Monthly Archives: April 2017

Idiotic vs. Stupidity in Electrical Generation

Banter can sometimes be a terrible thing.  Today many of us slosh hurtful words around without really contemplating what they are.  The word “idiot” is a good example.  Today’s dictionaries define the word “idiot” as someone who is very stupid, or senseless.  But the Greek origin of the word meant something quite different.

The Greek origin of the word “idiot” defined it as someone who was not trained in a particular field.  In the mildest form it was synonymous to “layman,” and at it’s most egregious it was recognized as someone who was ignorant of a particular training or set of knowledge, as “John the baker was not a doctor, therefore healing people would have been idiotic for him because he had no knowledge of the medical field.”

But the word “idiot” filtered down today to being just plain stupid.  And “stupid” implies the inability to learn, which is totally incorrect for the word idiot.  In the above paragraph I used the word ignorant to describe the state of idiocy.  I didn’t simply choose that word at random, nor was it used without extremely careful consideration.  Because  “ignorant” has become yet another slur to represent stupidity in our current culture.  And again it could not be more incorrect.  Ignorance only means lacking certain information.  It doesn’t mean that a person is incapable of getting that information, which is what “stupid” might seem to imply.  Conversely, “stupid” has nothing to do with intelligence.  Very intelligent people can be stupid for various reasons.  That only means they refuse to accept knowledge that is there for the taking.  So they may be ignorant of certain facts, meaning they don’t have the information pertaining to those facts, but it might be due to their own choice of refusing to acknowledge them.  It has nothing to do with their intelligence or cognitive ability.

I want to make a distinction between these words because  I’m going to be using these words below and I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding.

Our scientists and engineers currently working on electrical generation are stupid.  They are also idiotic.  And I’m not using these words as slurs or in any way attempting to demean their intelligence.  It’s simply that they choose not to search out information because they have developed rules for their current knowledge base that perpetuate the idea that no new information is possible now or ever.  They believe that they already know every possible thing about electrical generation that can ever be known, and that their system of generating electricity can not be improved upon.  They systematically choose to ignore new information or to research it.  That is the very definition of an idiotic system.  Their own system forces them to be stupid, or rather gives them the inability to learn new facts due to the faith in their current knowledge.  And whether they have genius IQ’s or even just normal IQ’s, they are stupid nonetheless because they have an inability to learn new facts.  The inability to learn new facts does not always come from low IQ’s, sometimes it comes from systematic conditioning.

Have you ever held a car alternator or generator in your hand and tried to turn it’s rotor?  If so then you know it is really dog-gone hard to turn that thing.  It takes a lot of force – like the engine of your car turning the alternator by a belt – to make it turn.  Why is it so hard to turn?

Although the answer is generally in depth with a lot of scientific principles regarding coils and electro-magnetism, the simple answer is that thin electric wires are wrapped into coils to pass through magnetic fields in order to create electricity.  So when a coil passes a magnetic field, although a current is induced in that coil from the magnetic field, and although that coil is the initial generating point of current, it is still nonetheless turned into an electro-magnet by the current inside it.

The thing about coils and elecro-magnets is that they create little things called eddie currents and other phenomena within themselves.  So the basic action of a coil with current in it is to RESIST CHANGE.  Therefore when that charged coil continues to move onto the next magnetic field of opposite poles – it resists changing for the new magnetic field.  That’s why it’s so hard to turn a generator or alternator.  It’s not rocket science.  It’s simply coil science.

Well then, you might ask, why do we use coils to generate electricity?  I don’t know.  I suspect it is because of confusion.  Because the laws of thermodynamics were built around the coil resistance that it takes to turn the generator.  The laws of thermodynamics then tell us that we will never get more power out of a generator than the power we put into turning it – Because it’s so dog-gone hard to turn it.  And it’s like a circle.  Scientists teach young aspiring scientists that they can never create more energy from a generator than the energy it takes to turn it, therefore they tell the young students to never try to find a better solution.  In addition, those young aspiring electrical scientists/engineers spend their entire lives not doing the research, not trying to find a better way, and remaining stupid (systematic inability to accept new ideas or technology)until they become the teachers themselves who now teach new aspiring young students the same bull-crap.  As the Lion King would say, “Acuna Matada.”  The circle of life!  For several hundred years the same systematic idiocy was used to retain the idea that the earth was the center of the Universe.  Or that fire was magic.  Those geniuses were wrong too.

What is an alternative to wire coils?  Could we just use a solid sheet of copper with the same weight as the copper in the coil to generate electricity?  We could do that but it wouldn’t be efficient.  Plus it would have almost similar but much smaller eddie current problems as the coil.  What we learned is that it’s not the amount of copper that induces electric current efficiently through a magnetic field, but rather the length of the copper wire.  However, the wire must be thick enough to handle what ever current is expected to pass through it.

So the question is – how do we build a block of wire – equal to the length of a coiled wire – that isn’t coiled?  I know how to do it.  But I am not trained in electric generation.  Therefore I’m an idiot.  But I’m not stupid.  And I’m not stupid because I’m ignorant of Thermodynamics.  Acunah Matada!

I’ll bet you could figure how to pass a bunch of wires that aren’t coiled past a magnetic field too.  Unless you’re a scientist.