I saw a post on Pat Phelan’s blog today about Steorn which sounded a little incredible, so I looked a little deeper into it.
The background is that an Irish company called Steorn put a full-page ad in the Economist saying:
At Steorn we have developed a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy…. We are therefore issuing a challenge to the scientific community: test our
technology and report your findings to the world.
Full page ads in the Economist don’t come cheap so if this is a hoax, it is an elaborate one!
According to Wikipedia’s entry for Steorn, Sean McCarthy, CEO for Steorn said in an interview with RTE:
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, […] 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.”
I hope they prove me wrong but personally I don’t believe a word of it – see the promotional video and judge for yourself.
Yyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Where’s that perpetual motion machine I invented a while back? Oh wait, it’s in my car which runs on water on that bridge I have to sell.
If you want to get the attention of scientists, challenging them to debunk your claims, an ad in The Economist might not be the best way to go about it.
If you want to get the attention of venture capitalists, however…
You have to look hard for PR companies who understand how to work with members of the scientific community. However, it’s relatively easy to find PR experts who understand how to file advertising copy. Steorn sounds very PR-savvy.
Ah i was pissed off orginally at the pure debasement of science. But now it is very funny. magnets moving up and down. You could not make this shit up
Is that the system that the japanese are going to use? You walk along and create power. I saw that a few days ago.
I posted what I think is the catch in this at http://stalltheball.com/index.php/2006/08/23/steorn_in_a_teacup.
The crux being “The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts.”
However once you factor in the magnets themselves as an energy source your maths change and greater than 100 % effeciency goes out the window.
John
This is something. No more conservations of energy!!
The guy say “If you move around in a magnetic field.”
My gosh, how do you think we get electricity now. Iron moving around in a magnetic field, or something moving in a magnetic field!!!
IT IS NOT free energy. You have to move to get it!!! The energy of motion is converted into electrical engery.
I sure hope this guy has not made an as… out of himself.
tom
If you wave a piece of wire around it will generate a small electric current from the Earths magnetic field.
Theoretically a satellite with a long length of wire trailing down into the earths magnetic field would generate a sizeable current as it travelled in orbit.
But it’s still not an “over unity” machine.
Google “N Machine” for other wonderous things you can do with a few magnets, wire, sticky back plastic and glue.
This all sounds very familar to me:
I know “The Dharma Initiative” – they seem to specialize in magnets and if I remember correctly they created a machine that seemed to draw “geomagnetic energy” which needed to be dissapated every 108minutes or so.
Wait that was fiction, but good fiction all the same.