No Stoern For You! Next!

Here’s an update to the Stoern Orbo project that I posted about here. As a refresher, Stoern was a company that claimed to have made an energy device that emitted more energy than it consumed, a machine that produces a net gain in energy.

Last November Wired wrote about 10 Snake Oil Gadgets. Basically this reviews ten gadgets whose inventors make fantastic and impossible or suspicious claims and, surprise, surprise, can’t deliver. Stoern’s Orbo made the list:

Orbo

When it comes to gadgets, perpetual motion machines are bullshit's bread and butter. Steorn, the Irish company behind Orbo, is only the latest in a long line of deluded, incompetent or fraudulent firms to claim the scalp of the laws of thermodynamics. File this one under deluded: enthusiastically setting up a public display, the inventors were humiliated when it failed to operate. But wait! Steorn gave its deal to 22 scientists who'll "validate" the device. Don't hold your breath, chaps.

Perhaps it's art, a complex exploitation of media credulity and skeptics' blood pressure. Perhaps its a clever-dick ad for Steorn's marketing abilities. What it isn't, however, is a free energy machine.

Think it might be real? For the love of Liebniz, get a freakin' clue: if it looks like a toy and the net gain is almost imperceptibly small, you're selling a measurement error.

The Age has an article in which the problem is put very distinctly:

"Oh, goodness, what can I say?" said Martin Sevior, associate professor at Melbourne University's School of Physics. "It violates a very fundamental principle of physics, and flies in the face of 2000-years-plus of physics. It's an incredibly big claim."

One of the basic principles of physics is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form.

‘nuff said on Stoern, methinks.

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Steorn Brands Free Energy Technology

Steorn, the company that claims it has an engine that produces free energy through magnetic field interactions, has branded its technology. They call it Orbo and I don’t know why.

On the surface the company’s claim seems valid and possible except as I pointed out in a previous post, it violates one of the fundamental principles of physics, which is that energy is never created or destroyed it is simply converted from one form to another. The net energy in the universe is constant.

As a digression, the inflation model of the universe claims that dark energy is making the universe expand. Expand into what? That's where my feeble mind melts into a pile of steaming gunk. You can talk about rising dough and raisins all you want but to create more space means more stuff and that means more energy is created. Why do I say that? Well, maybe I am wrong but there is no true vacuum. That means no true nothing exists in the universe. Even the spaces between the spaces are a froth of quantum energy where virtual particles are created and destroyed at a frantic rate. So there is no peace anywhere in the universe. No wonder I'm so anxious all the time with all that quantum foam percolating around me.

As the universe expands, the quantum foam expands which may be the dark energy that is causing the universe to expand exponentially faster instead of shrink like Einstein’s gravitational equations predict.

Maybe energy is created out of nothing after all. As the universe expands the energy within this universe gets larger forcing the process of expansion to grow.

In the end, Steorn may be just contributing to the expansion of the universe.

Maybe not.

From the Steorn Website:

“Our Claim
Orbo produces free, clean and constant energy - that is our claim. By free we mean that the energy produced is done so without recourse to external source. By clean we that during operation the technology produces no emissions. By constant we mean that with the exception of mechanical failure the technology will continue to operate indefinitely.
The sum of these claims for our Orbo technology is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy, perhaps the most fundamental of scientific principles. The principle of the conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created or destroyed, it can only change form.
Because of the revolutionary nature of our claim, not only to the world of science but to the world in general, Steorn issued a challenge to the scientific community in August 2006 to test our technology and report their findings. The process of validation that has resulted from this challenge is currently underway, with results expect by the end of 2007.”

See for yourself.

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