Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 16 March 2007, 11:18 AM
Back in the world of infinite free energy...
Steorn, home of our Irish friends with their perpetual motion machine, has redesigned its web site. It's given the free energy technology a name, too - Orbo.
And has Steorn told us how it works yet, who their panel of scientists are, or how things are going? Well, guess.
However, things are moving (albeit probably in circles).
"Our free energy technology will be made widely available to the development community immediately after the independent scientific validation process.
Under the terms of a modified general public licence and for a nominal fee, Steorn's intellectual property will be made available concurrently to all interested parties, from individual enthusiasts to larger research organisations. Steorn is taking this bold move to accelerate the deployment and acceptance of its technology for both humanitarian and commercial products.
Further details will be made available during the first half of 2007."
I don't know what a 'general public licence' is, nor what sort of intellectual propert Steorn's talking about (It can't be copyright and it can't be patents, which leaves... trademarks? Eh?), nor what the role of the 'nominal fee' is - why not just ask someone who knows?
It still looks like a load of Dubs having a laugh. At least there's not long to wait until they put up or shut up - and the day I have one of their machines sitting on my desk generating more energy than it consumes, I shall make a hat out of marzipan and eat it.
PreviousComments on this post
Yeah things are hotting up. Like you, I very much doubt they really have the technology for real, but even if there's just a 0.05% chance it's true, that would be incredible, and worth watching out for.
With this kind of tech, we can have free electricity, feed the third world, heated clothing, ipods and laptops which never run down, proper lighting on streets everwhere (day-light level even!), cars which never run out of fuel, a way to make oil from carbon and water out of energy (currently EXTREMELY prohibitively expensive in energy at the moment), easily launching rubbish into space as a means of waste disposal (to outside our solar system), and a big step towards getting floating cities in the sky. The mind boggles! I hear it's going to be 2 to 6 more times powerful (power per volume or size) than current battery tech (Lithium Ion), but of course infinity times more energy (energy per volume).
Dan (@skytopia.com)
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Rupert,
I have to say that I am surprised to read that you are now suggesting that you will be eating marzipan. It seems that you are retreating from your rabid statements of the past?
Sean (Steorn)
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Rupert,
You say (I shall make a hat out of marzipan and eat it. The day I have one of their machines sitting on my desk generating more energy than it consumes.)
Because marzipan is delicious to eat on its own
why not eat a jar of Jalapeno peppers intead!
Put your mouth ( hot, hot ,hot ) where your convictions are!
It's true, I do like marzipan. But I also like Jalapeno peppers. I doubt I'll be consuming either over Orbo.
And these rabid statements I've made - which ones in particular were you thinking of? Was it the one where I checked off the Steorn claims, point by point, against the classic definition of pseudoscience? The one where I examine the history of similar claims? Or the one where, for the life of me and after a long discussion with Sean on the blower, I really couldn't understand why the details of the system weren't just made public?
None of these seem unreasonable to me, let alone rabid! I can do rabid. I can do full-on spittle-flecked swivel-eyed ranty. In this case, though, it seemed better to leave that role to some of Steorn's more enthusiastic supporters and restrain myself to long-suffering sighs and a plea for the norms of scientific enquiry.
As for the "Well, what if it's right?" - being an enthusiastic consumer of science fiction (in which category Steorn most certainly belongs, absent any science fact to chew on), there are a number of quite sobering downsides to the discovery of new energy sources, as the history of the industrialised warfaring nations demonstrates.
Free energy for life is fab, free energy for death is less so
Rupert's writing in SInclair User where nicer than this blog post :(
Dan says "even if there's just a 0.05% chance it's true, that would be incredible".
Dan, there is a 0% chance this is true.
Zero.
Percent.
Kev: I doubt anything can ever be considered to have a 100% chance of being true or false. Even some hardened skeptics and scientists have pointed out that it's as "close to being zero as makes no difference". That would probably be around 0.000001%, but still not zero. Philosophically, our current understanding about information is based on our fallible minds and senses. Therefore, we can't be 100% sure of anything.
My own opinion is that we may have 'tapped' a small but crucial element of physics that if true, doesn't mean that our physics model will be necessarily turned upside down. At least most stuff can still be predicted very well by our current model.
Naturally, I still doubt any of it is true (but rather an oversight on the part of Steorn). Having said that, I must be humble too, as my knowledge of physics at the moment is very low compared to a lot of you here.
