This is what free energy looks like (apparently)

Akrasia

The Irish alchemy company 'steorn' were supposed to launch their perpetual motion device last night at 11pm, but unfortunately it's not working.

They have a live feed of engineers desperately scrambling to fix their machine (though not much was happening when I checked)
There is a camera pointed straight at the device, built in a clear perspex case
Have a look

http://www.astream.com/live/steorn/camera1.html

cavedave

Should this not be in the science section where everyone else is laughing at it? My guess is is it is some art project to show the gullibility of the media or some such. This is rather then some sort of scam or outright idiocy.

gbh

give it a chance...they might prove everyone wrong...personally can't wait for free energy...

simu

lol

A little perspex yoke?

There was a thread on this already in science.

Kelter

while I am as sceptical as it is fair to be, a good science type knows that just because something breaks a law, doesn't make it untrue. Look at Newtons laws for example.

cavedave

a good science type knows that just because something breaks a law, doesn't make it untrue. Look at Newtons laws for example.

breaks a theory certainly but a law is different. What breaks Newtons laws of motion?

10-10-20

I have one of these at home... but it works in reverse to the Steorn at this moment...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer

;-)

Anyhow, I'll be watching this closely. More power to them!

bonkey

. What breaks Newtons laws of motion?

I could be wrong, but I believe anything "suffering" from relativistic effects will.

Thats how General Relativity was first tested - it predicted differently to Newtonian physics and was then observationally verified to be more accurate.

cavedave

I could be wrong, but I believe anything "suffering" from relativistic effects will.

I am not sure about this I think the laws still hold but other effects (such as gravity) come into play when very large masses are involved. Hopefully some physicist can explain this.

If the theory is uncertain then laws will also have some level of uncertainty so they must not be "cast in stone" in the way i previously implied they were?

bonkey

cavedave wrote:

I am not sure about this I think the laws still hold but other effects (such as gravity) come into play when very large masses are involved. Hopefully some physicist can explain this.

There's no "but". Either the law holds, it doesn't, or it doesn't apply.

We know Newtonian physics are merely a reasonably-accurate-within-certain-boundaries representation of a more complex situation. This has been established beyond question.

Thus, Newtonian "laws" are not inviolate.

We use Newtonian physics in many tasks because its good enough for the job, and far simpler to use than Relativistic physics. If you want to build a car or a building, Newtonian is typically good enough to calculate your stresses etc. If you want to launch a probe to Mars, its not good enough.

If you're building something, you do so within tolerances. If you need to be accurate to with (say) 1mm, then you use the easiest calculation system which keeps you within that tolerance. If you know that one system is accurate to .1mm and another to .0000001mm but is 100x harder to use, then you use the easier system. If, on the other hand, you need to be accurate to .001mm, then clearly only one of those two systems will do.

Newtonian is akin to the ".1mm accuracy". its "Laws" hold as long as we don't look too closely, or work at scales where those inaccuracies will become significant (i.e. the very small or the very large). From a strict perspective, then, its laws don't hold at all. They're simply close enough to be useful for many purposes.

If the theory is uncertain then laws will also have some level of uncertainty so they must not be "cast in stone" in the way i previously implied they were?

If teh above isn't enough detail to answer that, I'd point you to the (more lengthy) response I wrote to your similar point in the Steorn / Free Energy thread over in the science forum. It may explain some of where we seem to be of differing opinion.

mrbig

We have been given little or no indication of what level of power this device is supposed to give out.
indicitation of power gain could be simply a calibration error in measurement equipment or some rational explination like induced current from electromagnetic interference, mobile phones give off plenty of energy these could be mistakinly be measured as energy from a device but I would doubt I could use this to power my car.
I am not ready to give up on newtons laws just yet.

bonkey

mrbig wrote:

We have been given little or no indication of what level of power this device is supposed to give out.

They claim a "power density" of .5W/cm3.

Capt'n Midnight

bonkey wrote:

They claim a "power density" of .5W/cm3.

that's 500W per litre.

Which means my kettle would take five times longer than normal to boil than if I plugged it.


IIRC you'd have no problem getting to Mars if you ignored relativity and just used Newton and three course corrections, which you would have to factor in anyway on a journey like that.


The laws that they claim to break are actually the laws of thermodynamics, which basically state there is no such thing as a free lunch.

bonkey

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

that's 500W per litre.

Yup.

Which means my kettle would take five times longer than normal to boil than if I plugged it.

Nope.

Power density refers to the amount of energy being generated per volume. You don't generate electricity with yout kettle, you consume it.

A better comparison would be (for example) that the motor in teh Smart FourTwo is rated at a max output of 45kW/L. A top-end car engine could produce in excess of 100kW/L, I believe.

So this wouldn't be practical to directly power a car.

However, if used in generating stations, space would be less of an issue, so such a power density wouldn't be an issue for powering the grid....and thus allowing you to boild your kettle in teh same amount of time as at present

The laws that they claim to break are actually the laws of thermodynamics, which basically state there is no such thing as a free lunch.

First Law: You can't win.
Second Law: You can't break even.

maniac101

bonkey wrote:

A better comparison would be (for example) that the motor in teh Smart FourTwo is rated at a max output of 45kW/L. A top-end car engine could produce in excess of 100kW/L, I believe.

No. This refers to the volume of the cylinders in the engine only. The engine itself (which an imaginary perpetual motion machine would replace) has a much greater volume. Therefore the energy density of a conventional car engine measured by total engine size would be of the order of 1kW/litre.

bonkey

Good point...didn't think of that.

mrbig

I may have misunderstood Bonkeys original point on this,

Power output from radio is given in watts per m3 or in the case of electromagnetic interferience smaller fields miliwatts per cm3,

How could this figure relate to cylinder capicity it is not an internal combustion engine.
Still no sign of the demo.