Free energy, holla (reploid war is over)
 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060818...dscienceenergy

I can't say I believe it one way or the other but I find it interesting. I've considered maybe they're unintentionally channeling energy that already exists from somewhere else. Could this mean our universe really did come from nothing at all?

I hope this discovery doesn't disapper, like orgone.

So many people and companies have made up inventions that claim to offer us infinite energy in the past...so far, I think that basic physics is winning.

Why do all of these magical devices seem to center around magnets, anyways?

CUZ MAGENTS ARE MADE OF MAGNETO, AND MAGIC,

MAGICAL MAGNETOS! Now with Free Magnet Marshmellows!, part of a complete breakfas.!

*ahem* I'd like to see at least a demonstration of this before I even begin to think that its little more then a hoax or an get rich quick scheme, even
if the people said they did 'rigerous' testing already. I almost think this story is secretly a Bullshit Detector Test.

You know, the only reasons I don't think it's weird for this thread to be here in General Discussion is because I'm fairly drunk.

There are so very many crackpots making various claims, yet every single one of those claims, either it be about free energy or the possibility of space travel using technology Tesla invented (I swear, this guy is some sort of god amongst crackpots) comes with a "Here's why I can't actually demonstrate this and become rich and famous because of THE MAN!" clause. Well, fuck you. If you had discovered a way to make "free energy", laws of thermodynamics be damned, then surely you'd be able to make some sort of doomsday device or something with it and threaten THE MAN with it to mark an end to its REIGN OF TERROR and be hailed as a hero the likes of which the world has never seen.

In conclusion, you're full of shit and I hope you die in a ditch somewhere.

http://www.aahom.org/img/store/drinkBird40x40.jpg

Infinite Source of Energy! Send me 200 grand for plans!

Seriously though, the idea of free energy is great, but I'm not about to jump on the bandwagon that challenges the most basic rules of physics. It'd be great to solve the world's energy woes (and probably stop a few wars) just like that, but I'm going to hold off on replacing my engine with magnets. Lot's of tiny magnets!

again with the magnets, always with the magnets

Even if this were real I invision the people behind it to be kidnapped and ritualistically teabagged by oil tycoons. There's no way real forms of alternate energy sources will begin to come to fruition until the natural rescource situation goes ultra-critical.

This discovery was brought to you by:

I actually have an idea for how to create perpetual motion using magnets. I'd leave it to someone else to determine how we can get energy from it. Unfortuantely, I lack the resources...

This article is interesting. I'm not going to say I don't believe it, but I find it hard to believe since the scientists don't attempt to explain why the device works, how it can defy known physics.

I just have a hard time believing some Irish guys should "accidentally" come across a device that taps zero-point energy. I presume that is what it must be doing since other than extracting it from the very fabric of space-time itself, you can't "make" energy.

Isn't what Dr. Octavius was trying to do in Spider-Man 2?

You guys are trying to call bullshit and it very well may be but keep in mind the people who discovered this are trying to get people to test it and examine it as opposed to making the bold claim that it truly works. They've also tested it for themselves over the past three years.

The guys who invented this will probably assassinated by agents of the oil industry.

Yeah, Eleo is right. These guys are begging the scientific community to investigate this. From the little bit of information that was provided on their website (I want to see those patents dammit!:mad:), it seems tha they were attempting to work on micro generators, and they discovered the output to be over 100% than the input.

And I think that the most likely explanation why magnets are a recurring theme in PMMs of the first kind is due to the fact that electromagnetism is a lot easier to manipulate and test than gravity, or the strong and weak forces.

There was a theory on fark that this is another viral marketing scheme that Microsoft came up with. I think it has something to do with the swoosh on the companies logo and the beehive on the registration page.

Probably. Actually, even if tests prove that this discovery does work, chances are the United States will find some way to say that it's too expensive to use and keep us trapped in the oil vice. We have creations such as wind and solar power, yet the U.S. doesn't really consider them to be as important to fund as oil. Yes, they are funded, but they continue to claim it's more expensive than oil.

