Dr. Mike's Bags are Packed

Dr. Mike's bags are packed!

aveeguy: drmike, quit teasing us! Are your bags packed?

drmike: YES! My wife never let's me do anything "just in time".

I also found this post enlightening from Dr. Mike. He's given us a layman's explanation of Magnetic Viscosity:

OK, let's drop down to the atomic level. The atoms are in a lattice, and several atoms form a magnetic unit, like Fe_3O_4. 1000's of units make a domain. Millions of domains make a magnet. (a very small one!)

So let's take all the units to saturation so all the domains align. Now, let the external field go away.Most of the domains stay aligned, but some don't because they are not oriented along their "easy" axis, and the magnet slips back to Br. The time it takes for all the domians to flip depends on the temperature of the magnet and the "anisotropy energy". If you kill the external field instantly (impossible in reality, but let's just pretend) then the instantaneous Br will be higher than at some time 5 to 10 decay constants later.

That is magnetic viscosity.

He goes on to say:

Where does the energy go? It goes into the atomic lattice - the atoms oscillate a touch slower in the domains that don't align. They have to give up some thermal energy to go to a higher energy state of mis-alignment with their neighbors. It doesn't take long for them all to come back to equilibrium with the rest of the magnet though - the speed of sound in the material helps with that.

This seems counter intuitive to me - you'd think the misalinged domains would heat up - but that doesn't conserve energy. The fully aligned saturated system is at the lowest possible entropy state. From basic thermodynamics

T*dS = dE + dW

I guess I'll give Steorn an out here. If they can maintain T and increase dS, then dE has to increase and they can do work with it. I'll have to think about that a lot more!

Is it or Isn't It?

Yesterday, an anonymous poster here and another anonymous source over at Dispatches from the Future claim to know details about the upcoming July demo. I almost didn't blog about the topic, I normally try to make sure any posts I make here have some substance.

Instead of spending time mulling over this potential leak, I'd like to bring up a related point. The SPDC is growing in size, and it will become, or has already become, very difficult to determine which members leak proprietary information out to the public, and even if it is possible to determine who leaked the information, the situation still boils down to the information being leaked.

For this reason, I find the SPDC NDA requirement a bit silly. Steorn must have realized from the start that anything presented to the SPDC has a very good chance of being leaked. The more revealing the information, the more quickly it will make it out to the blog-o-sphere. For those SPDC'ers out there, if this is all real, I cannot imagine a situation where Steorn would provide any substantial information to the entire 200+ SPDC'ers which would allow anyone to replicate their findings. If this is not real, then the SPDC'ers have signed an NDA with a company that has unknown intentions.

Could the whole purpose of this exercise in Free Energy be something as simple as attempting to scale up online security? Could Steorn have raised 14 million euros over the past three years to develop a product that can monitor online contractual agreements or something along those lines?

Disagreement, Even in the SPDC

In the thread, Which will happen first?, some of the skeptics and believers have a public argument over evidence presented to the SPDC:

enginerd:I am in no-wise violating the NDA I signed when I say that I have yet to see any evidence for Steorn's claim presented in the SPDC forum.

There are some interesting discussions. Sean drops some intriguing hints. Some people who post there are doing some cool experiments. I like cool experiments.

007: LOL - You must have joined the wrong SPDC. The one that the rest of us joined has lots of "evidence" as you put it. Since you've been all but anonymous I actually thought you'd left?

lazy8: Um..I really enjoy the extra "clues" for the game we play that are presented in the SPDC.

But absolutely NO PROOF or EVIDENCE of anything at all has been presented there.

Sure, some stuff that is claimed to be patent "pending" AFAIK, but, utterly nothing in the way of evidence of anything.

NOTHING.

First it's nice to see that there are skeptics in the SPDC. It also amazes me that the will to believe sometimes outweighs actual evidence.

Magnatrix Sees the Goods

Update: This thread has been removed from the forum

Today Magnatrix, one of the forum administrators, claimed on the forum that she has seen a "webfile" of the orbo running for a little bit of time, I'm assuming either it was a video or live webcast:

Magnatrix: The fact is the demo will happen.

How can I be so certain? Because I've seen the product.

pcstru4: And did it demonstrate OU, this product?

Magnatrix: That is a difficult one to answer...
I did not see it running long enough ( imho), not that it stopped or anything, it's just that this was via a webfile.
and since I don't have one in my hands yet, I could not state unequivocally that this is OU.... however, I do strongly believe that it is; (or rather will-be when I get one)
And I see no point in having a demonstration in such a public venue, making such claims, if it were not.
...
No more answers from me about Orbo...
either go to London yourselves, read what Dr. Mike has to say about it, &/or watch the broadcasts ()

Sean Returns for a Moment

Update: This thread has been removed from the forum

Today in the discussion "All Great Truths begin with Blasphemes", Sean poked in for a moment and had this to say:

We are not planning any futher ads at this stage, we will annonce the details only on the day it goes live, its going to be lots of fun, it will be interesting from my point of view just to watch the analysis of what is going to happen. I am already aware of people planning to bring IR cameras and all kinds of test equipment, so on-line may be the best place to watch (however there is only one place were you can get the T-Shirts and thats in the venue - and yes they are free, just like the energy!).

