http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6283374.stm

7/13/2007 8:43:36 AM

The Steorn guy made that claim last year. If you look at any of the info they provide you'll know he's just a moron.

7/13/2007 9:23:46 AM

Thermodynamics says [no].

7/13/2007 10:01:50 AM

Perpetual motion is simple.

Assumptions:

1) Cats always land on their feet
2) Toast always lands buttered side down.

Simply attach a slice of toast butter side up to the back of a cat and drop. As both the toast and cat attempt to achieve equilibrium with the above properties, the cat/toast entity will continuously spin while hovering in midair perpetually.

7/13/2007 10:58:31 AM

^ true story

7/13/2007 11:03:43 AM

this is as obviously bullshit as every similar claim ever made. There's always some kind of malfunction. They have a device that creates free energy, but they had to cancel the demo due to excessive heat from camera lights??? really?

yeah, right.

Quote :

"The public demonstration has been postponed indefinitely"

I bet.

[Edited on July 13, 2007 at 11:13 AM. Reason : .]

7/13/2007 11:12:04 AM

7/13/2007 12:25:48 PM

Quote :

"I believe that Mr McCarthy is truly convinced of the validity of his invention. It is, in my view, a case of prolonged self deception. Eric Ash "

hahaha

7/13/2007 12:30:15 PM

y'all are just haters

i've got a device in my basement right now that takes advantage of the Casimir-Polder force to glean free potential energy from the vacuum of space. it's well-established physics, just nobody has taken advantage of it on a large scale. not to mention once we figure out how dark energy fits into this whole equation, i have very little doubt that we'll find a way to tap into that as well

[Edited on July 13, 2007 at 3:58 PM. Reason : sure, we're slowly bleeding the universe of its energy, but hey, we'll be fine]

7/13/2007 3:55:46 PM

Steorn is an internet marketing company.

This hoax was simply a demonstration of their ability to make headlines and get people's attention.

[Edited on July 13, 2007 at 3:59 PM. Reason : 2]

7/13/2007 3:58:37 PM

I invented perpetual motion too.

But I won't let any of you see it.

7/13/2007 3:59:20 PM

that cat toast thing is funny

7/14/2007 12:48:23 AM

Sad story:

A Chinese physics major--Qijia Fu, class of 96--at Hamilton College, NY (I went there for some time) was so damn smart that in 1992, fresh from China, in a physics course during the first week of class, was able to devise a perpetual motion machine so watertight, that it took a damn smart Physics professor (Philip Pearle; internationally recognized in Quantum Physics) one week to figure out why it wouldn't work. The student was ranked first in Beijing in both math and physics, and he was accepted for Ph.D. programs in Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc, and he chose Harvard.

BUT, in summer of 1996, just having graduated from Hamilton and ready for Harvard, was hiking in the Grand Canyon, and was struck by lightning and died on the spot.

I entered Hamilton in 1996, so I never knew him, but he was best friends with my brother who also graduated from Hamilton in 1996. First week of class in Fall 96, there was a ceremony in his honor at the campus chapel, and several professors spoke about him, and even though I had never met this Chinese student, I got tears in my eyes due to the great things professors were saying about him.

Prof. Pearle had predicted that Qijia Fu would go on to win the Nobel Prize one day.

Here is something about the professor from the college's website, for those who are interested in his research:

Quote :

"Philip Pearle (Emeritus): Ph.D. M.I.T. The Foundations of Quantum Theory. Phil's theory of Continuous Spontaneous Localization has attracted considerable international attention. Examples of student projects with him are Perfectly Disturbing Measurements with Toru Ohira '86, Apker Finalist, Statevector Reduction in Discrete Time with Akihiro Nakano '92, and Spontaneous Radiation of free electrons in a Nonrelativistic Collapse Model, Qijia Fu '96, Apker Finalist."

(See his research at http://xxx.lanl.gov/find/quant-ph/1/au:+Pearle_P/0/1/0/all/0/1)

Yeah, that's the same student (he was a finalist for the Apker Award of the American Physical Society: http://www.aps.org/programs/honors/awards/apker.cfm).

Here is his undergrad research thesis:

http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v56/i3/p1806_1
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1997PhRvA..56.1806F

Aha, this is cool: http://www.szxy.org/special/other/fuqijia.htm

Had he gone to a full university with lots of research facilities instead of a liberal arts college, he would have been able to do far more in his undergrad research and be far more famous.

7/14/2007 1:32:19 AM

^
looks like God doesn't want people breaking his laws

7/14/2007 1:42:49 AM

watertight?

7/14/2007 2:06:00 AM

in a figurative sense, not literal!

7/14/2007 2:06:54 AM

engadget interviewed the nutty CEO today
http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/17/the-engadget-interview-sean-mccarthy-ceo-of-steorn/

7/17/2007 4:20:19 PM

I know its technically the Lounge, but the first thing I thought of was:


Lisa, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

7/17/2007 4:31:09 PM

http://freeenergytracker.blogspot.com/2007/08/nothing-new.html

Quote :

"So – some have visited the public forum. I am a member of the SPDC (private – NDA needed) and it is much more orderly there, as we have more scientists etc. Many skeptics did a u-turn in there as we have been shown a video of a famous inventor enthusing over the ‘miracle that is behind the technology’. Then we learned the name of a physicist from an old uni who confirmed the effect but can’t go public as Steorn doesn’t want that yet. The story around that is very believable for me. Finally, the mechanism has been explained – very simple, and I wrote a Fortran sim to convince myself of it. It actually works – as long as a stator magnet is not depleted, and it doesn’t look like it would be – test plots showing this to be the case have been presented by Steorn and some forum members have come close to reproducing the setup – one of them says he had an 8 hour run before something loosened up. Now none of this is substitute for the 22 Jury members and their report – but it’s pretty damn good. Coming soon for the cognoscenti 7 of us were selected to test the tech themselves.. That activity will start in a few weeks time. So – it’s all go: no sign of closing up shop after the London debacle."

8/25/2007 10:41:51 AM

8/26/2007 1:53:54 AM

8/26/2007 2:07:37 AM

http://www.steorn.com/

something new???

2/3/2009 10:35:29 PM

not likely

2/3/2009 11:33:25 PM

there are only so many ways that you can spin bullshit

2/4/2009 12:02:06 AM

Quote :

"Lisa, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"

2/4/2009 6:11:37 AM

Quote :

" CAT TOAST ENTITY"

2/4/2009 11:26:16 AM

steorn is relaunching their public demo today

http://www.livestream.com/steorn

[Edited on December 15, 2009 at 10:44 PM. Reason : at least this time they got something that does something, whether or not it is what they say it is]

12/15/2009 10:39:35 PM

12/15/2009 10:52:27 PM

The other two are lost on the infinite plane of uniform density.

12/16/2009 8:08:15 AM

Quote :

"Steorn presents itself as a serious company – unlike the carnival show of someone like Dennis Lee. So what are they up to? Did they bamboozle themselves by building a complex motor and missing some hidden source of external energy, or by making some math error? Are they extrapolating wildly from what ultimately is a minor error? Or, do they know exactly what they are doing – building a brand through media hype and luring investors with perpetual false promises about perpetual motion? Well – Steorn is back in the news again with a slick ad campaign and fresh promises about a demonstration. This video by Steorn pushes me in the direction of concluding the latter – that Steorn knows exactly what they are doing. Rather than addressing the concerns of their critics, they have chosen to mock them – ironically embracing the terms used to mock Steorn’s claims. It’s a clever gambit – too clever, if you know what I mean. For example, they show their Orbo engine happily spinning away, and then quotes from critics calling the technology “fairy-powered” and “powered by blarney.” It is a version of the Galileo gambit – trying to make it seem as if those who are criticizing your pseudoscience are simply blind to your visionary genius. Michio Kaku says Orbo is a “fraud”, but here it is “working.” Nice try, Steorn. The bottom line is the same – generate demonstrable usable energy, or there is no other reasonable conclusion than your technology is a fraud. Showing a motor spinning is useless, until independent scientists can satisfy themselves that the motor is truly over-unity – that all sources and outputs of energy have been accounted for. After viewing Steorn’s explanation of the technology, I am totally underwhelmed. It’s just another magnet scheme – really, Steorn, that’s it? Magnets? They hook up a motor to a battery. The battery spins the motor, which they also hook up to a generator, which returns some of the energy back to the battery. Wow. This is not even an original free energy scam. This is old-school nonsense in slick new packaging. And yet they would have us believe that this simple scheme has somehow broken the laws of physics. Garage cranks and free-energy hopefuls, not to mention real engineers, have picked over the idea of using some configuration of magnets to generate free energy for years. It’s simply a lost cause. Engadget also makes an interesting point. Recently Steorn marketed a “USB powered diving rod.” This is essentially a magnetometer. Engadget writes Meet the €289 (that’s $400 mister) USB Hall Probe that turns your $1,000 PC into a $40 magnetometer. When companies like Steorn start branching out into other dubious technological devices it is difficult for me to conclude anything other than selling pseudoscience is their business model."

http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=1362

12/16/2009 9:49:27 AM