I hope it does work and the creators find someone who is willing to test the idea. Did anyone see the episode of Mythbusters where they tested other free energy devices?

I did. I'd like to see them try a scaled-down version of this item, assuming it can be scaled down and assuming the people let them. At the very least, I'd get to see how it works.

Listen to you guys; so gullible. Do the names Fleischman and Pons mean anything to you? Perhaps you're not old enough to remember all the bullshit surrounding the amazing discovery of cold-fusion many years ago. It was tested plenty of times with mixed results. The point is, they had the best of intentions but were too naive and not thorough enough to realise that their experiments, which seemed perfect at the time, were inherently flawed.

Just don't get your hopes up.

Yeah. MAgnets are just another dead end as far as "free energy" goes. There is no such thing as free energy. Any high school physics teacher can show you that.

What would happen to magnets that are kept close together long enough like this is eventually their particles would lose their ordering and they would no longer be magnetic.

Kinda OT, but I always wondered: IF energy cannot be created or destroyed, where did all the energy we currently have come from? Big Bang is likely the layman's answer, but I'm really curious as to how all of the energy in the universe came to be if it cannot be generated.

Well there's a loophole for governments to make some money: Magnet Replacement Fee :D

I still think the whole thing is bullshit. To modify a 4chan meme for this:
"Proof or GTFO!"

Link to a testing rig pic.

http://www.steorn.net/images/sean4_large.jpg

I doubt this works. But I demand that it gets tested. Ignorance never advanced science/technology, so lets get this thing debunked.

Hot damn! They've even got a flywheel, the staple of all great perpetual motion machines!

Anyway, for those people saying we should actually pay attention to them, may I ask just why? Fine, science does not advance by immediately ignoring anything that challenges existing theories, but neither does it advance by listening to every crackpot that comes with his own theory he cooked up while under the influence of various substances. To quote; "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". There's NOTHING going on for that particular case, while, to take the quantitative alone, there's almost 150 years of experience since Maxwell formulated his equations on electromagnetism going against it, and just as much if you look only at the laws of thermodynamics. Ulysses makes a nice comparison when he mentions "Fleischman and Pons" but even then that's not the same; at least they weren't going as far as to claim free energy, "only" a way to achieve fusion never seen before.

Seriously, they have absolutely nothing. I've always been amazed how media and official looking press releases can suddently make people consider what they'd otherwise be clever enough not to bother with. If I had $100,000 buck, I too could put an ad in a major publication about something like that, and how my company, consisting of a desk and a phone in my mother's basement, discovered something so absolutely wonderful. Granted, this company existed before their "discovery", but from looking at their website there doesn't seem to be much about whatever other product or expertise they might offer.

If they really did have a free energy machine, then it would already have been published in serious peer-reviewed journals. If Einstein actually managed to get his theory of relativity published, which I find to be just as hard, if not harder to believe than this thing, then surely they'd be able. The difference here is that Einstein had actual quantitative, logical arguments. He didn't go "I've solved the problems we have with Maxwell's laws, but I'm not going to tell you how exactly. I will, however, have my theory examined by some people I deem to be worthy and will publish a full-page ad saying "TIME TRAVEL POSSIBLE" in the New York Time."

@ YeOldeButchere

Your example of Einstein is not quite equal. First off, the theory of relativity itself doesn't make money. It is a scientific discovery. Yes it is used to make more precise calculations and also explains other things that lead to making money. But this is energy we are talking about, argueably the most precious commodity. These guys don't care about breaking the laws of physics, they just want to make money off the patents. Playing those cards close to the chest makes good business sense.

Which brings me to my second point, this is a company not a couple dudes with too much time on your hands. From what I've gathered, they are primarily a research company (which means they won't have many concrete products to sell). I would fully expect that they keep this underwraps just like 3M, IBM, or Intel would.

To let you know, I don't think they succeeded. But hell, there is little reason not to see it get tested, especially as this does not appear to be coming from naive individuals. Yes, cold-fusion scientists were reputable at one time as well, but claims still need to be disproven.

