Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
/., 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.)
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
Democrat delenda est
This is for idiots.
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
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.
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.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
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.