Have you heard the one about the Irishman and the perpetual motion machine?
Have scientists unlocked the secret of perpetual motion?
By MICHAEL HANLON, Science Editor
28th August 2006
Has this scientist in Dublin found the Holy Grail of Science? Or is his claim to have found free energy blarney?
Energy to burn: Steorn executive Sean McCarthy with the testing rig for his company's perpetual motion machine
There are two scientific discoveries which, everyone agrees, would not only change the world for ever but would also make their discoverers rich beyond the dreams of Croesus, or even Bill Gates.
One, of course, is the elixir of youth. The other is free energy, perpetual motion, call it what you will - the notion that energy can be generated without a source, without cost, without fuel.
Free energy would solve one of humanity's biggest headaches for ever. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that it is the domain of madmen and charlatans.
Yet every now and again a claim is made which has a little more substance.
In the past couple of weeks, the internet has been abuzz with items about a bizarre story - emanating from Ireland - in which a small company says it has turned physics on its head and developed what it calls 'free energy technology'.
The company, Steorn [[http://www.steorn.net/frontpage/default.aspx]] - based on a Dublin industrial estate - freely admits its claims will be met with scepticism.
'This represents a significant challenge to our current understanding of the universe,' its company website says, and Steorn last week placed an expensive, fullpage advertisement in The Economist challenging the world's scientists to come forward and test what it admits are its 'blasphemous' claims.
This alone, perhaps, marks Steorn apart from the usual perpetual motion loonies. Like anyone who writes about science, I have over the years received letters, phone calls and elaborately annotated diagrams for perpetual motion devices - machines that, their makers claim, defy the laws of thermodynamics by generating more energy than is put in.
Physics tells us there is no such thing as a free lunch; that energy, work and power cannot be obtained for nothing.
To make a car go, you have to burn petrol. To keep the lights on you have to burn coal, gas or nuclear fuel. Even the sun will not shine for ever, as its hydrogen supplies will - one day billions of years hence - run out.
But little matters like breaking one of the most cherished axioms in science do not stop people from trying. Like the dream of eternal youth, promises of free energy are the domain of the snake-oil salesmen and con-merchants.
There are two things that all these people have in common.
First, they always insist, quite correctly, that no one in the scientific community will take them seriously. Often, they add, there is a sinister plot, the so-called Free Energy Suppression Conspiracy, probably run by the oil industry, to silence such breakthroughs.
The second thing these people have in common is that their ideas are, always, hopelessly, laughably, not going to work.
But what none of these people have done to date is spend a cool £75,000 putting a full-page advert in a top-flight international magazine, as Steorn did this month.
Nor have they engaged the (presumably pricey) services of top London PR firm Citigate Dewe Rogerson, whose client list includes Halifax and Hitachi. This is a lot of money to spend on a flight of fancy.
Theories abound: Steorn's 'free energy', say some, is a marketing gimmick. Others see the dark hand of Microsoft here (the computer behemoth has a major base in the Irish Republic and some of the typography on the company website is apparently similar to that on Steorn's webpages).
Maybe Steorn, and its chief executive Sean McCarthy, are just fruitcakes with money to burn.
But when I tracked him down in Ireland yesterday, he seemed disarmingly normal, even persuasive.
Mr McCarthy, a loquacious and charming 40-year-old with a degree in engineering, freely admits no one is going to take his idea seriously - as yet.
'Oh yes,' he told me, 'Three-and-a-half years ago we would have thought anyone who came up with an idea like this was a whacko.'
But Mr McCarthy denies flatly this is a hoax or PR gimmick and claims that his company really has found a way of generating energy for nothing - and now wants the cream of the scientific world to test their invention.
Steorn's 'day job', it seems, is as an engineering consultancy devising systems to help companies like banks fight credit card theft and other forms of electronic fraud.
A few years ago, Steorn was working on a novel CCTV system to spy on cashpoint machines. Instead of powering the cameras with batteries or from the mains, the cameras were to be powered by tiny wind-generators.
It was when Steorn was fiddling with these 'microturbines' that, Mr McCarthy claims, the engineers made a startling discovery: the magnets used in the turbines were behaving in a strange way and seemed to be generating more power than was put into them.
In essence, Steorn claims that by setting up a series of magnetic fields in a certain way, and moving a magnetic object through the field, you get an energy 'kick', apparently from nowhere.
There is no electrical input, and the magnets do not 'run down' like batteries. Once set in motion the machine - effectively a magnetically powered motor - simply runs for ever (or until its bearings wear out, presumably).
If true (and it's a big 'if'), such a device would be worth a fortune. You could use it to generate electricity - for nothing. Steorn claims, rather bizarrely, that one of the applications it is looking into is mobile-phone chargers, although one can think of other more dramatic uses for this technology.
For a Steorn free-energy machine could also be used to power cars, lorries, ships and anything requiring motive power. It would be the end of the global energy crisis, the end of global warming - and Mr McCarthy and his 18 colleagues would become the richest people ever to have lived.
Steorn has not filed a patent for the whole machine as such, as both the UK and U.S. Patent Offices are sniffy about perpetual motion gadgets and the conmen and dreamers who have been hitherto associated with them. But they have filed patents for constituent parts of the device. Inevitably, there are some questions. Why not simply publish the data and the plans on the internet and let the world's scientists decide whether this will work?
'We are a commercial organisation,' is Mr McCarthy's reply.
OK, if you are worried about secrecy, and patenting your plans, why take out such a high-profile advert drawing attention to an invention which could be worth trillions to anyone who copied it?
'This needs a full academic analysis,' Mr McCarthy says. There is no way, he asserts, that a subject as mad as 'free energy' would have been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal.
The next stage of the company's plan involves selecting 12 scientists from the thousands (so Steorn claims) who have written in since The Economist advert was run. This handpicked jury of boffins will be given access to the full plans for the Steorn machine and invited to test it to their hearts' content.
So could it work? The idea that 'free energy' is simply an elaborate PR stunt cannot yet be dismissed out of hand, despite Steorn's denials.
More likely, though, is that Steorn really thinks it is on to something huge, but is wildly over-selling its claims. Either that, or it is simply wrong.
Twenty years ago, a Dundonian engineer called Sandy Kidd convinced an awful lot of people that he had perfected a wondrous propulsion system based on gyroscopes that would, again, have violated some of the most fundamental laws of physics.
Kidd was no fraudster, but his amazing flying gyroscope sadly did not work. And when it comes to the field of perpetual motion, being wrong is, sadly, almost as much of a certainty as Newton's Laws of Motion.
As the Starship Enterprise's engineer, Scotty, was so fond of pointing out, 'you cannae break the laws of physics'. So far, no one has proved Scotty wrong.
dailymail.co.uk
****************************************************
Perpetual motion refers to a condition in which an object moves forever without being driven by an external source of energy.
The term is commonly used to refer to machines which display this phenomenon. In the macroscopic world, perpetual motion is not generally considered to be possible. Perpetual motion machines (the Latin term perpetuum mobile is not uncommon) are a class of hypothetical machines which would produce useful energy in a way which would violate the established laws of physics. No genuine perpetual motion machine currently exists (unless those Dublin scientists really HAVE managed to create one), and according to certain fundamental laws in physics they cannot exist. Specifically, perpetual motion machines would violate either the first or second laws of thermodynamics. Perpetual motion machines are divided into two subcategories (some physicists, including the noted professor of thermodynamics Mark W. Zemansky, include a third), defined by which law of thermodynamics would have to be broken in order for the device to be a true perpetual motion machine.
Perpetual motion machines violate one or both of the following two laws of physics: the first law of thermodynamics and the second law of thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics is essentially a statement of conservation of energy. The second law has several statements, the most intuitive of which is that heat flows spontaneously from hotter to colder places; the most well known is that entropy always increases, or at the least stays the same; another statement is that no heat engine (an engine which produces work while moving heat between two places) can be more efficient than a Carnot heat engine. As a special case of this, any machine operating in a closed cycle cannot only transform thermal energy to work in a region of constant temperature. See the respective articles, and thermodynamics, for more information.
Machines which are claimed not to violate either of the two laws of thermodynamics but rather are claimed to generate energy from unconventional sources are sometimes referred to as perpetual motion machines, although they do not meet the standard criteria for the name. By way of example, it is quite possible to design a clock or other low-power machine to run on the differences in barometric pressure or temperature between night and day [1]. Such a machine has a source of energy, albeit one from which it is quite impractical to produce power in quantity.
wikipedia.org
Have scientists unlocked the secret of perpetual motion?
