Steorn teases with a reveal date: Friday, April 13th
By Paul Miller 
posted Apr 10th 2007 4:52PM
posted Apr 10th 2007 4:52PM
We're going to try and not read too much into this whole Friday the 13th date, and just give you the straight facts: Steorn promises to be "releasing the update on the Jury process and so on" of its seemingly first-law-of-thermodynamics-denying Orbo "free energy" product on April 13th. Steorn has been promising technical information about the invention and jury results for a while now, originally saying "first quarter" 2007. So if we use our imaginations -- as we apparently are exercising to the fullest to even entertain Steorn's Orbo claims -- we can just pretend April 13th is still Q1 and sit tight for the (hopefully) big reveal.[Via Steorn Orbo, thanks Phil]
Haha, this should be interesting...
April fools day is April 1...not the 13
Silly geese
I hope they havent chosen friday the 13 to set the scene that the project is indeed a failure.
Oh man, I know it's just building castles in the air, but I really wish it's true. This world could use a miracle on such a grand scale once in a while. :-)
I keep wondering what the angle here is. 99% of me is skeptical of them, and is convinced this is some sort of publicity stunt. Still, that other one percent of me lingers despite my knowing better already...
Ahh so I have figured out the mysterious power, comes from people wearing masks and using chainsaws, in harmony, thus creating a resonant frequency of the earth and giving us free power!
AND STEPHAN WINS TEH PRIZEOR!!!!!
Seriously, I'll watch some horror movies all day long,
then stop by on here right before bed to hear the real
horror story of the night...that the laws of thermo-
dymanics have been broken and that we will all blow up
after reading their press release.
They are (most likely) the ultimate vaporware evar if
they don't say a damn thing on Friday.
i would not be suprized at all if this turned out to be a ARG for halo or killzone or something dumb like that.
All we can do is wait and hope its something practical and actually works
Perhaps Orbo will be the only source of energy powerful enough to run a computer capable of playing Duke Nukem Forever...
I figured out their "free energy"! You deposit your own flatulent emission into a coffee can and their specialized hardware converts the methane into electricity with 99.9% efficiency.
Cross my finger hope not to die
yawn.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0758746/
this is my bet.
Energy doesn't come from nowhere. The law of thermodynamics is probably still sound even if this comes out to be real. A lot of scientists believe that electromagnetic energy can be extracted from vacuum.
Interesting article:
http://www.steorn.com/news/coverage/?id=261
An experiment:
Take two magnets, one permanent and one electromagnetic. Take the permanent magnet and hang a key from it for 10 years. At the same time, take the electromagnet, put a level of current in it to produce the same amount of pull as the permanent magnet, and after 10 years, measure the amount of energy that was required to hold the key up.
The permanent magnet was able to use this amount of energy, "for free".
I have developed machines similar to the one described in the Guardian article, so I believe what Steorn has is genuine.
So a chair creates "free" energy by holding me up? Science heretics exist throughout history, they become realized as being truth tellers when the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly in their favor, not just that they sound cool. Bet against it.
@world peace:
"The permanent magnet was able to use this amount of energy, "for free"."
Um, yeah. In exactly the same way I can get the "amount of energy" of a bullet by dropping it on the floor instead of shooting it at it.
Permanent magnets and gravity are common occurences in perpetual motion machines because they do /look/ to the uneducated observer to be sources of "free energy". The problem is that the work you can gain from them can never be more than the work you need to get back to where you started from. Consider a rock at the top of a hill- I can push it down the hill and in doing so gain energy from gravity. However, unless I have some infinite supply of rocks at the top of my hill I now need to carry the rock back up the hill again. Because you will ALWAYS lose energy in the process (think about the old pendulum wont hit a guy in the face experiment) it will always take at least the amount of energy you got out in the first place to get the rock back up to the top of the hill.
Similarly for magnets- the energy you gain by being pulled towards will never be more than the energy you need to get away again. There is no magic arrangement which will counteract this!
whether they are a big hoax or not - talk about a violation of the laws of thermodynamics is silly.
first, they are not "laws", they are observations - they seem to work out well so far, but hey - there's an infinite number of things we don't know.
second, I can imagine lots of ways to get free clean power without violating any laws of thermodynamics.
third, our planet is not a closed system - far from it. would there be any life without sun? Q.E.D. the second law of thermodynamics only applies to closed systems.
Treetrunk-
Thank you for the lucid and logical response.
