Irish Company Claims Free Energy 1125
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.
check the site's forums (Score:5, Interesting)
Noether rules the day (Score:5, Interesting)
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
or... HALO 3 viral marketing? ILOVEBEES REDUX? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone have a source for this besides Wikipedia? Wouldn't this be a serious problem when the weakened magnetic field stops shielding us from the solar winds??
Re:Something Very Fishy & Patent Info (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Noether rules the day (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a good thing not even one pico-joule of energy has been created from nothing in the history of the universe, otherwise we might be here to appreciate this invention.
They are a web marketting company! (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:3, Interesting)
You could argue I suppose that they run on the evaporative cycle, but I prefer to think of them running on Gravity.
It may work, but here's the catch (Score:5, Interesting)
What Steom is actually claiming is quite possible, but uninteresting. Steorn is making three claims for its technology: [steorn.net]
The coefficient of performance [wikipedia.org] 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 [nrel.gov]. 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".
Re:Coefficiency (Score:3, Interesting)
A more complete analogy to what these guys are claiming is this: they can burn the gasoline, then still have the gasoline left over.
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:2, Interesting)
Lets just hope that when things get really bad, one of the many free power devices actually was not bunk, because to believe in conservation of energy itself is bunk. The universe has been showen to expand at an exponentially rate from it's creation, the distribution of a fixed amount of energy evenly throughout the expanding universe would mean that we wouldnt be moving for much longer.
Conservation of energy is more of a crutch to help explain what's happening in small scale physical interaction. Things like dark matter are just proof that the systems of energy in the universe are not a static one but dynamic.
YAPM - Yet Another Perpetuum Mobile (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Announced April 1st? (Score:5, Interesting)
Press Coverage
Steorn Announce "Free Energy" Technology
Irish company Steorn have announced a revoloutionary free energy technology. More
The Guardian | 1 April 2006
Theory (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe they are looking for people who will come-in, prove why it won't work, then to hire those people.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:2, Interesting)
> - on the contrary, it will still somehow cost me as much as
> energy does now, as greed seems to outpace progress these days.
If the device is priced fairly, then no big deal. People will buy it, the company will get rich, and everyone will be happy until we discover the awful enviromental effects (like everyone going bald... or growing hair.)
If the device is priced unfairly, then fuck 'em. People will steal the tech, and use it for themselves.
Kind of like software piracy.
Sounds like an N-machine (Score:2, Interesting)
The idea's been kicked around for a long time, and is not really new. Unfortunatly it looks as though if an idea is not patentable in the USA it doesn't exist. Start reading folks... this isn't anything new, it just that a company may have gotten enough attention to actualy get a non-oil consuming energy source off the ground (cause we all know what competition like this would do to Big Oil).
http://www.mufor.org/nmachine.html/ [mufor.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homopolar_generator/ [wikipedia.org]
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:3, Interesting)
The energy *could* come from *somewhere*... (Score:3, Interesting)
- slow down the rotation of the earth
- slow the rotation of magma in the earths core
- drag the earth closer to the sun
- etc.
(assuming those sorts of changes are lower-energy states). Now how it would do any of those without forcibly sliding you along the ground/driving you into the earth if you were holding it is a mystery to me, but...) The problem is if it does do something like that, it's hard to measure at the 1kW level, but if enough people do it, the day starts getting longer, the earth gets hotter, etc.Another possibility is that they've accidentally made a Really Good Antenna, and they're just receiving broadcast radio and converting it to DC...
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I think this is more likely to be viral marketing for a game or something daft like that.
Re:Lacking details but I'm skeptical (aren't we al (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm assuming they haven't actually got it "working" in the sense that it could generate electricity but, if they did, then they could do a couple very informative and easy experiments. Basically, use the thing to power a light bulb and then either put everything in an insulated enclosure or put everything except the light bulb in the insulated enclosure. Then measure the temperature in the insulated enclosure.
If the temperature in the enclosure increases when everything is in the enclosure, then conservation of energy (the first law of thermodynamics) has been violated and pretty much all of physics will have to be rewritten.
If the temperature in the enclosure decreases when the light bulb is outside, then only the second law of thermodynamics has been violated and most of physics is OK but pretty much all of thermodynamics will have to be rewritten.
