radar near Kassel, Germany. He was the Wing Commander and a Distinguished Air Force Graduate of the AFROTC at San Francisco State University. Goldes held an FCC First Class Radiotelephone License and an Advanced Class amateur radio license, and his early employment included work as an engineer and radio announcer at stations in Freeport, New York, and San Luis Obispo, California.
Between 1958 and 1959 Goldes established an experimental curriculum and taught world politics, history and sociology at Monterey Peninsula College, and in 1960 he founded Emerson College of the Monterey Peninsula, an experiment he associated with the beginnings of the free-university movement. His first full-time position after college was as an executive trainee with the Ampex Corporation in Redwood City, California.
Career
In 1970 Goldes founded and served as CEO of the AESOP Company, a financial consulting firm that installed Employee Stock Ownership Plans and performed economic research for government agencies. He had earlier served as Chief of Housing and Economic Development with the Oakland, California, Redevelopment Agency, and was a founding board member of Technology Consortium Inc., a prefabricated-housing firm. His earlier consulting clients were said to include the New York office of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
Goldes began full-time work on alternatives to fossil and nuclear fuels in 1973, founding the non-profit Aesop Institute. In 1975 he became founder and CEO of Sunwind Ltd., which developed the "Windmobile," a wind-electric hybrid vehicle invented by the late James Amick, a professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan. The Windmobile was the cover story of Popular Science in November 1976. Sunwind wound down operations in 1983.
In 1984 Magnetic Power Inc. became a commercial affiliate of the Aesop Institute, following a suggestion by physicist Robert Forward that zero-point energy might be developed as a source of electricity. After Russian work on polymer ambient-temperature "Ultraconductors" surfaced in 1991, Goldes and Kevin Shambrook visited Moscow and in 1993 co-founded Room Temperature Superconductors Inc. as a subsidiary to commercialize the materials. The company completed four Small Business Innovation Research contracts, including a Phase II award, with the U.S. Air Force and the agency now known as the Missile Defense Agency. Goldes spoke on room-temperature superconductors at four Global Superconductivity Conferences between 1989 and 1993. Chava Energy was later created to fund the commercialization of work begun at Magnetic Power Inc. and Room Temperature Superconductors Inc.
Claims
Through Magnetic Power Inc. and Aesop Institute, Goldes promoted a proposed generator he called GENIE (Generating Electricity by Nondestructive Interference of Energy), together with "fuel-free" and "NoFuel" piston engines said to run on ambient atmospheric heat, and small "Magnetic Power Modules" that he predicted would produce electricity continuously without batteries or fuel. Goldes described the technology as converting zero-point or vacuum energy from the quantum vacuum, using the term "Virtual Photon Flux."
These claims have not been demonstrated in any independently verified device and are regarded by physicists as inconsistent with the laws of thermodynamics; a working generator drawing usable power from the quantum vacuum, or a heat engine operating from a single ambient reservoir, would contradict established physics. Critics have characterized the various company announcements as examples of long-standing free-energy and perpetual-motion claims, and skeptical commentators have questioned both the technical basis of the projects and the promotional nature of Goldes's public writing.
Honors
Goldes was nominated for the World Technology Award in Energy in 2006. He made a presentation at the 2004 Arlington Institute conference on breakthrough technologies, and has spoken at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the Western Conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and National Renewable Energy Laboratory Enterprise Forums in Washington, D.C., and Sacramento.
Education
- Master of Arts (Fellow) Graduate Program in the History of Ideas, Brandeis
University 1956-58. - Master of Arts: History, Political Science, Sociology, San Francisco State
University, 1957. - Electrical Engineering: one year each at the Polytechnic University of New
York and California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo.