Free energy!

1. I think it's highly unlikely Steorn have anything and personally think they are deluded.
2. That is not to say that without a Ph.D and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers you have nothing of value to contribute to physics (or any science for that matter). These days it's less likely than before but not impossible. Of course you have to produce a paper to be reviewed.
3. If you have discovered something impossible from our current understanding of physics (e.g. you can travel faster than light, create gigawatts of power from thin air with a penknife and a piece of string a la McGyver, etc) and can design an experiment where others can reliably repeat it, then it has to be taken into the framework of science and not dismissed out of hand no matter how crazy. Look at quantum physics for God's sake - some of that is weird hard-to-believe stuff. Action at a distance for example has all sorts of consequences to name one.
4. I DO NOT think any of the last bullet point is likely to happen, I'm just making a point.
5. Physics is not like mathematics where you start from a set of axioms and define from there. You make a framework that describes the world as best you can and you test, test, test. If you disprove some aspect of the framework with your then you need to alter your framework.

Professor_Fink wrote:

Ok, I've already said this in this thread, but it seems to need repeating. Unless the laws of nature are not fixed, and change freely at the whim of some prankster god, then the you cannot break the established laws of physics in the regimes where they have been rigorously tested.

Steorn's machine occupies an extremely well tested region in theory-space. Basically we know all the physics that affects magnets at the energy and temperature scales that Steorn is talking about. There is no wiggle room.

All the worse for Steorn, conservation is one of the most fundamental rules in physics, as it is a direct consequence of the fact that the laws of physics are translationally invariant with respect to time, via Noether's theorem. Fundamental physical interactions have been verified countless times (and in the case of CERN and Fermilab, I literally do mean countless, since they generate too much data to store). Sean McCarthy's arguments about magnetic viscosity are deeply flawed and neglect many effects. He takes a macroscopic look at a quantum system and gets himself lost.

That seems unlikely since they've just canceled the public demo.



There tends to be only two reasons why people compare science to religion, and scientists to priests. The first is that they have taken some course in philosophy and want to show off how deep a thinker they are (the fact that they miss the obvious differences tends to make this counter-productive), and the second is to annoy scientists.

I have a pretty good idea why Steorn went the Economist route: No peer review journal would print their rubbish and you can't patent perpetual motion machines.