I came across a new website called Ning, which allows anyone to set up a custom social network, like Facebook or MySpace. I've set up Free Energy Trackers for all of us who are interested in what is going on with Steorn. Our first members are Dr. Mike, Sean McCarthy, and myself. Join and connect, and maybe we can figure this out together!
As seen in this picture from Steorn's most recent press release, Irish President Mary McAleese visited Steorn in early October as part of the Bolton Trust 20th anniversary celebrations. Steorn Executivees Roger Hatfield, Sean McCarthy, and Richard Walshe stand beside President McAleese in the photo.
(Photographed by David O'Shea)
In the forums today, FreshLaundry points everyone to Free Energy Truth, which has an exclusive interview with Blake, a Northrop Grumman employee located in Stuart Florida. Blake is a member of the SPDC, and is claiming that he was able to run an Orbo-like device in his own workshop for more than 8 hours:
It was late and I knew I had to work the next day so taking a final look at the running rig. I went to bed...it was still running when I woke up and when I left for work.Unfortunately Blake has not been able to repeat the 8 hour run:
I intend to keep trying to replicate the run to quell the naysayers. Until then it is just my word against the odds.
In the Steorn forums yesterday, a new thread started entitled "Nothing New" which highlighted this entry from hdeasy over on Randi's forums:
So – some have visited the public forum. I am a member of the SPDC (private – NDA needed) and it is much more orderly there, as we have more scientists etc. Many skeptics did a u-turn in there as we have been shown a video of a famous inventor enthusing over the ‘miracle that is behind the technology’.If you do a quick google search on hdeasy, you'll discover that he's been following Steorn since last August, and applied to be on the Jury. He's currently a member of the SPDC and has been active in Steorn's forum in the past.
Then we learned the name of a physicist from an old uni who confirmed the effect but can’t go public as Steorn doesn’t want that yet. The story around that is very believable for me.
Finally, the mechanism has been explained – very simple, and I wrote a Fortran sim to convince myself of it. It actually works – as long as a stator magnet is not depleted, and it doesn’t look like it would be – test plots showing this to be the case have been presented by Steorn and some forum members have come close to reproducing the setup – one of them says he had an 8 hour run before something loosened up. Now none of this is substitute for the 22 Jury members and their report – but it’s pretty damn good.
Coming soon for the cognoscenti 7 of us were selected to test the tech themselves.. That activity will start in a few weeks time.
So – it’s all go: no sign of closing up shop after the London debacle.
hairykrishna directs us to the latest edition of Physics World, which includes an article on Steorn's failed demo. Here are some interesting quotes:
The device consisted of a CD-sized plastic wheel adorned with 16 neodymium magnets that can rotate about two stationary magnets. After being given an initial push, the wheel was supposed to spin freely at about 250 revolutions per minute - not only overcoming air resistance and mechanical friction, but also lifting a small 10g mass.Sean McCarthy is also quoted as saying:
"If we were in the business of doing tricks," he says, "then the demonstration would have worked."
The CEO of Steorn, Sean McCarthy, has publicly announced that the Kinetica Demo of Steorn's Orbo will be postponed until further notice:
Folks,Steorn has also posted a press release regarding the decision:
We have had to make the unfortunate decision to deffer the public demonstration of our technology that was due to start on the 4th. I am very sorry that we have had to take this decision, I will provide a more detailed explanation of the reasons behind the decision later.
I would like to invite any of the forum members (SPDC or otherwise) who are in London to meet me at 15:00 here in Kinetica, were I will be available to answer any questions.
Very sorry about this, hope to see some of you at 15:00.
Thanks,
Sean
Further to Steorn’s announcement yesterday (5th July) regarding the technical difficulties experienced during the installation of its “Orbo” technology at the Kinentica Museum in London, Steorn has decided to postpone the demonstration until further notice.
Sean McCarthy CEO stated that “technical problems arose during the installation of the demonstration unit in the display case on Wednesday evening. These problems were primarily due to excessive heat from the lighting in the main display area. Attempts to replace those parts affected by the heat led to further failures and as a result we have to postpone the public demonstration until a future date.”
He continued that “we apologise for the inconvenience caused to all the people who had made arrangements to visit the demonstration or were planning on viewing the demonstration online.”
Over the next few weeks the company will explore alternative dates for the public demonstration.
