And… Yet Another Prepetual Motion/Free Energy Claim
April 28th, 2008
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People make free energy claims all the time and occasionally they get some press attention. Yet again, one has. This was covered in Engadget. It seems that the inventor is planning on demonstrating it to the public on June 20. Happily, the mainstream press and gadget blogs seem to be giving this claim about as much credibility as it deserves. In other words, it’s getting a collective eyeroll.
The device, created by Australian Archer Quinn, appears to be another take on an old classic: a spinning wheel is spun by a motor which is pulsed on and off. The wheel spins freely when the motor is turned off but gets the energy from the motor when it is on. The wheel is connected to a generator which is supposed to charge batteries and thus power the motor.
The idea being that since the motor is only on intermittently it will draw less energy, which it will. Of course, the generator also produces less energy because the load on the wheel is constant and the power to the wheel is effectively less, due to the motor being turned off and on. Therefore there is no energy gain and with the generator, motor, batteries and bearings all being less than 100% effecient the system will lose energy pretty quickly. The only way to keep it going longer: Add lots and lots more batteries and make sure they’re fully charged to begin with. Thus, the machine not only does not produce energy, but it consumes it by just spinning the useless wheel.
The story comes originally from the blog “Free Energy Truth,” which seems to have the same definition of “truth” as most of the “9/11 Truth” movement. Here is the original post on this thing with the interview with the inventor.
A little excerpt:
FE Truth: Do you claim to break any laws of physics with this device?
Archer: Laws of physics? No, Newton’s “laws” yes.
FE Truth: One of the best things you’ve done is not asked for any money or investment in this, so right away you’ve separated yourself from a lot of suspicion over fraud. What do you say to the remaining sceptics who will no doubt be saying you don’t have free energy?
Archer: Solar is free energy, we do not doubt the sun?, wind is free energy, we do not doubt the wind, gravity is, of all three the only constant free energy, does the sceptic doubt gravity?
Well I don’t really feel like pointing out all the things wrong here, but I am compelled to mention that gravity is not a type of energy. Gravity is a force. (It’s also a distortion of spacetime, but it is manifested as a force.) A force is not energy in and of itself. If you want energy from gravity you have to elevate something against gravity. Then you can let it drop and get your energy back, but no more than was used to lift the item.
My favorite post on “Free Energy Truth” was the one “Steorn: Debunker Desperation Creeps In“. Mind you, this was posted in March 2008, almost a year after Steorn set out to demonstrate their “Free Energy” machine and failed to. Since then, there has not been much talk from Steorn and they’ve been dismissed by just about everyone, except for this site, which seems to think that Steorn is actually the one who has the “truth” and everyone else is desperately trying to disprove their free energy machine. Of course, it seems a little odd to demand proof that Steorn’s machine doesn’t work, considering the assclowns they’ve made of themselves. But the site seems to think there is some kind of conspiracy to deny the truth of the free energy machines. Needless to say it’s the “big oil companies” who apparently control the laws of physics.
The post happens to attack my friend James Randi for having dismissed Steorn and continuing to do so when their technology failed. Apparently Mr. Randi had stated that Steorn folded in 2007 and was no longer in business. The post stated:
You’ll remember recently that Bob Park and James Randi recently laid into Steorn and wrongly proclaimed that the company had folded in 2007. In our last post we exposed how a basic error in these two geriatric debunkers fact checking showed how little they actually know of Steorn and free energy. We only just stopped laughing at this when….
In what can only be seen as an act of debunker desperation, Randi’s latest pile of kaka (less than a week later) again contains the same nonsense. It’s anyone’s guess why the sublime is now turning into the ridiculous, but they may now have realised that they’ve called it very wrong this time and they’re now trying to do overkill. Debunker panic, realisation, fear? Fear that Steorn really do have what they say.
As they and the entire world will no doubt in time see, Steorn are VERY, VERY serious indeed about bringing this technology to the world.
Well, if they are serious about indeed bringing the technology to the public it sure does not seem that way! Randi actually issued a clarification on the statement of Steorn having folded. Whether or not Steorn is in business or not is a bit of a technicality here. The firm is apparently still in existence and their website is still up, but they have not actually had any activity in the year 2008 and they have not reported any earnings at all other than “under one thousand Euro.” The company has no revenue for last year, apparently no liquidity and no assets to be reported. They don’t appear to have any clients or any activities of note either. But they’re still technically registered and everything. So… whether or not you take that to be “folded” or not, it sure does not look like a booming business!
It doesn’t look to me like the skeptics and nay-sayers are running scared.
