Steorn introduces salable product. Still no "Free Energy"

I just received a press release from Steorn. You might remember this company from my previous blog posts.

To summarize, Steorn dramatically advertised that they would demonstrate a mechanical "over unity" or perpetual motion machine back in July of 2007. Steorn announced that they would demonstrate this machine at the Kinetica Museum in London England, but the demonstration failed when it experienced "technical difficulties" due to the machine having an unforeseen sensitivity to light which caused it to fail. That was the last we heard about a public demonstration of their equipment.

Personally, I think their machine had an allergy to skeptical observation - but perhaps I'm too cynical? Seriously, I thought they were hyping impossible vaporware in order to attract gullible investors. I believed that they had no intention of creating any sort of real product.

Well, I was wrong, and I'm not afraid to admit it!

The press release from Steorn today has announced the foundation of a new laboratory. But better yet, it announced the availability of test equipment designed to support those "organisations developing rotary and magnetic systems." Here are Steorn's first two products in this lineup:

• A Hall-effect based sensor to measure the amount of magnetism of an object.
• A torque sensor - designed to measure the magnetic force component of torque.
  

These products seem to be geared for inventors who are experimenting with over-unity systems. These could be anyone from garage inventors to small firms.

On the Steonlab website, the products look sleek and beautiful. They are easily of Tektronix quality in visual appeal. They also come with software packages that create reams of data and graphs automatically.

You have to be a specially accepted member of the Steorn website before you are allowed to view product pricing, so I don't know how much this equipment costs. However, I read the Steornlabs legal Terms and Conditions with interest:

Every order placed via our Website will be subject to acceptance by Steorn. We reserve the right to decline any order without providing a reason for doing so, regardless of whether payment has been received by us. Should we decline an order where payment has been received, the payment will be refunded in full.

Wow, that's not creepy or paranoid at all is it? You don't see Tektronix doing something as silly as this.


I think Steorn has found a way to make a product that they can actually sell, without coming out and admitting that perpetual motion or energy machines don't actually work. I think that their product will be geared to those individuals who fervently believe in "over unity", but who don't have the foundational knowledge to realize that they can duplicate these sensors in their own labs using off-the-shelf parts. (Hint - buy a Hall Effect sensor, and hook it up to a Tektronix digital storage oscilloscope. Learn to use the basic skills you would learn in a freshman Physics lab to subtract environmental forces from the forces you intend to measure. Learn to use Excel to make your own graphs.)

If you don't have the training or ability of a competent electronics technician, I guess the Steorn equipment would be pretty valuable to you.


In this press release, Steorn also mentions the release of "ZeroF passive magnetic bearings" due out sometime this summer. But I'm not sure what that could be. The name seems to suggest that these bearings will be free of magnetic flux, which would be useful if your perpetual motion machine is allergic to unforeseen electromagnetic energy. (Light, for example.)

Steorn also announced that it's over unity machine, the "Orbo" is due out by the end of this year. Finally! I can't wait to get one. I plan on feeding the output energy from my Orbo into the input and create my own mult-megaton explosion!

But I guess I'll have to do that in a dark room.

Free Energy

I've been reading a recent comment thread on "Fuelless (sic) Engine Plans" at the Above Top Secret website. I found the website after a skeptic on the thread linked to my postings on the Steorn perpetual motion machine fiasco.

The thread starts with a question about the company, "Creative Science and Research" that claims to offer the plans for "fuelless (sic) Engines". I've never heard of the company before. A brief glance at the website does cause me to be suspicious. Lots of big promises of new technology that you can make from junkyard scrap according to their plans. Of course their plans are all for sale. They have testimonials in the form of customer letters, but no real mention or even links to the science behind the technology.

