Unlimited energy for free: Steorn in a teacup?
In this age of Peak Oil and ever higher prices for energy it's inevitable that new technologies will be found to help make up some of the short fall from diminishing oil reserves. A few years ago, in 1989, there was supposed cold fusion by the now discredited Fleischman and Ponds. Nobody has been able to recreate the cold fusion they claimed to have discovered. And now there's Steorn, an Irish company that actually has an impressive track record in counterfeit detection. They claim they have found a way to use magnets to generate more power than is put into their device. They say that one of their devices the size of a laptop battery will give off five times the power and never need recharging. What they are effectively talking about is a perpetual motion machine. But the law of entropy forbids such a device. That's why nobody would listen to Steorn until they placed a full page advertisement in the Economist magazine inviting scientists to try this discovery for themselves. OK, so they are putting their money where their mouth is and that makes this a story to watch. It seems very unlikely it's more than a hoax or an incorrectly conducted lab experiment but, what if..?