Note: I wrote the article below summing up the Steorn free energy so far for the Jordan Times. This repeats some info I already had on 360east.

CONTROVERSY | Are we witnessing the birth of the biggest invention of the past millennium, or a hoax of global proportions. Either way, Ahmad Humeid thinks this is a story we should follow

Imagine you can go to your local home appliance store and buy a box, the size of, say, your refrigerator, that you can take home, have an electrician connect to you home’s main electrical input, then, at the flip of a switch, this box starts producing you home’s electricity, for free, forever.

Imagine going to a mobile shop and buying a battery that you can put into your mobile that never runs out. Never!
Imagine similar devices running cars, trains, planes. For free. Pollution free too.
Imagine cities, putting their fuel powered power generators to sleep and replacing them with generators that ‘create’ electrical energy out of, well, nothing.

Now imagine what kind of impact on humanity such generators would have. And don’t forget, by the way, imagining the impact on oil producing countries and companies.

That’s a lot of imagining you’ll have to do.

And, if you want to believe Sean MacCarthy, an Irish Engineer, the technology that could lead to free energy generators like the ones I described, already exists in his company’s basement in Dublin!

The name of the company is Steorn. The company, for sure, exists. MacCarthy is its CEO and he’s already been interviewed on ABC News, FOX news, the Guardian and other less known media outlets. The whole thing started when, last August, Steorn published a full page ad in the Economist challenging the world of science to test his company’s invention: devices, based on magnets, that can produce free, clean energy. The company want to assemble a jury of twelve respected scientists who would, independently test their technology and judge: it either works or it doesn’t.

‘Free energy’ is blasphemy in the world of physics and Steorn knows it. In fact, their ad’s headline is a quote from Irish playwright and Nobel prize winner George Bernard Shaw: “All great truths begin as blasphemies”.

Modern physics has what can be considered an immutable law: the conservation of energy. You cannot create or destroy energy. You can only convert it from one form to another. So when someone comes along with a claim of producing energy out of nothing, it is immediately discredited by established science.

Yet, Steorn’s claim was immediately followed by considerable interest, outrage and debate at the same time. This is not surprising given that MacCarthy and Co. are basically claiming they have invented Fire 2.0: something that will profoundly alter human civilization.

“Hoax”, “Scam” and “Fraud” where immediately screamed. That too is no surprise: Steorn’s claim comes as the latest in a long string of claims of free energy and perpetual motion machines that goes back centuries.

For a week after the claim was made the internet was abuzz with talk about free energy. “Steorn” became the most searched terms on Technorati, a site that tracks the world’s 50 million blogs. Almost 60,000 people have registered on Steorn’s website to receive the results of the jury’s investigation and over 4,700 people have applied to be on the 12 person scientific jury.

The internet is littered with claims of free energy producing devices. Some of them are based on water, others are based on magnets, whether moving or stationary. But what sets Steorn apart is that, unlike the shabby, dubious looking web sites of some the other claimants that are often associated with UFOs, anti-gravity, conspiracy theories and fringe science, Steorn web site (and media appearance in general) is a slick, legitimate looking endeavor. Instead of obscure discussion forums, they have used a mainstream, respectable publication to issue their claims. Their ad in the Economist must have cost them something like US$ 100,000. And they have hired a well know PR agency to handle their image.

All of this can be dismissed as a clever packing of a fraud. But it cannot be denied that, given the scientific community’s skepticism, and the expected negative reactions to such claims, Steorn might not have had any other way to push the world to take it seriously. The company claims that numerous scientists and engineers have already tested and confirmed their claim in private and under strict non disclosure agreements, but that none is willing to come forward publicly with a confirmation, for fear of being discredited in the scientific community.

Notably, not many big media outlets carried the story. Neither the BBC nor the New York Times, for example, mentioned Steorn’s claims. A possible explanation for this reluctance to publish is that editors are careful not to be seen perpetuating suspected hoaxes or fraudulent claims. But the defenders of the concept of free energy would tell you that it all suppression of information by big corporations who are threatened by claims that would fundamentally change the economies of energy in the world.

In the various interviews he has given so far, MacCarthy came across as a confident, accommodating, straightforward person. He, and Steorn, are not giving out any technical details, citing that their technology is still in the patenting process.

Steorn’s CEO seems to be happy with their self-admitted publicity stunt. In an interview with a web site called New Energy Times, MacCarthy said: “I think the point that we’re making is that this publicity stunt, and it is a publicity stunt, has one direct aim, and that is to grab the attention of the scientific world really to get them angry enough to have to deal with this. The question we’re asking is an honest question to the world of science: either prove this works or prove it doesn’t work – whatever you find, and to also make absolutely sure the answer is put into the public domain. As far as we’re concerned, we’re not asking a question we don’t know the answer to.”