The whole pitch smells like snake oil, but hey, I could be wrong. Perhaps it is possible, for a mere $70.00, to build a 350 Horsepower (260 Kilowatt) Free Energy Motor that can be slaved to an AC Generator ($70 for plans) and then used to run your house. (They don't say how to do AC / AC conversion to get the correct frequency - but they do sell plans for a DC / AC 60 Hertz inverter for $25.00)


The Above Top Secret forum thread continues with plugs for Tom Beardon's MEG device. (James Randi has handily tore the MEG to pieces.) It mentions a couple of other bits of pseudoscientific crud, and there some discussion about a guy who claims to make a cell phone interceptor out of a television remote control, an electret microphone, and a steel salad bowl. (I had to look that one up - there's a Youtube video of this supposed feat that is gut-splittingly funny to anyone who has a clue about modern cellphone compression and modulation methods - the idea that the guts of a standard television infrared remote control have any bearing whatsoever is hilarious.)

But I'm not really interested in these various bits of woo, no matter how entertaining.

The reason why I'm writing is that one skeptic seemed to go a bit overboard in poo-pooing everything that forum members brought up. And I think what was triggering his skepticism was the insistance of others in the forum in using the words, "Free Energy" in place of the words "Ambient Energy".

There is a such a thing as "Ambient Energy", and it can be tapped for use. It is both "Free" in that you can get this energy without paying for it, and it is also NOT free, in that the energy has to come from somewhere.

When I was young I lived in a trailer park with my mom, my sister, and some other guy. Through the magic of Google Street View you can see where I lived here. Not far from me were some high tension, high power lines. The kids in the neighborhood figured out that on a dry day (unusual in Houston) you could hold a fluorescent bulb under the the high power lines and watch it light up. One artist has actually made a display out of this, using hundreds of fluorescent bulbs. You can see that project here.

So, if you lived near some high power lines, wouldn't it be possible to create some sort of antenna system to pick up the radiated energy, and use it to power your home? This would be "Free Energy", right? Not quite.

The energy that you could pick up from your antenna goes through a load (your home appliences and such) and then to Earth ground. This would act as the secondary "coil" of a transformer where the high power lines act as the primary "coil". The power to your home would be created by induced EMF from the power lines, and attaching your antenna to a load would oppose this flow of power through counter-EMF. The high power lines would experience a "load" in your location from having to drive your antenna, and the power company might have to increase the amount of electricity generated to compensate. The power company could detect the additional load, and depending on the size of the load they might investigate. If they find your antenna system, you could be charged with theft of power.

The forum also talks about using an onion as a battery - which is very possible. Lemon batteries are a standard demonstration in many science classes. This is also not "free" energy. Lemon trees get their energy from the sun in order to produce lemons, so a lemon battery is very indirectly (and inefficiently!) tapping energy from the sun.

Another battery discussed is the "Earth Battery". I had to investigate that. Earth Batteries work off of Telluric Current, which are caused by differences in electrical potential in the Earth's crust, allowing an electrical current to flow from point to point. Telluric currents are powered by the interaction of the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind. Telluric currents were not discussed in my physics or electronics classes - I'm guessing that they would discussed under soil science. However, ground loops are a big problem in electronics, and they are somewhat similar.

The big problem in harnessing telluric currents is that they are unstable. They waver in position, and fluctuate in intensity. Sometimes they disappear entirely, especially during drought.

Although there is "free" ambient energy here, it also ultimately comes from the sun. It is not easy to harvest it either. And I have to wonder what effect there would be on the Earth's magnetic field if a couple billion humans were tapping the Telluric current? Lenz's Law would work here too - eventually damping the magnetic field (and maybe affecting the Earth's rotation? I dunno. "Dammit Jim, I'm an Engineer, not a Scientist!")

And this is what I wonder about when people start talking about "free" (meaning "ambient") energy. We can harvest energy from the oceans, from the wind, from heat chimneys, but there is a price to pay in our environment. In most cases, that price is very small, even unnoticeable.

But what happens when several billion people are harvesting energy from their environment? I certainly don't know, but perhaps it should be investigated.

Science Fiction writer Larry Niven talks about the problems on the other end of free energy - that civilizations may have to deal with the waste heat that is the primary by-product of abundant cheap (or "free") energy. This isn't just a greenhouse effect, this is actually adding heat to the planet as a byproduct.


