Slashdot Mirror
Perpetual Energy Machine Getting Lots of Attention
Many users have written to tell us about a magnetic machine promising "infinite clean energy". Engadget has the first picture of the device and is reporting that the announcement (along with a short video) of this supposed device will be released later tonight. "CEO Sean McCarthy tells SilconRepublic how it works. Namely, the time variance in magnetic fields allows the Orbo platform to 'consistently produce power, going against the law of conservation of energy which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed.' He goes on to say 'It's too good to be true but it is true. It will have such an impact on everything we do. The only analogy I can give is if you had absolute proof that God wasn't real.'" In my experience if something seems too good to be true it generally is. I wouldn't get your hopes up.
There's a sucker born every minute.
Seriously, why is anyone outside of Art Bell and George Noorey even giving this guy the time of day?
I hear there's gonna be a demo on the Brooklyn Bridge. It just so happens I have purchased a deed to said bridge. Where's my cut?
If it draws power from fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field, it isn't perpetual motion any more than a tidal generating station, for example. It draws power from an external source, therefore it doesn't violate the laws of thermodynamics.
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul
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Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
Unfortunately no one is interested in my machine that produces infinite dirty energy. :(
If these asses are pulling energy from Earth's magnet field (and if it looks like free energy, they probably are), somebody please stop them, we need it.
Here's an older story on Slashdot covering the same company and technology.
It's a typo - "allows the Orbo platform to 'consistently produce power" should be "allows the Orbo platform to 'consistently produce revenue".
everyone knows that by creating Orbos, the natives of Mars lost their magnetosphere and ensured their civilization's premature demise.
(fake science makes for fun ingredients for science fiction!)
Anything that truly allows you to get something for nothing would so drastically alter our understanding of reality such that many things we take as absolute truth would become unreliable (predictability and statistics would be meaningless.. we would have to accept the possibility of spontaneous creation of radiation and perhaps even matter..)
I don't know where they're getting their energy from, but I cannot even fathom the possibility that it defies the law of conservation of energy.
>>"The only analogy I can give is if you had absolute proof that God wasn't real."
There's some really strong evidence that God isn't real. There's no strong evidence that PPM work. In fact, there's a number of things about the universe which strongly suggest that PPM are impossible, just as there's some things which strong suggest God is impossible. Really, even from a 'making an analogy' point of view: this machine is like having proof God exists.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Except it doesn't do that, making your comment irrelevant.
...from all the criticism and energy people waste their time on generating against this thing.
See conservation of energy isn't being broken.... and the source is perpetual....
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.
...they wouldn't need to convince anyone. They could just sell the energy, use that money to make a bigger device, sell more energy, lather, rinse, repeat. You don't need investors when you can print money.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Someday someone is going to create a real perpetual motion machine and no one is going to believe them.
I think at some point in the 19th century the US Patent Office decicded that to patent a Perpetual motion machine you would have to produce a working demo and have it run for a year and a day (they had a LOT of bogus claims). So if these guys think they can make one, time to build a demo and set it up for review.
It would be possible to draw some energy from the earth's magnetic field, but not very much its not a very strong magnetic field.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
... presumably a 4th July joke, replacing the April edition for obvious reasons.
On the other hand, Rudy Rucker in the 'Edge Question' 2007: "Endless free energy will flow from the subdimensions. And, by using subdimensional shortcuts akin to what is now called quantum entanglement, we'll become able to send information over great distances with no energy cost. In effect the whole world can become linked like a wireless network, simply by tapping into the subdimensional channel."
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
The fact it's unveiled in the form of a 10-day exhibition at a 'museum' tells us something about the nature of this 'product'. Have a look at the Kinetica Museum (avoiding unnecessary Flash intro)
Right across the top is their angle on events:
Between Shows > Our Next Show : starts July 5th, world's first free-energy demonstration
However, despite it being a piece of entertainment, the company are serious. See this story from Ireland, where they are based: "The company stumbled upon the technology while working with wind turbines to power remote surveillance CCTV cameras for ATM."
They discovered it by accident! That's how all the best inventions are conceived.
I wish there was a way to buy anti-stock in such ideas. In other words, make money off of its loss. Somebody told me there is something known as "puts", but they are generally configured for experienced career investors.
Table-ized A.I.
People like you make me so mad! You and your perpetual energy smear campaign. Thermodynamics thermoshamammics. For Too long we've been governed by the laws of physics. Energy wants to be free (as in speech), man!
Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
I know how the story unfolds. The device will work, by extracting magnetic energy from Earths own magnetic field. In a few years, Steorn will be one of the hugest and most profitable companies in the world, causing oil consumption to almost stop.
Steorn's main geomagnetic extraction complex will, over time, develop into a city, and then into a gigantic megalopolis, which people will call simply "Steorn". The Steorn megalopolis will be circle-shaped, powered by eight gigantic Orbo generators (also delimiters of the city's eight sectors), and divided into two vertical levels, the lower scum one, where low wage workers live, and the high one, were executives, rich people etc. live and work.
Over time, a quasi-religious movement will develop affirming that Steorn's consumption of geomagnetic energy is actually causing Earth to die, and the most fanatic among these will form an eco-terrorist movement dedicated to the destruction of all Orbo generators. The funny thing is: this movement will be actually correct! Worse: not only will Steorn be in fact slowly destroying the world, but they will have also developed advanced genetics research on an alien found years before, using these discoveries to genetically enhance their own self-defense troops.
The history of our future proceeds in many details, but I'll make it short. Suffice it to say that one of these troops will discover all about his increased abilities, the alien, the Orbo generators destroying Earth, and will decide to accelerate the process, by causing a meteor to strike Earth. Earth itself, in a move indicating some kind of self-awareness, will fight back by redirecting its own geomagnetic field against the meteor, destroying it. The collateral effect of this, however, will be a magnetic induced disease over humanity, who will slowly start to die. A cure will be found, but not before much damage happens.
Due to all of this, the world will realize they must stop using geomagnetism as a source of energy, turn off all Orbo generators, and finally turn back to that old means of power generation left behind decades ago: petroleum. So much, in fact, that even the former leader of the anti-Orbo eco-terrorist group will become one of the earliest investors in oil extraction and oil-based energy production.
Then history will repeat itself.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Can you make energy off these? If you create and aliment a flame-war, for example?
Of Code And Men
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE. NEVER EVER EVER NEVER NEVER EVER. Can we, as a species, please get over it?
Although I agree with your statement for the most part, It is short sided to say "NEVER EVER EVER NEVER NEVER EVER". There have been a lot of things that scientist (and others) claimed could never happen, just to be proven wrong in the future (ie we can never go faster than the speed of sound). We have a few hundred years,if that, of "modern" science under our belts. In a few million years, our level of knowledge will be a lot closer to a caveman then a scientist. Never say never.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
If they don't have a first machine, and only equation, they have NOTHING. On paper I can fly to the moon with only a big 7 foot stick , 77 inches of blue string (MUST be blue) and 3/4 gallon of milk. They HAVE to have a physical demonstration of PMM/OU or they are one of those thousands of other scam artist (Stan Meyer, Mark Golde, Dennis Klein...) which pretend to have something they don't really have : PMM/OU, or are quite near, SOOOO NEAR, we only need a bit of reengineering, to get a final solution to the free energy problem (yeah, right). Steorn pretend they worked 3 years (now 4) on this and they would never have a ready machine ? No generator ? Nothing ? (YEAH. RIGHT.).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
These cowboys gave a talk in our University in Dublin. They also wanted to film the talk, presumably so they could chop and change comments by the hostile audience and other learned speakers (experts in Thermodynamics and Magnetics). This quite sensibly wasn't allowed, but the talk went ahead anyway. However there didn't seem to be much behind the flashy powerpoint presentation. I think this is more of a scientifically-fictional pyramid scheme than anything else.
...the law of Energy Conservation breaks you!
