Irish Company Claims Free Energy

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.

Comments

You can tell something about these people

[ackthpt]

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.

"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.

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

[snowgirl]

"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.

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

[nizo]

From this article:

In order for such a revolutionary technology to have the public support needed for it to become used widely, McCarthy says that confirmation from the academic community will be crucial. "That is our focus at this point," he said.

McCarthy declined to specify how many prototypes they have built, or how long they have run, how much power they produce, and other details of the design.

All of this documentation will be presented in full to the jury of twelve scientists that are soon to be selected to analyze the technology. As of the time of this writing, 1,300 people have expressed interest in serving on the jury of scientists; and 15,516 people have signed up to be notified of the results.

The selection of the jury will screen out anyone who has past involvement or other indications that might be construed as showing support of the technology in some form or other. "We want cynics," said McCarthy.

"We are not seeking validation from the court of public opinion. What we need is validation from the academic world," he said. Once that has been achieved, then the public can know.

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

[LurkerXXX]

No. It sounds like they are looking to do some advertising, so they can rope in some not-too-smart-but-greedy venture captial investors.

Re:You can tell something about these people

[IAmTheDave]

Ya know, our (yours, mine, /. in general) skepticism is unquestionably well placed - free energy would collapse some economies, invigorate others, bring about new business opportunities, advance the living conditions of people stuck in third world countries - the actual ramifications are impossible to really get a grasp on.

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:You can tell something about these people

[ConsumerOfMany]

I think its great that everyone thinks Venture Capitalists are complete idiots. If thats true then where did they get the money to invest in the first place? If venture capital never had any returns, then venture capitalist would not exist.

Re:You can tell something about these people

[AugstWest]

I'm sorry, but did you sleep through the 1990s?

Re:You can tell something about these people

[frisket]

I'm as skeptical as the next nerd, but it's still essential for respected scientists to conduct the tests, do the math, and come up with an answer, even if just to debunk it formally.

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.

Re:You can tell something about these people

[Kadin2048]

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.

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.ht m#i486

Re:You can tell something about these people

[ConsumerOfMany]

I'm glad you were able to pull out such a specific rebuttal, but my point remains. The mere fact that venture capital money is still around means that it is pulling returns greater than its inputs, regardless of pets.com and other attention grabbing headlines shoved out by the media. Just because some lost money on dot.coms doesn't mean more made it on biotech and others...

Re:You can tell something about these people

[DerekLyons]

Validation in the academic world, free or even cheap power has never done well because it's not money. Since the 1900's there have literally been thousands of perpetual motion and free power devices. Who's to say that every single one is bunk,

Who is to say? Anyone who paid attention to the their physics classes in High School.
 
[snippage tinfoil hat ravings and handwaving nonsense.]

Crackpots and Opportunists say Crazy Crap

[Distinguished Hero]

Crackpots and Opportunists say Crazy Crap (perhaps in hopes of securing some cash investments); Film at 11 on You Tube. Why is this on Slashdot?

Good grief

[jmorris42]

Is it now the policy of slashdot to give headline coverage to every crackpot perpetual motion machine? It might have been mildly amusing had it been filed under humor, but as news? Even the snarky wisecrack from the editor doesn't make up for the misfiling.

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 /., there is no "Free Energy", no Free lunch, no tooth fairy and there ain't ever going to be flying cars. (We will eventually solve the tech for a flying car but the liability is insoluble.)

Re:don't think so...

[Mr. Underbridge]

Seriously, could someone explain to me the slashdot editors' obsession with junk science, specifically perpetual motion and free energy machines, and the like? This is not news. This is not for nerds, except to laugh at. This certainly doesn't matter, since variations on this crap have come around every few months for millennia.

This is for idiots.

Fry them now

[spun]

Exactly. Make it look like they are actually serious. How much VC cash do you think they will rake in between now and the test? After the scientific community announces that this is bullshit, they will claim to need more money to "fix" the issues that the scientists raised. The VC fools, not wanting to admit to themselves that they have been swindled with one of the oldest cons in the book, will happily throw more money at them. They will continue with this cycle until enough people wise up and the lawsuits pour in, then they will disappear to the Cayman Islands.

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:Fry them now

[Xerxes1729]

It would be nice to give everyone a fair hearing, but at a certain point, you have to just say, "Enough is enough." There are millions of crackpots all over the world who think that they're the next Einstein or Galileo or whoever. If you spend all your time fairly evaluating each of their claims, that's all you're going to be doing.

Re:Fry them now

[spun]

No, first round verification does not mean a world wide ad campaign to find a panel of scientists to verify this. There are proper channels. Look at their site for God's sake, this is a scam and that should be made painfully obvious to everyone. If it turns out it isn't, we can apologize later, after the world-wide fucking revolution this kind of technology would cause.

How you can tell this is bullshit...

[Xerxes1729]

...without having to know anything about physics.

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?

You know a company's honest when.....

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

They're in the tech industry claiming revolutionary results and their, "About" page contains no less than five pictures of the CEO, three of the marketing manager, two each of their finance and operations managers, and NONE of their tech people.

Re:Bah, how can it be so hard...?

[jmorris42]

> Just create the devices, let's say five of them. Take them with you. Plug in normal devices.
> 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.

No they don't

[Silent sound]

It really sounds to me like they want outside verification, and are willing to pay for it themselves.

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?

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.

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.

Re:No they don't

[shess]

Uh... no, if they wanted outside verification, they'd just plain go out and get some.

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 ... you hook it up to the grid, and start generating revenue at a couple cents per kilowatthour, round the clock. Since it's "free", your revenue is operating profit, and should add up FAST. After a couple months you build another unit, and another, and pretty soon you've bootstrapped yourself into a real company.

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:don't think so...

[Cheap Imitation]

Free energy is the scientific community's equivalent to the "winning the lottery" dream. The odds against it actually happening (to you) are insanely long.

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.

Re:Announced April 1st?

[CyberLife]

Good catch. The press release was issued on April Fool's Day. Did the submitter or anybody at Slashdot check to see whether this was intended as a gag?

Re:don't think so...

[Red Flayer]

1) It's funny. Laugh.

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?

Why the hostility?

[Forge]

I don't see why the hostility.

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?

[flibuste]

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:Why the hostility?

[DaoudaW]

I don't see why the hostility.

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?

[malfunct]

The problem is that the laws of thermodynamics say that if you had to put energy into the system there will be a net loss of energy over the life of the process. Means in this case that you are guaranteed not to get back more energy than you used to split the water into oxygen and hydrogen and in all likelyhood you would get significantly less back in a harnessable form. That said the beauty of hydrogen as fuel is that you can take hard to capture energy and store it as easier to use hydrogen. For instance hydro electric power is plentiful (yes it has environmental issues but I'm just being hypothetical) but can't be used to power a car. If it instead powered a electrolysis plant and the hydrogen was used to power the car that is workable.

Also for those who LOVE hydrogen as a fuel, remember, water vapor is a greenhouse gas.

Re:Why the hostility?

[Planesdragon]

The problem is that the laws of thermodynamics say that if you had to put energy into the system there will be a net loss of energy over the life of the process

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.

Sell the electricity.

[shoolz]

If the device really worked, there would be no need for scientific verification. They'd just hook 50 of them up to the grid and make millions generating and selling electricity to the power companies.

If it works, why does it need to be proven? Just go out and make billions with the device.

Wrong dream.

[abb3w]

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.

Prove or Profit

[OverflowingBitBucket]

Don't know about you, but I'm thinking one of:

- 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.