As a skeptic, it is really easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of snake oil salesmen, some of which are merely cons, and others who actually believe in their own products. The knee-jerk denial is something that we all have to guard against, and I'm just as guilty as anyone else.

Still, there are ways of rating claims to see if they stink of pseudoscience. Carl Sagan's "Baloney Detection Kit" and Dr. Robert Park's "Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science" are good starters. Richard Feynman's lecture on "Cargo Cult Science" is also good to help determine the difference between science and woo.

I also think that those people who enjoy poking around in the "Borderlands of Science" must also be careful in their terminology. It is too easy to slip into language that isn't based upon reality, and from there slide a little bit further into the realm of magical thinking.

I think it fair that skeptics demand more precise language in these fuzzy areas, that greater evidence must be demanded than for more mainstream claims, and that in these areas experiments must have unequivocal, repeatable results.

Steorn's "Free Lunch" is tested today

Starting today, Steorn is displaying a scaled down version of a mechanical “over unity” or perpetual motion machine at the Kinetica Museum in London England. Dubbed the “Orbo” this device is supposed to use permanent magnets to generate a rotating motion that can then be harnessed in a way that defies conventional understanding of thermodynamics.

I’ve spoken about the Steorn device before in my blog, and what I’ve said before still stands. I think that they are either self-deluded, or an out and out fraud. I don’t think their demonstration in the museum will amount to much – it will either be a low friction device with source of motive power that is either hidden or not very obvious, or it will use stored power in some way. If they get it going at all - there seems to be a bit of confusion about that.

From Steorn’s website:

Orbo is based upon the principle of time variant magneto-mechanical interactions. The core output from our Orbo technology is mechanical. This mechanical energy can be converted into electrical energy using standard generator technology either by integrating such technology directly with Orbo or by connecting the mechanical output from Orbo to the generation technology. The efficiency of such mechanical/electrical conversions is highly dependent on the components used and is also a function of size.

Orbo technology is subject to continuous development. This development is focused on improving the manufacturability of the technology, production costs and power density. Orbo was initially developed as using stop-start mechanisms (with a power density of 0.5 Watts per cm3), Steorn is currently finalizing the development of constant motion systems and a significant improvement in power density is anticipated

Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy is quoted at Silicon Republic as saying:

Orbo technology… was discovered accidentally (and) theoretically produces energy from nowhere using magnetics.

“The law of conservation of energy has been very reliable for 300 years, however it’s missing one variable from the equation, and that’s time,” said McCarthy.

McCarthy explained … that Orbo technology works on the basis that occurrences in magnetic fields do not happen instantaneously, and are therefore not subject to time in the way that, say, gravity is.

This time variance allows the Orbo platform to generate and consistently produce power, going against the law of conservation of energy which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed.

“This is as big a claim as you can possibly make in the world of technology and science,” said McCarthy.

Endgadget has a photo of the device that is supposed to be tested at the museum, (shown here) and has been keeping track of when the Orbo is supposed to be displayed via streaming video online. (link to streaming video site)

The Kinetica Museum website also said that the event would start at 6PM London local time, but that has already passed as I write this – the newest word from the Over Unity forums is that the demonstration will start at 6PM ET. 6PM ET is 11PM London local time, which seems like an odd hour to start the demonstration. I think that perhaps Steorn may have encountered some setup problems. Any engineer could tell you that the first demonstration of a prototype model is fraught with danger. Personally I like to have prototypes in place and running the day before a demonstration, and I test them obsessively.


My opinion is that Sean McCarthy is speaking in technobabble. I’ve seen no mathematics to back up his claims, and I think that his working prototypes will either be found to be faulty, or will never actually become widely available – depending on whether McCarthy is self-deluded or a fraud.

There have been hundreds of claims of perpetual motion or over-unity energy machines. The claimants have been, without fail, unsuccessful in getting their machines into the market place. Perhaps this is because the secret cabal of scientists and power-mongers who control the world’s energy supplies have actively suppressed these inventors. Perhaps it is because these inventors are self-deluded, poorly educated, or frauds bent on separating investors from their money.

