Since we're on the subject of public understanding of science,
I'd like to take a moment to rant about professional scientists'
understanding of science also.

My page of reference shall be
http://www.padrak.com/ine/FEONBRTV.html
("Free Energy As Seen On British TV")

I use this as a point of reference because it's a mixed
environment of media, engineers and 'scientists', and one
where I saw the TV show in question, and was quite
interested and amused.

An observed point in the article is that engineers would
seem to have a better grasp on reality than scientists.
It's a shame the page doesn't quote my favourite sentence
from the show, which was one of the scientists surveying
one of the free energy setups. 
Before he saw it he insisted there must be some error in 
the equipment. Voltmeter wired wrong, wrongly calibrated, 
something like that.

So he spent several hours meticulously checking every
piece of equipment, before declaring
 "I can't find anything wrong with it, and it seems to work,
 but it doesn't work because that would violate Conservation
 of Energy". (Or words to that effect)

Does anyone else see the flaw in this? "The world can't be
round, because that would violate the world being flat!"

I actually found his unreasonable statement far more convincing
that it works than any attempt to persuade me so would have been.
If he spent hours trying to disprove it, and the best he could
come up with is "It can't work, dammit!"...

*here comes the science bit*
I have a high-end-layman's knowledge of topics like this, and
would like to observe here, for the benefit of those of you
with equal or greater knowledge, some 'coincidental' things
from the article.
If you have no scientific bent at all, don't expect to
understand much of the following.

1. Note that most of the alleged free energy devices in the
article utilise pulsing of some sort. Plasma arcs pulse, and
the water-based ones used deliberate controlled pulsing. Note
also that this similarity is despite some of the engineers
having worked totally independently. I think this lends
credibility to the technology.

2. The article mentions 'aether' and 'zero point field'. I
would like to stray from this in my random theory. Since
none of the researchers could explain their results, I think
alternative theories aren't too undesirable.

3. Consider Quantum Physics. My understanding of one of the
basic demonstrable experiments of Quantum Physics is that of
light through slits. Ordinarily, light shone through two
narrow slits shows interference patterns. The similar Quantum 
Physics experiment is to send /single photons/ through slits
onto a hyper-sensitive receptor. Even with only one photon
at a time going through, interference patterns are shown.
But what could be interfering? As far as I'm aware, the two
main theories to answer this are the multiverse (where photons
in other 'verses' effect the one travelling in ours) or some
sort of "probability photon" or "ghost photon". I believe it
is from this experiment that the famous and oft-misquoted
Schroedinger's Cat tale derives. (The cat is /both/ alive and
dead, not /either/ alive or dead. "Either" would be /normal/
physics. I hate hearing people quote it wrong.)
[sheepish note - I later checked from the original german, and
it seems a more accurate quote is to say the cat is an equal
mix of alive and dead. Mine was still approximately right.]

See how points 1 and 3 go together? Throwing single photons
is similar to pulsing, to my eye. And though the extra light
isn't harvested, its effects are seen.
Perhaps the energy isn't drawn from "the aether" or "zero
point field", then. Perhaps it's drawn from probability-energy
or energy-in-another-'verse'. Though maybe that's what 
"the aether" is, since it's hardly a defined thing.

My point is, if you mention "the aether" or "zero-point" to
most scientists, they'll poo-poo you in seconds. "Quack
nonsense theories". But they're no more quack-nonsense than
Quantum Physics. (Which, indeed, many scientists also declare
to be nonsense, even though, much like free energy devices,
it appears to have demonstrable results)
In fact, aether may even /be/ Quantum Physics, since it's
undefined. Zero-point isn't, it's a quite different theory.
Quite an interesting one, though.
Oh, correction, it seems someone's decided to merge ZPF and
Quantum Physics already.
http://www.calphysics.org/research.html
It even says in this article (of a much more scientific
nature than the previous) that "Thermodynamic analysis has 
also shown that it is in principle possible to extract 
energy from the quantum vacuum".
Hoorah for science slowly catching up with engineering.

Afterthought - isn't that usually the way of developments?
1. Engineer makes new thing work that doesn't fit science.
2. Scientists try to disprove it.
3. They can't.
4. They change theories to make it proven instead.

--RavenBlack, thought-filled layman.