Well, yes, but I'd guess that's just to make their hoax seem a bit more plausible. I mean, would anyone even give this company the benefit of the doubt if they said that they had invented some sort of miracle source of infinite energy, but that no one could see or test it? I'm sorry, but this is just too far-fetched for me to believe at all...it's probably a hoax, maybe a well-meaning group of people who misplaced a decimal point somewhere during their testing, but they're trying to throw a couple hundred years of physics out of the window with this development.

It is interesting to think of just how our society would change with an infinite source of clean and safe energy, though...

I remember seeing this a few years ago in another GFF thread, by another impressionable, under-educated teen. "Genesis World Energy" told us all how they would revolutionise global energy systems, causing a massive change in the way we lived, using a strange type of hydrogen extraction system about the size of a common washing machine. Somehow this device required no power to do this job, or to be more precise, used energy it created itself to perform the extraction. This gas could then be used to fuel anything. In the case of Genesis World Energy, they were clearly riding on the hype behind the very real advent of fuel-cells, no doubt to make their own "invention" sound legitimate.

As it turned out, it was bullshit. I bookmarked their slick website all those years ago, and just now for the first time in forever I checked it. Their website is gone, and the website of an individual monitoring their activities came up with this:
http://members.cox.net/john.lichtenstein/

There's another thread somewhere on GFF where we have been discussing the nature of matter. Matter and energy are made of the same "stuff". All matter and energy that ever existed or ever will exist was created at the creation of the Universe itself. Think of it in the same way as water on the Earth. There may occasionally seem like shortages of water around the world, but in basic terms the total amount of water on the Earth remains constant (except for marginal atmospheric losses), it is just how it is distributed that has such a great effect on society and nature. We cannot run out of water, ever.

I'm sure there are several organisations champing at the bit to debunk this Stargate SG-1-style prop, it'll just take a while before they can get their hands on it I suppose. Conducting impartial and accurate scientific analyses takes a lot of planning and rounding up the right people.

EDIT:
Lol, Einstein's work was ALL about energy, was it not? That's pretty hilarious. The beauty of his work is that it is testable, provable, and very real. This is why String Theorists struggle, they can't test jack shit even if they wanted to, as opposed to the Loop Quantum Gravity guys who base their work in an Einsteinian framework and so may, someday, have something to work with.

The reason I've compared those guys with Einstein is that they're saying they have a working device but just can't get the attention of the scientific community. When Einstein first published his theory of Special Relativity, it predicted things so weird (time slowing down, length contractions, mass depending on energy...) that it could have easily been dismissed as the work of some random crackpot. Yet it got published anyway, because Einstein had actual quantitative, experimentally verified evidence. These guys don't.

They're saying they want the attention of the scientific community! They're essentially asking anyone with a Ph.D to look at their stuff, but no one even wants to. That kind of conflicts with the whole "keep things secret and make cash with it" idea, no?

Yes, a "research company" with absolutely no info whatsoever about anything else than their miraculous energy source on their website. Oh, and that was an accident, so one should assume that they have something else they're doing, or at least were doing before. Yet there's nothing on that.

This company was a dot.com business, which then decided to become a R&D company. Don't compare it to 3M, IBM or Intel, please. Being incorporated doesn't mean anything. Take the fine company known as Infinium Labs (remember the Phantom?). Anyway, it happens to be pretty close to a publicly traded company, and yet it has a whole 5 employees last time I checked! How much more reputable is Steorn? Can you name a single thing they've ever done before. I've made a few quick checks, and haven't found anything.

Cold fusion is one thing. At least it doesn't break fundamental laws of science which have stood for a century and a half, more if you consider that perpetual motion machines have been imagined all the way back in the 13th century and likely before.

Sheesh.

If I said Steorn is shit and no one on planet earth should give them the time of day, would that make you satisfied?

I agree, perputual motion has been worked to death... Science is abused all the time with illegitimate claims... That doesn't mean credible people shouldn't go disprove it. Saying every situation is the same as the last one I'm pretty sure is covered in Aesop's Fables with "cry wolf". The time that you don't check something out is the time that it happens.

