In a nation thirsting for energy, he loomed like a messiah: a small-town engineer who claimed he could run a car on water.
The assertion — based on the premise that he had discovered a way to easily split the oxygen and hydrogen atoms in water molecules with almost no energy — would, if proven, represent a stunning breakthrough for physics and a near-magical solution to Pakistan’s desperate power crisis.
“By the grace of Allah, I have managed to make a formula that converts less voltage into more energy,” the professed inventor, Agha Waqar Ahmad, said in a telephone interview with The New York Times’ Declan Walsh. “This invention will solve our country’s energy crisis and provide jobs to hundreds of thousands of people.”
Established scientists have debunked his spectacular claims, first made one month ago, saying they violate ironclad laws of physics. But across Pakistan, where crippling electricity cuts have left millions drenched in the sweat of a powerless summer, and where there is hunger for tales of homegrown glory, the shimmering mirage of a “water car” received a broad and serious embrace.
Federal ministers lauded Ahmad and his vehicle, sometimes at cabinet meetings. The stand-in minister for religious affairs, Khursheed Shah, appeared on television with him and took a ride in his small Suzuki rental, which was hooked up to a contraption that Ahmad described as a “water kit.” Respected talk show hosts suggested he should get state financing and protection.
The country’s most famous scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan — revered inside Pakistan as the father of the country’s nuclear weapons program and reviled elsewhere as a notorious figure in the international nuclear black market — gave it his imprimatur, too. “I have investigated the matter, and there is no fraud involved,” he told Hamid Mir, a popular television journalist, during a recent broadcast that sealed Ahmad’s celebrity.
The quest to harness chemical energy from water is a holy grail of science, offering the tantalizing promise of a world free from dependence on oil. Groups in other countries, including Japan, the United States and Sri Lanka, have previously made similar claims. They have been largely ignored.
Not so with Ahmad, even if he is an unlikely scientific prodigy. Forty years old and a father of five, he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1990 from a small technical college in Khairpur, in southern Sindh Province, he said in the interview. For most of his career he worked in a local police department. He is currently unemployed.
But he sprang up at a moment when Pakistan was intensely aware of its power shortcomings. Violent riots erupted across Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Provinces recently as temperatures in some places hovered around 110 degrees amid electricity shortages that stretched up to 20 hours per day. Chronic shortages of natural gas, which powers many cars and homes, result in lines snaking from gas stations. Energy politics are expected to play a prominent role in elections set to take place within the next 10 months.
In another measure of the issue, the United States government has donated heavily to electricity generation projects, hoping to win support from Pakistan’s largely hostile public; last week, Congress authorized $280 million for various hydroelectric projects.
News media commentators said the coverage of Ahmad’s claims was the Pakistani version of Britain’s “silly season,” when journalists and politicians embrace the unlikely during the annual lull in politics. But for established scientists, it was a symptom of a wider, more worrisome, ignorance of science. It shows “how far Pakistan has fallen into the pit of ignorance and self-delusion,” wrote Pervez Hoodbhoy, an outspoken physics professor. He added: “Our leaders are lost in the dark, fumbling desperately for a miracle; our media is chasing spectacle, not truth; and our great scientists care more about being important than about evidence.”
The “water car” is not the first unlikely episode in Pakistani science. In 2010 Atta ur-Rahman, head of the state higher education body, aired views that the United States government was financing a covert science project in Alaska that sought to manipulate the world’s weather and that could set off earthquakes, floods and tsunamis.
Dr Rahman’s article incited a furious public debate with other scientists, notably Dr Hoodbhoy, who has also sought to highlight a worrisome decline in academic standards in Pakistan.
Stories of widespread plagiarism, fake qualifications and doctorates granted under dubious circumstances have circulated in academic circles for several years. “We have had a flood of academic garbage,” Dr Hoodbhoy said. The trend was inadvertently accelerated under the military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, who required all members of Parliament to hold a college degree — prompting some to acquire fake ones.
Pakistan is not lacking in academic talent. With 68 percent of the population under 30, according to the United Nations, education is a preoccupation among parents across the social spectrum. This year 200 Pakistani undergraduates will start at 50 different American colleges under the government-financed Fulbright educational exchange program.
Yet even the country’s academic achievements are mired in the old problems of politics, prejudice and religion.
The work of a Pakistani particle physicist, Abdus Salam, won him a Nobel Prize along with two others scientists in 1979, and it has been credited with paving the way for the discovery of what appears to be the Higgs boson particle, which was announced July 4.
But Dr Salam, who died in 1996, is largely ignored in his homeland because he was a member of the Ahmadi sect, whose members suffer state-sponsored discrimination and, in recent years, attacks by violent extremists.
For his part, Ahmad brushed off his critics, claiming to have run the Suzuki for 250 miles on 10 liters of water.
“I am not concerned with theory. I have given a practical demonstration that a vehicle can run on water,” he said. “What more proof do these critics need?”