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
This device which is really nothing more nor less than the exact same technology that NASA uses for orbital flyby which is how we get probes into deep space is just an application in electromagnetic fields rather than G fields.
Wrong. The gravitational slingshot technique conserves energy, so it could not be the basis for a perpetual motion machine.Now as to those making jokes about the first and second laws of thermodynamics. If an object at rest remains at rest unless acted on by an outside force and an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.... Is this not by definition perpetual motion? It keeps on doing whatever until forever.... Pretty obvious folks.
Don't be dense. Perpetual motion usually (as it does in this case) refers to a device that produces more energy than it consumes.Of course those who oppose the idea that we can arrive at energy by some means such as this, openly preach to us that the whole universe erupted out of the head of a pin, [Big Bang anybody?] and are quite happy for all of its mass and all of its energy to have erupted out of nothing in that event. [Logic anybody?]
I'm not an astrophysicist, but my understanding is that time also began in the big bang. It's not like one moment there was lots of mass and energy when there was none the previous moment. There was no previous moment.
Correction: you're not an intentional troll.No I haven't done anything but point out the truth and that isn't troll.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
We all know what will happen if it does not work. That's just plane boring to talk about. Also reading people make jokes about snake oil is boring too.
What's more interesting is to think of what WOULD happen if it were true. How would the politics of the world change? Would it plunge the world into war? Would peace brake out?
As a thought experiment independent of this being true how would the world change in 3 months, 6 months, 6 years if unlimited engergy was discovered?
Funny you should say that. Because this IS not a perpetual energy machine, but is actually just using a "novel form" of acquiring energy.
And it doesn't break any laws of thermodynamics. Not more as a simple dynamo or a magnetic brake.
The only "catch" is that they tap the energy of Earth's magnetic field.
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
Good ole English confusing things and people again. We need to define some terms here.
If an object at rest remains at rest unless acted on by an outside force and an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.... Is this not by definition perpetual motion? It keeps on doing whatever until forever.... Pretty obvious folks.
English definition wise, yes, any object put into motion will remain in motion forever, or until acted on by an outside force. The problem is you cannot get anything useful like a source of energy out of it. Say you have a wheel you can start spinning with no outside forces on it. It will spin forever. Sounds great right? Now say you attach it to a shaft driving a generator. Free power forever right? No. Spinning the shaft to power the generator is now putting an outside force (resistance and all that) and your wheel will come to a stop eventually. Not too useful.
What perpetual energy/motion machines are supposed to do is provide more energy/motion than is being acted upon them from the outside force that is putting their motion/energy to work. Let me say it again another way, they create energy/motion out of nothing, and then the surplus is used for some kind of *work* (charge a battery, power a motor, etc. etc.) If they were creating energy/motion and you did not tap the power, then the device would speed up, and speed up, and continue to speed up to infinity.
What the inventor (and all inventor of perpetual motion devices claim) is that they have found some method of doing this. Creating something that creates energy out of nothing (as opposed to all other sources of energy, which require something. An engine requires fuel, a solar power requires sunlight (or other light) the light from the sun requires hydrogen and other elements to be spent or transformed in a nuclear reaction, etc, etc.
If a perpetual motion/energy machine is ever really devised, it will likely be found later on that the machine is simply running on an formerly unknown form of energy. (As mentioned on here in other posts).
Easily dealt with.
Build a working model, and offer it and the plans to build more for public inspection by a variety of scientists.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Isn't that what solar cells are? 'Practical' perpetual energy? I know there are issues with the breakdown of materials, and eventual cooling of the sun, but if you invented the solar cell and called it a 'perpetual energy' machine, then where would you be? Much like where this guy is I suspect, being called a scam artist before you even get a chance to exhibit, being ignored because you weren't in negotiations with governments and pushing for NDAs.
