Irish Company Claims Free Energy 1125
raghus writes "An Irish company has thrown down the gauntlet to the worldwide scientific community to test a technology it has developed that it claims produces free energy.
The company, Steorn, says its discovery is based on the interaction of magnetic fields and allows the production of clean, free and constant energy — a concept that challenges one of the basic rules of physics." I can't wait until I can use this free energy to power my flying car and heat my aquarium of mermaids.
You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Insightful)
They talk in circles and can't provide any definite explanations as to how something like this would work.
About 7 years ago I worked with a fellow who absolutely was buying into some black box he would just plug things into and it would harvest energy from the earth's magnetic field. Sounds about the same thing. If there was enough density of magnetic fields to run a toaster, odds are you'd be suffering some serious and potentially fatal side effects.
Moving around in circles to gather energy, what a neat idea! Um, where do we get the energy to run around in circles? Sounds like that net forces thing, the sum of all forces acting upon my car at the moment are zero, but if I could just remove those coming from one direction, it should move in that direction, right? Hey, how about something that runs on gravity, since there's an unending supply of that, eh?
I'm also of the opinion if we started using something which was naturally in abundance, like earth's magnetic fields, it would cumulatively and ultimately affect something we'd regret later.
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:4, Insightful)
I have to agree with you here. To me it just sounds like electromagnetic induction. Move a wire through a magnetic field, and boom! It makes electricity.
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:4, Insightful)
My thoughts are twofold:
1) Man, if it's true, how awesome would that BE?! I'm the kind of person that - as skeptical as I am - always holds out hope for discoveries like this. There is more clean energy in this universe than we'll ever need - harvesting it is the difficulty. If someone discovered a way to do it - man alive that'd be sweet.
2) If it's true, someone will patent it and it won't be free - on the contrary, it will still somehow cost me as much as energy does now, as greed seems to outpace progress these days.
Since it's probably BS, I don't really have to worry about either one of those two thoughts, but seriously - #1 - how cool would that BE??
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Why the hostility? (Score:4, Insightful)
These guys claim to be doing exactly what a layman should do when he thinks he has discovered technology which challenges a fundamental scientific principle.
Invite as many credible scientific experts as you can find to test it and report the results of such testing in peer reviewed scientific publications and on the Internet.
Free energy is one of the biggest discoveries that people are seriously searching for. That and intelligent extraterrestrial life.
And yes, apart from free energy there is the promise of virtually free energy. I.e. If you could create a small (as in portable) device that can separate Water molecules into the atomic components and burn the resulting Hydrogen for energy, cool. If the energy generated in that process is significantly greater (1.5X to 2X) than what is required to run the machine, viola. Virtually free energy.
Bonus points if it runs on watter too impure to drink and still maintains a positive balance even with the purification process.
So let them be. If it's bogus that will come out in the testing. This has happened before, without the invitations. If it's legit. Whoopee. countries like mine which produce mineral raw materials (bauxite) but import all our energy needs could see a an economic bump.
A bump our politicians will work feverishly to squander, but that's a different story.
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no such thing as "free" energy. What you get is what you've spent somewhere else. The FA says their thing generates "energy" (electricity) when you move something around a magnetic field. The energy carried by the electricity generated by magnetic induction (moving a conducting object within a magnetic field induces an electric field in your object) is the energy you spent moving the object around the magnetic field. No gain, no loss.
What seems strange is that, without naming it, the FA says they've found something that seems to break the conservation of energy. I bet you scientific scrutinity will unveil a source unaccounted for in the first place.
Re:The energy *could* come from *somewhere*... (Score:5, Funny)
Naw, that would never work.
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:5, Funny)
Ack! I hope we don't have to get free energy from violas! Those things sound awful!
Look, it depends on how its played. If I *have* to have someone play a viola in order to power my car to get to work, then perhaps I could chip in for lessons. Or else we could design a soundproof chamber for them to play in, possibly. You have to think creatively - that's what free energy from violas is all about.
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I think this is more likely to be viral marketing for a game or something daft like that.
