F6FLT
Skeptics and critics are seldom welcome anywhere but in the last few years the division has grown. I don't notice it as much as some because I'm a freak and truly welcome criticism and lively debate.
I have been banned from overunity.com, energeticforum.com, magnetosynergy.com, and even here, the most open forum on the subject, my thread on free energy scams and fairy tales, has been blocked though.
This has never happened to me on conventional physics forums although I have discussed topics on the fringe and been criticized for it.
I see much more ostracism in free energy than in conventional science. On arXiv, you can even find papers that are completely out of the conventional theories, about exceeding the speed of light or about anti-gravity.
Conversely on a FE forum, when one explains that surface waves or other objects defined by physicists are not at all what stivep, champion of disinformation, describes, one is banned.
I think of it this way, I cannot know what I cannot imagine and 99% of the battle is understanding what the actual problem is. So when a critic/skeptic claims X cannot happen because of Y I research Y for as long as it takes until I understand it the nature of the problem. It feels a little like cheating because the critics are actually giving us half the answers to a possible solution, lol.
This is the right method. However, before following it, there is a first step to take: that of facts. A skeptic can say that X cannot happen because of Y, but if the facts contradict him (I say facts, not their interpretation or experimental artifacts), then he is wrong. Facts take precedence over theory. The first thing is always to establish the reality of the claimed facts.
On Rosemary Ainslie... it's debatable.
A debate like the sex of angels then, without any hope of operational results:
the reality of the facts is not demonstrated, so in science, end of story.
Not only has no one been able to reproduce the facts claimed by Rosemary Ainslie, despite the simplicity of the set-up, but also her measurement errors have been demonstrated.
The problem with the free energy movement is that it is unable to separate the wheat from the chaff and draw conclusions. It perpetually rehashes the implausible past stories of so-called free energy like the Ainslie setup, which become urban legends.
This inability to capitalize condemns it. Salvation can only come from skeptics like TinselKoala, but those are stifled. They are not very prolific because they take the trouble to verify what they say, they propose fewer ideas because they have eliminated the obvious bad ones rather than spreading them on the forums, they are critical and therefore the object of attacks, and the austere truth they detail is less amusing than the fantasized fictions and pseudo-scientific entertainment of the FE gurus. Humans prefer dreams to reality. It's easier to wallow in faith and indulge in fairy tales than to acknowledge failures and move forward.