Reply To: Where are Japan and China in funding Focus?

[TimS]

Don’t think so, guys.

The founder, the current chairman’s father, is Stephen Horvath. He still appears to be the senior scientific person at Star Scientific, at least he is the elder gent sitting at the instruments in the videos on the website.

This is the same Stephen Horvath involved in the “water powered car” silliness in Australia back in the ’70s. He was sufficiently convincing back then that he actually had a senior politician, Queensland’s premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, host a public display of the car. Unfortunately, it would not start and his mechanic was at the pub.
Horvath’s hydrogen Fairlane – The Courier-Mail

He claimed at the display that the car was powered by thermonuclear reactions. However, he actually got a patent for it back then,
United States Patent 3,980,053 – Google Patents
which depicts a car running by burning hydrogen created by electrolysis powered by the car battery charged by the alternator… so there was no fusion or muons involved, just many gullible people. He claims in the patent that his key innovation was a circuit that increases the electrolysis speed, generating hydrogen fast enough to power a car, as if that was the problem with this concept.

This gentleman may well be an excellent engineer. I believe the water powered car people are still selling the circuit in his patent for driving the electrolysis, with the caveat that you can’t sue them if it doesn’t actually work to run your car on water. Hovarth Energy Australia, created around the water powered car, became Star Energy a little over a decade ago. Now it is Star Scientific. I wouldn’t hold my breath.