As an engineer I' m well aware of the law of conservation of energy and I read a lot of comments of the evangelists who protect this law with enormous stubborness. Nevertheless I want to adapt this law in a very simple way.

Energy cannot be produced or destroyed. This is the main topic of the law of conservation of energy and there is a lot of discussions about this. But this is not my point! My point is the summation of energy. The balance between input energies and outputenergies is done by a summation. An engineer for example sets up a system (i.e. boiling water) and summarizes the input energies (current, heat, whatever). Then he summarizes the output energies (heat, vapor and so on). Last but not least he divides the ouput energies by the input energies and gets the efficiency which is always smaller than 1.

My point is that you can only compare the summation of input to the summation of output when you are absolutely shure that you captured all types of energies. Otherwise you cannot compare the summations.

An example. When someone would have done the energy-balance 500 year ago of let us say a turning magnetic wheel, he would get it wrong because magnetism was unkown that day. He would think "Uhmm. These funny stones make my wheel turn and I dont know why. The Input is less than the Output. This wheel cannot work."

So let me turn this whole discussion into a new direction. Are we absolutely sure that we know all possible kinds of energy? If yes, we can compare input with output. If no, we simply cannot do this!!

Of course we can do a balance of input/output energies if we are interested in certain energies and do not care about the rest. This can be done! No problem. But we cannot compare input to output thinking we captured all possible energies. This is logically nonsense and it show a huge arrogance of us human beings against nature. Do we really think we know all the secrets of nature?

The existence of water on earth is still unknown.
Why is a combination of two gases Hydrogen and Oxygen a fluid? It should be a gas!

What if an unknown energy goes in a process and turns into a known energy? Overunity!
What if an known energy goes in a process and turns to a unknown energy? We dont even have a name for this.

So the law of conservation of energy is right but not the way we use it.

Abgas Engel