Ben Preiss
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 Perpetual Motion Machine or Pie in the Sky? A small Irish company, Steorn, is competing for world class chutzpah by having taken out a full page ad in The Economist challenging scientists to test their claims to have invented a perpetual motion machine. Which is to scientists, pretty much crazy talk. Like prove that I don’t have a goose that lays golden eggs. Basically a perpetual motion machine means free energy, or energy from nothing. This is a no go from a physics point of view, a God machine. They have sunk a lot of money into the Orbo, thats what they call their machine. Have they all kissed the Blarney Stone?  Nearly a year has elapsed since the firm put an ad in The Economist announcing that it had accomplished the impossible: developed a machine that would never stop running, producing unlimited clean power forever. In other words, it declared it had solved the world's energy crisis in one stroke. Steorn had entered a province traditionally populated by hoodwinking fraudsters and talentless tinkers alike: the perpetual-motion machine.If it is a hoax, it's an expensive one. Steorn has invested more than $5.7 million in Orbo, as the device is known, along with $160,000 on The Economist ad alone, according to British newspaper The Guardian.Now, after 10 quiet months during which Steorn claims that an anonymous panel of 22 scientists have been testing their technology – a process set to conclude at the end of this year – it finally launched a public demonstration of the device at East London's Kinetica Museum on Wednesday and streamed it over the Internet – briefly, at least.On Friday morning, Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy posted another note saying they had made the "unfortunate decision" to defer the demonstration for an unspecified period of time, adding they would explain what had happened later."I have no doubts about the results," says Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy in a promotional video on his company's website. "None."
While most may believe he's wrong, we have plenty of reasons to hope he's right.
(thestar)References: steorn, thestar Comment: on Orbo |
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