Something I’ve been keeping my eye on for a while is Steorn.com. It’s an engineering company in Ireland, that claims to have discovered how to make a perpetual motion device. Now, of course that breaks the laws of physics :-). Nonetheless, they seem to be legit (or … at least more legit than your backyard mad scientist :-P).
They haven’t said how their technology works exactly yet - only that it is based on having magnets in a circle, and pushing an object around the circle using the magnets. They understand that people will be skeptic, so they have devised a way to prove it works — a long time ago, they took out an advertisement in a popular magazine, inviting scientists to debunk their device. The only catch is: if the device works, the scientists have to publicly state it works. Steorn had over 5000 applicants, and out of them, whittled the list down to 22 scientists with both the free time and academic background to properly investigate their device.
Pretty cool stuff! We’ll have to wait and see if it’s a hoax of some sort :-). If it is a hoax, Steorn has done an amazing job at fooling a lot of people. Check out this page on their website with two videos explaining the entire thing - and this page with their most recent video from April 13, 2007 (or you can just search YouTube).
April 30th, 2007 at 9:55 am
Wow! This was interesting..
I bet the device is at the end something anyone can build in their home with couple of magnets and a metal ball
May 1st, 2007 at 6:08 am
That would be pretty awesome. Steorn, the Orion quantum computer, we’re in the middle of a technological revolution waiting to happen!
May 1st, 2007 at 10:54 pm
A perpetual motion machine is pointless though unless the ouput force is greater then the used force by enough of an amount to create usable energy
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:04 pm
If it’s not a hoax, I (almost) can’t believe it’s a “true” perpetuum mobile, in the sense it creates more energy than you put into it. What is possible though (and that doesn’t matter in practice as long as it works) it is some very clever way of using the earth magnetic field, or something along that line.
May 16th, 2007 at 3:10 am
wow, ’twas just 3 days ago i was thinking about the possibility of using magnets to create free energy (coincidence?). i tossed about a few ideas on how it could actually be done, some of which seemed possible, but i didn’t bother with it too much at the time.
still, it’s nice to know others are working on such a thing. personally, i have good faith in this idea. i can’t wait to see how this ends up ^-^
September 22nd, 2007 at 8:41 am
I have been doing some reading on zero point energy, and I now consider it possible this device somehow “taps” into it. There are some great video’s about it on google video.
By the way, you might find this interesting:
http://dispatchesfromthefuture.com/