By MICHAEL HANLON, Science Editor
28th August 2006
Has this scientist in Dublin found the Holy Grail of Science? Or is his claim to have found free energy blarney?
Energy to burn: Steorn executive Sean McCarthy with the testing rig for his company's perpetual motion machine
There are two scientific discoveries which, everyone agrees, would not only change the world for ever but would also make their discoverers rich beyond the dreams of Croesus, or even Bill Gates.
One, of course, is the elixir of youth. The other is free energy, perpetual motion, call it what you will - the notion that energy can be generated without a source, without cost, without fuel.
Free energy would solve one of humanity's biggest headaches for ever. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that it is the domain of madmen and charlatans.
Yet every now and again a claim is made which has a little more substance.
In the past couple of weeks, the internet has been abuzz with items about a bizarre story - emanating from Ireland - in which a small company says it has turned physics on its head and developed what it calls 'free energy technology'.
The company, Steorn [[http://www.steorn.net/frontpage/default.aspx]] - based on a Dublin industrial estate - freely admits its claims will be met with scepticism.
'This represents a significant challenge to our current understanding of the universe,' its company website says, and Steorn last week placed an expensive, fullpage advertisement in The Economist challenging the world's scientists to come forward and test what it admits are its 'blasphemous' claims.
This alone, perhaps, marks Steorn apart from the usual perpetual motion loonies. Like anyone who writes about science, I have over the years received letters, phone calls and elaborately annotated diagrams for perpetual motion devices - machines that, their makers claim, defy the laws of thermodynamics by generating more energy than is put in.
Physics tells us there is no such thing as a free lunch; that energy, work and power cannot be obtained for nothing.
To make a car go, you have to burn petrol. To keep the lights on you have to burn coal, gas or nuclear fuel. Even the sun will not shine for ever, as its hydrogen supplies will - one day billions of years hence - run out.
But little matters like breaking one of the most cherished axioms in science do not stop people from trying. Like the dream of eternal youth, promises of free energy are the domain of the snake-oil salesmen and con-merchants.
There are two things that all these people have in common.
First, they always insist, quite correctly, that no one in the scientific community will take them seriously. Often, they add, there is a sinister plot, the so-called Free Energy Suppression Conspiracy, probably run by the oil industry, to silence such breakthroughs.
The second thing these people have in common is that their ideas are, always, hopelessly, laughably, not going to work.
But what none of these people have done to date is spend a cool £75,000 putting a full-page advert in a top-flight international magazine, as Steorn did this month.
Nor have they engaged the (presumably pricey) services of top London PR firm Citigate Dewe Rogerson, whose client list includes Halifax and Hitachi. This is a lot of money to spend on a flight of fancy.
Theories abound: Steorn's 'free energy', say some, is a marketing gimmick. Others see the dark hand of Microsoft here (the computer behemoth has a major base in the Irish Republic and some of the typography on the company website is apparently similar to that on Steorn's webpages).
Maybe Steorn, and its chief executive Sean McCarthy, are just fruitcakes with money to burn.
But when I tracked him down in Ireland yesterday, he seemed disarmingly normal, even persuasive.
Mr McCarthy, a loquacious and charming 40-year-old with a degree in engineering, freely admits no one is going to take his idea seriously - as yet.
'Oh yes,' he told me, 'Three-and-a-half years ago we would have thought anyone who came up with an idea like this was a whacko.'
But Mr McCarthy denies flatly this is a hoax or PR gimmick and claims that his company really has found a way of generating energy for nothing - and now wants the cream of the scientific world to test their invention.
Steorn's 'day job', it seems, is as an engineering consultancy devising systems to help companies like banks fight credit card theft and other forms of electronic fraud.
A few years ago, Steorn was working on a novel CCTV system to spy on cashpoint machines. Instead of powering the cameras with batteries or from the mains, the cameras were to be powered by tiny wind-generators.
It was when Steorn was fiddling with these 'microturbines' that, Mr McCarthy claims, the engineers made a startling discovery: the magnets used in the turbines were behaving in a strange way and seemed to be generating more power than was put into them.
In essence, Steorn claims that by setting up a series of magnetic fields in a certain way, and moving a magnetic object through the field, you get an energy 'kick', apparently from nowhere.