Steorn’s website has this to say about the Orbo:

Under the terms of a modified general public licence and for a nominal fee, Steorn's intellectual property will be made available concurrently to all interested parties, from individual enthusiasts to larger research organisations. Steorn is taking this bold move to accelerate the deployment and acceptance of its technology for both humanitarian and commercial products.

I predict that the total combined energy added to power grids or used to power vehicles by Steorn devices will be easily measurable in watt-hours, and that all such energy will be consistent with conventional methods of energy storage and conversion. I predict that Steorn devices will amount to nothing, and that if these devices are made publicly available, the average person will never use one as more than a toy - a toy that eventually “winds down”.

I think these are optimistic predictions. A pessimistic prediction is that Steorn will always be right on the edge of the distribution of a practical device, and will even patent it – but it will never, quite, be ready for sale to the public. Or perhaps they will sell devices to the public under a very specific license that limits device owners in the way that they publish research on these devices.

My safest prediction is that Steorn’s personal stock will increase while they never quite succeed in creating a practical application from their over-unity machines.


On a final note, I'd like to make the observation that the Steorn website is in constant flux, web pages disappear and links to the Steorn website are apt to become dead without notice. I find that to be a bit odd.

================================
6PM PT - July 4th update.

Well, the Steorn web page that talked about the demonstration has gone MIA. The live web feed has been showing a continuous picture of what looks like Big Ben. Endgadget is reporting that the event has been postponed due to technical difficulties. The Steorn web site says:

Update 4/7/07 23:30

Due to slight technical difficulties we will now be publishing the live stream as of Thursday 5th July.

Giving Steorn the benefit of the doubt - I'll say they merely had problems setting up their prototype, and this isn't a fraudulent event. But I'll make another prediction - I'll predict that Steorn's future will be plagued with problems where their products are almost ready to demonstrate.

======================
10 AM PT - July 5th update

It seems like Steorn might not be online at all today. Text on the live stream link says:

Important update on the Kinetica demo:

We are experiencing some technical difficulties with the demo unit in London. Our initial assessment indicates that this is probably due to the intense heat from the camera lighting. We have commenced a technical assessment and will provide an update later today. As a consequence, Kinetica will not be open to the public today (5th July). We apologise for this delay and appreciate your patience.

Great, that's all we need. An electrical generator that is so sensitive that it breaks down due to unchecked ambient energy. Lights, leakage from your microwave oven, maybe even energy from your CB radio will kill it?

On a side note, camera 3 from the live stream shows the sidewalk outside the Kinetica art museum's window, where it appears that a street market is doing business. Occasionally you see a curious shopper peeking into the window at the Steorn display, which as of right now is merely an empty transparent box.


Has Steorn violated any laws of Physics? Are they merely converting energy from a previously untapped source? Will "The Government" shut them down before they can prove their concept? Has the "Oil Cartel" already bought out Sean McCarthy?

Orac, over at Respectful Insolence has more on Steorn.

Lots of interest in Steorn on my blog

A lot of you are new visitors to my blog, looking for an explanation of the Steorn perpetual energy machine and trying to figure out if it is a hoax, if it can be debunked, or if it’s the real thing.

You can skip down to the next post to see my musings on this.

Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn, issued a public challenge in the Economist magazine, and now the Steorn website has a “days since we issued the challenge” automatic counter.

I still think this is bullshit – Steorn is just looking for investor money – if they were serious about proving their claims they wouldn’t do it by a challenge. I still like my idea of having their machine output energy or do work and see if it surpasses a calculated energy density of their ‘black box’. They wouldn’t have to show the world how they do what they do, and they could still prove their concept without needing specially qualified scientists.

Think about it, if someone told me that they had a car that got an infinite amount of mileage on one tank of gas, I wouldn’t need a scientist to explain why this was true. All I’d need to do is drive the car back and forth across country. After a certain number of miles I would certainly surpass any theoretical limit of energy density in the supercar’s gas tank.

It’s that easy people – you really ARE that smart, you don’t need a scientist to ‘explain’ how Steorn’s machine works, you just need to see it demonstrated long enough to prove it.

I’ll bet you $10 that will NEVER happen.