Re:You can tell something about these people (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey. HEY! That's it!
Or if this isn't Steorn's method, it'd certainly do an interesting job. Not sure how much useful energy it would get us, but it would work.
How do we induce electric current? With a changing magnetic field. What's the Earth's magnetic field doing? Changing.
Technically it still obeys the laws of thermodynamics: the movement within the Earth's core is doing the work. It's the same as waving wires in the air and extracting a little current thence, but we don't have to do the work of changing the magnetic flux. And yes, it's a very small amount of energy, but it would work.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, anyone know what Steorn used to be? I do. (Score:2, Interesting)
And moreso as they published in THE ECONOMIST! (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
Claims like this should be easy to verify (Score:2, Interesting)
Many other charlatans and crackpots have made this claim. I have yet to see anyone publish a coherent layman's description of how to accomplish it.
I think the best way to disclose such an invention would be to post a web site with a list of parts to buy, where to buy them from, how much they cost, etc., and step-by-step illustrated instructions for putting it together. The end result simply needs to be a box that one could screw a light bulb into and keep the light turned on perpetually without an external power source.
If somebody did this, he would not even be a need to explain how it functions, because it would be impossible to refute. Scientists would eventually figure out how it worked.
Unfortunately no claimed free energy source that I know of passes this simple test.
Re:They are a web marketting company! (Score:2, Interesting)
The funny thing was that their entire advertizing campaing was "it does not exist", "don't come", "it's a waste of time", but at least 1000 people came to the "opening" they made a film of it, and of how advertizing companies can really make you believe whatever! It's great!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_dream [wikipedia.org]
bugs! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why the hostility? (Score:2, Interesting)
As most of us already know you can run vehicle engines on hydrogen and that does include jet engines. The hydrogen economy has to arrive sooner of later.
Most people dont know of a Cornish generator, this uses aluminium wire and water to produce hydrogen. The oxygen is bound to the aluminium creating aluminium oxide, the wire and the oxide are easy to transport around the world if people are worried about transporting hydrogen.
There is of course another knock-on effect from starting to cover the worlds deserts with solar panels, that being economy of scale. The panels themselves would become much cheaper making it possible for the average person to install them on their house. The figure I read was that production needed to be up 100 fold to bring the price down enough for true mass market.
A little political will would kick start this process, you dont actually need to cover 4 percent of the worlds deserts when you have every home generating some of its own power needs. Any excess created could be stored as hydrogen until needed. You would still need a power grid, but that power too could be based around hydrogen technologies.
We are so close, but it feels like it is still so far away. Clean, cheap energy without sacrificing the car or the plane.
Simon.
Re:don't think so... (Score:3, Interesting)
Galileo's claims were not scoffed at, he did a very good job of presenting his evidence.
Unfortunately, the Church (the Catholic Church, the only Church of mention at that time) took his theories very seriously, and that's why they put Galileo to the test, demanding that he basically rebuke himself. When they discovered that they couldn't put the cat back into the bag, they basically asked for an apology. None of this would have been necessary if the Church didn't act as the supreme authority for all physical knowledge, but hey, God is omniescent and the Pope is the mouthpiece of God, and there you go.
Columbus wasn't scoffed at when he said the Earth was round, that is a common modern misconception. In Columbus's time, approximately 50% of all Spanish citizens believed that the Earth was round, based on the excellent Porteguese and Dutch map-making skills, it was hard to NOT notice the only way to make coasts meet was to project them on a sphere.
Quantum Physics wasn't scoffed at for scientific reasons, it was scoffed at because a religous believing super-star of physics wouldn't accept a theory that allowed randomness to drive the lowest basic forces. Ironically, it was Albert Einstein's early works that opened the door for seeing physics through "Quantum Physics" eyes, but the same Albert Einsteins decried quantum physics as being too random, and not capturing the "devine design of God", leading to the famous quote (which has never been proved or disproved) that "God does not play dice."
So basically, all of your examples belies a mis-understanding of history, and you admit the company has shady looking characters, and you STILL expect us to hold out hope that they aren't out to fleece VC investors of hard-earned cash? Hope springs eternal, but so does stupidity. Don't promote things that even you feel a reservation in promoting, be true to yourself.
Re:gravity conversion (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The energy *could* come from *somewhere*... (Score:3, Interesting)