This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Just LAME, Not Even Wrong, Obfuscation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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April 28th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
The ‘ole flywheel with a pulsed motor makes the permanent magnet motor seem a lot smarter by comparison. I find the “Free Energy Truth” website amusing. I guess “Free Energy” exists if you count bypassing your electric meter or driving away with unpaid gasoline, but definitely not from this “invention”
It’s possible that the guy just buys it because he put a big battery on it and found his machine kept working for a while and decided that was that. It might look like free energy if you don’t watch it long enough to notice the battery being depleted and also if you happen to be an idiot.
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April 28th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Still hanging on to the idea that Steorn is serious? Yeah, I’d say that blog is laughable. The skeptics are not the desperate ones. All they had to do is show the damn thing work. They failed and almost a year later they have not given a real explanation or showed it.
Considering they were claiming to disprove some basic laws of science that have been tested and retested for centuries and very very well established, I’d think the burden of proof would be on them. It’s amazing how they can talk about ‘free energy for years on end without ever actually producing the damn thing.
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April 28th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
You all know the Intelligent Design types were all pulling for Steorn under the theory that if science could be humiliated over the Second Law, then they could use this to their advantage. There was quite a bit of traffic about this on their forums at the hight of the story I’m told. Second hand because I can’t see myself looking at those sites unless I was too drunk to read them.
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April 28th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
You know I never thought that anybody would believe in perpetual motion machines of the first kind where its pretty obvious that friction rules. It’s usually the exotic second and third perpetual motion machines that catch people up. I just loved the quality of the bearings, well greased that this guy was using.
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April 28th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Why do the bearings matter? I mean if you loose some energy to friction that’s no problem, because remember this is “free energy” so the supply is limitless!
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April 29th, 2008 at 1:39 am
That blog is absolutely amazing. I can’t believe anyone is still claiming Steorn has a device that works. I love how it states with such authority “WE NEED FREE ENERGY NOW” Yeah, right! Go call your congressman and tell them to repeal the laws of thermodynamics!
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April 29th, 2008 at 4:23 am
AAAAARRGGGGHHHHHHHHHH.
Loose: not attached, not firmly restrained.
lose: Get rid of, misplace, fail.
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April 29th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
fixed
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April 29th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Soylent said:
Oh come on. Is a repeated tendency to make a spelling mistake really as bad as thinking a spinning wheel can give you free energy? I think not!
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April 30th, 2008 at 6:59 am
Kim said:
When people stop correcting you they have stopped caring. I care about most of you guys, I don’t care about fruitloops who want to become ghosts or think they’ve invented PMMs.
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April 30th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Thermodynamics is a bitch, ain’t it? Not really, but if you’re trying to invent an “free energy” machine…
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May 1st, 2008 at 1:01 am
We’ve got devices that should be, for all practical purposes, free energy machines. Only problems are, (1) they (supposedly) can’t
be scaled down, thus need large utility companies to build them; and (2) for some reason they inspire fears of three-eyed frogs
and women with two belly buttons in the general public. I’d settle for one of these cheap energy machines for personal use.
For that matter, I’d even be happy with the 58% efficiency that my 9:1 compression ratio engine is *supposed* to have according
to the formula in my thermodynamics textbook. (I’ve measured it at around 20%.)
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May 1st, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Make that 30%. Two gallons per hour to provide 20 kW. Still, just getting what the Laws of Thermodynamics should allow me
would almost double my highway mileage.
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May 1st, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Burya Rubenstein said:
One of the things about thermodynamics is that it basically amounts to the fact that you have loss everywhere there is energy transfered or converted The engine has loss, the transmission does, there’s loss from tire deformation and from the imperfect alternator and voltage regulator and from the diferential etc etc. It compounds as well.
It also comes down to the fact that it gets increasingly difficult to improve effeciency as you increase it. It’s easy to improve from 10 to 12% but 40 to 42% is more difficult and once you get past 50% it’s really hard to squeeze any more out.
There are theoretical limits but in general in practice with all the concerns we don’t even get close to the theoretical limits. Heat is generally a crappy form of energy, like electricity or mechanical energy, because unlike other energy forms there’s no way to turn it into something else without generally loosing most of it.
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May 3rd, 2008 at 4:01 pm
What have Newton’s Laws got to do with this? It’s the laws of thermodynamics he’s claiming to break. The guy doesn’t even know his laws.
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February 14th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Over Unity is a very simple concept to understand.
You just have to be in the right frame of mind.
Use the following instructions to achieve the right frame of mind.
1. Buy yourself a big anvil.
2. Set the anvil at the end of a long hallway.
3. Run as fast as you can and ram your head into the anvil.
4. Repeat the above steps until Over Unity makes sense.
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