I'm hoping that this will turn out to be something similar. I'm hoping that the demonstration will show way of harnessing energy we previously mostly ignored or didn't use the same way. We've got geothermal energy mostly untapped, wave energy mostly underfunded and immense, practically immeasurable energy flung by the sun into space, benefiting nobody. It isn't as if the energy sources don't exist, we just don't have the technology to tap most of the big ones yet.
The way I understand it, perpetual energy isn't even really impossible, sub-atomic particles pop into and out of existence all the time and sometimes get separated, thus Hawking radiation and for all practical purposes, perhaps all purposes, demonstrate perpetual motion. The trick would be in harnessing them, tricky bit that, what with the black holes and all. If you figure out how to do it you'd get a lot of cool points.
Failing any of the big payoff candidates like black holes or tapping the sun, maybe you could harness the magnetic properties of the earth? I think they're mostly a product of the earth's kinetic and maybe heat energy, they aren't truly perpetual, but it would be a neat trick to actually find a way to use them.
Yes, I know, this has the earmarks of a scam, but why not wait until we get a chance to find out more before we dismiss it entirely? You're not spending anything but your time, and to my way of thinking, anything that makes you think and reconsider your notions of what is possible is not a waste.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
If someone has been able to really make this work, well I'll be truely amazed.
Such a device does not have to be violating the laws of thermodynamics. For example, the device could be getting energy from somewhere via some mechanism we don't fully understand yet.
A hundred years ago nobody would have considered that you could get energy from mass via E=mc^2 and we'd be awfully arrogant as a species to think we have all of physics figured out.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Tidal power. Massive amounts of water moving towards and away from shore, pulled mostly by the gravity of the moon.
You can call it altruistic but you really need to
consider the long-term ramifications of an
infinite energy source.
If there was all of this abundant energy available,
it would be put to work, and the net result is heat.
Lots of it.
Homo Sapiens has already proven they can't manage
what they have now.
An infinite energy source would likely result in
massive global problems, likely not survivable.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Whoa, my crackpot meter pegged with just the intro! Surely we can harness the heat from all this BS and solve our energy problems forever!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
What you say is entirely true.
And it's certainly a very interesting area of philosophy to explore. But to claim that everything (except that which is explicitly defined and self-contained, like the rules of logic) requires faith is to completely remove any meaning to the word "faith." It can no longer be used in meaningful conversion.
I take a ball, and I drop it 20 times in a row. It falls to the ground each time. Then I go out and learn about the laws of gravity, and the huge body of theory around it. When I pick up the ball and drop it again, I will say that I "know" it will fall to the ground, based both consistent past experience and the science supporting it. You will say that the expectation that the ball will drop requires faith, and to some literal degree you're right, but to use the term that way (and expect everyone else to use it that way) is in practice nonsensical, and should be reserved for pedants and philosophers (which even then requires context).
I read the Steorn patent a while ago (the last time it was posted on /.), and I spotted the flaw pretty easily. The machine is meant to move a metal plate around to selectively block the magnetic field from a permanent magnet. If you could do that without using too much energy, then it would be a viable perpetual motion machine, but moving conductors around in magnetic fields takes precisely "too much" energy.
In hell, you will find a mountain of broken, feces-covered typewriters and a stack of copies of the First Folio.
Good job...
(I just wanted to say 'good job' too!)
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
Buf if the magnetic field gets weaker, the compasses stop working, and the boy scouts can't use them to find their way in the forest. Won't someone pelase think of the children ?
Oh, and we'll all die horribly under the particle bombardment of solar wind, but first things first.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Let's not use any Energy that is not GPL'ed!!! Closed sources Energies are the cause of all evil!!!
"I think this line is mostly filler"
It's a FORCE, you can't "tap" it any more than you can tap gravity.
And it doesn't break any laws of thermodynamics. Not more as a simple dynamo or a magnetic brake. Ummm, what?
From http://www.steorn.com/orbo/claim/:
"The sum of these claims for our Orbo technology is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy"
"The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%"
That's 2 out of the three lawys of thermodynamics broken, by my count.