This will turn out to be another huge misunderstanding of basic scientific principals by well-intentioned but badly misinformed neophytes.
Clue numbers 1-10 is the pitch straight to the media, with half sincere, half sarcastic invitations to the "scientific community" to validate their device.
I read from this that they are not scientist. This is troubling. How can they make such extravagant claims if they don't have the requisite knowledge and skills to test their own theories and devices?
All scientific claims demand scientific rigor, which starts, not ends, with open discussion peer reviews.
As you correctly pointed out, almost all 'free energy machines' are based around magnets. The nescient are puzzled, amused and confused by the seemingly magical properties of magnets.
The problem is, magnets are very well understood, and have been for about 150 years, ever since Faraday (tirelessly) outlined the relationships between electricity and magnetism.
People have been trying to achieve free energy for thousands of years. One famous example is the attempt in the 1300's to build a waterwheel on a pond or lake (no river or waterfall). The idea was that once the wheel was manually set in motion, it would drive a pump that would push water uphill back to the top, where it would fall back into the buckets, then run continuously by itself after that. Even better was the hope that not only would the machine drive itself, but it would also be used to do additional work. This would require a machine of more than 100% efficiency.
It didn't work then, won't work today, and won't work tomorrow. The physical world is governed by rules that man cannot get around.
It's exciting to believe that we are so clever that we will eventually find an end-around to physical laws. Remember cold fusion?
Two very bright but misguided scientist pitched their 'findings' of cold fusion directly to the press. This started a firestorm that within weeks resulted in Congressional inquiries and research appropriations bills (tax dollars!).
It crashed almost overnight when other members of the "scientific community" couldn't reproduce the results, and had perfectly logical and sound explanations for any anomalies that may have been observed.
This cost both men and the University of Utah their credibility.
Believing in free energy (or even the possibility) is like a game of 3 Card Monte. Follow the Lady, you tell yourself, and you can win the game. But you can't and never will. The Lady is cloaked in the laws of thermodynamics.
I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I would never, ever, bet against the laws of thermodynamics. Right this minute, thousands of laws are being broken around the globe, but be assured not one of those.
Get hip here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamics
Ok so for sake of argument lets say this is not BS then why on earth would they "sit" on the most important discover of our time. This would not only make them richier than Bill Gates selling crack, but help humanity. They don't need scientist to verify their claims if all is true, it would just WORK.
All the heretics in history didn't hide their discoveries but boasted of them, until they were believed, shut up or killed.
This sounds like exactly what I was working on with my dad and a friend of ours, Steve Farnsworth (Son of Philo Taylor Farnsworth). It's even called Orbo, which would be a perfect name for what we were working on.
All I can say is, I hope that this isn't another fake. It would change the world dramatically if it was true. Cross your fingers!
Common misconceptions with "free energy" machines (and misconceptions from people incorrectly trying to make perpetual-motion machines), are that they need to output more than is input and that they are able to run forever. All that is required of a "free energy" machine to be *effective*, is that they are able to use energy most efficiently.
In modern machines, there is an amazing amount of energy that is not used toward the intended goal of the machine. The practical purpose of "free energy" machines, is to use any and all resources possible, to create a machine whose movements are most efficient in utilizing energy toward the intended goal of the machine.
There is no need for over-unity, nor is there a need for the machine to run forever. A very high efficiency is all that is required for the practical applications of "free energy" machines.
By the usage of permanent magnets, vacuums, gravity, acceleration, chemical reactions, etc., if a machine can be made even 99% efficient *in its own usage of energy*, very little energy would have to be input for the machine to run for the entire lifetime of a user. THAT is the real application of an energy efficient, "free energy" system.
@world peace:
Um, no. When people talk about a machine using "free energy" they generally do mean perpetual motion or "over unity". The mythical "Searl effect" generator for example.
In modern machines the majority of energy wastage is as heat. I have never seen a "free energy" technology which was about recovering heat. Indeed, such systems DO EXIST, but are regular obeys-the-laws-of-physics processes such as ground-source heat pumps, or the transfer of heat from parts which produce it to those which need it in a chemical plant (energy balance).
Virtually every "free energy" machine I've seen seems to involve some arrangement of spinning things and magnets. Unless this machine does perform over unity (which by connecting its output back to its input would result in perpetual motion) then by adding it to any other system all you do is WASTE MORE energy.
If this is some sort of hoax/letdown, I think we should all teepee the house of whoever did this.
