The Arlington Institute is a great clearing house of interesting signals in the field of humanity's development of materials and their manipulation. The most interesting item to arrive in my inbox for several weeks is this special alert from the institute's President John L. Petersen:
It appears that we may be on the verge of an extraordinary breakthrough in energy production.The Irish company Steorn, (www.steorn.com), in a brilliant strategic move, took out a full page ad in The Economist to tout their new energy technology – now called Orbo – which they say uses no input energy and produces usable output. They were soliciting for candidates for a jury of scientists to publically evaluate their claims. They got 5000 responses, 1000 of which were from scientists. Although initially looking for 12 jury members, they settled on 22 who are in the process of evaluating the technology and will issue a report in the fall.
Of course, the jury is still out, (and traditional science says it is impossible) but take a look at this five minute quarterly report by Steorn’s CEO and tell me if you don’t sense that these guys probably really have something and are proceeding in a very sophisticated way to bring it to fruition.
I had lunch with my friend Eddie Mahe today and we discussed this. Eddie said, “If this is true, it changes all scenarios of potential futures.” He’s right. We may be about to witness the birth of a new energy source that rivals the discovery of fire.
Indeed, I scoured every page of Steron's website and listened carefully to the videos. These seem like cluey, considered, and well intentioned people who just might have disproved in the most brilliant way a fundamental law of thermodynamics. And they're going about proving it and presumably dispersing their technology in a very astute and respectable way. Not educated in such technical things, and without enough information to call it a hoax, I'll wait eagerly for their public demonstration mid-year and the outcomes of their independent scientific assessment.
Every futurist needs to go back to the drawing board with their clients, now!
Comments (2)
Chris, I think your analysis regarding the quality of the communication by Steorn is in this specific instance very light on. I'll elaborate at some length.
The Steorn thing has been doing the rounds for a while now. I first saw it probably more than a year ago. The general nature of the claims that are made by the Steorn people are very familiar to me. In fact, there is nothing remotely unique or new about what they claim on their website - countless people (most of them naively, some I suspect maliciously) have made similar claims since at least the development of the first heat engines (ie "steam engines"). What is described on the website is a common-or-garden variety "perpetual motion machine of the first kind" ie a device that produces greater work output than energy input (in this case, I believe the claim is actually for zero energy input). Many people have tried to patent designs for such devices, and I believe that the US Patent Office now officially refuses to accept such applications without a working model being provided (which has of course never been provided). Many of these so-called designs are based on some sort arrangement of rotating magnets, and it sounds like the Steorn things is another one of these (""What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy," The Age, 20 August 2006).
Of course, any physical laws are always open to falsification. If someone provides evidence that (as would have to happen in this case for instance) the first law of thermodynamics does not hold in particular circumstances (i.e. circumstances other than all observed so far in human history!), then that law will be replaced, and to paraphrase Eddie Mahe, everything will have changed forever!
But back to Steorn's particular claims: the point is that, given the enormous historical weight of these most fundamental physical laws (and thermodynamic laws are generally regarded as just that - the least likely laws to be violable, and the ones with the most profound consequences if they ever were found to be violable), the burden of evidence lies most squarely with Steorn. The Steorn representatives claim that this will be provided some time in the future, but they give absolutely no basis for their claims to be accepted at this time. This would be like me saying that I can jump over the moon in a single bound, and in fact, I did it yesterday, but no one was looking, and I'll do it tomorrow again with some specially selected observers who will confirm that I can do it, and for now, you should believe me because I'm a nice, trustworthy guy, and I know that it sounds improbable, but you will just have to trust me for now. Actually, this is a pretty reasonable analogy for what they are claiming, in terms of the credibility that it has - I mean the evidence against what they claim is just absolutely staggering, it is one of the greatest, most bombproof bodies of evidence that we have on anything, literally. So, they would really want to have a little more to offer if they wanted to be taken at all seriously.
I have to say that my initial appraisal last year was that this was pretty clearly a publicity stunt (have a look at what they say about their other technolgy activities - don't know if these are real, but they claim to do stuff in plastic card and optical disk fraud). Either that, or a practical joke, maybe some people wanting to hold the mirror up to us to expose our shallow gulibilty in relation grasping after the "quick fix" to existential challenges. Or just a piss-take hoax perhaps. That appraisal really hasn't changed - and I'll be very pleased to change it come July this year if the evidence is provided, because it means that I can retire and just go surfing for the rest of my life, which will be very nice. Actually, we will all be able to...so come to think of it, it will probably be bloody awful with all the crowds, so on second thoughts, I'll probably be really pissed with them.
So with that as background, I'll just reflect on the Futuristics post in relation to this, and try to flesh out why I am so concerned about shining a critical light on it like this. In the post you wrote:
"Indeed, I scoured every page of Steron's website and listened carefully to the videos These seem like cluey, considered, and well intentioned people who just might have disproved in the most brilliant way a fundamental law of thermodynamics. And they're going about proving it and presumably dispersing their technology in a very astute and respectable way."
Having also read over the website thoroughly and also looked at secondary online commentary, my own analysis is pretty much 180 degrees out of phase with this - ie I didn't see or hear one single shred of evidence that the Steorn claims have any more credibility than any similar claims that have been made previously. There was just nothing there that appeared to me to suggest technical brilliance or astute or respectable proof of the claims. In fact, the impression that arose for me was that the claims were lacking in any real credibility. As a few people have pointed out on the Steorn forum, the following quotes from the 13 April Sean McCarthy are particularly problematic: "if it works or doesn't work can only be answered by experts. Those experts, 22 of them, are currently looking at the technology..." ie the scientific validity of our claims will not be verified by the scientific method, it will be determined on the basis of authority, and we will decide who holds the authority. Then a little later: "There is no question that our technology works". OK - so why the shenanigans with the 22 experts who WE have personally decided are the only people capable of verifying our claims, if there is no question? And interesting also that the 22 experts are being engaged on a commercial basis to verify the claims ie they are being paid to endorse OUR foregone conclusion.
This seems to me to be a pretty clear case of "not all ridiculous ideas are in fact useful". I think we have to get better at critically filtering our scanning. I spent time going back and looking at this on the basis of your recommendation, because I trust and respect your judgment on what to filter out and what to let through. In this particular, very specific instance, I found the quality of the filtering to be poor.
Josh
Posted by Josh Foyd | May 7, 2007 3:23 PM
Posted on May 7, 2007 15:23
Thanks for taking the time to set me straight on this one Josh! I must admit, I was obviously sloppy in my scanning – likely carried away with the possibility of clean energy, happily suspending disbelief to a degree, and taken in by the simple, and as you point out, credibly suspect, 'independent scientific assessment.'
Opps. God, how easy it is to get sucked into some of these things – hope, such a dangerous thing sometimes! As is said by Red in the Shawshank Redemption "Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane."
A fun 'counter-factual' to contemplate though hey? I wonder if we will ever get close to completely clean, renewable energy – I doubt 'free' will ever be possible, because even if we managed to rout the fundamental scientific facts of thermodynamics, someone will still have to do something to get to it and replicate it – and that will cost something! (not to mention the cost of upheaval to humanity as a whole – would it really be worth it?)
Still, I'll be watching to see how this all plays out – hoax or apparent scientific miracle? Both are of interest to me;)
Posted by Chris Stewart | May 7, 2007 3:40 PM
Posted on May 7, 2007 15:40