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Steorn's "Free Energy" Jury Comes Back To Bite Them
chiark writes "Remember Steorn? Free energy for all, coming soon, and a gauntleted slap in the face to the physics establishment: 'come be our jury, and prove us right or wrong.' Well, 2 years later, the jury's verdict is in, and it's not the validation Steorn was hoping for: 'Twenty-two independent scientists and engineers were selected by Steorn to form this jury. It has for the past two years examined evidence presented by the company. The unanimous verdict of the Jury is that Steorn's attempts to demonstrate the claim have not shown the production of energy. The jury is therefore ceasing work.' Steorn had the choice to either accept this and move on, or attempt to rebut. Guess which approach they took?"
I just can't believe that anyone wasted 2 fucking years of their life trying to "disprove" it.
CheShA: Manchester Breakcore / Drill and Bass Yes I'm a s
And I bought a DeLorean in preparation just for this... Thanks a lot, Steorn. Bah!
they accepted the results gracefully and in the future all their ideas will comply with the laws of physics, just like every other crank out there~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So, after failing to provide enough evidence, a jury decides the company cannot prove their claims. In the press release, the company claims to still move forward? Sheesh....
In other related questions, what's going on with the Markus Zahn guy? Everything I can pull up about him and his invention comes to an abrupt stop in the 2 months following shortly after that story.
import system.cool.Sig;
Or Geniuses?
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
They're going to make asses out of themselves again?
The solution to their problem is to form a lobbying group to get Congress to reform the Laws of Physics. Those laws have been around for centuries and are clearly woefully outdated. Sure, at first the so-called "Laws" of Thermodynamics were a good idea, but now they're just holding us back.
Once again, some nut/fraudster claims the laws of thermodynamics don't apply, and they are wrong.
The fact that these people get any attention is a sad reflection of the state of scientific understanding in the general population and the media.
Methinks that if they make a single sale, they should be charged with fraud. It's bad enough that they screw with whatever miniscule understanding of science people have left... but they're going to go ahead and sell this shit?! Fuck, they must be doing the same drugs that makers of Enzyte are taking. Btw - why am I seeing Enzyte ads on TV again? Wasn't the CEO and a bunch of execs meant to serve sentences for fraud?
I am willing to prove it as well.
But only for the next five minutes.
You will not be allowed to look inside the box, ONLY to measure the energy going in and out. You're not allowed to touch the machine and it must be in a completely dark room. You must pay all expenses for travel and lodging yourself. You must address me as "esteemed scienctist sir" at all times.
A-ha, and there the time is up. I see none of you felt brave enough to try to disprove my claims. I am the winner. I'll be sure to quote this in my journal.
The fact that people take these free energy claims seriously is the prime example of how scientifically illiterate people are, and it's a real problem. It's what allows things like alt-meds to gain a foothold, UFO abduction proponents to have a voice, and free energy claims to waste everybody's time.
Even somebody like myself with no scientific background whatsoever can understand basic scientific principles like thermodynamics. It's called scientific literacy, it's like regular literacy except you replace regular words with science words.
And that was the last Terry Fox run I ever participated in.
And will any of the investors be gullible enough to invest additional money for the company's plans to commercialize it?
It's sad that this people get any attention at all.
But then again, if you're so dumb to buy into their BS, you probably deserve to be screwed.
You believe in perpetual motion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z6UJbwxBZI
Of course, one still can't extract useful energy from such a system. But as a superfluid, as long as the temperature and pressure were maintained, a superfluid fountain would never stop flowing. I think that counts as "perpetual motion". And for those who say one must expend energy to cool a local environment down to create superfluidity, ask yourselves: are there places in the universe where such conditions could exist naturally? As the universe cools over time, should one expect such conditions to become more widespread? Because if so, then what you're really saying is such conditions need not be artificially created and therefor it is a "natural" effect. Weird stuff.
None of which gives us so-called "Free Energy".
"In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" -- Homer Simpson
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
the company had resolved the key technical problems related to the implementation of Orbo and is now focused on commercial launch towards the end of this year..
/s
Those are some hardcore ***ards. They have been told by scientists they have nothing, but they carry on. Respekt!
Knowing the basics allows you to avoid pseudo-science without effort.
Once you master physics, you see the world for what it really is. Everything turns to green code, and you can tear apart charlatans with a wave of your graphic calculator.
Look, I admit that their claims sound unlikely, but you can't just dismiss all claims out of hand because "they break the laws of physics". The fact is that they break the current laws of physics.
