An Irish company claims to have created a device that outputs more energy than it takes in.
"We put in a small amount of mechanical energy and we get a large amount out." [Steorn Chief Executive Sean McCarthy] said....
"What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy," McCarthy said.
"The energy isn't being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It's literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy," he told Ireland's RTE radio.
Cool!
But doesn't such a claim violate the established laws of physics? So it would seem. Specifically, the First Law of Thermodynamics
The increase in the internal energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the amount of heat energy added to the system minus the work done by the system on the surroundings.
The Steorn company feels that that since they are directly confronting the scientific community, they are not getting the recognition they deserve.
"But we have been unable to get significant scientific interest in it. We have had scientists come in, test it and, off the record, they are quite happy to admit that it works.
"But for us to be able to commercialise this and put this into peoples' lives we need credible, academic validation in the public domain and hence the challenge," McCarthy said.
Damn. Doncha just hate it when that happens? That damn monolithic "Scientific Community" standing in the way of free energy for everyone. Probably paid off by oil executives.
So Steorn has taken the tack that every huckster and con man takes: The took out a full page add in the Economist Magazine challenging "the worldwide scientific community to test a technology it has developed that it claims produces free energy."
Now why would they need to do that?
I mean if they know the device produces more energy than is input then they must have tested it. And if they've tested it, they have test data. And if they have test data, they could publish it.
They could also hire a scientist to work on the underlying principles involved, write a paper, and get it published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. That would guarantee it got the attention of the ecientific community. It would also guarantee that other scientists would work to try to validate, or not, the device.
But no. Instead they take out an ad in the Economist.
Defending Steorn in the comments to this blog post by the SciGuy Eric Berger, we find typical conspiratorial thinking
Please consider the possibility that the the modern scientific community bears the same relation to society that medeival Christianity bore to Europe in the middle ages: The single source of truth about the nature of the world and man's relation to it. This view implies that modern scientists are more like priests defending an orthodoxy than individuals of an inquiring mind and their primary function is to defend and protect the world view of an extremely conservative society.
The complaint and the frustration voiced by Steorn is nothing new. Many people in the new energy community who have had dealings with the modern scientific community share it. And, of course, your cynical skepticism is nothing new either. But of course in the face of a new truth the scientific community's faith in their theory or your skepticism count for nothing. The only real issue is assuring that is the new proposal really is a new truth. And this requires stringent measures to keep ALL interested parties from cheating either by omission or commission.
To which another commenter responded
the 'new energy community; bears a striking resemblance to the old 'ufo community' and the old 'ESP community' and the old 'hollow earth community'. They all bear a striking resemblence to the 'con artist community'.
Or the Intelligent Design community.