To me, I guess the one thing Steorn 'should' do is produce hundreds of mini keyring LED torches that last forever. Dish them out a shopping mall or wherever, and that would be proof enough without all the scientific verification etc. The other thing they should do is never sell out to the energy companies who might bury the patent, and also be prepared to have trusted people standing by to release the full specs (and how to build one) online, in case of an emergency.
Dan
Hi Dan
You make a lot of fair points. However, I have to pull you up on the following point:
"My own opinion is that we may have 'tapped' a small but crucial element of physics ..."
The principle of energy conservation underpins all physics. If that principle were found to be untrue then we would have to throw away everything we know and start again.
It could be the case that I've misunderstood what these boys are up to. If they say they have made a box that produces energy without taking it from somewhere else, then I'll say they are mistaken. If they are saying that they have made a box that produces energy by taking it from some unseen source then I'd say I'm very impressed. Maybe in a few hundred million years the Earth will stop rotating and then we'll realise where they were getting their energy from ...
The 'thing Steorn needs to do' is publish the design. It then won't matter what anyone believes, because whatever it does can be demonstrated. I'm sure I could build one and test it, and I would (well, assuming it's not patently ludicrous or impossible to make) .
If I found it was over unity, what do you think I'd do? Pretend it's not?
This whole NDA-based scientific jury business... good luck to anyone who's taking part (and has anyone said they are?), but it's completely pointless.
No fundamental physical discovery in the history of the world has needed anything more than "Here's what we found. Here's how to do it. What do you think?".
It's pseudoscience, by any conceivable definition.
Rupert: I can't speak for Steorn, but from what I understand, they are a business too, and hope to make some money licensing the technology to third parties (at least that's what would happen at first, before other companies reproduced the technology and freely used it in their own products). That's why they at least want to be 'first' with the tech, and refrain from giving out details.
Naturally, that also excludes my idea of handing out "hundreds of mini keyring LED torches" to people.
Hi Kev: I was just wondering if there's even the smallest chance, that they are homing in on an effect which the technology manages to amplify/harness. The effect may otherwise be very hard to notice with 'any old arrangement of magnets'. Newton's theory of gravity explained the universe 'perfectly' until Einstein came along and found anomalies. Granted, the laws of thermodynamics probably have a load more evidence, but (maybe) that doesn't exclude the possibility of a very special anomaly which requires near-exact circumstances for anyone to notice it. If true, then our understanding of physics wouldn't be overturned, just tweaked ever so slightly to take account of the new variables.
Having said that, perhaps you're right, and the energy is coming from somewhere, like the Earth's rotation. No worries there as there's over 2.5e29 joules of the stuff, so assuming we all consume around 3e20 joules per year, we should have energy for 850,000 millennia! :) (stats taken from at least two corroborative web sites each).
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Well I'd give them a slither of possibility if they were in fact a viable company with a reputation worth protecting but it seems that they have nothing to lose : http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2006/03/26/story12884.asp
So it looks like they are having a "last laugh" before heading to the dole office.
Dan
This debate also put me in mind of Einsten/Newton - however, not because it's a good analogy but precisely the opposite.
The difference is that the conservation of energy is a principle, not a theory. It is taken by physicists to be a fundamental truth upon which theories can be built that explain the world around us. It can't be tweaked - there is no slightly inaccurate equation which is right 99% of the time (as was the case with Newton and I'm sure many many others down the years).
Anyway, I sense I'm going (gone?) off-piste here so I'm going to stop before I go into a full-on rant.
Getting back to the subject, I have to agree with TwoWolves that this is a major wind up by the Orbo guys who I'm sure are having a good laugh at us debating their made up nonsense.
TwoWolves: From what I can tell, Orbo technologies is not Steorn - they just had an investment by Steorn, and Steorn's new product happens to use the name "Orbo". See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbo
It is crystal clear to me that Rupert has not researched the Steorn phenomena in any measurable depth, barely in fact. Goodwin seems to have taken a few scant musings at a webclip or two, followed by a brief sojourn through several pages of html to arrive at his rather arrogant and quite frankly wrong, conclusion.
One thing you must all be wary of is "The Giggle Factor". Rupert has a nasty case of this and it may be contagious.
Overunity and zero-point energy have suffered from this since Jesus was a lad. Several well-reported cases of fraud have not helped Steorn's case however and Goodwin is just jumping on the bandwagon, ironically helping to keep the truth suppressed by his own ill-informed scribblings.
Columnists naturally have egos the size of 5 bedroom houses and opinions to match. Tis a common trait in columnist land to spout controversy. Who ever got any readers from saying something everyone agreed with?