Hell, there could be all sorts of unlikely explanations that don't even break the current laws of physics (like perhaps some mass is being converted into energy)
Real Science means conducting experiments and taking measurements. The 'laws' of physics are only as good as the experiments and measurements taken.
The fact is that the experiments have been conducted, and it appears that it doesn't work. It doesn't mean that the Jury are 'idiots' for trying to test it - it means that they are scientists.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Orbo is based upon time variant magnetic interactions, i.e. magnetic interactions whose efficiency varies as a function of transaction timeframes.
It is this variation of energy exchanged as a function of transaction time frame that lies at the heart of Orbo technology, and its ability to contravene the principle of the conservation of energy. Why? Conservation of energy requires that the total energy exchanged using interactions are invariant in time. This principle of time invariance is enshrined in Noetherâ(TM)s Theorem.
The time variant nature of Orbo interactions can be engineered using two basic techniques. The first technique utilizes a method of controlling the response time of magnetic materials to make them time variant. This is achieved by controlling the MH position of materials during permanent magnetic interactions.
The second technique decouples the Counter Electromotive Force (CEMF) from torque for electromagnet interactions. This decoupling of CEMF allows time variant magnetic interactions in electromagnetic systems.
I may as well get out my cheque book, I'm convinced.
I'd note that we get free energy all the time. We get more energy out of a gallon of gasoline than was put into making it. We get far more power from a pound of fuel in a nuclear reactor than we put into mining the uranium, refining it and turning it into nuclear fuel. Neither of those violates the first or second laws of thermodynamics. That's because those laws apply to closed systems, and we're not in a closed system. In the case of gasoline, the sun put energy into the system from outside. In the case of uranium, the supernova that created the uranium atoms put the energy into creating them. So it's entirely possible to have a source of energy that's simply tapping something outside our normal view of the system. Such a source would appear to be providing free energy.
OTOH, Steorn seems to have failed the acid test: producing results. It'd've been much more convincing if they could've just dropped a unit down on the bench and told their jury "Here it is, here's how to turn it on and off, here's where the power comes out. Have fun with it.". A working prototype trumps all theoretical arguments, and Steorn couldn't produce a working prototype. Until they can, I'm inclined to believe they're either mistaken or running a scam.
Is this free as in beer?
Working as a design engineer and FEA analyst at a small mechanical design shop gives me the chance to work with on a lot of different projects.
:-)
One day, my boss comes in and tells me to look over a design this old guy from Florida has for a power generating machine.
This guy wasn't taking the "violates the laws of thermodynamics" line, so I had to spend some time to model up his design (a large drum that rotated, with small pistons that would drive up and down in relation to the surface of the drum, driving a crankshaft). He couldn't get it that this was essentially an overly complex gear, except with way more inefficiencies.
He tried to use the "if you roll a wine bottle with a string attached to the circumference, you can lift a load". He just couldn't accept that this was an example of transfer of work. Sigh.
What finally got him to calm down was that even if the drum could produce positive energy, it would immediately be gobbled up by the inefficiencies of the drive motor, gearing, and generator.
Best part of it was that I still got paid!
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
Lisa, in this house, we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I'm wondering which bright boy will get the idea to start a new religion based on "Orbo?" This free energy must be coming from the gods, right? ;)
In the short story "Waldo," one of the main themes were "magical" energy generating devices called "DeKalbs." SPOILER: Ended up that they were actually sucking energy from an alternate universe. At any rate, I'm not inclined to dismiss it outright just because it can't be explained. However, I agree with a previous comment that they need to produce a working prototype in order for it to be taken seriously.
We have this in Finland too. Called "Utele", and obviously they're collecting money from investors. http://www.utele.org/utele/?page=6000002&l=1
If I invented a free energy machine, here is what I would do.
1. Create a "Solar Panel Farm" on my Property. The panels would be cheap panels of glass spray painted silver on one side. In an obscure shed would be the "AC/DC converter for the cells" which in actuality would be chock full of my amazing magnetic free energy engine thingies. I would produce about 2x as much energy as I would if the solar cells were actually real. :) Have another shed with "batteries" to supply the grid at night, in reality, they are filled with more of my machines and used batteries that don;t work with GNDN (goes nowhere, does nothing) wiring.
2. Sell the energy to the electric company and take the money to buy more land and build more "fake solar farms or fake windmills" more nondescript sheds built housing my free energy devices.