This will be the most upsetting thing since I found out Lasik at home was a hoax!
hope this Orbo thing can power D-wave quantum computer ;)
Heoward Steorn Reoules! Bababeooey!
It's a lot more fundamental than no more electricity bills. If anyone DOES produce a perpetual motion machine they will have to redesign much of the universe to accommodate it. The stars themselves, for instance, would stop working without conservation of energy. You'd have to rewrite Einstein's E = mc^2 to read "E = Whatever" making nuclear power stations unpreduictable to put it mildly!
This whole thing is pure nonsense. Only someone who knows nothing about physics would be stupid enough to believe it. Sadly, there are lots of people in this position. For instance, read the comment above by someone who argues that because a permanent magnet can hold a key, it must be 'generating' the energy consumed by doing it with an electromagnet! (it seems to have escaped him that hanging it on a nail achieves the same thing, so presumably nails can 'generate' energy too!)
When we run out of fossil fuel, my bet is that we'll simply have to get used to travelling less, wearing more clothes rather than turning on the heating, and going to bed early! Certainly, this rubbish won't do a damn thing for us.
This company is right here in Dublin... I should go by their offices to ask if I can see it in action! :)
If it were true, the big oil companies would have already started their PR campaign to discredit the company, the owners and their families.
If free energy were made available today, the markets would crash and so many people would end up losing their jobs/livelihood. This kind of stuff has to be slowly introduced into the market to allow the old technology to "Phase out" over time.
@unlikely
you can be a skeptic sure, but the ego it takes to make the claims you seem to have done is astounding. What's to say that certain systems obey the conservation of energy laws, and others don't? How about zero point energy dictated by the Casimir effect? Sure it's small, but who says that this cant be scaled up based on a currently unknown technology or science? Saying free energy doesn't exist is in your words "pure nonsense", because it DOES exist, but not currently in any practical scalable form.
I won't go into why E=MC^2 wouldn't be made obsolete as well as it's cousin the atomic binding energy equation. But i will say that although i may seem the fool for believing that a company may have discovered something so revolutionary, you may be looked upon as a fool years from now if a paradigm shift occurs in our scientific understanding of quantum physics.
@Matt M:
The Casimir effect is accounted for by quantum mechanics due to the random small fluctuations which occur in fields giving rise to tiny instantaneous forces. It is sort-of analogous to the Van Der Waals force which occurs between molecules due to the random motion of their electrons. Zero-point energy is simply the lowest possible state a system can be in, quantum mechanically. Neither concept violates conservation of energy.
Unfortunately, I still don't see how this can be of any use. Not only are the forces involved absolutely tiny (the force between two 1m^2 plates 1 micron apart is equivalent to 0.13 grams. See http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/casimir.html), but it still doesn't get you anywhere because (just like against gravity or a magnet) you still need just as much energy as you could extract from the system in order to pull the plates apart again!
As far as I'm concerned "unlikely" is quite correct- this is indeed absolute nonsense.
Relax people, its just a scooter, we've been down this road before.
Perhaps they planned to make it a April 1st joke, and then either:
a) Forgot to do so, and decided to allow the project to fail on the doomed day of Friday the 13th or
b) Actually DID come up with a real way to produce free, clean, constant energy in the time between when they announced it, and April 1st.
Or, possibly a likely situation:
They don't have anything. But on Friday the 13th, they will say this, and announce alongside: "We did this to prove that there is no easy way out. We have to take climate change seriously and start thinking about our usage of energy" etc, etc.
You know.
"I won't go into why E=MC^2 wouldn't be made obsolete "
No. I bet you won't!
Look. If CoE no longer applies, the workings of the whole universe are in doubt.
You talk about 'obeying' the energy laws as if they can be repealed or ignored at will. The point is that they are observations of the actual working universe, and there are no cases where they have ever been observed not to hold. Moreover, a whole stack of theoretical physics - which successfully explains the workings of virtually the whole observable universe - is based on it holding. You may think I've got a big ego, but it's not so big as to turn the universe on its head which is what abandonment of the conservation of energy would involve.
Steorn are not the first to claim perpetual motion, (Using magnets - a popular choice for perpetual motion 'inventors' - there are no successful ones) nor will they be the last. But the chances of them actually doing so are considerably lower than that of finding a leprachaun!