There is no electrical input, and the magnets do not 'run down' like batteries. Once set in motion the machine - effectively a magnetically powered motor - simply runs for ever (or until its bearings wear out, presumably).
If true (and it's a big 'if'), such a device would be worth a fortune. You could use it to generate electricity - for nothing. Steorn claims, rather bizarrely, that one of the applications it is looking into is mobile-phone chargers, although one can think of other more dramatic uses for this technology.
For a Steorn free-energy machine could also be used to power cars, lorries, ships and anything requiring motive power. It would be the end of the global energy crisis, the end of global warming - and Mr McCarthy and his 18 colleagues would become the richest people ever to have lived.
Steorn has not filed a patent for the whole machine as such, as both the UK and U.S. Patent Offices are sniffy about perpetual motion gadgets and the conmen and dreamers who have been hitherto associated with them. But they have filed patents for constituent parts of the device. Inevitably, there are some questions. Why not simply publish the data and the plans on the internet and let the world's scientists decide whether this will work?
'We are a commercial organisation,' is Mr McCarthy's reply.
OK, if you are worried about secrecy, and patenting your plans, why take out such a high-profile advert drawing attention to an invention which could be worth trillions to anyone who copied it?
'This needs a full academic analysis,' Mr McCarthy says. There is no way, he asserts, that a subject as mad as 'free energy' would have been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal.
The next stage of the company's plan involves selecting 12 scientists from the thousands (so Steorn claims) who have written in since The Economist advert was run. This handpicked jury of boffins will be given access to the full plans for the Steorn machine and invited to test it to their hearts' content.
So could it work? The idea that 'free energy' is simply an elaborate PR stunt cannot yet be dismissed out of hand, despite Steorn's denials.
More likely, though, is that Steorn really thinks it is on to something huge, but is wildly over-selling its claims. Either that, or it is simply wrong.
Twenty years ago, a Dundonian engineer called Sandy Kidd convinced an awful lot of people that he had perfected a wondrous propulsion system based on gyroscopes that would, again, have violated some of the most fundamental laws of physics.
Kidd was no fraudster, but his amazing flying gyroscope sadly did not work. And when it comes to the field of perpetual motion, being wrong is, sadly, almost as much of a certainty as Newton's Laws of Motion.
As the Starship Enterprise's engineer, Scotty, was so fond of pointing out, 'you cannae break the laws of physics'. So far, no one has proved Scotty wrong.
dailymail.co.uk
****************************************************
Perpetual motion refers to a condition in which an object moves forever without being driven by an external source of energy.
The term is commonly used to refer to machines which display this phenomenon. In the macroscopic world, perpetual motion is not generally considered to be possible. Perpetual motion machines (the Latin term perpetuum mobile is not uncommon) are a class of hypothetical machines which would produce useful energy in a way which would violate the established laws of physics. No genuine perpetual motion machine currently exists (unless those Dublin scientists really HAVE managed to create one), and according to certain fundamental laws in physics they cannot exist. Specifically, perpetual motion machines would violate either the first or second laws of thermodynamics. Perpetual motion machines are divided into two subcategories (some physicists, including the noted professor of thermodynamics Mark W. Zemansky, include a third), defined by which law of thermodynamics would have to be broken in order for the device to be a true perpetual motion machine.
Perpetual motion machines violate one or both of the following two laws of physics: the first law of thermodynamics and the second law of thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics is essentially a statement of conservation of energy. The second law has several statements, the most intuitive of which is that heat flows spontaneously from hotter to colder places; the most well known is that entropy always increases, or at the least stays the same; another statement is that no heat engine (an engine which produces work while moving heat between two places) can be more efficient than a Carnot heat engine. As a special case of this, any machine operating in a closed cycle cannot only transform thermal energy to work in a region of constant temperature. See the respective articles, and thermodynamics, for more information.
Machines which are claimed not to violate either of the two laws of thermodynamics but rather are claimed to generate energy from unconventional sources are sometimes referred to as perpetual motion machines, although they do not meet the standard criteria for the name. By way of example, it is quite possible to design a clock or other low-power machine to run on the differences in barometric pressure or temperature between night and day [1]. Such a machine has a source of energy, albeit one from which it is quite impractical to produce power in quantity.
wikipedia.org
