This article from Sunday's Mail sounds amazing; so much so that it seems too good to be true. I remember back in the 1960's there was this rumour that someone had invented a car that could run on water, but the petrol companies had bought him out to prevent the idea reaching the market. Personally I didn't believe it, but stranger things have happened. A few years back we had 'cold fusion', but that proved to be a hoax.
There have been a number of urban myths like that. One I remember that goes back a looong way was that someone invented a carburetor that was enormous, and able to increase mileage to ridiculous and energetically impossible heights. The story also involves big bad industry buying it, and then not developing it. (Maybe related to the story you related.)
ReplyDelete"A few years back we had 'cold fusion', but that proved to be a hoax."
Actually there was/is something to that phenomenon, as some are beginning to acknowledge,...
https://phys.org/news/2009-03-cold-fusion-rebirth-evidence-controversial.html
...and as at least one high power physicist at the time said could be possible.
https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SchwingerJcoldfusiona.pdf
Bottom line, research was killed prematurely. (That said, I'm not sure how valuable a technology it would be, given that the reaction rather quickly destroys the substrate in which it occurs, but perhaps if we'd been able to follow up on that...)
But something weird is going on, and the concrete thinkers of the time with vested interests killed research inyo it.