One of our readers was able to get this photo of the lab where Steorn is working on the device:
"Attached are 2 pictures of the upstairs of Kinetica-Museum which Steorn are using as a temporary workshop. You can see a perspex disc, blu tack, a drill, a hammer and a hack saw. Over unity it would seem does not seem to require more than a few basic household tools! Though those hot lights clear play havoc with the blu tack!!!"
He was also able to speak with a Steorn employee:You can also see pictures of the red jacketed Steorn employee I vented my spleen at around 10.00am, telling him that I had never in my 20 years in technology sales and marketing seen such an incredible display of incompetence. He had no answer to the most obvious of questions. He presented himself as a spokesman for Steorn.
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Most tellingly he admitted before 4 witnesses that there was no load bearing Orbo device inside the Kinetica museum. No weights being lifted by any device. Just a spinning Orbo (still requiring fixing) . He explicitly said that "the load bearing device is back in Dublin".
SeamusF updates us again:
We are experiencing some technical difficulties with the demo unit in London. Our initial assessment indicates that this is probably due to the intense heat from the camera lighting. We have commenced a technical assessment and will provide an update later today.I find it interesting that while the skeptics just get more skeptical, some of the believers in the forum argue that these technical difficulties show that Steorn is the real deal. I think that's a bit of a stretch! I'll hold off judgment until the dust settles.
As a consequence, Kinetica will not be open to the public today (5th July). We apologise for this delay and appreciate your patience.
SteornSkeptic:Its probably so that they can show videos of everything from the construction phase to a full working prototype in that location.On a final note, Steorn has updated their website, so now the previously non working links are all functional:
SeaumsF: Correct!
The Kinetica Museum website has been updated:
From 5th-13th July, visitors to Kinetica can witness for themselves 'Orbo' as it perpetually spins a clear polycarbonate wheel with absolutely no supply of external energy or power supply attached.Also, thanks to one of our readers, here are pictures of the outside of the Kinetica Museum:
THE MUSEUM OPENS AT 11AM ON THURSDAY 5TH JULY
Due to technical difficulties we will now be live from London on the 5th July.
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 ;-).
After a bit of back and forth between Sean and Dr. Mike, which lead to a public approval by Sean for Dr. Mike to publish his experiment, we now have the beginnings of Dr. Mike's Sv Experiment.
Some thought Sean was a bit harsh on Dr. Mike today. There seemed to be some miss communication regarding whether Dr. Mike could publish his version of the experiment. While Sean had emailed Dr. Mike a critique of the proposed experiment, I wonder if Dr. Mike was still expecting a follow up email or communication allowing him to openly discuss the experiment. Once the dust settled, we got our answer from Sean:
Mikes experiment design is his own, he asked my views, I gave them to him, I saw many technical problems with it, if Mike wants to post his experiment, there is nothing that Steorn can or would do about it, other than to comment on the variety of problems that I see with it, although I do now see that Mike is suggesting stainless steel instead of the steel design that he originally mailed to me and posted above, there are lots of issues, I have no problem discussing them in public, IMO the design is not very good, but lets get the issues in the open, but again I do want an explanation of the lapse of memory issues.While it's always fun to discuss finances and intentions, I prefer physics. The Sv Experiment thread is off to a great start and I'm sure we'll all learn a lot more about magnetic viscosity and Sv in the process.
Dr. Mike's NDA is in Steorn's hands now:
drmike: Thanks all. NDA has been received by Steorn, now it's really Sean's turn.As usual, we'll just have to wait and see what happens. Nothing else substantial happened in the forums, other than a few folks being fooled by the very clever Edward Windermere. It doesn't take much reading to realize that Edward is fictional.
I've been playing with avatar's instead of physics, but at least it's math related...
Steorn, which is based in the Docklands Innovation Park, is raising funds from private investors to complete development of its microgenerator technology. The company has already raised about €3million in backing, and is three years into a four-year development plan.I find it fascinating that a dot-com company transitioned to researching wind power, where they supposedly discovered free energy. I'm also amazed that they were still raising capital last summer after already raising €3 million.
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Sean McCarthy, the cofounder and chief executive of Steorn, said the firm’s products were based on the same principle as kinetic energy generators in watches. The products should be ready by the summer of 2007.
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Steorn employs 16 people designing its products, which are manufactured by a partner company in Holland and shipped back to Dublin for testing. ‘‘We have adopted a policy of partnering rather than hiring,” McCarthy said.