The only "catch" is that they tap the energy of Earth's magnetic field. You can't get energy from a static magnetic field. (You can get it from a changing magnetic field, and the Earth's magnetic field is changing; but it's doing so over a timescale of hundreds of thousands of years, so the energy you'd get would be very, very small.) Doing so would basically be tantamount to breaking the first law of thermodynamics.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
An easy one is the crystal radio. You're getting power from the transmitter. Make an array of crystal radios, on different frequencies, gang them together... hey, now you're getting a good deal of power!
The Earth's magnetic field wanders. Use that.
There are various gyroscopic-like things related to the Earth's orbit and rotation, particlarly having to do with things not being all planar. Use that.
Plank time, baby.
That's how fast you have to be.
I call bullshit on the ignorant article
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Then you're actually talking about buoyancy doing the lifting, not gravity. Unfortunately, gasses don't tend to stratify, they tend to mix. So now you have the complication of separating your hydrogen and oxygen from your inert gas before they recombine on their own. Sorry to be a buzzkill, but you generally don't get something for nothing.... damn thermodynamics anyway.
The only(?) perpetual motion machines that can be built on a small scale are coriolis machines. Way back in the 19th and early 20th centuries is was a fad to build perpetual clocks with horizontally rotating pendulums that stole energy from the earth's rotation to power themselves. The amount of power extracted is very small though and requires careful leveling of the clock. Also, they won't work in the tropics or at the poles. They only work in intermediate latitudes.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
One high tide is the ocean being pulled toward the Moon. Twelve hours later it's being thrown away from the Earth by centrifugal force. The Earth-Moon system rotates around a point 1,000 miles below sea level. Tidal braking is however why the Moon always faces the Earth.
Windmills harness the power of air moving under force from both solar and the Earth's rotation. One of the oldest transducers known to industry, after the waterwheel.
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make install -not war
Is this the joke where we wrap the skeletons of Edison, Watt, Ampre, Einstein, Newton, and the like with magnets - and then wrap copper wires around them to generate power by them turning in their graves?
Neil is that you? Yeah yeah, it's me... Neil...
Oh, this is just too much fun!
Everybody is cranking out lots of criticisms and such, but you just know everybody is still going to be paying attention on July 5th!
Typically with over-unity claims which actually make the news, there is a big press release and gab-fest, and then a few weeks later the inventor vanishes from view never to be heard from again.
I recall one gentleman in Japan, Kohei Minato, three years back who had managed to garner a lot of positive press with his funky spinning wheels. He had an Irish minister of some sort pay him a visit and descriptions of his free-spinning wheel are really cool. (The coolest item is in the last fifth of the page at the bottom.) He generated some modest interest in 2004 when a journalist was significantly impressed with his work and published an article (copied at the link above). I wonder what happened to Mr. Minato. I've not heard a peep about him since then. If he's in jail, it's not the kind you get put in for fraud, because then there would be some record of his being prosecuted. Perhaps its one of those special prisons they have for people who dare to tap into some forbidden energy source the petrochem companies don't want anybody to know about. There are tales of inventors being kidnapped at gunpoint. I know a guy who worked for an agency whose job it is to kill scientists. But hey, shhhhh. Stuff like is entirely not real. I'm only joking. Really. Joking. Shhhh. Plausible deniablility. Cuz the guy is just gone. There's nothing on the man that isn't three years old.
Well, actually, I did hear one peep. There was a fellow inquiring after Minato, claiming to have last seen him in Japan in December of 2006. Apparently, Mr. Minato has been offered a production facility in another country. But that could be just the background noise of the grand ol' internet. Who's to say?
Anyway. . , if this Orbo thing is a scam, you can bet it's a great one. Their showing has been really patient and well-crafted thus far. I'm so happy they're still around a year after their first announcement. I mean, think about how much effort is being expended here; it involves a large number of people who are all towing the line. Scientists, and production staff, and PR people. If this is a scam, it's much, much larger than any other over-unity claim, which usually only involve one or two people working in a garage. According the the wonderful world of wikkipedia, Steorn invited a democratically selected member of a forum to visit their facility, and they wowed her with a bunch of smoke and mirrors. This is so rich! Damn, I'm excited!