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:5, Insightful)
What hostility? All I'm reading is a healthy dose of skepticism. Those of us who have been observing the world for awhile, I'm 50, get tired of discrediting hoaxes. This is a hoax and it's unconscionable to encourage scientists to interrupt research which could decrease our dependence on fossil fuels. This is nothing more than a publicity stunt to attract investors.
According to TFA, (1)Steorn will pay for the research, (2)publish the research themselves and (3) develop products based on the research. Here's a translation: (1) We aren't applying for grant money. We know our "research" wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny required. (2) By publishing the research ourselves, we have complete control over it. (3) Okay, there won't be any products developed but if we can keep the research going for a couple of years, we'll get more victims^h^h^h^h^h^h^h investors.
This is so predictable... when will Slashdot quit falling for these stories.
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:5, Funny)
What most of us are searching for are two women at once. With that, we can generate our own energy.
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:5, Informative)
Except that we're destroying the planet's water supply to get it.
Uhm, hello? My name is high school chemistry:
2H2 + 02 = 2H20
Please note that "burning" hydrogen doesn't "destroy" the water supply. It creates it.
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also for those who LOVE hydrogen as a fuel, remember, water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which means exactly two things.
1: Any "free energy" device is dependent on a system outside of its physical construction, just like hydropower or solar power is dependent on an outside source.
2: If (1) isn't the case with this, and the claim is valid, then we need to revise either the laws of theormodynamics or how we apply them. They weren't written by God, they just happen to be the best description of that aspect of physics that we have.
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:5, Informative)
One is that it shows that water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing. If the supply wasn't constantly being refreshed it would fall out in a matter of weeks. That's basically saying it's a transient phenomenon representing an adjustment to equilibrium. This is unlike carbon, where if the supply wasn't constantly refreshed it would fall out on timescale far longer than those of present interest to humans (and as far as we know this essentially requires biota to sequester it, hence the Gaia hypothesis). This timescale distinction is frequently used to distinguish between forcing and response in a system (waves generally being considered response, and other changes forcing).
The second is that on human-centric timescales there is a clearly a large-amplitude "sink" of water (i.e. lots of water leaves the atmosphere). The amplitude of the natural sink of carbon is much lower and therefore we can accumulate a meaningful amount more easily.
bugs! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell, with the right system, you'd pass your garbage through this system before taking it to a land fill, and the output would be fuel for fuel-cells - for Very Little Money (tm).
The other nice thing about the bacteria is that they could be used in small scale devices: at home, to reduce reliance on a national grid, and even to send power out of the house when usage is low. This would assist the decentralisation of power generation which is abolsutely necessary to get out from underneath the giant power and oil companies which rule western democracies.
*sigh*
Dreams are free I suppose.
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:5, Funny)
Man, you guys are missing the most plentiful supply of helium in the world. One word:
Balloons.
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Informative)
If "it" is a natural phenomena, it is not subject to patent in the United States. Manual of Patent Examination Procedure - Section 2106 [bitlaw.com] If "it" is a machine that converts a natural phenomena into traditional energy like electricity, then that machine could be patented but nothing stops you from developing improvements to it or an entirely different machine. Regardless, the patent for that machine would expire 20 years from its filing date and would then become public domain.
If you have a computer system on your desk, there are probably at least 100 different patented products on your desk. That hasn't barred you from owning and enjoying the technology, however. There would be an incredible demand for "free" energy, and therefore market forces would provide ample incentive for competing scientists to develop non-patented devices to harness that energy. Sure, there might be some nasty legal battles, but in the end the original inventor will be able to patent at best what he has contributed to the technology.
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, just like Disney's copyrights!
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Insightful)
Right; because damned if human greed hasn't kept the price of those computer chips right up where they always have been, $60 per 1000 transistors [1], keeping all the profits for themselves. Corporate bastards.
[1] Intel 8080 retailed for around $360 IIRC and had 6,000 transistors. http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.h
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:4, Funny)
I actually make very effective use of vacuum energy while I'm vacuuming my carpet...
OH, you mean that other vacuum...
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Funny)
"For the first six months that we looked at it we literally didn't believe it ourselves. Over the last three years it had been rigorously tested in our own laboratories, in independent laboratories and so on," he said.
Roughly translated:
We can't *believe* how fscking stupid our neighbors are...we ran a power cord from their external outlet 3 years ago, and they haven't even noticed!
Dude....free energy!
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Insightful)
It really sounds to me like they want outside verification, and are willing to pay for it themselves. Shouldn't we let that take place before we fry them in oil?
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Funny)
They would have to be even more "not-too-smart" then the average greedy venture capitalist investor.
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Informative)
While inheriting wealth is certainly the easiest way to be rich, it isn't the "best" way as the vast majority of wealthy people did not inherit their money. From a quick google search I found this from globalpolicy.org [globalpolicy.org].
So 80+% of all millionaires in America are "new money".Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:4, Funny)
Their father.
Fry them now (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we need to bitch-slap these peckerwoods now, before they fleece too many dumb but wealt- Wait, you know, I think their ideas just might work. Send cash just in case.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Excommunicate this bastard NOW. Make it quick, painful, and public. We don't need a whole rash of people believing in this hogwash, undoing years of education about the creation of this planet and the Sun's role in God's plan for mankind.
Stomp
Re:Fry them now (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fry them now (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not a scam, an ad campaign (Score:5, Informative)
There is a website SteornWatch.com that came up seemingly hours after the initial press, was linked to in the forums available on the steorn website (why do they have forums again?), and contains absolutely no useful information or any popular theories about steorn.com. Steornwatch has a disclaimer saying they are not affiliated with steorn, Citigate D.R., or any of their subsidiaries. Who is Citigate D.R.? You'd have no idea from the steorn.com website, but "Citigate Dewe Rogerson is the leading international consultancy specialising exclusively in financial and corporate communications. Its work for clients, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups, focuses on developing and building corporate brands and actively managing corporate reputations, with all stakeholder groups from capital markets to consumers." How does steornwatch.com know about this firm, and why would they put it in the disclaimer and not mention what it has to do with steorn on their steorn exposé page?
Where are the actual people who came up with this? Did a group of marketing agents and publicists put their heads together and decide to create a free energy device someday? None of their "key players" is touted as being any kind of scientist or having come up with the machine itself.
All of this smells fishy even if they had something that wasn't an incredibly controversial scientific breakthrough up for grabs. And with people probing the viral marketing a lot now, this kind of thing is bound to come up. Burden of proof is on them, and so far I'm not impressed.
The Emperor's Clothes (Score:5, Funny)
The magnets have no clothes! They're naked!!! *averts her eyes out of embarassment*
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Funny)
That depends. How much energy is required to fry them in oil? Is this energy free?
No they don't (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh... no, if they wanted outside verification, they'd just plain go out and get some. This "jury" thing, on the other hand, is proof they DON'T want outside verification, because the whole thing is clearly designed specifically with the intent of presenting the appearance of allowing outside review of their technology while minimizing or eliminating the chance anyone will actually get a chance to see what it is. Seriously, they're inviting the world to come join a lottery in which the winners get to be told what their invention is after a long dramatic pause of unspecified length while public hype builds? And you think this is a form of public review?
What this "jury" thing actually DOES do is allow them to handpick people to give a dog and pony show to, afterward leave the world still unsure what their supposed invention actually is, and beforehand allow them to generate a gigantic mailing list of people to pitch to later on. The most important element is that "jury" thing allows them to brag-- as they do in a huge box on the front page of their site, as they do in your blockquote-- about the large number of people who have signed up to be on the jury, thus presenting the impression of great public interest in their invention. It's a hype-generating trick, and you have fallen for it hook line and sinker.
And did you not notice this piece of garbage on their website?
How can you possibly take seriously someone who writes a paragraph like that? If you look at archive.org you'll see that Steorn didn't even have an active web page in 2005.
Shouldn't we let that take place before we fry them in oil?
Shouldn't THEY let it (the academic verification) take place before they expect us to do anything OTHER than fry them in oil? Seriously, giving these people the time of day makes about as much sense as halting, before you delete your spam, to wonder whether maybe that e-mail really WAS sent by a Nigerian prince. The perpetual motion machine is after all one of the few scams that's been around even longer than the Spanish Prisoner [snopes.com].
Re:No they don't (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, you know, just hook up to the grid and start selling power. Admittedly, it would be easier to get tens of millions of dollars and jumpstart things, but
Well, unless your current prototype doesn't, you know, really provide free power. It will only do _that_ after you've built the $10M version, of course.
-scott
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Insightful)
Who is to say? Anyone who paid attention to the their physics classes in High School.
[snippage tinfoil hat ravings and handwaving nonsense.]
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Funny)
You must have not been applying enough power.
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, any first year electronics or physics student should be able to tell you that when you pull/use energy from a magnetic field, it still comes from somewhere else rather than being created from nothingness.
In an electrical transformer, that source is the current passing through the wires and creating the magnetic field. In a rare earth magnet, the energy has been used to properly line up the atomic structure and gradually demagnitizes the source as it's used up. In the case of the very weak Earth's magnetic field, the main source is the Earth's rotation and the magnetic contents that are thus flowing/rotating inside. The Earth's magnetic field has decayed about 10-15% over the last 150 years, so I wouldn't count on that as a long-term source of free energy anyway.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone have a source for this besides Wikipedia? Wouldn't this be a serious problem when the weakened magnetic field stops shielding us from the solar winds??
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:4, Informative)
National Geographic [nationalgeographic.com]
NG#2 [nationalgeographic.com]
CNN [cnn.com]
Space.com [space.com]
New Scientist [newscientist.com]
Oh yeah, magnetic north (and probable south as well) is moving at an accelerating rate. The Magnetic North Pole is leaving Canada on it's way to Siberia.
CNN [cnn.com]
Enough sources for ya?
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Funny)
Personally, I'm going to use my perpetual motion device to run my Pentium IV Extreme computer powered by Windows Vista while I play Duke Nukem Forever on the Phantom Labs produced graphics card.
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Funny)
If we were to start tapping into the magnetic field at such a scale it would devastate the field of magnotherapy. When traditional medicine fails you, where will you turn if the magnetic fields were practically gone due excessive exploitation?
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Funny)
Gerbils dude. Lots and lots of gerbils.
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything less is a negation of what science is supposed to be about, and reduces scientists to the level of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, condemning a theory without testing it.
And moreso as they published in THE ECONOMIST! (Score:5, Interesting)
"Steorn has decided to publish its challenge in The Economist because of the breadth of its readership. "We chose it over a purely scientific magazine simply because we want to make the general public aware that this process is about to commence and to generate public support, awareness, interest etc for what we are doing."
Oh, because the Economist has a broad, far reaching readership, not limited to only those interested in MONEY... unlike the science magazines who have a readership that actually may be interested, and, heaven forbid, know something about energy.
My god what a load of shite.
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:5, Funny)
You take a sensible approach. After all, the odds that this is real are astronomically low. But if it actually is some new miracle technology, existing energy companies will certainly try to destroy it. So you are covered either way.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You could argue I suppose that they run on the evaporative cycle, but I prefer to think of them running on Gravity.
don't think so... (Score:5, Informative)
However, they did leave some clues. If I look up the domain registration, the two addresses on the domain registration actually exist. One appears on a patent application from 6 years ago for credit card systems. The application was rejected for failing the "nonobvious" criteria and being too vague. This fits with their story of being a (apparently failed) technology company doing transactions.
(The other address, by the way, is now the Gay HIV clinic in Dublin - I suspect that the CEO just used to work out of there, and it is now used for another purpose).
So I'm with this either being a wacky publicity stunt. The names are too perfectly chosen so that nobody can actually research them, and the people look too much like actors...
Re:don't think so... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is for idiots.
Re:don't think so... (Score:5, Insightful)
But the payoff is so huge that the speculation is fun. How would our lives change? What would we do with it all? What COULD we do with it all?
Sure, it'll probably never happen. But I'll read the articles for the same reason I occasionally buy a 1$ ticket. It's cheap admission for the chance to dream big for a little while.
Wrong dream. (Score:4, Insightful)
Free energy is the scientific community's equivalent to the "winning the lottery" dream.