If steorn actually have a perpetual motion machine let them display it. The company has a long record of NOT displaying anything worth a bucket of warm spit. They were supposed to be publishing full specifications of their machine on 1st April. On the appointed day, guess what? Nothing! A notice is issued that it would be delayed a week. Guess what happened a week later? Nothing! Except that it is announced that an update on the findings of the jury will be given on the 13th April. These are just the latest in a series of non-events. The 'full specifications' bit, I note, has been quietly forgotten about.
The latest witterings from the company are hints to the effect that it might take years. Now that I DO believe. Millions of them!
To believe that they have anything worthwhile requires (a) a very poor understanding of physics and (b) almost no imagination.
"I won't go into why E=MC^2 wouldn't be made obsolete "
No. I bet you won't!
Look. If CoE no longer applies, the workings of the whole universe are in doubt.
You talk about 'obeying' the energy laws as if they can be repealed or ignored at will. The point is that they are observations of the actual working universe, and there are no cases where they have ever been observed not to hold. Moreover, a whole stack of theoretical physics - which successfully explains the workings of virtually the whole observable universe - is based on it holding. You may think I've got a big ego, but it's not so big as to turn the universe on its head which is what abandonment of the conservation of energy would involve.
Steorn are not the first to claim perpetual motion, (Using magnets - a popular choice for perpetual motion 'inventors' - there are no successful ones) nor will they be the last. But the chances of them actually doing so are considerably lower than that of finding a leprachaun!
If steorn actually have a perpetual motion machine let them display it. The company has a long record of NOT displaying anything worth a bucket of warm spit. They were supposed to be publishing full specifications of their machine on 1st April. On the appointed day, guess what? Nothing! A notice is issued that it would be delayed a week. Guess what happened a week later? Nothing! Except that it is announced that an update on the findings of the jury will be given on the 13th April. These are just the latest in a series of non-events. The 'full specifications' bit, I note, has been quietly forgotten about.
The latest witterings from the company are hints to the effect that it might take years. Now that I DO believe. Millions of them!
To believe that they have anything worthwhile requires (a) a very poor understanding of physics and (b) almost no imagination.
Even if Steorn actually HAS what they claim, you might wonder whether giving an infinite energy source to - say - the US military is altogether a good thing. It could be a lot worse than that too.
If they are to be believed, they 'stumbled upon' this effect, which means it is pretty simple to reproduce if you know how. Can you really trust every spotty nerd in the world to behave himself, and not construct a variant of this device that allows him to convert the whole planet to a ball of molten slag one evening after school? I think not.
Just as well its impossible if you ask me!
Treetrunk-
Thank you for the lucid and logical response.
This will turn out to be another huge misunderstanding of basic scientific principals by well-intentioned but badly misinformed neophytes.
Clue numbers 1-10 is the pitch straight to the media, with half sincere, half sarcastic invitations to the "scientific community" to validate their device.
I read from this that they are not scientist. This is troubling. How can they make such extravagant claims if they don't have the requisite knowledge and skills to test their own theories and devices?
All scientific claims demand scientific rigor, which starts, not ends, with open discussion peer reviews.
As you correctly pointed out, almost all 'free energy machines' are based around magnets. The nescient are puzzled, amused and confused by the seemingly magical properties of magnets.
The problem is, magnets are very well understood, and have been for about 150 years, ever since Faraday (tirelessly) outlined the relationships between electricity and magnetism.
People have been trying to achieve free energy for thousands of years. One famous example is the attempt in the 1300's to build a waterwheel on a pond or lake (no river or waterfall). The idea was that once the wheel was manually set in motion, it would drive a pump that would push water uphill back to the top, where it would fall back into the buckets, then run continuously by itself after that. Even better was the hope that not only would the machine drive itself, but it would also be used to do additional work. This would require a machine of more than 100% efficiency.
It didn't work then, won't work today, and won't work tomorrow. The physical world is governed by rules that man cannot get around.
It's exciting to believe that we are so clever that we will eventually find an end-around to physical laws. Remember cold fusion?
Two very bright but misguided scientist pitched their 'findings' of cold fusion directly to the press. This started a firestorm that within weeks resulted in Congressional inquiries and research appropriations bills (tax dollars!).
It crashed almost overnight when other members of the "scientific community" couldn't reproduce the results, and had perfectly logical and sound explanations for any anomalies that may have been observed.
This cost both men and the University of Utah their credibility.
Believing in free energy (or even the possibility) is like a game of 3 Card Monte. Follow the Lady, you tell yourself, and you can win the game. But you can't and never will. The Lady is cloaked in the laws of thermodynamics.
