exchemist
Veteran Member
Actually in general I agree with you there is a place for cranks on these forums. They serve a purpose in making you re-examine your assumptions and sometimes their ideas have a sort of mad genius about them, even if they are wrong. On one forum we had a thermodynamics nut convinced you could run a heat engine with just a heat source and no heat sink. He'd got the idea from, yes, you guessed it, Tesla, that great hero of so many cranks
, especially those with an engineering background. But he'd come up with an "ice engine", in which work was done by freezing water into ice so, that it expanded and lifted a weight. He thought this proved the idea of waste heat being necessary in a heat engine was misconceived. It took a while to analyse and show him where he had gone off the track. Of course he didn't believe me and eventually he got banned for wasting everyone's time, but it was a fun problem. (There is in fact a parallel with the early "atmospheric" steam engines, in which the power stroke was also driven by a phase change from cooling.)
But this flat earth fellow was pretty offensive in manner from the outset. I'm glad to see the back of him.