3. Keep repeating my process of making "fake" solar energy farms and maybe some real ones that produce more electricity that they should, (wink wink), selling electricity till I have built up a war chest enough to buy a region power company. Take several coal powered plants and fill them with my machines and only burn enough coal to make a diffuse small amount of smoke so no suspicions are raised. Lower my electricity rates as well for the consumers cause I don't have to buy so much coal to make power. Start selling power to other companies and take them over in the same way.
4. Once I have over 52% of total electricity in the country being produced by my free energy devices I would then open a chain of plants that would extract CO2 from the air, break sea water down and make hydrocarbons the hard way, sure it would be energy intensive, but what do i care, I gots free energy! Disguise them as refineries and buy a token amount of crude from domestic producers, make about 20x the amount of hydrocarbons for the amount of crude processed. Sell the produced oil to China and Russia first and then to the US, take over the oil companies the same way I did for the electric companies. Build enough infrastructure to crush the middle east and OPEC financially.
5. When the whole world is dependent on my free energy, then come clean about how I did it and how I made free energy and laugh my ass off from my personal moon base which is powered by my free energy machine.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Although there is ample evidence to suggest the universe as we know it began with a Big Bang, it never made any sense to me how anything could come out of nothing, much less anything of such magnitude.
Clearly, our current laws of physics are incomplete. For example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy.
I wonder when we finally figure it out whether we'd also discover a new source of energy that'll solve all our energy needs once and for all.
Steorn's extraordinary claims are outside of the realm of known physics, many others have made similar claims (Galileo, Newton, Einstein, etc). The difference is proof...
Steorn needs to provide substantial proof to the world that their claims are legitimate, that the known laws of physics need revision.
Proof would open up enormous possibilities for research and development, now that we know what to look for, and how to test it (think airplanes, transistors, etc).
But Steorn has failed to provide any basic proof of any of their extraordinary claims. The scientists have not disproven anything, they have just shown that Steorn can not back up their extraordinary claims when tested properly.
The scientists go back to work.
Steorn goes back to "we fixed the little problem, it really works now, send us money, you can trust us..."
I say we find a way to steal energy from another universe, this free energy would be awesome! What could possibly go wrong with increasing the amount of energy in our universe, other than turning an open or flat universe into a closed universe.....
Enjoy the big crunch, all our fault, at least we could enjoy the Omega point while it lasts....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Unlike most people, I have studied the subject of "free energy" quite substantially the past 2 years or so, and since I know quite a bit about the field, it is astonishing to read that people simply disgard the possibility of finding a clean, endless energy source because of "the laws of thermodynamics forbid perpetuum mobile". Yes, you can't create energy out of nothing, but that does not mean there aren't any energy sources that are free for the taking.
As a matter of fact, it has been known for more then a hundred years that in principle we can tap all the (electrical) energy we need out of the environment, or the vacuum, to be more precise. You see, mankind has known about a free energy source ever since JP Morgan financially crushed the great Nikola Tesla, who already wrote in 1892 (!):
http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1892-02-03.htm
"We shall have no need to transmit power at all. Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. This idea is not novel. Men have been led to it long ago by instinct or reason; it has been expressed in many ways, and in many places, in the history of old and new. We find it in the delightful myth of Antheus, who derives power from the earth; we find it among the subtle speculations of one of your splendid mathematicians and in many hints and statements of thinkers of the present time. Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic! If static our hopes are in vain; if kineticÃf"and this we know it is, for certainÃf"then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature."
It turns out that the basic theory our electrical engineers work with, the Maxwell equations, have been deliberately curtailed such that they won't allow "over-unity" devices nor the so-called "scalar waves" or longitudinal waves, which can be both electrical or magnetic.
Today, the German Professor Konstantin Meyl shows some remarkable experiments, based on a.o. Tesla's "magnifying transmitter", which show that scalar waves *do* exist and are much more effective then Herzian type of electro-magnetic waves:
http://www.energeticforum.com/renewable-energy/3545-konstantin-meyl-scalar-faraday-vs-maxwell.html
He also explains that the currently used Maxwell equations are actually a special case of his complete theory, based on vortexes. His theory can do without postulates like "black matter" and the like and also allows over-unity devices operating with scalar waves. Very interesting videos...
Another interesting researcher is Professor Claus Turtur, who a.o. calculated the energy density of the vacuum in his paper "Verification and Conversion of the Energy of the Zero-point Oscillations of the Vacuum" to be about 1 * 10^29 J/m3:
http://www.wbabin.net/physics/turtur1e.pdf
That's an awful lot of energy present in every qubic meter of space! If we can only retrieve a fraction thereof, we have all the energy we need.
Now that does not mean it's easy to do, but it's certainly waaaay to short around the corner to call this "impossible", "foolish" or anything like that.