Steorn’s Free Lunch – Free Energy? I think not!

Steorn is an Irish company that claims to have found a way to create ‘free energy’.

Free energy has been a favorite target of crackpots for a long time. Also called, “Over Unity” or “Perpetual Motion” machines, they’ve been debunked time and again until scientists and engineers are sick of seeing them anymore.

But Steorn Chief Executive Sean McCarthy believes that now his company has succeeded where all others have failed. He believes that his company has found a way to get something for nothing, and he acknowledges that a lot of scientists are going to dismiss him.

From a Reuters news service:

"We fully accept there is going to be cynicism surrounding this but what we're saying to the world of science is come and prove us wrong," said Steorn Chief Executive Sean McCarthy.

"The answer to the question we're posing is too big not to look," he added.

Well, it couldn't hurt to look, right?

Steorn has issued its challenge by advertising in the Economist magazine. Of course the first thing they did is set themselves up as a poor, oppressed and misunderstood minority by using George Bernard Shaw’s quote, “All great truths begin as blasphemies".

But just because something is a blasphemy doesn’t mean that it is also a ‘great truth’. This is a logical fallacy. Michael Shermer, in his book “Why People Believe Weird Things” pointed out “Heresy does not equal correctness.” From his book (a link to this chapter in his book is here.)

History is replete with tales of the lone scientist working in spite of his peers and flying in the face of the doctrines of his or her own field of study. Most of them turned out to be wrong and we do not remember their names. For every Galileo shown the instruments of torture for advocating a scientific truth, there are a thousand (or ten thousand) unknowns whose "truths" never pass muster with other scientists. The scientific community cannot be expected to test every fantastic claim that comes along, especially when so many are logically inconsistent. If you want to do science, you have to learn to play the game of science. This involves getting to know the scientists in your field, exchanging data and ideas with colleagues informally, and formally presenting results in conference papers, peer-reviewed journals, books, and the like.

But is Steorn ‘playing the game of science?’ From Steorn’s website:

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.

Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn, commented: “During the years of its development, our technology has been validated by various independent scientists and engineers. We are now seeking twelve of the most qualified and most cynical from the world’s scientific community to form an independent jury, test the technology in independent laboratories and publish their findings.

“We are under no illusions that there will be a lot of cynicism out there about our proposition, as it currently challenges one of the basic principles of physics. However, the implications of our technology go far beyond scientific curiosity: addressing many urgent global needs including security of energy supply and zero emission energy production. In order for these benefits to be achieved, we need the public validation and endorsement of the scientific community”.

“We’re playing our part in making that happen by throwing down the gauntlet with today’s announcement – now it’s over to the scientists to ensure that the real potential and benefits of our technology can be realised.”

Ooh! Some “academic institutions” have confirmed their claims but won’t publicly go on record so they are “forced” to “throw down the gauntlet?” This reeks of conspiracy! Look out! Black Helicopters!

So far, Steorn has indicated no peer-reviewed works, and has shown no photos or video of their device. They have given very little in the way of theory. The only hint of how this device works is from a film that can be downloaded from their website, or from Google Video. From that film, we see the following graphic while McCarthy says,

“The technology is the ability to construct certain magnetic fields that when you travel around the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position you’ve suffered a net gain of energy. Quite simply the analogy would be, you know, you walked to the top of the hill and you walked back down to the bottom of the hill and in doing that you gained energy; and it really is that simplistic.”

The graphic and the explanation are very close to the way that an electrical generator works. The basic concept behind generating an electrical current is to pass a conductor perpendicularly through a magnetic field. The magnetic field causes an electric charge to move around that conductor’s circuit to generate an electromotive force, dubbed ‘voltage’. As an example, take a coil of copper wire, and wave a magnet back and forth across it. If you clip a voltmeter to the ends of the wire, you’ll see a voltage as you wave the magnet past the wire. Voltage is electromotive force.

From the graphic, you can see the Steorn trademark image moving in a circle between magnets. If you were to imagine their trademark as a coil of wire, you would have something that fairly approaches the example I gave above.

