Thad Mauney
Thad Mauney | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Arizona (B.S. 1974); Colorado State University (Ph.D. 1984) |
| Known for | Thermodynamic measurement of high-efficiency and claimed over-unity devices; exposition of E. T. Whittaker's scalar potentials |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | analytical chemistry, Thermodynamics, Electromagnetism |
Thad Mauney is an American chemist and independent researcher, holding a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry, who is a recurring speaker at the ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference run by Tesla Tech. Within the independent-inventor and free-energy community he is known less for advancing a particular device than for a methodological argument: that experimenters working on high-efficiency and claimed over-unity machines must measure them by rigorous, closed-boundary thermodynamic accounting if their results are ever to be taken seriously. He has also lectured on the scalar potential formulation of electromagnetism due to E. T. Whittaker.
Biography
Mauney received a Bachelor of Science with Honors in chemistry from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 1974, and a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, in 1984. His graduate-era research was in environmental analytical chemistry; he is a co-author of a study of the solvent extraction of coal fly ash published in Environmental Science & Technology in 1986.
He subsequently worked as Director of Research and Development at GeoResearch, Inc. in Billings, Montana, and as Senior Scientist with Michael Baker Jr., Inc. of Alexandria, Virginia, developing instruments and software for environmental science, range science and geographic information systems. He was awarded a United States patent for an "Interactive Mapping System" in 1993.
Alongside his scientific career Mauney trained in Tibetan Buddhism and was ordained as a Lama at the Billings Dharma Center in 1994. In later years he has worked as an independent nutritional health scientist and educator, and is the author of popular books on preventing and reversing breast and prostate cancer by nutritional means.
Scientific contributions
Thermodynamics for the experimenter
Mauney's best-known contribution to the alternative-energy community is a practical methodology for measuring device performance. His starting point is a diagnosis of why the field is ignored: ultra-high-performance and new-energy devices, he argues, are routinely dismissed by physicists and engineers not necessarily because the devices do nothing, but because the performance claims made for them are stated in terms that make no sense thermodynamically, and are therefore unfalsifiable and unreproducible.
His remedy is deliberately low-tech. In his 2014 ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference lecture, "Thermodynamics for the Experimenter: Measuring Hi-Efficiency Device Performance," he set out the thermodynamic fundamentals an experimenter actually needs and then showed how to obtain defensible numbers using inexpensive apparatus — "string, pulleys, water, thermometers, and clocks." The point of the exercise is that mechanical work and dissipated heat can both be captured calorimetrically at the boundary of a well-defined system, so that an efficiency figure can be quoted in a form another researcher elsewhere can check. Mauney's emphasis on reporting results that others can validate is a rebuke aimed inside the free-energy community as much as outside it.
Open-system thermodynamics
Mauney returned to the theme at the 2017 conference with "Open Systems Thermodynamics and Free-Energy Devices." The argument here concerns the boundary itself: the familiar prohibitions of classical thermodynamics apply strictly to closed and isolated systems, whereas any real bench apparatus exchanges energy with its surroundings. Researchers in this community, including the device proponents Mauney addresses, hold that some machines draw on an ambient environmental energy flux; Mauney's contribution is to insist that whatever one believes about the source, the accounting must be done honestly — the experimenter must state where the system boundary is drawn and account for every crossing of it, rather than declaring a violation of conservation from a measurement that quietly omitted an input.
Whittaker's scalar potentials
At the 2019 conference Mauney presented "EM Scalar Potentials According to E. T. Whittaker," an exposition of the work of the English mathematician E. T. Whittaker. Whittaker's 1903 and 1904 papers showed that the electromagnetic field, conventionally written since Heaviside's vector-calculus recasting of Maxwell's equations in terms of one scalar and one vector potential, admits an alternative representation in terms of two scalar potential functions. As Mauney presents it, what Whittaker proved is a means of transforming one style of expression into the other, and the alternative form may help make sense of the scalar waves associated with some of Nikola Tesla's inventions.
Mauney noted that researchers including Tom Bearden have drawn attention to the possibility that, because the scalar potential is defined everywhere in space, interference patterns between scalar potentials could in principle transmit information or energy in ways not available to ordinary transverse waves. Consistent with his general approach, Mauney framed the talk around implementation rather than assertion: what Whittaker's mathematics does and does not extend, what would actually be needed to realise these equations in a physical system, and what that might mean for the development of new energy sources.
TeslaTech
Mauney has been a repeat speaker at the ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference organised by Tesla Tech in Albuquerque, New Mexico, appearing in the programs for at least 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2021. His lectures alternate between the measurement and electromagnetic-theory topics above and health-related subjects; his 2016 talk, "The PULSE: How your heart can guide you to extraordinary health!," belongs to the latter group. Recordings of his conference lectures have been issued by TeslaTech on DVD and posted to the organisation's YouTube channel.
Talks
- "EM Scalar Potentials According to E. T. Whittaker" — ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference, Albuquerque, 10 August 2019
- "Open Systems Thermodynamics and Free-Energy Devices" — ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference, Albuquerque, 27 July 2017
- "The PULSE: How your heart can guide you to extraordinary health!" — ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference, Albuquerque, 2016
- "Thermodynamics for the Experimenter: Measuring Hi-Efficiency Device Performance" — ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference, Albuquerque, 1 August 2014
- "Frequency Based Technologies... Past to Present" — Steve's Place
Works
- Pat A. Soltys, Thad Mauney, David F. S. Natusch and Mark R. Schure, "Time-Resolved Solvent Extraction of Coal Fly Ash: Retention of Benzo[a]pyrene by Carbonaceous Components and Solvent Effects," Environmental Science & Technology 20(2), 1986, pp. 175–180
- United States patent, "Interactive Mapping System," 1993
- Preventing & Reversing Breast Cancer Naturally
- Preventing & Reversing Prostate Cancer Naturally