No. It's the equivalent to the "getting superpowers by being bitten by a radioactive spider" dream. Which is also cool, and great fun to hear about, and if it's going to be told well even qualifies as news for nerds... but doesn't deserve anything but ridicule when brought out in public.
If they were serious, everyone they were telling about it would be forced to sign some serious blood-oath NDAs. They wouldn't leak this much until they had a small-scale pilot facility ready to run their lab for a while... or perhaps after they had set it up and been selling power to the utilities in the US for a few years. This looks like just another variant on lost treasure maps, forgotten gold mines, wildcat oil wells, and Florida "real" estate.
Re:don't think so... (Score:5, Insightful)
2) If we let it fester, you might never know how quickly an infection of belief growst. Look at ID.
3) It gives everyone posting righteous indignance a sense of mental superiority that fuels the nerd ego-drive. That, my friend, is a source of 'free' energy.
And, given your nick 'Mr. Underbridge,' perhaps your grumpiness is due to the fact that you've been out-trolled by the editors, a cut to your own ego-drive?
Something Very Fishy & Patent Info (Score:5, Informative)
- The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%.
- The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts.
- There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).
I hope the coefficient is greater than 0.0001% over 100%. Although all their technology page says is that this alleged free energy solution has to do with magnets. Not much else.Furthermore, they claim they approached universities and educational institutions about validating their findings and recieved little or no support from them. Why wouldn't a university be eager to attach their name to it? Is it because of the patent?
If you're interested in reading their patent, here is the application [freeenergynews.com] (pdf warning). If you just want to get the gist of it, visit the Pure Energy Systems Wiki [peswiki.com] complete with diagram. It looks like a way to block and unblock a strip holding magnets, thus creating magnetic flux around a piece of metal (driving the current I believe).
Coefficiency (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, my physics teacher demonstrated hos to get energy out of magnets. We took a low-power LED bulb, two magnets, and a stabilizing platform to hold the magnets. We set the magnet's south poles facing each other, and wrapped the whole thing in ultra-thin cooper bell wire, which was atached to the LED and a diode. By simply pushing the magnets together the LED bulb would every now and then try to light up, it would flash but we could never keep the light on.
Don't discount it. Remember it onyl takes a tiny weak spark to get massive amounts of power out of gasoline. It just depends on what form that 'spark' comes in, and what form of 'gasoline' you're using.
Re:Coefficiency (Score:5, Informative)
No, AC units (heat pumps) are not more than 100% efficent. This sort of incorrect statement is a mistake of terminology.
A heating unit has a "Coefficent of Performance" (aka COP), which describes the ratio of heat output to the energy input. A resistive heater (say, your toaster) has a COP of exactly 1. Every bit of power going into it comes out of it as heat.
Your heat pump (a car AC unit is just a heat pump, pumping heat out of the car) has a COP of 3 or 4, thus leading to the "400% efficent" terminology. It's not 400% efficent, it's just 4 times better as producing heat (or rather, moving heat from one area to another) than a resistive heater would be. The reason is can do this is that moving heat around requires a lot less work than producing it does.
My point is that the terminology is not comparable. This sort of thing is claiming to produce energy without doing work, or at least, to produce more energy than the amount of work actually put into it. Not really the same thing at all.
Re:Something Very Fishy & Patent Info (Score:3, Interesting)
Big deal... (Score:5, Funny)
Years ago, I harnessed the energy from the monkeys flying out of my ass, and I haven't paid an electric bill since...
Crackpots and Opportunists say Crazy Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
check the site's forums (Score:5, Interesting)
Obligatory Simpson quote (Score:5, Funny)
Is it marketing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is it marketing (Score:5, Funny)
Good grief (Score:5, Insightful)
But even as humor it should not have been posted since there was a similar one only a week or so ago and I really doubt anyone has a new joke to make about these assclowns that didn't get used then.
Listen up you primitive screwheads at
Noether rules the day (Score:5, Interesting)
When Noether proved in 1918 that every conservation law must have a paired symmetry, physics was transformed for-ever. From then on whenever you saw a conserved quantity it implied there was a symmetry that could be seen in space-time.
