Steorn is Back
January 25th, 2010
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Remember Steorn? yeah, Steorn and their Over-unity Device called “Orbo.” Well in case you don’t, here’s some of the previous Depleted Cranium coverage.
Steorn is a company in Ireland which, some time ago, claimed they had a perpetual motion/free energy/over-unity device. They were prepared to do a demonstration and then… well, it didn’t work. Not surprising, really, it did not work.
I have to admit, however, that the demonstration did surprise me. I was left waiting for the punchline. I had assumed that the whole thing must have been some kind of viral marketing or publicity stunt. I was really expecting them to take out them machine and then announce that it runs on some energy drink or something like that. However, it seems that the company really did believe their device would work and apparently had never tested it before the demonstration.
They even have a video about it:
Honestly, not being able to see what is going on with their setup too well within the video, I’m not going to comment other than to say I’m confident that this is not doing anything magical or achieving any kind of over-unity. It’ll stop as soon as the batteries or whatever energy storage mechanism is powering it runs out.
They’re also selling some stuff on their website as the “Steorn Lab,” which actually includes what appears to be a reasonably nice USB gaussmeter.
They are renting a nice exhibition hall in Dublin and have a revamped website and press releases. It appears that they have some funding. So what is this? A stunt of some kind? A viral marketing campaign? Or is it really a device that they honestly think will produce over-unity? One thing is for sure, it’s not going to actually be what they claim it to be. After the embarrassing fizzle last time, it’s hard to say.
Your guess is as good as mine.
This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 11:39 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Just LAME, Not Even Wrong, Obfuscation, media. 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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January 26th, 2010 at 1:44 am
I don’t really get what he’s saying. Basically that if they change the motor wiring it doesn’t produce the same induction effect? It still needs power to run and he states that the power input is lost to heat etc, of course, there’s not really any power going to work because it’s not doing any significant work. It still needs to be hooked up to a power source. What is this supposed to prove?
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January 26th, 2010 at 3:01 am
Russ said:
That there is one born every minute.
Seriously though, didn’t that blue ribbon panel they set up of ‘real scientists’ come to the conclusion that this was all a crock? I mean how many times can you keep going to the same dry well?
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January 26th, 2010 at 5:03 am
@2:33… “I’m now going to ask Max to invert the current.
That sounds suspiciously like reversing the polarity.
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January 26th, 2010 at 6:15 am
Saturday there will be a live streaming video demonstration on Steorn.com which is designed as the ‘ultimate proof’ that Orbo is an OU machine. However good the demo there will be many who are not convinced. After all, this overturns the accepted and tested wisdom of hundreds of years of scientific enquiry.
Nothing can be proved via video-link for sure. But it’s only a few days away and Steorn have made it plain that the public are welcome to watch in person, ask questions and examine the machines.
I will be there expecting to see history made. It’s about time the planet and the people got a lucky break.
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January 26th, 2010 at 8:20 am
SKDBMember,
I’m sorry pal but if you’re waiting for the law of conservation to be overturned or some other ‘lucky break’, then you’re going to have to keep on waiting a long long time – like forever.
I remember in a dynamics class I had we were going over the coefficient of restitution. This coefficient must be less then 1, otherwise once an object makes contact with any force it would then bounce off with a larger amount of energy. I facetiously asked my professor if Flubber had a coefficient of restitution equal to 2.
Now, I begin to think to myself, what if Flubber existed? One could place said Flubber between two plates. One in which the coefficient of restitution is less than 1, and another in which the coefficient of resititution is greater than 1 and therefore create a perpetual motion machine. Great, grand, wonderful.
However, what if flubber was contained between two plates with each having coefficients higher than 1? Well the flubber would get faster and faster, approaching the speed of light. I surmised that it’s mass would arch towards infinity but it would still continue to gain speed and eventually swallow the universe as a super massive black hole. It was then that I decided the physical laws we live by are there for a reason.
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January 26th, 2010 at 9:29 am
As I see it, there are three possibilities:
A) The demonstration will fail, leaving the Steorn guys surprised and disappointed, saying they need to do more research.
B) The demonstration will fail, leaving the Steorn guys pretending to be surprised and disappointed, and asking for investment money from people with no understanding of the laws of physics.
C) The demonstration will succeed, re-defining the laws of physics as we now know them.
I can’t say which one is most likely, but I can say which one is *least* likely. For now, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they are overconfident and stupid, rather than dishonest. Either way, they aren’t getting any of my money.
Never bet against the laws of physics, people.
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January 26th, 2010 at 11:02 am
I have to say thos guys have some guts. Showing a perpetual motion engine that has obvious electric cables wired to it, that’s something I never saw before (and my first impression at the beginning of the video was “with a plastic casing that big, I could hide enough batteries to run on a small charge for days”). Anyway, I didn’t see anything here that I didn’t toyed with on a “normal” electric engine when I was a student.
And for MrNiceguy, I would vote on D) The demonstration will seem to work, albeit no one in the audience will really understand how, not redefining the laws of scam.
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January 26th, 2010 at 11:25 am
I was going to say, isn’t there the possibility that it “will work” but only because the thing they’re showing is not what it seems and has either batteries or a plug somewhere that is not visible in their webcast.
I thought this company and these guys had made complete fools of themselves on the last go-round but they seem to want some more of it.
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January 27th, 2010 at 12:51 am
Franck said:
Don’t confuse bravery with stupidity.
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January 27th, 2010 at 6:33 pm
“Never bet against the laws of physics, people.”
History is replete with revisionism of “Laws”.
Always question. This is how Science moves forward.
If you do not perform Steorn’s experiments, you are not in the game.
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January 27th, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Hi folks,
Don’t be too hasty to judge the technology. If you don’t know how the technology works, how can you say it doesn’t work? Because a few laws that we’ve made based on Newtonian physics? How old is that? Aren’t there galaxies out there that break these laws by just being there and doing what they are doing? This finitely sized universe defies these laws… oh wait, that’s assuming we KNOW that it is finite in size, or is it infinite?
Our “laws” that WE created only apply if the game you are playing is in the same field. This technology is outside of the field of classical physics, therefore it simply doesn’t apply rather than saying it “breaks” these laws.
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January 27th, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Nick said:
Only in the imagination of people like you. The fact is science rarely elevates a theory to the status of law, and only when it can be shown that there cannot be counter examples. Like Carletes alluded to in comment 10, any universe permitting over unity, would mean that some natural positive feedback process would have destroyed said universe long ago.
Nick said:
Rubbish. I don’t have to shoot myself in the head to know that it would most probably kill me.
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January 27th, 2010 at 8:55 pm
Resolad, we didn’t create these laws, we discovered them. They were there long before we discovered them, and will remain long after we are gone.
Gravity didn’t just spring into existence once we wrote down the theories and laws that govern it. It was always there. The same goes for thermodynamics. Doesn’t matter what we think, we are bound by them, they are not bound by us.
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January 27th, 2010 at 8:56 pm
It is ridiculous to assert that we understand all the laws that make the universe tick. Over 90% of everything in it is invisible ‘Dark matter’ and there is also ‘Dark energy.’
“There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than in your philosophy or mine.”
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January 27th, 2010 at 10:35 pm
SKDBMember said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_ad_ignorantium
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January 27th, 2010 at 10:41 pm
SKDBMember said:
Oh please. You know every time some overunity device comes up on the radar, and starts getting criticized in the science and skeptic blogs, people like you crawl out from under your rocks telling us we are narrow minded, and overly conservative. But guess what? Every single damn time, we turn out to right, and you morons turn out to be wrong.
So take your tired Shakespeare and stuff it up your behind – it’s going to be the same story this time too.
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January 27th, 2010 at 11:48 pm
It always seems that the people most hellbent on “revolutionizing” physics (or any other field) are the ones who understand it least. This experiment looks like a tremendous waste of time!
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January 28th, 2010 at 1:51 am
Well, there is something to be said for checking for repeatability.
George Lucas can make video of fantastic and seemingly impossible things. So of course Youtube videos don’t mean anything.
But it is necessary for the “inventor” who claims a device to be over unity to describe in detail exactly how to build it, so that others can follow the instructions to see if they get the same results. Ie, is the experimental result repeatable? This is the way to avoid the hiding of batteries, blocks of sodium, covert wall plugs, and other energy sources to trick the observers. The inventor, or crackpot, as the case may be, can’t hide a power source in a device that someone else builds out of his reach.
