The question:
On 11/1/07, K—— D——– <----------@yahoo.com> wrote:
Tobias,
I just ran across this clip about a company called Steorn. They claim to have developed a form of free energy (greater output than input) which flies in the face of accepted laws of thermodynamics. Who knows? Just wanted to get your perspective.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=346997458258985632
There are some other video clips related to it that are interesting too.
K——-
My response:
“They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern
intelligence won’t accept anything on authority. But it will accept
anything without authority. That’s exactly what has happened here.” –
G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much
I’m not sure what their particular technology involves, but there were some things with weights and magnets that seemed related to the name. Maybe they have found some combination of things that works in a way that commonly held physics does not account for. But I doubt it. I do think they have found a way to make something from nothing: venture capital. Hopefully not yours.
The problem with these claims is that it just doesn’t work. They have prototypes, they have research. But rarely do they have anything that works. It always is one of two things: it almost works, and if they could just fix this little problem, it would work…or it’s a scam. This is because heat flows from your hot coffee to the cold room. Just something about the world makes everything that happens, happen in a direction that makes the available, usable, power dissipate. Every little thing. A ball bounces slower and slower. A wheel slows down. You never coast as far up the next hill as you started. The coffee in your cup doesn’t get hotter and hotter and cool the room. No, everything goes toward a lukewarm existence. Every mountain tends to fall down, and every valley gets filled in. Even if you don’t trust the Establishment. Sure, they are pretty adamant that anyone who claims they have perpetual motion is lying or mislead. But, they have tested a huge number of systems, and combinations of systems, and it always comes back that everything goes downhill. So, they can say pretty strongly that your overbalanced wheel won’t keep spinning forever—-even if you use Magnets (which—I speak as if insane—contain a mystical force which makes things act in ways that science doesn’t understand).
So, if everything is falling, and not bouncing back as high, or spinning to a stop like a wobbling top, how do we survive? How can life go on, with so much working against it? The answer is, the sun.
That ball of fire is pouring so much energy into the world, that we (and plants, and animals and coal plants) are able to stave off the still, lukewarm night by channeling its power into our leaking buckets and letting the fringe of the sun’s rays keep us from starvation and asphyxiation.
It turns out, the sun makes a lot of energy. As our planet orbits this glowing orb, we sweep up a tiny bit of this light and heat. Some of that reflects back out into the darkness of space. Some helps keep the earth from freezing over. And some powers political debates about the risks of current and future trends. Because a little of it we catch, and turn into power. But so much of it slips through our fingers, but we catch enough of it to keep the sails full, and the wheels grinding in the mill.
There is another explanation as to why you see people claiming to make free energy, and nobody actually doing it: it could be because it works.
There is a way to show that you aren’t just miscalculating something, or that your multimeter isn’t inaccurate, and that is to actually have the input to your machine be fed from the output. Often people skip this, and just “demonstrate” that the output is more than the input. But if it really is “over-unity” why not loop the power cord instead of having it plugged into the wall? There is a danger with this: if it actually works, you could get a runaway process going, and it could spin faster, and glow brighter, magnet stronger until POOF! it explodes in a frenzy of energy, and the machine and the inventor who is manning the dials would be lost forever to history.
This is a dramatic, but unworkable theory. Perpetual motion machines end in not a flash, but a whimper.
—-Tobias