Furthermore, Thomas Bearden shows how and why the Maxwell equations have been deliberately curtailed in order *not* to allow over-unity devices:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Site:LRP:The_Deliberate_Curtailment_of_Nikola_Tesla's_Primary_Energy_Source
"Tom Bearden and Leslie R. Pastor discuss how the present electrical engineering model (and practice) was severely curtailed to exclude overunity (COP>1.0) electrical power systems that take their excess electromagnetic energy directly from their interactio
"don't think of conspiracies, think of sharks swimming in parallel lines." - John Loftus
Just ask to see the company's quarterly electricity bill. If it's greater than 0.00EUR (0.00GBP/0.00USD) walk away.
AT&ROFLMAO
"Look, I admit that their claims sound unlikely, but you can't just dismiss all claims out of hand because "they break the laws of physics". The fact is that they break the current laws of physics"
If I give somebody five pieces of cedar planking, they might build a television out of them, and that would certainly break my understanding of the laws of physics. I won't, however, drive to another city to validate some guy's claim that he built a television entirely out of cedar planking. I'll just assume that he's either a fraud or a moron, and in either event I won't waste my time.
In the case of "free energy from magnetism" proclaimers, unless they've got an industrial complex with strong ties to major research entities, a collection of advanced physics and engineering degrees, and a boatload of the finest scientists hired away from the most successful companies, their claims CAN be safely dismissed out of hand. If we're wrong to do so, the practical implemention and marketing of it will prove us all fools. The fact is that I can't yet go out and buy myself a magnetic free energy generator.
Nobody is going to stumble on to a unknown hole in the laws of thermodynamics by working in their garage anymore. If such holes were that easy to find, they'd have already been found. Sure, our understanding of physics is incomplete, but we've got the basics down pretty solid.
but the Irish leprechaun is dead.
Well, our lead engineer immediately shot down our CEO's plan for free engery, and mysteriously wound up dead the next day. So, we took his body, wrapped it in coil, and replaced his tombstone with a large magnet. With our CEO's business practises continuing, it should make our former lead engineer roll in his grave, and produce free energy :)
Sadly, it's impossible to win the war. They write long posts so that it's as chore to reply. They throw all sorts of idiotic, unrelated crap into the mix to confound the issue. They point at the web sites of other nutjobs. I don't know why they quote Tesla - not because Tesla wasn't great, but because people also quote Tesla when talking about UFO's and psychics.
But in the end there has never been so much as a single confirmed instance of a light bulb being lit for a nanosecond by zero point energy.
Talk about backing a dead horse.
Should have been attached to a thread above. My apologies.
This was disproved by Claude Shannon of Bell Labs fame using information theory (a branch of math that looks dangerously like computer science). In short, the amount of energy required to encode the demon's single bit of information about each molecule is exactly balanced by the amount of energy that could be extracted by the work of Maxwell's demon.
Are they actually asking for money now? I've just skimmed their site, and the closest I've found are that they let you contact them about "accessing" the technology. There's an Investor Relations page, with numbers that are four years old and that doesn't seem to be linked from the main site any more. There doesn't seem to be any clear way to join the project as an investor though. If they're trying to scam people, it's a modest effort.
My guess is that the company fervently believes they've worked out free energy, but only out of some hazy measurements that they haven't yet nailed down. They're seeing the mirage of perpetual motion in some device they can barely analyze because their equipment sucks and because they lack experience. They'll improve their instrumentation eventually, work out the kinks, and quantify that it's not outputting more energy than that input, and move on.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Until, that is, it's understood. They don't understand what they've done and haven't been able to quantify anything, they think it's something impossible (read: magic), but eventually the truth will emerge and they'll drop it.
Some people are wondering why someone would waste so much time on this.
I've always had an interest in the history of perpetual motion and i would have liked to have been on the jury. It is interesting to see some of the crazy ideas that people have come up with I would love to see a detailed explanation as to how the Orbo was supposed to work.
What? Me? Worry?
All of the issues you raise are totally valid - when the person is a scientist. Scientific literacy does not require the use of the scientific method. It's good for the average person to be both skeptical and open minded, but I'd be happy if all the idiots out there who believe in homeopathy and magical $10k audio speaker wires would just learn some of the basics of the current state of human knowledge. Leave evaluating radical new theories to the scientists, give the average Joe an "A+" for just dismissing it out of hand until a consensus of scientists have deemed it to be the new law of the land.
If they're not all careful they may find themselves _Where Bo One Has Gone Before_. http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Kosinski