I hope that legit scientists and physics experts go debunk this. And I hope you don't go the route of choosing to ignore and piss on things because of past experience regardless of the present.

It's not that I don't believe scientists shouldn't examine things which do not agree with our current theories, hell if we had done that physics would still be the same it was at the end of the 19th century when "eveything has been figured out, except for some minor details", it's just that they haven't provided anything whatsoever yet. That people even think about giving them any consideration until they provide some evidence is idiotic. It angers me to see that people are willing to consider things for which they'd otherwise ask for proof because of a "press release", a website with essentially nothing on it but a field to enter your email address and an ad anyone could get by forking out cash they got from some gullible investors, along with... with what? They haven't provided anything else! There's that photograph someone posted earlier of the device in question, but all it looks like is some large aluminum frame with various electric/mechanic components anyone could get from their local hardware/electronic/car parts store.

This is what bothers me. Of course if I'm wrong, then please correct me. I hate being wrong, and I'm usually more than willing to admit my mistakes. But first, please point out to me why I should believe anything they say. To me it looks exactly the same as any of those crackpot websites you can find on crank.net, except that those guys are actually more vocal about their stuff. And more likely to already have taken money from gullible investors for their ad, and thus more likely to do so again from other people.

Why the hell would anyone place an ad (which is not cheap BTW) bringing their product into question and under scrutiny if there is no legitimate product? That's like Phantom placing an ad in Time saying that they want 12 magazine reviewers to come check out the console at their offices. It maybe bullshit, but you are asking to be called on it in the public arena thereby ruining any future your company may have, especially with investors.

The way to get money off fake stuff is to keep it behind closed doors and have small meetings with gullible investors all the while claiming in small press releases an incredible product (reference again the afforementioned Phantom console). What these guys are doing is the exact opposite. This to me does lend credibility.

We know this much though, either A) they made a mistake in their tests, B) they made a few mistakes in their tests, C) they made alot of mistakes in their tests, D) they are the dumbest-asses ever, E) they actually have some kind of energy producing product. And those answers all lead to the same conclusion of get this crap checked out.

It's called "calling one's bluff". Advertising costs a lot of money. Even if the product was debunked, the attention the company would get - as a bunch of radicals intent on pioneering weird and interesting technology, would be very valuable to them. If they challenge people to come to them, it makes people like us think about the company and talk about them a lot, their motivations, their other products, everything. We analyse who they are and in so doing acquire a fuller understanding of what they do and what service/products they provide.

For them, that alone could be considered a victory. Now, this device of theirs looks like it utilises gyroscopes in some way. Gyroscopes are known to have superficially baffling properties. It could just be an elaborate trick, since no company with half-decent engineers would believe that a machine could "create" energy... unless those very engineers had worked hard on manufacturing a hoax, in which case it would stand up to scrutiny for a while.

I do suppose that's a viable scenario. It still seems a bit ass-backwards to me. Publicity stunt of some kind, this is for sure. As with other fake schemes, they are trying to get public opinion on their side first (claims to solve world problems instead of just info about the device). There is definitely suspicion to be had.

Only time will tell.

Well here's a question. Let's say that humanity (or a more evolved species derived from us) somehow continues to exist for thousands or even tens of thousands of years. In that time span - assuming we remain as intelligent as we are now on average or continue to become more intelligent - do you think that not a single scientific law will be proved false or modified in a significant way? Do you really have that much faith in what we currently think we know?

Personally, I have an open mind and am willing to challenge my understanding of anything. I look at everything I know more so as a logical assumption than as a universal truth. One plus one is two and for me to second-guess this every time I did basic arithmetic would be wasted time, sure. Although I am 99.999999999% sure that 1 + 1 = 2, a part of me still leaves open the possibility that this is false or at least a half-truth of some kind, because I acknowledge the limitations of my brain and I acknowledge my own subjectivity.

Of course laws will change! That's not something I doubt. Classical mechanics was always thought to be perfect until Einstein showed that what Newton found out is but an approximation of what really happens, but which is incredibly close to what really happens unless we're talking about incredible velocities. That's but one such event, and it will happen again, make no mistake, unless we live in an incredibly boring universe.