I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I would never, ever, bet against the laws of thermodynamics. Right this minute, thousands of laws are being broken around the globe, but be assured not one of those.
Get hip here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamics
On several occasions, promised revelations and meetings have been cancelled by steorn, on the grounds that it would damage protection of their invention.
But I don't know how the company expects to protect it's intellectual property anyway (which is their main stated reason for secrecy), because the UK and the US patent offices specifically exclude the granting of patents on perpetual motion machines. The US office has a concession which is that they WILL issue a patent if the applicant produces a working model. (It hasn't happened to date!) I've no idea what the Irish patent office's policy on perpetual motion machines is, but I imagine they're much the same. They don't want to waste their time on lunacies any more than anyone else.
However, in any case there is no such thing as a world patent. some countries don't actually have a patent system. Once the secret is out, there is absolutely nothing to stop - say - nigeria copying the machines and exporting them to any country that doesn't have patent protection for perpetual motion machines, such as the UK.
One is forced to the conclusion that steorn's secrecy is therefore mere smoke and mirrors designed to obscure the fact that they have nothing worth while to sell.
A) There's some PR angle I'm blatantly not getting...A lot of people are going to be rather pissed off at them.
B) Misinterpretation of data...Though I doubt it would of got this far if it was this simple
C) Fraud/weird conspiracy angle...I honestly don't buy the whole evil oil company thing
D) Actually works...I really really doubt it, but I'll believe it when I see the physics.
Well, here we are on Friday 13th at 8 a.m.
What's the betting that all we'll get is "The vetting procedure is going according to plan" or some equally uninformative ambiguous twaddle.
There are two certainties. The first is that no perpetual motion machine will be revealed, and secondly that this disappointment will not shake the faith of the believers. Even the MD admitting it was a scam or that they got it wrong will not do this. No doubt the oil companies will be accused of suppressing it!
I await developments with interest.
Questions are asked in the Steorn forum about the promised statement due today.
The MD replies it will come out this afternoon, but there will be nothing new in it that those in the forum haven't seen already.
One of the faithful ventures to ask him about the promised 'detailed technical specifications' - which seems to have been forgotten about.
Then - in a startling change of tack - the MD says it will appear this afternoon or evening. So either the detailed technical specs (which have not been seen to date) are nothing new (???) or we have a terminological paradox on our hands here.
The whole thing seems extremely dodgy to me.
As anticipated, nothing whatever of substance emerged.
Are the believers concerned? No, not a bit of it! One of them indulged in a bout of public self-flagellation for having made the mistake of believing the plausible MD would indeed tell us something new.
Having watched the man's video, I must say I'm impressed with his ability to talk a blue streak about nothing at all, and exude confidenece from every pore. Were I a judge, I suspect I'd be doodling the word 'Guilty' on my notebook as I listened. However, Should I ever feel the urge to sell Nelson's column to a passing tourist, I'd be after employing him as a salesman.
The 'Detailed technical specifications' by the way, turned out to be a vague guess about the power density of a non-continuous model - I suspect it's all they have - and a pious hope that a 'continuous output' version (which they claim to be working on) would do substantially better.
VERY dodgy!
10 a.m. Saturday 14th April.
Steorn website seems to have died.
I wonder if they attempted to power their servers using their perpetual motion machine?
when john lennon sang of peace he was shot
it seems that the way of the world is to make.....
no matter the cost to humanity and the environment,
I like wave and wind farms even if they do make a noise..I like these guys already but i fear they are about to be publically crucified by the oil giants
I hope they come up with the goods..leonardo is watchin over you :)
In a thread called 'question' in the forum, the MD attempts to maintain confidence by offering to answer questions. All the answers are, of course, vague, and incomplete, but he did admit they do NOT yet have a continuous perpetual motion machine.
I strongly suspect that they have fooled themselves with a toy in which a falling weight appears to raise a larger weight. Probably they are releasng stored energy which is hard to identify. Converting this into continuous motion seems to be so far beyod them. The MD spoke of 'progress' in getting continuous output, but admitted that they 'might not' have it by the promised july exhibition, in which case their toy will be demonstrated. I reckon if the scientists they have investigating it are worth a damn, they'll have identified the misapprehension/trick before then and the whole thing will die the death.
I cannot say whether they are knaves or fools, but I'd put my pension on them being one or the other. We shall see.