What McCarthy leaves out in this explanation is a simple question. What makes their image move in a circle? If something is passing through magnetic fields and generating electricity, what is making it move?

From my example, as I wave a magnet across a coil of wire, I am the one moving the magnet, and I expend energy (calories) as I do so. I could just as easily wave the wire back and forth across a magnet and get a similar result, but the fact remains that I’m expending energy to move one thing across another. McCarthy’s analogy is the same thing. He says, “Quite simply the analogy would be, you know, you walked to the top of the hill and you walked back down to the bottom of the hill and in doing that you gained energy; and it really is that simplistic.” No it’s not, that’s not an explanation, that’s just pseudo-technical babble.

Moving up a hill requires an expenditure of energy. It is possible that you could reclaim that energy while moving back down the hill, but the fact is that you will only reclaim energy, you won’t gain energy. Think of standing on an airless planet and throwing a rock straight up. It takes energy for the rock to climb, but the gravity of the planet will counteract that energy until the rock stops going up and starts coming down. Eventually the rock will approach the same amount of energy as it comes down, and at the point where energy approaches unity, the rock will impact. A GAIN of energy would mean that the rock would return to the ground with more energy that it had when it first left the ground.

The energy efficiency of anything is a formula that states that efficiency is equal to power out divided by power in. This could also be defined by efficiency equals work divided by energy. The amount of energy I put into throwing the rock straight up is power in, and the amount of energy expended by the rock on impact back with the ground is power out. If I put 10 units of energy in, and get 10 units of energy out, I have an efficiency of 1, or 100%. This could also be called a coefficient of performance. Steorn seems to use the words "coefficient of performance" as a synonym for the word "efficiency"

According to Steorn’s website,

Steorn’s technology appears to violate the ‘Principle of the Conservation of Energy’, considered by many to be the most fundamental principle in our current understanding of the universe. This principle is stated simply as ‘energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form’.

Steorn is making three claims for its technology:

1. The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%.
2. The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts.
3. There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).

The sum of these claims is that our technology creates free energy.

That’s right, Steorn says that their device will create energy.

In an electrical generator electricity (electrons) are not created – they already exist in the wiring. These electrons are only being made to move. Think of marbles in a garden hose, each marble is an ‘electron’. If I have a paddle that pushes each marble down the hose, that marble will push the next in line, which will in turn push the next one, all the way around the hose, in a circle back to my marble pusher. Steorn is saying that their device adds electrons, or ‘marbles’ to this circuit. They are saying that they are not ‘stripping’ those electrons from anything else, which would degrade the material that is being stripped (item 2). Electrons are a fundamental building block of matter – so are they creating matter out of nothing? In my example, if I kept adding marbles to the hose, sooner or later that hose will burst. If this device creates electrons, what happens to them?

A heat engine is a device that uses a temperature gradient to generate work. Work could be applied to moving a magnet or a coil through a magnetic field to generate an electric current. When a heat engine is in use, it allows the unequal temperatures to equalize, the hot flows into the cold temperature area and work is done. If you are measuring the warm side of a heat engine, you’ll see it cool off as work is preformed. If heat is not added, the engine will slow down and less work will be done. This is a basic part of Thermodynamics. Steorn seems to be saying in item 3 that their free energy machine is not based on being a heat engine.


Evaluation

I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that Steorn actually has a machine that generates ‘free’ energy. I’ll give them a (very generous) benefit of a doubt and pretend that they are being honest, and that they don’t understand what is actually going on.

Perhaps Steorn is experiencing all too common simple measurement errors. If something is measured beyond the accuracy of the measuring equipment then it is possible to see something that isn’t there. For example, an ammeter that is accurate to +/- 0.02 amps, and measures a current of 0.01 amps is not really seeing a true current flow, perhaps current is flowing, but it is beyond the ammeter's capability to see. Another example is a scale that tries to measure a device and shows that the device is ‘lighter’ when it vibrates than when it sits still. The scale isn’t measuring a net gain in energy from a 'hovering' device, it is only experiencing stiction. Pons and Fleischmann were guilty of measurement error in their cold fusion fiasco. The last I heard, they still believe they achieved cold fusion, despite much evidence otherwise.

