I think the concept of efficiency is outdated. For a group of open minded people i feel that laws of efficiency and equations are limiting.

laws are a method to inhibit people from doing things, i.e murder, theft etc etc it then follows that laws of physics thermodynamic energy efficiency etc are also limiting us. even the whole over unity concept.

Anyone else agree?

i agree to a certain extent, however the intruments used to observe and measure these things are designed based on intial observations which means that the measuring instruments themseleves are biased towards the intial theory. this is the same for anything and everything in science.

A good example would be measureing current via an ammeter. An ammeter was designed with the intial resitance, voltage and current equations in mind therefore it is biased towards these equation, in the same way a clock is biased and measures time according to 24 hours in a day, however there isn't exactly 24 hours in 1 revolution of the planet.

edit: another example would be the existence of atoms, we physically cannot see an atom no matter how powerful the microscope so we use STM's tofeel them and generate a computer image, the STM is biased based on the initial atom theory.

"another example would be the existence of atoms, we physically cannot see an atom no matter how powerful the microscope so we use STM's tofeel them and generate a computer image, the STM is biased based on the initial atom theory."

Unfortunately your analogy breaks down--because we never really "see" anything, except photons reflected or emitted by whatever it is we are looking at. In a sense the photons "feel" the target in almost the same way as the atomic force microscope "feels" the atom.
But I do agree--your perception of what those photons represent is strongly dependent upon your tacit "theory" of the world.
A black cat detector, which only responds to black cats, will lead you to believe that only black cats exist. Unless you can free your mind of logical error and bias, and perform the correct kinds of control experiments, that is...

@GestaltO

Also i find a particle that has no mass to be odd, how can something exist if it has no mass unless it is pure energy, and if it is pure energy interpreted by our brains then this again backs up my theory that atoms/particles do not have a physical presence in the current understanding of what we deem as physical.

I think most of our issues concerning matter and energy revolve around how we percieve things and how we apply our knowledge. As you say it seems odd that a particle could have no mass as this does not fit into the reality we know. We could call it pure energy or we could define the conditions necessary for a massless particle. It is well know that a mass on earth has the property of weight that can be measured but this does not apply in space. The properties of the mass have changed because the conditions surrounding the mass have changed. In space a mass may not have what we consider as weight but the mass still has the property of inertia or the tendency to resist changes in velocity thus this property of inertia would seem to be a consistent property of every mass. This may very well be the problem, in that we assume the property of inertia is constant in every mass because we have been given no reason to believe otherwise. However there has been speculation that many inventors have produced fields which counteract the property of inertia in which case inertia may vry well be nothing more than a condition and not a property of mass. If this is true then a massless particle could exist not because it has no mass but because the property of inertia has been removed or counteracted in some way giving the appearance of a massless condition. I think we should keep an open mind but more important we should be precise in our thoughts, If we believe something is impossible we should justify why we think this under every possible condition we could imagine. A good example is the wright brothers airplane where nobel winning physicists wrote papers proving by calculation that this "airplane" could never fly ---- it was impossible. But the reality of the situation should have been obvious, a bird "can" fly so must an airplane but only when the conditions surrounding the flight of an airplane become similar to that of a bird. In this case it was nothing more that the geometry of the wing and the power to weight ratio, I find it simply amazing that at that time there were many highly educated people having an opinion on the airplane and almost all of them were completely wrong in which case we can say there knowledge and education meant absolutely nothing because the fact remains that there opinion was flawed.

@GestaltO

"We could call it pure energy or we could define the conditions necessary for a massless particle"
in defining conditions rather than the thing itself we are going back to what i will now dub "black-cat syndrome" though, are we not?

I tend to believe the "wave theory" more so than other theories in which case there are no "things" only conditions of energy which give the appearance that something is there.

"It is well know that a mass on earth has the property of weight that can be measured but this does not apply in space"
who says it doesn't apply in space? Even is this is the case that does not explain the photons within the planet or once they reach the planet. space theories unfortunatly will almost certainly remain only theories for many many many years to come.

I was under the impression that "weight" was a condition of mass due to gravity because in space things would appear to be weightless. Concerning photons, as I subscribe to the wave theory I do not think they exist as matter but only as an energy wave, a wave travelling on something giving the appearance of motion and substance in which case what we consider as a "photon" could be anywhere depending on the conditions present. This would seem to be true regarding the transmission of light through space, that is the fact you cannot see light in space until it comes into contact with matter. As well it is documented that Nicola Tesla could produce light effects in any given space at large distances which would lead me to believe that light is a condition of a given space and not "something" that has travelled anywhere.