Sometimes though, the truth can be stranger than fiction, and this my friends is a prime example. That is my last word except to say I passed a very nice bakery on the way home last night and they do a simply calorific range of marzipan headgear.
I thought about posting one to dear uncle Rupert, but then he's already got one lined up courtesy of the head pastry chef at Steorn.
Bon apetite!
From http://www.steorn.com/orbo/technology/
"Detailed technical specifications will be made available at the end of Quarter 1, 2007."
Yet no details are available, more excuses for missing dates probably are coming. Looks like Steorn is a hoax.
I, like many people here, have my doubts about the science behind Orbo but I also have strong doubts as to the usefulness of this project in terms of a hoax. It has passed the intial "oh this is interesting, im going to forward this to my friends" point and I cant imagine missing milestones being a part of anyone's well-crafted hoax - that simply makes buzz fizzle. On top of that you have pictures of the Steorn staff getting their heads shaved for charity, drinking in the pub. It just doesn't FEEL like a hoax and if they do reveal it as a hoax at this point I think there would only be a negative imapct to whatever "other" product or service they were promoting. It would be like crying wolf and then pitching yourself as a PR person. I think that, even if they are wrong, they genuinely feel that they have something of merit.
The video has no useful content, is self-serving, and makes empty promises for the future-- all hallmarks of a scam or self delusion. Sorry if this is a duplicate post, the system software is behaving weirdly for this blog.
The so-called quartly progress report video from Steorn is here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=h3aaRrEIp-0
I don't know if I can make a link-- here's a try:
if it worked, click here.
And here is another clip. That one I think is from September 2006. Not much different since then, is there? So how much trouble is it to show an "overunity" device works... if you have one?
There are some well understood classical explanations from where the energy is coming from, so don't be too quick to judge what you don't know.
All the evidence so far points to the fact that they do indeed have something of extreme interest that will change the world forever.
Public demos in London in July will help convince an otherwise skeptical public when they can interact with the technology and see it live!
Accepted science reveals that there is a sea of limitless energy abundant at quantumn levels and it appears Steorn have maybe figured out how to tap into this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy
"There are some well understood classical explanations from where the energy is coming from, so don't be too quick to judge what you don't know."
WHAT energy? They haven't shown any energy-- all they have are empty claims without the slightest evidence. At this point, there's nothing to explain so what I know or don't know about classical "explanations" is entirely irrelevant.
"All the evidence so far points to the fact that they do indeed have something of extreme interest that will change the world forever."
Really? Exactly what evidence is that? That they claim it? I've not see one tiniest bit of evidence from Steorn, and believe me, I've wasted hours looking, hoping and looking some more.
"Public demos in London in July will help convince an otherwise skeptical public when they can interact with the technology and see it live!"
Want to make a small wager? Or a very large one? They promised technical specifications on April 13,2007. What did we get? A crummy Youtube video full of claims with absolutely no evidence and certainly no specifications. You do know what specifications are, right?
I will bet July will be exactly like April and it will continue until they manage to collect sufficient money from fools or alternatively, the interest runs out.
"Accepted science reveals that there is a sea of limitless energy abundant at quantumn levels and it appears Steorn have maybe figured out how to tap into this."
Yeah-- whatever. Actually "accepted science" says nothing about tapping free energy. So far that's entirely the province of frauds, phonies, self-deluding uneducated people and plain crooks.
In August last year this was posted. Reposted here. Any comments rupert?
The reason the superconductor overunity device works is simple. Here is a copy of transcript.
Imagine a superconductor ring with a wave travelling around the ring. A current is induced in a separate circuit creating "Free energy".
Incidentally this proves that the speed of light is not the maximum velocity something can move. ie. the superconductor ring has a circumferance of C and radius R. If the magnetic wave is measurable above the ring at some radius (R + r') than the wave must be travelling at 2xPIx(R+r') = C' around the ring.
Since C' > C the wave at some point must be faster than the velocity of light (summarised)
This blog has a nice picture describing how it works http://spaceandeden.blogspot.com
That's completely nonsense, Michael. As soon as you start drawing power from the superconducting ring, the current in the ring will decrease and disappear in a time period inversely proportional to the amount of power you draw. That's why that circuit has never been built. The picture describes a silly fantasy-- not how anything works. And most of the rest of the text is gibberish. For example from the same place:
"Telekinesis with dice
------------ --------- --------
Choose a number. Concentrate on dice. Throw dice for number. Like magic card trick. Choose what works."