In a word, more. “Water car” jokes have circulated widely on Twitter, while an Internet comedy group, The Naked Tyrant, rolled out a spoof video featuring a religious man who claimed to make his car run on “pious deeds.”
And, as a reader of one newspaper noted in a letter to the editor: “What is odd is that the only specimen so far on display is the one fitted in his own car.”
Agha Waqar’s HHO kit explained
Posted on August 4, 2012 by scientist
All who make comments on Honorable Agha Sahib they must know how his kit works.
Here I am elaborating the construction of his kit. Where, I will try to address the questions of many.
1. Why Agha uses distilled water? Is he adding some hidden substance? How electrolysis is possible without a catalyst?
2. What is the battery usage during Special Type of electrolysis?
3. How milliamps of current are able to break water molecule?
4. Is it possible from electrolysis to produce a large quantity of hydrogen that it can work without storage?
5. Is it possible from electrolysis to produce a large quantity of hydrogen that it can work without mixing other fuels?
First of all you have to understand resonance.
RESONANCE: In some mechanical and electronic mechanisms when Energy is applied with some Rhythm (frequency) Output of the energy becomes much higher than energy applied constantly. The frequency required in a system to occur resonance is called resonant frequency of the system.
continued
waiting for your comments @ [email protected]
This is not correct to say that the output energy becomes higher or more than the input energy. It is equal in theory and less in practice because of system loss. The amplitude of oscillation increases significantly at resonance not because of higher energy output but because the system resistance decreases drastically at resonance. When the oscillation amplitude and system resistance are traken together to account for the energy output, it is always less than the input.
Hope this helps.
my comment is very long please tell me on email how can I send it in one go
sab se pehley salam qoami hero agha khan ko jis ne awam ko mayoosi se nikalne ki aik umeed de hi meri request hi apni awam se k ap please kisi bhee govt. k kisi bhee member pe bharosa na kare q k in sab sayasi logo ko achhi tara jante hi pls meri pakistani awam se se request hi k aap loag is hero ki us khud mada kare ikhlaqi ho ya chahe paiso se is moqa ko zaya mat hone de ye ALLAH ki taraf se madad hi un logon k khilaaf jinho ne pakistan ko mitana chaha pls is hero ki mada kare aor is hero ko is k maqsad me kamyab karayn pls thanks for for agha waqar khan
WE ARE PROUD OF YOU ' YOU ARE OUR NATION HERO.PLESE DO SOME THING MORE.WE ARE WAITING FOR NEW DHMAKA SOON. ALLAH BLESS YOU WE ALL LOVE YOU .KHALED & COMPANY.
splitting water through electrolysis is a slow and inefficient process for using as an automobile fuel. The elemental bond between Hydrogen and Oxygen is so strong that even at this technologically advanced stage it still eludes the scientists to figure reasons of this bond's strength. At about 1100 Centigrade temperature, water dissociates only about 15-18 percent into a mixture called water gas that was used in public transports during World War II. The process was cumbersome, inefficient and dangerous but it worked as a stopgap alternative. The splitting of water by Mr Waqar at ambient temperature into Hydrogen and Oxygen seems throwing the laws of Thermodymics into garbage. He should explain how he can use hydrogen as fuel and what will happen to Oxygen. In Fact he has invented a self-perpetuating machine that will revolutionize the input-put equation chemical reactions. If Dr Qadeer Khan has endorsed it, Waqar deserves our congratulations.
To prove his claim Mr. Ahmed should continue using his car on water kit and may also try to fit the kit in another few cars. If successful, this will automatically popularise his invention.
That is good but it need proof from few reputed and auto engineers then the Government and people of pakistan has not only acknowlege it but to support him in all aspects. Congrates to Mr. Waqar and hope for the best of nation.
this is a fake and a scam; as a Pakistani with a lot of experience in science this is clear to me….!
Dear All, this is totally wrong, and a fake water kit , he used tyre tube which already filed by gas, he just plays, you should see the tube …………..And then decide.
Any wise person can understand at the spot that it is despicable crime to declare Agha Waqar a fraud with out finding physically any fraud in car that he has already demonstrated in front of top journalists politicians and many Ph.D's. Some theoretical Ph.D's has launched hate campaign against the greatest inventor of mankind history Agha Waqar. All objections of these some IRRESPONSIBLE Ph.D's do not carry any weight and sense. They WRONGLY claim, this invention violates laws of science; in fact it does not. The reason of their totally absurd claims is their jealousy against inventor & their inability to understand that new invention. Sometime they say, Agha is not engineer, so he cannot invent. But Edison the biggest inventor of history was too neither Ph.D nor even B.Engg. Ata Rehman & Hoodbhoy are driving in wrong direction on one way road. Their all hue & cry is, that car cannot be run on electrolysis with battery but they do not know that method of Agha is ABSOLUTELY not conventional Electrolysis. When they will know his method, they will not sleep for many nights
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