A lot of physics courses focus on the conserved quality and not the symmetry. Perhaps it's because the maths is a lot neater with conserved quantities than with symmetries. But I argue that the real understanding of the physics is to be had in making sense of the symmetries.
Conservation of energy implies that the laws of physics are constant over time. This is why breaking the law of energy conservation is important. If even one pico-joule of energy is created from nothing in the universe, it destroys the constancy of physical law.
The theory of electromagnetism has been verified to factor of 10**-20. I find it highly unlikely they've found something new in theory to allow this.
The fact they've issued a press release rather than a research paper suggests they're cranks. Nothing to see here, move along.
Simon
Re:Noether rules the day (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a good thing not even one pico-joule of energy has been created from nothing in the history of the universe, otherwise we might be here to appreciate this invention.
Yeah, good luck! (Score:5, Funny)
For the typical nerd, the outcomes in decreasing order of likelihood are:
NO NO Really!!! This Could Work!!! (Score:5, Funny)
FFVF Commutator (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
There might be one inside this box...
NOBODY PANIC (Score:5, Funny)
Top Irish Scientists (Score:5, Funny)
Pshaw (Score:4, Funny)
--- SER
They are a web marketting company! (Score:5, Interesting)
Quote: "Recall that Steorn is a former e-business company that saw its market vanish during the dot.com bust. It stands to reason that Steorn has re-tooled as a Web marketing company, and is using the "free energy" promotion as a platform to show future clients how it can leverage print advertising and a slick Web site to promote their products and ideas. If so, it's a pretty brilliant strategy."
1. Pretend to invent an impossible technology that nobody will believe in.
2. Promote the heck out of it on the internet.
3. ???
4. Profit.
Well, the infamous missing step three is "Demonstrate to your web-marketting customers that you can market even such a preposterous idea as free energy successfully and they will flock to your doors".
How you can tell this is bullshit... (Score:3, Insightful)
During 2005 Steorn embarked on a process of independent validation and approached a wide selection of academic institutions. The vast majority of these institutions refused to even look at the technology, however several did. Those who were prepared to complete testing have all confirmed our claims; however none will publicly go on record.
Please. Any physicist who figured out how this miraculous technology worked would be more revolutionary than Einstein or Newton. Showing how to violate conservation of energy would be an instant Nobel Prize. If their data really support this, why won't they go on record and become famous? They could win at least $2,000,000 (from the Nobel committee and from James Randi).
"What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy," McCarthy said.
To me, this sounds a lot like a generator. You know, rotating a wire loop through a magnetic field to generate an electic current. That's only been around for, what, 180 years?
It may work, but here's the catch (Score:5, Interesting)
What Steom is actually claiming is quite possible, but uninteresting. Steorn is making three claims for its technology: [steorn.net]
The coefficient of performance [wikipedia.org] is not efficiency. It's the reciprocal of efficiency. Most refrigerators and heat pumps have a coefficient of performance greater than 100%. 200-350% is typical. The coefficient of performance of an ideal heat pump, and the efficiency of an ideal heat engine, both working between the same temperature difference, will have a product of 1.
So Steom can meet its claims with any off-the-shelf heat pump.
Since they talk about "magnetics" so much, they're probably fooling around with something exotic like a magneto-caloric heat pump [nrel.gov]. This is a cute idea that's been around for a while, requires very strong magnetic fields, is sometimes used for cyrogenic cooling, and has been considered for auto air conditioners. There are buzzword friendly papers like "Preparation of Superferromagnetic Lanthanide Nanoparticulate Magnetic Refrigerants" on the subject. If they've made that work, they may have something with product potential. Maybe. But it's not "free energy".
I have one and it works (Score:5, Funny)
What's more, it's easy to operate. I just have it on a bracket on my car engine and spin it up with a simple little rubber belt. Mind you, the Mk 1 has a few problems to iron out - I need to find a way of enabling it to keep running when the engine stops, at the moment it stops when the engine does and I think this might be the braking effect of the drive belt. Anyone got any ideas, or know where to get in touch with Mr. Bosch whose name is on the side of it?