What I tend to dislike is laws simply being thrown out the window suddently even if they've stood perfectly well so far, and without any explanation. What these guys are saying is that using magnets, something which has been well understood for a long time, and for which we have laws that especially prohibit any possibility of getting free energy out of a magnetic field, namely one of Maxwell's law which states that the divergence of a magnetic field is always zero, they can suddently invalidate the laws of thermodynamics. It doesn't only have repercussion on energy generation, mind you, if you invalidate thermodynamics, a lot of other sciences will be affected. For example, information theory, since it's inception, has always been related to thermodynamics, and chances are you'd come upon strange results in information theory by allowing something seemingly unrelated to happen in thermodynamics.

If I take the example of cold fusion, this is not something I would have instantly rejected. Cold fusion never completely threw out of the window any basic laws such as thermodynamics; it attempted to explain a phenomenon that was observed, or thought to be observed, so that it would most fit with our current theories. The problem is that according to the scientific method, such hypothesis must be tested, then if found to be wrong, discarded or modified, and if found to be correct, kept and published so that others can improve upon it or spot flaws. Unfortunately, in the case of cold fusion, there might not even have been an unknown phenomenon to begin with, and even worse, the hypothesis made to explain it apparently fit with the results, so it was published. Mass media jumped on the opportunity, and the rest is history. But I'm not entirely sure why people are so keen to point at cold fusion as some sort of disaster. It seems to me as if the scientific method wasn't to blame, and that the scientific community did a fine job spotting the flaws in the theory, which is essentially the whole point. These things happen, but the main difference is that most people usually never learn about it, the would-be theory remains just one more hypothesis that didn't quite make it and is relagated to being one of the many in the history of science.

I have nothing against modifying laws when needed, indeed that's the whole point of science, but I demand strong evidence as to why it should be done. I know better than to file all those that came before me as dimwitted cretins by invalidating their work completely, because I seriously doubt those people where dimwitted cretins. Worse would be proposing my own entirely different theory as to how the universe works, placing myself above a large number of history's greatest. I suppose you could call it humility.

Man you guys almost make it sound to me like you don't want them to have discovered this; like the notion of an aspect of science getting shat on by sheer accident is disturbing or makes you uncomfortable. Granted they do have to prove it at some point for it to be totally valid, but it's not like they're already saying that what they think they've discovered is fact although I'm sure they'd like it to be. I personally think they're just as interested in finding out how they're wrong as they are finding out if they're right.

All this nonsense about it being a hoax or a marketing ploy is just ridic. Like the mainstream population gives a shit or is paying attention to this.

Double Post:
I would lol if it turned out that creating energy caused an equal amount of energy to be destroyed. Then the law would be entirely broken and yet it would be sensible.

I brought up the situation of cold-fusion not because it was a great disaster but because it showed that scientists with the best of intentions and the purest of hearts can still make mistakes. There is a saying, that goes along the lines of "Don't count your chickens until they hatch." I think it would be great for the world if these guys were successful. We need to find a clean source of energy more than anything these days, to help ensure our survival as a race. The scientific community wants this so badly that it may be seeing something that isn't really there, in the same way that if there's someone in your life you really miss, you may start to see them all over the place.

Einstein made mistakes too, you know. Noone holds it against him. All of science is based on probabilities. Yeah, there's a tiny chance that if you, let's say, drop an apple, it'll shoot out into space at 7 miles per second. It's just not likely. It's also unlikely for there to be crock of gold at the end of the rainbow.

People who are all into "new" physics are desperately trying to find workable new laws and modifications to incorporate their theories into the same framework as established ones. The trouble is, existing laws are very robust. Einstein knew what he was talking about. He even predicted Dark Energy a long time before it became a fashionable field of research like it is today.

If this device DOES somehow work, it will be due to a subtle as yet unknown effect that does not break any existing laws apart, but perhaps lies beneath them. Energy can't be created or destroyed; if these people are correct, they must be pulling energy from somewhere else. The crux of this problem would be where that "somewhere" is.