So in addition to free energy, some will get free T-Shirts! While Sean doesn't explicitly come out and say it, I'm assuming from his attitude so close to the July Demo that things are going as planned.

No News, Good News?

It's been a while since I've posted. I'm still reading the Steorn forums every day, there just hasn't been much to report! Steorn hasn't posted to the forums since early June.

Dr. Mike has posted more data from his Sv Experiment, but won't have time to analyze the data between now and the July Demo. Also, on the good news front, members of the SPDC have sponsored Babcat's trip to go to the demo. While it might be quiet this month, my guess is it will be tough to keep up with all the news starting in July.

On a completely different subject, I'm in the process of starting a SCUBA related website, and I could use some help! If you are a SCUBA diver and are interested in helping, please email me at wgorman AT gmail.com. Thanks!

Sv Experiment Photos

Today, Dr. Mike posted photos of his new t-shirt and also a few photos of his Sv Experiment. As you can see, reality is a bit different then CG ;-).

Also today, Dr. Mike had this to say about the experiment:

Given Steorn's claim that power is generated, we should see some interesting phenomena which can not be easily explained with standard CoE physics. Since they get a mechanical gain, I would think we can see it with a mechanical set up.

Since I don't know what to look for, the more eyes and minds looking the better. Suggestions for data collection and doing analysis are welcome. It seems like spread sheet type software can do things like plot and mess with the data. Coming up with algorithms takes a little playing with - you need to try stuff, plot it, try something else, plot it and keep playing to see what pops out or changes. Then, when something looks strange, go back and try another experiment with different parameters to see what happens.

T-Shirts, Minnesota and Leaked Orbos

Dr. Mike received a package from an anonymous fan containing Dr. Mike branded t-shirts for his upcoming trip to London. I don't know how I'd feel if an anonymous package appeared at my door, but that's a pretty cool gift!

Also today, the forum member gdaigle has published this article over at OhmyNews.com about how Orbo, if real, could impact the state of Minnesota.

Finally, nleseul points us to this first ever leaked photo of Steorn's Orbo:

Dr. Mike Sv Experiment Update

While the experiment is still an on-going process, Dr. Mike has provided everyone with a lot of data to keep those interested busy :-). ramuk has published screen shots of excel graphs of the raw data to give us an idea of what we're looking at:

drmike: I'll take a few more blocks of data this evening if I can, then start to think about signal processing.

I'm still at a loss as to how this data may show a loss of energy and a violation of CoE, but I'm not a physicist ;-).

Dr. Mike's First Data, Sean Visits the Forum

Dr. Mike announced here that he has published the first set of experimental data to his website:

First data is uploaded. It's just accelerometer data, packed in a zip file. Let me know if there are problems, this is really just a test run. I've got to add magnets and magnetometers yet.

Also today, Sean chimed in on the "Why hasn't Sean posted any comments for the past two weeks" discussion:

As for the not posting in a while, its pretty simple, have been buried at work and had the flu, sorry its a bit mundane, but true.

He also answered Ping's question on Steorn Nominees:

Ping, agreed on the company structure, and we are preparing to restructure Steorn towards the end of the year, but as I said before in here Steorn Nominees is not for that purpose, it was a vehicle that we used to co-invest into Orbo Ltd. (nothing to do with our technology), it serves no other purpose at all.

The Slowest Week Yet...

You may be wondering why this blog hasn't been updated for a few days. Unfortunately there has been no news to pass along. While we haven't heard a peep from Steorn lately, we are getting updates from Dr. Mike on his experiment:

I got the bearings! So now I get to build the actual experiment. Biggest problem is that the steel rod I got is exactly 0.75" diameter, and the bearing holes are exactly 0.75" in diameter, so it won't go together. I've got the rod in the freezer and I'll stick the bearings outside to warm up, so with luck I'll get .001" clearance be able to assemble my pivot. I don't think it's going to sag much.

The accelerometer and other two inputs (which will soon be magnetometers) are being read at 796 Hz and I can capture to file with no apparent loss using hyperterm. I think collecting data under linux or dos should be trivial.

But mostly, it's just plain fun!

For any of those folks who think validation or experiments, especially during someone's spare time, only takes a couple of days, Dr. Mike's setup shows that even something as simple as a pendulum takes a while to put together. Watching Dr. Mike's process on getting the sensors working, bearings fitted, etc is "just plain fun" for the rest of us also! I can't wait to see some photos and data.