You know a company's honest when..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Recreating their results (Score:4, Funny)
Announced April 1st? (Score:5, Interesting)
Press Coverage
Steorn Announce "Free Energy" Technology
Irish company Steorn have announced a revoloutionary free energy technology. More
The Guardian | 1 April 2006
Re:Announced April 1st? (Score:5, Insightful)
My personal free energy invention (Score:5, Funny)
(a) Smoke, and
(b) Some mirrors.
Oh, and I'll also actually need (c) A curtain.
Please send all VC monies to my address in the Caymans.
Thank you.
Sell the electricity. (Score:5, Insightful)
If it works, why does it need to be proven? Just go out and make billions with the device.
Not impossible (Score:4, Informative)
This is quite possible, since the magnetic field is not conservative (=the energy energy is only determined by the position). Example of a conservative field: gravitation, because if a mass goes up and down a hill it has a net energy gain of zero.
Not so for movement in a magnetic field. You can compare this to a whirlpool: if you drop something in it will spin round and round faster and faster, so clearly its energy is not detemined by the position alone.n In fact this is more or less how electromotors/dynamos work (or could work).
"The energy isn't being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It's literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy,"
This, however is bollocks: classical mechanics and electromagnetism form a pretty closed system. I'm not saying the conservation of energy principle cannot ever be broken (though this would be surprising) but in any way it can never be broken withing the classical system, i.e. using only mechanics and electromagnetism.
Prove or Profit (Score:5, Insightful)
- Prove it. Publish your results and get it peer reviewed. None of this nonsense "people won't even take my claims seriously" nonsense. There is probably a reason.
- Profit from it. Free energy? Make a big bank of these things. Sell the power. There are plenty of buyers.
And if neither of these things are happening, I'm thinking one of:
- Crackpot.
- Investor scam.
Read their patent application (Score:5, Informative)
"A low energy magnet actuator allows magnetic fields to be turned on and off using a small amount of energy. The magnetic actuator according to the invention generally includes a base suitable for the support of a plurality of magnets. An actuatable shield is positioned in relation to the plurality of magnets so that it effectively blocks the magnetic field when it is positioned over at least one of the magnets. The magnetic fields of the plurality of magnets interact in a manner that allows low energy actuation of the shield."
It's just a thing for shielding a magnet with another piece of metal. The patent application does not claim an energy gain.
I was really hoping they'd claimed an energy gain, which might trigger the USPTO's answer to perpetual motion machines. The USPTO has the right to ask for a working model, but they very seldom exercise it. Except for perpetual motion machines and antigravity machines.
The application has been assigned to an examiner, and is in routine processing.
Re:Bah, how can it be so hard...? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Let them run uninterrupted for weeks. Keep watch while they're running.
Exactly. Hell, just demonstrate more usable energy come out of a black box than could be supplied by an equal volume/mass of gasoline + generator and you could attract investors as long as they could stuff a meter up it's bum and make sure it wasn't a radiothermic generator. Because even if it weren't 'free energy' there would still be a pretty good chance of it being something commercially viable, at least for some extreme segment of the market.
But these perpetual motion con artists never do that, for fairly obvious reasons.
Mod down odious twat (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not going to follow in your footsteps by making any assumptions about your nationality, twerp, but here, for your edification... [wikipedia.org]
Thats a list of credits that includes Boyles Law, high speed photography, modern electrocardiogram, X-ray crystallography, Boolean algebra, the basis of all modern computer arithmetic, the induction coil and discovering the principle of the dynamo, leading a team that discovered a treatment for leprosy, 'Fitzgerald-Lorenz Contraction', 'Stokes Theorem' and Stokes-Navier Equations', the hypodermic needle, Kelvin, aaaaand naming the 'electron' and measured its charge.
Here is your ass. You're welcome.
Nice guy. NICE GUY?? (Score:4, Informative)
Mod this down on principle, thanks.
I'd like to see the field equations where they show you being able to end up with more potential energy than you started with. You know, a time-parameterized finite element analysis in three-dimensional space with suitable boundary conditions. They say they accomplished this on paper "in software".
WELL THEY COULD JUST VERY WELL RELEASE THOSE RESULTS
But no. No. They want to do a "demo" with a "jury".
That's what magicians do in Vegas.
Utter bullshit. MOD THIS DOWN.