Great big scam or what? My concern is, mabey they are pulling energy from one of the other dimensions and causing some major problems for those folks.
The real question is…how did this end up in “The Economist” ??
When and how did this company end up in The Economist? I can’t find any mention of it in the magazine’s online index.
To me it sounds like they bought an ad. The Economist will sell ads to anybody, I would wager, on account of them being a magazine.
As for the technology, I’ll bet that they jack human bodies into a giant computer and harvest the energy created by the human brain while it thinks it is living in the real world. They need to come up with a catchy name for it, though, something like The Array.
All you need to know is on their Our Technology page.
Yeah. Because no academic institution would want their name all over the news that someone has violated a universally accepted law of physics and thereby solved all of mankind’s problems. That makes a lot of sense.
And who’s going to choose these “qualified” physicists? What’s that? You are? Well, that sounds reasonable.
Yuh huh. How about “we chose the Economist because Popular Mechanics and National Geographic just gave us odd stares. Also, they don’t have a sense of humor like the Economist does.”
So, in short, scam.
Dewey, here’s the section from their webpage:
sinjin’s translation: We… um… bought an ad in the Economist because… uh, what was I supposed to say? Oh yeah, because that’s where the, that’s where the really um, smart people read. I mean, that’s where they go for news, and stuff. Yeah, physicists they er love the economics of it all. There’re like, twelve physicists who read the Economist, right? Why don’t we do this in Science again? <because they don’t sell ads!> Oh, right. We decided to shun Science because they, um, they have a crytofascist review process which is prejudice against innovation.
Thanks for the information.
Wow, they made it into The Economist by purchasing an advertisement. And then they issued a press release about it. Pardon me if I’m a little underwhelmed.
So their angle appears to be gathering a fairly good sized list of email addresses.
Or it could be promoting an as yet unreleased film, or perhaps a means to help producers accept a script.
A quick google of “Sean McCarthy” and “Richard Walshe” doesnt appear to be bringing up any relevant information or background on these two.
I think their tactic is to yell loud enough so that at least a few idiots will believe them merely due to the volume. At least enough to get some money from it.
Since their theory doesn’t have a ghost of a chance to actually be true, the only chance they have is to yell and scream about how the scientific community is out to get them. It’s a merchandising gimmick, not innovation.
It works for Joe Newman.
I should also add the wikipedia page on Steorn seems to have a huge amount of changes, discussion, and history given the short time from the initial press.
I know exactly what scientists are saying off the record. They’re using words that arn’t fit for the public press. 
(Bolding mine.)
I just saw this on Neil Cavuto (US News Show). Neil was completely credulous. He said something like “from what little I understand you gather energy by traveling around in a magnetic field”. I have to revise my opinion that Larry Kind is the dumbest guy on television.
If those other dimensions can’t figure out how to stop us from stealing their energy, then screw 'em. They’re obviously not smart enough to exist.
“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 energy isn’t being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It’s literally created.”
Sounds like the energy is ‘created’ from the energy used to ‘travel round’. In other words, it’s a dynamo; crank the handle and whoopee! free energy! As long as you keep cranking the handle, and as long as you ignore the energy used to crank it.
A few comments about the website.
I suspect the quality of the site enhanced a lot of the publicity this claim is getting. It’s gorgeous. Really nice design, very professional. If it had been black with huge green letters, instant dismissal. Seems they’ve hired Citigate Dewe Rogerson, a British PR firm.
Bad typography in places - I’m guessing it’s built on a .NET CMS, and probably the designer signed it off to the client, who then screwed it up a bit adding new content.
The domain is registered to Sean McCarthy, who is presumably the same Sean McCarthy CEO, at Unit 12, Fumbally Court, Dublin 8. I did a wee look on google.ie and there’s only one other organisation registered to that address: Gay HIV Strategies - however, that document isn’t dated (and spells “Foreword” wrong), but has a reference to the year 2005 in it. These units on business parks are unlikely to be shared by more than one organisation, but the phone numbers are different, so there may be no connection.
But the most telling thing is that nobody has added anything to the Press Clippings page. Hmmm.
But, a new site, Steorn Watch, skeptical analysis of the claims. They even have an interview with the CEO, who agreed to participate. It’s worth a read. He seems pretty sincerely to believe the claims, and explains why they’ve gone down the cheap publicity route (because without it they would never get anyone with any credibility to agree to validate it - clever) - but there’s one thing that I find a trifle strange: he doesn’t seek to dominate the industry - just sell the license and move on: “once this is validated we will go off and develop some other cool stuff”. Why wouldn’t you want to exploit such a system?
Oh, and their offices are definitely a real address.
Could be a classic confidence trick - he’s not interested in selling anything, just stealing money from gullible investors.
Or he could just be a (well funded) crazed loon.
Yeah, that just doesn’t make any sense at all; free energy, if it could be done, would be as fundamentally ground-breaking a technology as, say, manned flight or the whole of semiconductor electronics; it would change everything. There’s no way anyone who developed it would just say “Meh, how much d’you reckon I can get to be shot of this thing?”
It is lovely, isn’t it? I know you’re qualified to be able to make such judgments.
On further thought… I suppose it’s just about possible that they have inadvertently struck upon a method of generating energy from the rotation of the Earth; i.e. “when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position”, you’re not actually in the same position, because the Earth is turning.
That’s not to say I think it’s likely, and I can’t quite get my head around how direct tapping of the Earth’s rotational energy could be done, but if that’s what they’ve achieved (as opposed to real free energy), it would still be quite significant.
So if this catches on, the Earth will eventually grind to a halt? Although Wikipedia says that the Earth has 2.9 x 10[sup]29[/sup] Joules of rotational kinetic energy which is, let’s see, ~10[sup]23[/sup] kWh, so maybe not a huge concern just yet.