I wonder, if it's all scammy, how they've worked out how to not go to jail for fraud? Is it illegal to lie to your investors? Maybe they'll all claim it was just an elaborate test of the PR abilities, a cosmic joke to see who they could fool, and that really, no money changed hands. Who knows?
Or if they've got some kind of device on their hands which draws energy from somewhere else, like the Earth's magnetic field as some have suggested, then. . , hey, is that cool or what? They've done enough high-profile press work to perhaps not get vanished. (Though I wouldn't count on it.) Either way, Steorn is putting on a helluva neat show. This is pulp science at its best! It reminds me of my favorite period in fiction; the late 1700's, early 1800's, when steam and flying contraptions and "Watson, get the pistols!" was the way science was conducted. A showing of a revolutionary new technology in an art gallery? Are you serious?! Well, damn, let me get my top hat and cane! These days are sorely lacking adventure in science. Too few pith helmets and too much slick corporate chrome.
So, rock-on, Steron! I can't wait to see what you pull out of your hat! And if you actually have something genuine, a word of advice: Opensourcing it would keep you from getting killed by the Bad Men. If you don't have
I'm a good judge of character..and these guys strike me as, at minimum, sincere. I want badly for it to be true -- bring on the Holodeck next -- and replicators! I'm ready for the future!
However, the proof of the pudding is under the crust. Have a look a their Disclaimer, which says it all:
"Steorn and its suppliers further do not warrant the accuracy or completeness of the information, text, graphics, links or other items contained within the Materials or Ideas."
Indeed.
Seriously when you hear a claim of a perpetual motion machine, then at the instant that you hear the word magnet, you should think scam.
I'm no physicist, but I think the rough answer is that people would have to be really dumb to use the 2nd law of thermodynamics as an argument against evolution, not just because they'd be wrong, but because they'd be arguing against the existence of life in the first place. (Seriously - all living organisms have to stave off the effects of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, it's fundamental to their survival. The reason they don't violate it is that the processes involved create more entropy elsewhere.)
From TFA: Here we go, after months of doubt over claims of a magnetic machine promising "infinite clean energy," Steorn will be putting their wares on display for public scrutiny in London. A physics defying perpetual machine, if you will. Starting tomorrow, rumor has it that the Kinetica museum will host the Orbo device for a ten day long public demonstration of the technology. We're expecting a formal announcement at 6pm 11pm London (1pm 6pm New York). iPhone shmiPhone, this is going to be good. Update 1: Still nothing from Steorn yet, but Irish RTE News has also "confirmed" the impending announcement. Moreover, a "very simplified version" of the technology will be viewable by streaming media over the Intertubes. So get ready kids, they say you'll be able to watch janky video of a prototype "lifting a weight" from four different angles starting at 6pm London Eastern Time. Otherwise, you can view the device live at Kinetica from Thursday 5 July to Friday 13 July. Update 2: First picture of the mystical device! [Thanks, Jordy] Update 3: CEO Sean McCarthy tells SilconRepublic how it works. Namely, the time variance in magnetic fields allows the Orbo platform to "consistently produce power, going against the law of conservation of energy which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed." He goes on to say "It's too good to be true but it is true. It will have such an impact on everything we do. The only analogy I can give is if you had absolute proof that God wasn't real." Whoa. Link to demonstration site now added below. Update 4: Well, 6pm London time has come and gone. However, Steorn's site now says that the video will go live at 6pm "Eastern Time." Apparently, their demo is aimed at the US. A fossil-fuel Independence Day? Riiiiight. Update 5: Jeebus, what a non-event. Even though they wield supreme control over the laws of physics, Steorn had to cancel tonight's event "due to technical difficulties." We'd laugh if it wasn't so pathetically tragic. The live stream is now rescheduled ambiguously to the 5th July. Now move along folks, there's nothing to see here.
Drill baby drill - on Mars