Misdirection is a powerful psychological force. It just feels right that energy can come from nowhere, because that's how our world works! There is stored energy all over the place, but we weren't there to see it get stored, so it's like it came from thin air.

Energy just comes up out of the ground, as trees or coal or oil or uranium, and we use it, and when we need more we just do more digging or chopping!

Geologic time is an alien concept for humans, far more alien than anything ever shown on Star Trek. Even those of us with lots of science education have trouble grasping it. It's really quite hard to look at an oil field and think of it as the accumulation of millions of years' worth of solar energy. It's like trying to remember that you are one of seven billion people in the world: that number is so much larger than the number of your friends that you can't really understand it.

There are plenty of Americans who want something for nothing, and people like to root for the underdog. It's the feel-good sensation that's sweeping America!

If the purported energy source is really unlimited, could we really consider it clean?

This is a fun way to approach the paradox of perpetual motion: if we had a machine to generate energy from nothing, (or to magically teleport unlimited amounts of energy from Alpha Centauri, or whatever) we'd soon fill up our Earth with lots of extra matter (matter=energy, don'tcha know), and eventually the planet would collapse into a black hole!

Or, much more likely, we'd heat the Earth up enough that we could successfully radiate the excess energy out into space. Al Gore would not like that plan one bit.

Of course, while you're violating the second law of thermodynamics, I suppose you could always build a second machine that takes the exhaust heat from your perpetual-motion-powered cars and planes and sends it back to wherever it came from.

I remember from my Thermodynamics class that modern gasoline engines are only about 37% theoretically efficient (most of the energy is lost as heat). Even if his invention doesn't violate scientific paradigms and is merely a more efficient induction motor, it might build a market.

Well, sure, but you've got to ask yourself which is more likely: that the chef with no science education, no professional experience with motors, no understanding of thermodynamics, and so little knowledge of his field that he allows his invention to be branded as a perpetual motion machine (as if that will enhance his credibility!) has made a previously unknown breakthrough in induction motor efficiency? Or that he has merely constructed an insanely complicated-looking but otherwise uninteresting variation on previously known physics?