I suppose you think that works too. Lots of luck in Vegas, pauper.
Mary,
You need to look into and research more on the areas of Zero Point Energy & Dark Energy. Research it, speak to people and try to keep an open mind, god knows we've got enough closed minded scientists already, don't encourage them.
"What might appear to be empty space is, therefore, a seething ferment of virtual particles. A vacuum is not inert and featureless, but alive with throbbing energy and vitality.
A 'real' particle such as an electron must always be viewed against this background of frenetic activity. When an electron moves through space, it is actually swimming in a sea of ghost particles of all varieties – virtual leptons, quarks, and messengers, entangled in a complex mêlée. The presence of the electron will distort this irreducible vacuum activity, and the distortion in turn reacts back on the electron.
Even at rest, an electron is not at rest: it is being continually assaulted by all manner of other particles from the vacuum." (Paul Davies, Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Nature, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1984, p. 105).
Hi Malcolm,
There may be thousands of way to get energy plentifully from the universe and some of those ways may be environmentally harmless. Some may even involve so-called free energy. I don't know.
The problem with what you wrote is that nothing in it has anything remotely to do with Steorn.
My point is this: Steorn claims to have actually made a machine that produces more energy than they put into running it. To show whether or not this is true is almost a trivial experiment. The extra energy *must* be shown somehow and none of the methods for doing it are either difficult or time consuming. Most important, none of the methods for detecting overunity and demonstrating it require *any* knowledge *whatsoever* about how the machine works.
The problem here is that too many well meaning people such as yourself are basing their conclusions on meaningless and unproven claims from Steorn. That's especially revealing because, with a minimum of knowledge about science, one could easily see how simple and fast such a device is to test. That (and many other observations on Steorn's behavior) leads me to the obvious conclusion that this is most probably a scam and at best, giving them every benefit of the doubt, self delusion. There is virtually no chance that Steorn has made any discovery of significance. Significant and meaninful scientific discoveries are *never* handled in the bizarre, overly complicated, and time wasting way this one has been.
Maryyugo spends a disturbing amount of time rubbishing Steorn's claim with nothing more to add then just verbiage.
I can imagine why Steorn went this way in advertising their product. There are stories of heavy handed tactics such as threats, personal attacks even physical harm, when people get involved in energy. I know of one personally. The recipient this time received a dose of some unknown chemical dissolved in DMSO.
Nonetheless, all Steorn has to do is demonstrate the machine, or give details so that anyone else can try. Without that, there is nothing to distinguish them from hoards of similar claimants from the past, none of whom has panned out.
This isn't verbiage or rubbishing Steorn - these are factual statements.
Can't get past that.
R
"I know of one personally. The recipient this time received a dose of some unknown chemical dissolved in DMSO. "
Have any evidence to support that preposterous claim?
Yes. I have evidence to support Steorn's claim. Check out the following blog. The credentials of these people are astounding. My favourite is Lee Felsenstein's yahoo comments.
Blog:
http://overunityenergy.blogspot.com/
Hi Michael,
Please reread my question. It was: Do you have any credible and verifyable evidence to support your claim that someone you know personally received a dose of " some unknown chemical dissolved in DMSO? " Was it reported to law authorities and what did they determine? Frankly, to me, without more evidence, the whole story sounds like paranoid delusions.
As far as the blog you cite, there is nothing on those pages which would lead one to believe Steorn's claims. Lee Felsenstein's claims are just claims. There is nothing at all to substantiate them. Anybody can make claims. Steorn should simply shut up until they have a working machine that's been properly and impartially tested.
And as I noted before, the reasons why the diagram of an overunity superconducting drive on the web site you cited won't work can be shown and understood by any average eighth grade science student.
Hi Mary (or should I say Penny),
I know why you're here and your reasons for the constant attacks on Steorn, but on this occasion you are gravely mistaken. Sorry to have to be the one to inform you. Tell your boss he's barking up the wrong tree.
There are many complex reasons for the way this is being played out. The recent treatment of Sean at UCD by academia is typical of the contempt being shown by science in general.
Is it any wonder that extraordinary claims need extraordinary measures to get it into the thick skulls of egotistical scientists trying desperately to hold on to CoE. What is it that they fear so much?
The argument given to UCD students was that they should take CoE on "faith". What? Excuse me? A scientist asking his students to take CoE principles on faith - Whatever happened to testing and data? It is no wonder the world is in the current state it's in If this is academia's response to new physics problems.
