Thane Heins is nervous and hopeful. It's Jan. 24, a Thursday afternoon, and in four days the Ottawa-area native will travel to Boston where he'll demonstrate an invention that appears – though he doesn't dare say it – to operate as a perpetual motion machine.

The audience, esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Markus Zahn, could either deflate Heins' heretical claims or add momentum to a 20-year obsession that has broken up his marriage and lost him custody of his two young daughters.