andygates

If you fancy a textbook illustration of why engineers should study science, take a look at overunity.com.  It's a forum for overunity engineers - people building perpetual motion machines.  And so many of them are self-taught garage engineers (pretty competent, even) but they suffer from the Engineer Problem: unless he knows why the physics says a thing is impossible, then an engineer, especially an old, time-served and respected engineer, risks thinking that he's got a better solution that just has better bearings or a clever arrangement of weights or dipoles.

They come up with great, gloriously random and utterly wrong stuff, these engineers, like this:

I've come to a conclusion that gravity has the same property as acoustic wave, but in comparison to any normal acoustic wave gravity is a DC acoustic wave. You may easily compare this to DC electric or magnetic field. With acoustic waves it's just a bit harder to imagine. But gravity is just that - it causes a constant accelerating movement in bodies: acceleration is caused by resonance in the same way as the swing of a resonating membrane increases with time. The only difference is that under gravity there are no constraints and so the velocity is gained infinitely. The mechanism of gravitation is as follows: bodies gain velocity due to acoustic DC wave gradient - it is very close to magnetic DC field gradient as it affects a magnet...

I admit it, I stumbled on the place while looking for a concise explanation of Mach-Lorentz thrusters...