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.
more than a few people think that the whole site is part of another viral marketing campaign by Microsoft and Bungie, this time for Halo 3. Don't take it as gospel quite yet, but it would explain the total lack of engineering and scientific detail that a company of this nature should be showing to the world.
the coolest club on
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
From a quick shifty of that patent, it looks like it's based around the "If I just block the magnets, I create energy!". Just like the idea that one of the guys in my secondary school got excited about when he's invented a perpetual motion machine. If they are so confident, and having been spending the last 3 years on this project, why haven't they built a big one that outputs a reasonable amount of power, and powered something of a reasonable size. I expect they have been "tweaking" the design, and it's "just under the 100% mark", they just need to deal with some "inefficent" parts of the system. Or maybe they've invented unlimited free power.
http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2006/08/ste orn_and_free_1.html
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".
What Steom is actually claiming is quite possible, but uninteresting. Steorn is making three claims for its technology:
The coefficient of performance 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. 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".
Science - since a long time is based on the principle that you publish your information, and no matter who the other person is - he or she can criticise you (peer review). And, since theories can only be falsified (or to put it in words of a physicist: you can explore in which limit the theory holds), you have to provide openly what you want to falsify. The measure of acceptance for a theory in physics is how many people had the chance to falsify it.
What these guys so is the opposite. They do not publish any information WHAT they acually do. They do not go to a conference ans seek the open criticism. Thy do not go with this discovery to a peer-reviewd journal (this discovery would ensure the Nobel price to the scientist when it is accepted by the peers). No they want to set up a closed jury which they select. Are these people the advisory board or should they just convince the bank? If this circle is closed - may they report on a failure or are they, after beeing selected to be the "jury" only alowed to write positive things about the company. Do they have any kind of NDA? Wre they allowed to disassemble the technology? Will they have financial interests to say yes? Will they be taken to a brainwashing show in a nice hotel in the mountains or will they be sent to the lab? Open questions.....
They claim that Energy conservation does not hold. This either means that the Noether does not hold (and it holds since it is a mathematical law) or that space is not time invariant. An they are right. If you are moving some parts in circles the space is not time invariant. Thats the principle of a generator. But the thesis that the overall energy conservation does not hold is ridiculous - if stated in that way.
Perpetuum mobile exist for a long time and never any Joule of energy was won - still a lot of them are patented. That is because you can apply for a patent without proving that it works.
BTW.: I find it embarassing that perpetuum mobiles are even mentioned on slashdot.
http://www.steorn.net/en/coverage.html
Press Coverage
Steorn Announce "Free Energy" Technology
Irish company Steorn have announced a revoloutionary free energy technology. More
The Guardian | 1 April 2006
Karma: Excer..ex...excellahhh...realll good (mostly affected by drinking not done in moderation)
Except the guys aren't doing that: They aren't inviting as many credible scientific experts as possible to test it - they are asking people to apply, from which they will select 12. What a layman should do (other than attempt to publish in a peer-reviewed journal) is supply the information needed for anyone to try to duplicate the machine and its results.
Personally, I think this is more likely to be viral marketing for a game or something daft like that.
Yeah, heaven forbid that the challenge be published in a SCIENCE journal, even a POPULAR one like, oh, I don't know, Scientific American or Discover.
"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.
No, that's not correct. Scientists have recently discovered bacteria which shit Hydrogen. From memory they eat rubbish too - so they are busy trying to genetically modify these little fuckers to shit more hydrogen, and faster.
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.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"