Words are mere sound and smoke, dimming the heavenly light.
I left Methernitha that day with many questions buzzing through my mind. What if I asked to become a member? Would I be accepted? Would they let me see it then? Would I find out how the machine functioned, and whether trickery was involved? How long would it take to gain their trust? Stefan Marinov, a Bulgarian physicist and free-energy inventor, joined Methernitha and for many years attempted to understand how the machine worked. He claimed to be privy to the secret of the device, but he could not convince the group to share their knowledge with outsiders. In the summer of 1997, he leapt to his death from a library window at Graz University; his suicide note ended with: “feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes” (“I did what I could, let those who can do better”).
Soon after making my pilgrimage to the Methernitha, I heard about a conference devoted to free energy to be held in Berlin. Looking down the schedule, I was excited to see that there would be a presentation of a Testatika. I immediately booked a place and bought a plane ticket. When the time came, a somewhat half-heartedly constructed machine was described as a demonstration device, created to rule out certain hypotheses of the Testatika’s design—to show how it didn’t work. When I spoke to him after his talk and explained my ambitious quest to build my own working version of the Testatika, he earnestly recommended that a thorough reading of Gœthe’s Faust might be the best way forward.
—Nick Læssing, “Something for Nothing”
Cabinet issue 21—Electricity