During the lecture Sean's points were never addressed and instead they resorted to ridicule and underhand tactics. Why did they need to If they are so sure of themselves?
I understand why Steorn have taken the route to validation that they have and it seems the only logical path to follow with a world so agressively against the thought that free energy is real. What are we so afraid of? Why is it so difficult to come to terms with? Maybe it's education, after all who else out there REALLY understands dark energy or the zero-point field? 9 out of 10 memebrs of the public would think you were making it up until they Google it and find out it is in fact real.
Once Orbo is accepted then we can actually move forward with how we are going to apply the technology instead of wasting time trying to derail the success of our own future. Are we really hell-bent on using up the very last drop of oil?
I cannot fast forward in time to show you a working device, but I'm sure you'll be intrigued at the London demo and first in the queue on launch day.
PS. There may be enough marzipan left for you also when this is all over.
Just show the damn thing and have done, Steorn.
I can guarantee acceptance will follow immediately. What's everyone going to do, pretend they haven't seen it? If they're going to be that resistant to reality, no amount of coy posturing before the event's going to make any difference. If they're not - then just show the damn thing.
And _still_, getting on for a year after the event, nobody's said why Steon doesn't meet the classical definition of pseudoscience.
(still, "The London Demo" sounds interesting. Must follow that up")
OK, so I went back to the Steorn site to have a look at progress to date. The only progress appears to be that they've removed the public forums, taken down any promises to show the technology by a certain date, the jury announcement at the end of 2007 notwithstanding.
I seem to remember Sean saying that if people were convinced before the official end of the trial, then they'd go public immediately. By now, the jury will have seen what's on offer. If it works, they'd be convinced. Really, it doesn't take long to show a working device to a physicist and have them go "Yep, that's working". The how can follow later - many years later. You don't wait for that.
But these July demos - when and where are they? Can't find anything on the site. And the reference to the UCD lecture is also intriguing: where is this written about, or being discussed?
The UCD University College Dublin lecture is on YouTube in 5 separate parts. It was taken by a student. The student who filmed it has edited a lot of the important parts out where one of the professors does a comedy routine to try and ridicule Steorn.
The quality of the recordings are poor as it was taken on some sort of digital camera instead of a proper video camera.
However, the important thing to remember is that Sean's arguments and points are never addressed properly and it was pretty clear to all that the professors knew nothing about magnetic viscocity and Sv.
Despite having the world against him, Sean actually comes out on top by being funny, informative and willing to debate any of the points.
PS The forums ARE still active.
Where are the forums? I can't find them on the site... and I can only find part 4 of the UCD videos, if the rest are there they don't seem to have Steorn as a keyword!
And the world's only against Steorn as it is against anyone who refuses to demonstrate evidence for a thoroughly implausible claim.
Hi Rupert,
The forums are alive and well at:
http://www.steorn.net/forum/
However, there are many of them and it's confusing to navigate through more than 5000 (!) threads. The search facility returns a 404 error when I tried it.
There is also an interesting Steorn blog here called Steornwatcher:
http://freeenergytracker.blogspot.com/
... unfortunately, it is also hard to follow. The format and threading isn't very clear. To me anyway.
Many of the skeptics (sceptics if you're from the UK) are now saying that if Steorn actually had a running prototype of any type, even incomplete and imperfect, they should have brought it to the UCD seminar. At the minimum they should have shown a video or photos and diagrams. Absent that, they seem to be just another free energy claimant-- either self deluded, fraudulent, or some unholy mixture of both.
I see that Steorn has now said the mystery device works through magnetic viscosity. Not something I'd heard of before, but thanks to the majestic Google it doesn't take long to cobble together a picture of what's going on. And I can't see how it helps. The idea appears to be that if you couple energy into a system by rapidly changing a magnetic field, you get more energy out by slowly changing it back again (or vice versa - not clear on that point, but it's definitely a question of differential speed of change). It's also a violation of the conservation of energy. Whether you call this a matter of magnetic viscosity or not - doesn't really matter. That's a straightforward proposition, simple to test and unambiguous to demonstrate. If it is a charade, it won't last for much longer; if it isn't, we'll know that too. I see Steorn still prefers to pour scorn on its critics than talk them out of it, so I suppose I'd better plump for the charade option. Meanwhile, the video clips from the university event have reappeared: here they are for everyone's viewing pleasure
Apropos of nothing in particular...
As you "don't know what a 'general public licence' is", you may be fascinated to learn that it has managed to reach version 3.
