It does take more energy to charge the water with radio waves which is what they are trying to improve. However, it still would not be violating the laws of thermodynamics because the flame’s cost is the integrity of the water molecules which break down into hydrogen and oxygen.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/11/14/saltwater.fire/

I don't know where gluonium is, and this is my first comment,
but this has to be bullshit. All the energy is being supplied by the
RF field, and a lot more is being put in than is available
in the "flame" of dissociated hydrogen and oxygen from the water,
if that is what it is (it may just be plasma from RF ionization).
Otherwise it would violate the laws of thermodynamics,
which even Einstein said were the most elegant and solid, being
based on minimal assumptions, as well as conservation of energy. What it
does demonstrate is the blinding stupidity/ignorance of not only people,
but also the news media. Remember the cold fusion fiasco? Any
scientist or engineer worth their salt, so to speak, would not give
this idea a second's thought, any more than the hoax videos like the one
purporting to show how to make water burn by putting two AA
cells in it for 45 minutes. Woof!

The laws of thermodynamics imply that their radio wave generator is using at least as much energy as the fire is producing. There's no way to reorganize saltwater into chemicals with higher total binding energy (unless a nuclear reaction occurs). He basically just invented a cool new method of electrolysis. It will only be useful for cars if he can separate and store the hydrogen & oxygen before they react.

The reporters in this video are ignorant like George Bush -- hydrogen from electrolysis is just an energy medium. The energy for electrolysis has to come from somewhere, typically the electrical power grid, which in the US is powered mostly by fossil fuels. Non fuel cell electric cars are satisfactory -- we need to work on more environmentally friendly ways of generating power for the grid.

Hmm, which episode is this from? Season? Good stuff though. "In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"

Edit: Nevermind, I found out. It's Season 6, episode 21 - The PTA Disbands. :-)

Isn't the second law of thermodynamics "things always get more random / warmer"? Presumably the burning reaction makes the molecules more random, and it's definitely getting warmer.

After doing some Googling, it isn't necessarily the same molecules that are burning and releasing oxygen. If you mix something that's going to burn with Sodium Chlorate, NaClO3, then 2 NaClO3 + heat --> 2 NaCl + 3 O2.

wouldn't that violate the second law of thermodynamics gryphon?

Ah. So if this is a science ... *adds to collective*

Yeah, my husband the chemical engineer likes to sum up thermodynamics as "You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game." Upvote all plain English "rules"!

The Black hole information paradox results from the combination of quantum mechanics and general relativity. It suggests that physical information could "disappear" in a black hole. It was a contentious subject for science since it violated a commonly assumed tenet of science—that information cannot be destroyed.

In 1975, Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein showed that black holes should slowly radiate away energy, which poses a problem. From the no hair theorem one would expect the Hawking radiation to be completely independent of the material entering the black hole. However, if the material entering the black hole were a pure quantum state, the transformation of that state into the mixed state of Hawking radiation would destroy information about the original quantum state. This violates Liouville's theorem and presents a physical paradox.

More precisely, if we have an entangled pure state and we throw in one part of the entangled system into the black hole while keeping the other part outside, we get a mixed state after we take the partial trace over the interior of the black hole. But since everything within the interior of the black hole will hit the singularity within a fixed finite time, the part which is traced over partially might "disappear", never to appear again. Of course, we don't really know what goes on at singularities once quantum effects are taken into account, which is why this is conjectural and controversial.

Hawking was convinced, however, because of the simple elegance of the resulting equation which 'unified' Thermodynamics, Relativity, Gravity and Hawking's own work on the Big Bang. This annoyed many physicists, notably John Preskill, who in 1997 bet Hawking and Kip Thorne that information was not lost in black holes. In 2004 Hawking had to pay out to Preskill when Hawking conceded that Preskill was in fact correct.

There are various ideas about how the paradox is solved. Since the 1998 proposal of the AdS/CFT correspondence, the predominant belief among physicists is that information is preserved and that Hawking radiation is not precisely thermal but receives quantum corrections. Other possibilities include the information being contained in a Planckian remnant left over at the end of Hawking radiation or a modification of the laws of quantum mechanics to allow for non-unitary time evolution.

In July 2004 Stephen Hawking announced a theory that quantum perturbations of the event horizon could allow information to escape from a black hole, which would resolve the information paradox. Basically, his argument assumes the AdS/CFT correspondence which states that an AdS black hole is dual to a thermal conformal field theory, which is unitary. However, as of 2004 the full details of the theory have yet to be published, so most peers are reserving judgment before accepting the result. When announcing his result, Hawking also conceded the 1997 bet, paying Preskill with a baseball encyclopedia (ISBN 1-894963-27-X) 'from which information can be retrieved at will'. Thorne, however, remains unconvinced of Hawking's proof and declined to contribute to the award.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_paradox

So, if the bible is against alcohol...why do all Christians drink the blood of Christ (cheap wine) every Sunday? Darwinism is Evolution, fool! (it's obvious this chump never read The Origin Of The Species). Stars are forming all the time (NASA has the evidence), fool!

Christianity and science are mutually exclusive beliefs (you can't believe in both). I love hearing them attempt to explain science (or anything for that matter!) NOTE: the mis-spelling of Matter as Mater when mis-quoting the rules of thermodynamics (at 7:30)!

Farhad - you should use speech marks ("") and the source when quoting someone (*ahem Dave Gorman *cough), EG:

In reply to your comment:
“I mean I seen people who run creationist research labs, yet are completely wrong in their scientific arguments, 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that 'in a closed system all things tend to entropy, if you omit the closed system' and state simple 'all things tend to entropy' that would mean evolution is impossible. Which is frankly bullshit.”

I think its important that they do that in Wallace, in our day and age people are too willing to believe someone with a degree over their own gut common sense. I mean I seen people who run creationist research labs, yet are completely wrong in their scientific arguments, 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that 'in a closed system all things tend to entropy, if you omit the closed system' and state simple 'all things tend to entropy' that would mean evolution is impossible. Which is frankly bullshit.

I'm sure the second law of thermodynamics stopped working for a while there.

The car is plainly impossible. You can't make fuel on the fly and get better (or even close to) the efficiency than we have now with out breaking the first and second laws of thermodynamics.

Aside the technical boner that therealblankman noted, this seems rather legit. The science behind it, however, is not appearant. Unless he's figured out how to break thefirst law of thermodynamics (though they mention plugging in the machine), I don't see how this machine is economically feasable. I will say, watching the one guy (Byerly) touch a lit torch that can supposedly cut through steel intrigues me.