Yes it’s probably a waste of time. But it doesn’t seem it would hurt to once in a while check for repeatability. That is, IF a complete description of the experiment is provided.
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January 28th, 2010 at 5:09 am
Anyone who thinks that this isn’t worth watching (even if they’re already convinced that it ‘wont work’) should be ashamed of themselves, for thinking so little about the future of the species.
we as a species are currently over using out available resources, if we don’t slow down this useage, or investigate alternatives, then future human generations will be in severe trouble, and will probably become extinct. Now is the time to investigate ways to reduce our hunger for resource.
You won’t lose anything by watching the live demonstration. If you’re knowledgable enough, you’ll understand what they’re showing, and I suspect that you’ll find it interesting enough to want to learn more. If you look at it and think “WTF?! – these guys are crazy, I have no idea what they’re trying to show – CoE holds, and it’s a scam” – then you’ve clearly missed the point.
The laws of physics that we write, they don’t run the universe, the universe runs/works/is in it’s own way, regardless of us. Our laws of physics, describe, in as best a way as we can define, the observations made from numerous experiments. Some of them are easy to describe, others are not. However it is impossible to do inifinitely many experiments to cover infinitely many variables – think of chaos theory, or the three body problem. We have yet to find reliable models to predict accurately what will happen over a long enough period of time. Think about the weather – we can predict todays weather, and probably the next few hours, and maybe a couple of days worth, very easily based on what is happening now, here, and what is happening nearby, and we can generalise about what the weather might be like in a few months time, or for certain periods of the year, but accurate prediction over a long period of time is currently impossible. This is an example of where thousands of man hours, and computer hours is still unable to help us.
there are, surpisingly, things about the universe that we do not yet know.
I don’t think Steorn are creating energy from nothing – it’s far more likely that they are somehow tapping an as yet unknown energy source (presumably from magnets – cf discovery of wind power, solar power, etc)
whatever they’re doing, they would appear to still think that it’s possible, and reproducible. watch the live demo, you never know, you might surprise yourself.
Thanks – Crastney (member of SKDB)
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January 28th, 2010 at 5:43 am
there are, surpisingly, things about the universe that we do not yet know.
So your chosen path to learning them is to ignore the things we do know. Let us know how that turns out.
To the enthusiastic members of SKSB: Your faith is touching, but before continuing with your incontinent bluster, how about waiting for the demo to actually take place?
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January 28th, 2010 at 9:26 am
Finrod said:
They have to get their licks in now Finrod, in their own subconscious they know this isn’t going to work, so they have to vent while they still have cause.
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January 28th, 2010 at 9:30 am
Nothing incontinent about me old chap. The blustering in here is entirely from the skeptics. I just seek to make a polite and sensible point. Time will tell who has the final laugh so we should all keep our poweder dry IMHO.
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January 28th, 2010 at 10:09 am
SKDBMember said:
Like I said up thread, your type always shows up to lecture the skeptics on how you think science works and scold us for not being open minded, every time something like overunity gets some play in the press.
Every single time we have been proven right, and your side wrong, yet I never seem to see any of you showing up afterwords, when whatever it is, has been exposed as a fraud, to apologize.
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January 28th, 2010 at 11:02 am
Apologise? For having a different viewpoint to you? Extracting apologies is not the purpose of debate. Victory alone should be enough for anyone.
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January 28th, 2010 at 11:09 am
SKDBMember said:
Apologize for insulting our intelligence, our education, and our knowledge. This is not a matter of viewpoint, or opinion, overunity is physically impossible, it is that simple.
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January 28th, 2010 at 11:14 am
If you consider discussion of this topic intrinsically insulting to your intelligence I shall **** off and leave to enjoy the fruits of being right on your ownsome. Enjoy, and try not to drag your knuckles too much.
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January 28th, 2010 at 11:42 am
Crastney said:
If I wasn’t already aware of this, I wouldn’t be doing research in theoretical & applied mechanics. I guess that makes me biased in a way; I wouldn’t want to be forced to throw out everything I knew about physics overnight. You assume that the skeptics don’t care about discovery or furthering knowledge. Often, the opposite is true. There is a correlation between the “if you disagree with me, then you are closed-minded” argument and a weak scientific position. I would be less skeptical of the demonstration if it had been preceded by a published paper or at least been described in detail.
