The MEG, a claimed solid-state free-energy device developed by a team led by Thomas E. Bearden, a retired United States Army lieutenant colonel, and granted a United States patent on 26 March 2002. Its proponents claimed an indefinite output of 2.5 kilowatts drawn from the vacuum, with several units linkable to power a house.
The Hunt for Zero Point closes on it. Cook notes that the Patent Office traditionally refuses free-energy applications and treats the grant as de facto acceptance that something is there, writing that the date may in time prove momentous. That reading does not survive scrutiny: a patent grant is not a validation of physics, and no commercially available MEG has appeared in the years since. It is the most credulous page of a book that is elsewhere disciplined about evidence.
Connections
Zero-Point Energy · The Hunt for Zero Point · Engineering the Vacuum · Magnetic Energy Converter · Maverick Inventors