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Perpetual Energy Machine Getting Lots of Attention

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Jul 04, 2007 02:46 PM
from the swimming-in-snake-oil dept.
Science Technology
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.
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  • As they say... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Seumas (6865) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @02:48PM (#19745831)
    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?

    • Re:As they say... (Score:5, Funny)

      by whopub (1100981) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @02:58PM (#19745973)
      I don't know about perpetual energy, but I've been working on perpetual lethargy for years. I wish I could publish a paper on it, but that would ruin years of research.

    • Seriously, why is anyone outside of Art Bell and George Noorey even giving this guy the time of day?
      Because several times, legitimate scientists have said this, really believing what they were saying, and the resulting systems were frequently quite difficult to understand in terms of deciphering the flaw.

      It's a lot like when people used to let high school math coaches claim to have solved Fermat's Little Theorem. We all knew they didn't, but there's a lot to be said for the puzzle of locating the coaches' mistakes.

      Now, like you, I think this guy is a snake oil shill, as opposed to someone making a legitimate error. Nonetheless, I find his device bizarrely fascinating specifically because I don't see his particular cheat just yet. And, as such, I'm glad to have exposure to the nonsense. It's fun.

      • Re:As they say... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Seumas (6865) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @03:00PM (#19745987)
        Here is how you know when a perpetual energy machine is fake (aside from the fact that it is supposedly a perpetual energy machine):

        If you invented something like that, you would be in secret negotiations with governments, militaries and major corporations. You wouldn't be wasting your time with youtube demonstrations and internet articles. You'd be involved in secret demonstrations with signed NDAs all around and massive bidding wars.

      • Re:As they say... (Score:5, Funny)

        by DrLov3 (1025033) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @03:12PM (#19746125)
        Homer : Lisa, in this house we respect the laws of thermo-dynamics, go to your room!

      • Finally, "Free As In Speech" Energy! (Score:5, Funny)

        by pdbaby (609052) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @03:41PM (#19746455)
        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!

      • Re:As they say... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by dinther (738910) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @04:03PM (#19746737) Homepage
        Why would you want to remove a story you perceive as untrue? It sounds just as ridiculous as religious folks wanting to remove posts that God doesn't exist. The statement is made and now you either ignore it or deal with it. Don't call for this statement to be denied to others after you received it.

  • Sure. (Score:5, Funny)

    by GWLlosa (800011) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @02:48PM (#19745839)
    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?

  • Lisa, get in here! (Score:5, Funny)

    by TrekkieGod (627867) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @02:51PM (#19745877) Homepage Journal
    In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

  • Mr. Madison... (Score:5, Funny)

    by going_the_2Rpi_way (818355) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @02:51PM (#19745881) Homepage
    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

    • Re:Mr. Madison... (Score:5, Informative)

      by ZombieWomble (893157) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @02:58PM (#19745967)
      That was the impression I got from reading the various blurbs their PR people have put out. I mean...

      "The law of conservation of energy has been very reliable for 300 years, however it's missing one variable from the equation, and that's time," said McCarthy.
      That's just completely incoherent - the law of conservation of energy is that the total energy in a closed system is constant OVER TIME. How can it possibly leave out time?

      • Re:Mr. Madison... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Hoplite3 (671379) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @03:23PM (#19746239)
        Mod the parent UP! This is the time when I agree that they should make stupidity more painful.

        "That's just completely incoherent - the law of conservation of energy is that the total energy in a closed system is constant OVER TIME. How can it possibly leave out time?"

        Hell effing yes. dE/dt = flux through the boundary, that's conservation of energy. If the system is isolated, the righthand side is zero, but it is still a statement about energy AND TIME.

        Rock on, you crazy thermo-knowing poster. Rock on.

        • Re:Mr. Madison... (Score:5, Informative)

          by ZombieWomble (893157) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @03:51PM (#19746587)
          Even more fun... I did some more research, and found out that they're apparently exploiting some inherent time variation in the strength of something over time - it's not clear exactly what, though. Initially I thought it was the strength of a given magnetic interaction, which was sort of feasible, but then he went on a bit more...

          http://quthoughts.blogspot.com/2007/06/steorn-it-j ust-keeps-going-and-going.html [blogspot.com]

          He gave a talk in UCD the other week, this blog has links to the youtube videos. Check out the second video. About 4 or 5 minutes in, he switches over to talking about some unsolved questions in physics. Turns out, there is no dark matter or dark energy. Apparently it's trivial to fix this problem by incorporating "time variance" in Newtonian Mechanics, which is what they had done with their Orbo deviece. What exactly the nature of this time variance is, or what the nature of the solution is is unfortunately not forthcoming though.

      • Re:Mr. Madison... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Coryoth (254751) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @03:31PM (#19746327) Homepage Journal

        That's just completely incoherent - the law of conservation of energy is that the total energy in a closed system is constant OVER TIME. How can it possibly leave out time?
        Worse yet, the law of conservation of energy actually spills out as a consequence of Noether's theorem [wikipedia.org], and the time symmetry of the laws of physics -- that is, the fact that the laws of physics should be the same today as they will be tomorrow. CoE is, in a sense, a consequence of time.

  • older story (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2007, @02:53PM (#19745903)
    Here's [slashdot.org] an older story on Slashdot covering the same company and technology.

  • do we want to end up like Mars? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dster76 (877693) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @03:00PM (#19745993)
    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!)

  • If it were real... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chris Snook (872473) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @03:13PM (#19746135)
    ...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.

  • Dead giveaway... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LordSnooty (853791) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @03:31PM (#19746329)
    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 [kinetica-museum.org] (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 [www.rte.ie] 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.

  • The Future (Score:5, Funny)

    by alexgieg (948359) <alexgieg@gmail.com> on Wednesday July 04 2007, @03:44PM (#19746501) Homepage
    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.

  • Beware of this company (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hellsDisciple (889830) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @04:02PM (#19746723)
    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.

    • Re:Stop It (Score:5, Interesting)

      by shaitand (626655) on Wednesday July 04 2007, @03:18PM (#19746197) Journal
      '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.'

      We need a magnetic field. But isn't like there is a finite amount of energy stored that you are using up like a battery. The magnetic field is powered by a gravity generator and that generator is going to keep running whether you utilize the energy output or not.

      The big question is how much energy would you have to draw from the earth's magnetic field it makes any significant different. When you consider how tiny the global energy demands are compared to the actual energy stored in the stable matter of earth, I have a feeling that the result will be a very substantial amount.

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