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January 28th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
SKDBMember said:
Don’t flatter yourself – we were never having a discussion.
Kevin B. said:
One-to-one, every time.
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January 28th, 2010 at 1:26 pm
Hi Kevin B. I wanted to engage in discussion – but it was refused. That looks like a closed mind to me.
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January 28th, 2010 at 2:39 pm
There’s no need to feel left out, SKDBM. You can post all sorts of nonsense here. You just ned to be aware that it will be regarded as such.
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January 28th, 2010 at 2:44 pm
Hi Finrod. I guess one more bit of nonsense mixed in with all the rest makes no difference.
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January 31st, 2010 at 4:27 am
Well i watched the video, didnt see anything particularly mindblowing.
The thing i find interesting is their choice of torroidal electromagnets, and a high amount of plastics in the design of the ‘motor’ to minimize magnetic shielding. I have an electronic engineering background before switching to IT, but I still use brushed and brushless motors a lot. What they’ve made is basically a 4 pole brushless motor.
While i’m not convinced there is any gain in energy at all, *IF* there is, i think i can see where its coming from. The magnets on the rotor are likely to be neodymium rare earth magnets, which are uber-strong and have a serious magnetic field. Usually you cant pull 2 directly apart, you have to slide them. What I think is happening, is that basically during rotation, the magnets are inducing a small current in the torroidal coil. Physics 101: every school kid knows a magnetic field moving through a coil will induce a current. Any of the “additional” energy they think is coming out of this system is likely to be as a result of this small induced current. Thats also why its made of plastic, to ensure as little interference as possible to the magnetic field.
Catch is, as soon as you remove the power to the electromagnets, rotation will slow and the induced current will drop. There certainly wouldnt be enough power to maintain its own motion. Nor would it be “perpetual” as the magnets themselves would lose their strength over time. Essentially what they’re trying to to is power a motor, from it’s own rotation, its not possible. Even with an external power source the gain just isnt sufficient to be self sustaining.
At least thats what i got from watching it.
As for ‘reversing the current’, lol, classic. He does infact reverse the polarity!
Which given that its 4 electromagnets in series, should make bugger all difference anyway. Probably why theres 2 magnets next to each other on the rotor, they’ll be mounted with opposite polarities facing out so the rotor will still turn in the same direction regardless of the polarity of the magnetic field from the electromagnets.
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January 31st, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Kingbob said:
I think the same. What I see here is a fairly straightforward electric motor. It has a few slightly unusual aspects to it, like the fact that they use toroidal magnets, which is not an especially good choice for a motor, but otherwise it’s a permanent magnet DC motor.
I’m not impressed by what they are showing on the scope, especially because they don’t really give a good explanation of how everything is wired and such. It looks like it’s just a simple issue of not getting the same induction back when they have the polarity reversed and I agree it’s just the magnets are not inducing counter-current because now the current is flowing the other way.
They seem to missunderstand the whole issue of energy and work in a motor. The fact that a motor needs energy has nothing to do with the internals of it or the magnetic fields. If a motor is under load, like spinning a fan or lifting a weight or whatever, it is going to need energy to do that because the load is going to work to slow the motor and to keep it going, you need to put more energy in. Of course, a motor can keep spinning for a long time without power input if you don’t have a load and it has a low friction bearing. That’s a simple flywheel.
Thus a motor will spin without power input if there is no friction and no load on it. We can’t create frictionless flywheels, but we can come pretty damn close. Of course, if you watch it long enough there will be perceptible slowing of it.
If this is indeed more than 100% effecient, then it should need no input power at all. Simply connect the output shaft to a generator and it will power itself, right? That’s the thing. As long as there is power input nothing is proven.
An important thing to remember: There have been claims to having produced a more than 100% effecient motor before and in some cases the inventors actually believed it because they had done some simple calculation mistakes. For example, they confused things like the usable power with the reactive power or they calculated the shaft output power then compared it to the input power but they were not using a true-RMS measurement of the input current or something.
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