Last week, in an internet live chat, I asked MacCarthy about the expected cost of his technology if implemented for mobile phones, which is an area that the company seems to be targeting. MacCarthy answered that it would be comparable to that of current battery technologies.

The September 8th deadline for closing the registration of scientists for the Steorn ‘free energy challenge’ is approaching. The media interest in the story has waned in the last week. Even bloggers are not talking about it much.

If the story is exposed as hoax or fraud, MacCarthy and Co. probably have to emigrate to another planet.
If the whole thing is a big social experiment (to test corporate fraud concepts, for example), then the boys at Steorn will have to come up with an excuse/explanation of why they conducted this global experiment that will be so brilliant that people will forgive them!

If the company has deluded itself and grossly mis-measured their experiment’s results, they will be forever discredited.

As in many free energy claims, the name Nikola Tesla was brought up in the context of the Steorn controversy. Tesla (1856-1943) was

Serbian/American scientist who invented nothing less than Radio communication, and alternating current, just for example. Although he is considered to have gone eccentric in his later years with some of his theories and claims, he is named by many “the inventor of the 20th century”.

One of the things that Tesla said was that “one day man will connect his apparatus to the very wheelwork of the universe… and the very forces that motivate the planets in their orbits and cause them to rotate will rotate his own machinery”

This quote is used by many who believe that energy can be gotten from ‘hidden’ sources in the universe.

Others are saying that we already have free energy in the form of the sun and the movement of the seas. It’s just that we’re under the spell of fossil fuels and unwilling to change our polluting ways.

Read these related posts on 360east:


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Comments

6 responses to “Do you believe in free energy?”

  1. Khalaf Avatar
    Khalaf

    Ahmad: There are well known proceedures to disseminate new scientific results. These are through conference presentations and technical publications, where peer review is brought to bear. If such a discovery is real, it can’t be supressed. Given the lack of rigorous scientific review and the lack of details, I doubt that this whole thing is anything but a hoax.

    Of course, I hope that it isn’t.

  2. Humeid Avatar
    Humeid

    Khalaf: I am not a scientist. So I can’t speak with any authority on the process of scientific review. But I encourage you to dig deeper if you are interested and you will be surprised at the scientifc orthodoxy that exsists.

    Remember that many paradigm shifting changes in science where considered crazy by the dominating scientific thought at the time.

    Scientists and inventors are often not friends at all. Inventors tinker around to find solutions to practical problems and sometimes might stumble upon “law breaking” scientific discoveries. Scientists, on the other hand, have to work on “accepted” areas of science that will guarantee them respect and funding. Different mindsets..

    As for suppression.. Many conspiracy theories fly around these things. But I would not totally dismiss the prosepect of suppression of innovation by incumbent energy players.

    In many areas, the human race could be farther along, in the areas of energy and others, but the best technology doesn’t always win. Just think back to VHS vs Betacam video tapes. The worse tech won because of the dominance of JVC at the time.

  3. Khalaf Avatar
    Khalaf

    Ahmad: It is certainly true that orthodoxy dies hard in science, and I know that for a fact. But this does not prevent scientists from presenting their new findings to other scientists through various forums (not an ad in the Economist).

    I have trouble with your suggestion that an investor made this supposed ground breaking discovery. Simply put, this is BS. This type of discovery requires knowledge, equipment, funding and time. It can’t be made in somebody’s garage. I know this is part of PC lore, but the technology for computers existed before the PC.

  4. Oula Farawati Avatar
    Oula Farawati

    that was nice… very well-written… wondering how decreasing the world’s dependency on fossil energy wil change the politics of this part of teh world .. Arab countries, especially Gulf countries, would become less important… less attention, maybe less problems! the US and all the superpowers will have somone else to concentrate on!

  5. Saad Avatar
    Saad

    Ahmad: Good article. One sad fact struck me, as always: Why dont we in Jordan make use of the massivly abundant solar energy?

  6. Tom Fenton Avatar
    Tom Fenton

    There’s no indication that it’s a hoax, though there is a possibility for that, just as there was for the first mechanized flight in 1903. Though McCarthy was wrong when he said that energy is being created by the Steorn device, energy nonetheless is available in the Earth’s magnetic field and in the quantum vacuum of space. McCArthy insists, though, that he is not tappi9ng either source. As for the vacuum, there is plenty of generally accepted literature in Quantum Physics indicating that it is possible to tap such virtual but very real energy, thought to be either virtual photons or waves, by astute electrical engineering. Steorn may have done just that, but they may not know enough Quantum Physics to know that.