But even Pons and Fleischmann had a workable theory of where their energy came from. Theoretically cold fusion could actually work and generate energy through nuclear fusion. But fusion doesn’t create energy or matter, it only transforms it. Steorn is saying that their process creates either energy or matter, or both.

Maybe Steorn is just a crackpot company. Dr. Robert Park is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park. Dr. Park has published a list of seven warning signs of bogus science. From that list we are warned that science may be bogus if:

• The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
• The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
• The discoverer has worked in isolation.
• The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.

Wow. Four out of seven, that's pretty strong!

Steorn, as a company of about 20 people (according to their video) could be considered to be working in isolation, since they did not work with the scientific or academic community while developing this technology. They pitched their invention directly to the media after unnamed scientists and academic institutions refused to help them out, effectively suppressing their work. As for proposing new laws of nature, making matter or energy out of nothing definitely requires new laws of nature!

Another of the seven warning signs of bogus science is:

• The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.

Which is another way of saying, “measurement error” like I’ve already discussed. Steorn hasn't said as yet, but I'll bet that eventually we'll be told that the results of their device are "currently" at the limits of detection, but that someday the results will be huge!


So why is Steorn issuing a challenge in the Economist magazine? I could see a potential argument from crackpots that Steorn is afraid of having their technology ripped off – but a simple patent would fix that. Other perpetual energy machines have been patented. Unfortunately, when such a machine is patented it becomes pretty easy to see how it works (or doesn’t work). James Randi has demonstrated this with the MEG perpetual energy machine.

And speaking of The Amazing Randi, the Steorn ‘free energy’ device would easily qualify for Randi’s One Million Dollar Challenge. Under item 2.3 of Randi's FAQ, Steorn’s device would, “Violate Newton's Laws of Motion.” Steorn could easily fill out an application and send it in. If they prove what they say they can do, then not only will Randi hand them a million dollars, but I’ll bet Randi would be one of their biggest promoters!

In my own humble opinion, Steorn isn’t issuing a challenge in the Economist magazine because of conspiracy, or because of fear of theft of their idea, they are doing it in order to attract investors with deep pockets. When Pons and Fleischmann announced cold fusion, they were inundated with offers of funding.

If Steorn wants to prove their device without giving away their secrets, all they would need to do is turn it into a black box, and have perform some work outside of the box. Maybe turn a wheel, or generate a current. They could set up the box on the MIT campus and have it put under guard, and just wait while measuring the output energy of the black box.

It would be easy to calculate the energy density of a box of a given size for all known forms of convertible energy. The energy density of gasoline is greater than that of a battery, and the energy density of an explosive surpasses the energy density of gasoline. As the black box outputs energy the scientists at MIT could have a chart that shows the black box surpassing energy densities for different materials. Long before it gets to the energy density of gasoline investors would start lining up to dump money on Steorn. If the black box is measured at the energy density of fission or fusion – well! That would be something!

And think about it, any device that produces more energy than it consumes could be plugged into itself and would continue to increase in energy density until some part of the device reached its theoretical limits and destroyed itself. Perhaps the device would blow up. If no part reached a limit the device would soon become a new (small) sun! The potential for weaponization of such an item is enormous!

I think it would be cool if Steorn could emulate Dr. Brainard and use their device to make a Model T car fly!

But like I said, I don’t believe it. I don’t think Steorn has discovered anything more than just another way of separating investors from their money. I think this is little different from the Alchemy scams of the 1920’s.

Perhaps I’m wrong in laughing at Steorn’s claims, just as other great inventors in history were laughed at, but I think I’m pretty safe in doing so. As Michael Shermer says,

“They laughed at Copernicus. They laughed at the Wright brothers. Yes, well, they laughed at the Marx brothers. Being laughed at does not mean you are right.”

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4 July 07 - Update:
A prototype of the Steorn "over unity" device is supposed to go on display today at the Kinetica Museum in London. See my blog entry.

6 July 07:
Added a clarification on Steorn's use of "coefficient of performance".