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The firm is also in the process of raising further investment, but McCarthy would not comment on the amount of funding required.
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Steorn worked on some of the biggest internet projects in Ireland, including Fyffes’ Worldoffruit.com portal, but had to restructure after the boom ended.
There's no doubt that Steorn is interested in magnets. From their test rigs to the SPDC, they clearly have put in a lot of engineering time. In the forum today, the members of the new SPDC post on their initial feelings about the content on the site, and whether it has persuaded them one way or the other. Crank has this to say:
Nothing in the SPDC so far has changed my opinion. I'm about 2/3rd of the way across on the fence - I'm 60% unbeliever because 'it's impossible', 40% believer because I don't see why they'd have put so much effort (and money) into something that wasn't true, and I can't find another logical explanation.What are other possible logical explanations? As for why they launched the SPDC, if they were a scam, the SPDC may be their vehicle. Here are a couple of interesting quotes from the same discussion:
I don't plan to participate in SPUD feedback polls like this in the future, because I don't think it's my place to suggest I've learned some secret information in the SPDC that, if outsiders also knew it, might convince them one way or the other.From tewkatz:
The forums were a single community, skeptics and believers alike, watching Steorn from the outside...there is now a division that will inevitably grow.As these forum members point out, SPDC may be a powerful tool for Steorn to either convince outsiders, or also to brainwash SPDC members. I'm confident that most of the SPDC members will be vigilant. I also hope that there is no reason for them to be.
Today in the forums we saw that while Steorn is (im)possibly going to save the world from our energy crisis, they also may amuse the world with their forum shenanigans. Crank, who has administrator rights in the forums, banned Sean, who then turned around and banned SeamusF and Crank. Later Sean put the blame solely on Seamus and unbanned Crank. All of this, and the two accounts that I applied for are still both banned. What a strange place this forum is.
Speaking of Crank, I figured I would post some of the pictures that she has up on her Flickr Account. A while back Sean discussed having a large test setup in a stairwell:
Crank was able to photograph the setup. So at least they don't seem to just make stuff up. Also, here is a screenshot of some video that Steorn allowed Crank to screen capture:
The little black thing in the middle is the special configuration of magnets in resin which Steorn claims produces free energy. This toy looks overly complicated, and even Steorn has said in the past that there are much simpler ways to use the technology than this.
The SPDC went live today. Many forum members commented on problems with the software, especially lack of smiley's. Also, Sean had some interesting things to say today in this forum discussion:
Here's some more clarification on the device to be sold:skeptical:The Kinetica Toy video was shown and that certainly wasn't OU! Again, the impression was it demonstrated "some feature" of their technology. If it didn't why show it? So I suppose the same can be asked of the post-validation PR toy.lol, the power of assumption strikes again, in fact the 'Kinetica Toy' showed a far greater level of OU than we understood at the time - the point is that there is no way to defend a video without test data and there is no way that such test data can be seen as real. The point about the products is that unlike the version of the Kinetica toy 'seen on video' there is no manual intervention, they self sustain.
Maybe it will be like one of those toys you get at McDonalds.
Sean
The product produces energy, up to 100,000 will be made (if the demand is there) but no more than 100,000. It will go on sale only after validation, and we are not taking any pre-orders.And finally:
Sean
Sean is very clear and precise when speaking about the details of the toy Steorn will be selling. He's also not afraid to come out and say he has free energy. I'll reiterate my thought that this is extraordinary.The Pope:Sorry, you answered me before I got my question out!First understand that we are not producing a household item that everyone will want, the production of the product is another part of the validation process. Our business model is licensing - hence we have set an upper limit on the production, the product is more of a statement than something anyone will want IMO - other companies used to large scale manufacture and productization will have to produce consumer products, its not what we do, or will do.Ours produces energy - free energy.Then why do you only expect sales in the thousands then?
Thicket, a regular on the Steorn Forums, started a thread entitled Separating Free Energy Research From a Scam . As crank points out early on in the discussion "my first thought was that that was written by someone who was deliberately targetting Steorn". If Steorn is not a scam, they will still be labelled as one until they release real data. Understandably, they won't until their validation day, so we should just hang tight. As Steorn has pointed out repeatedly: "...who has asked you to believe?"
This forum discussion turned into a yelling match between hairykrishna and Steorn:
hairykrishna: ... Why am I at the bottom? is it because it would take me about 20 minutes to establish that you were talking bollocks?And to cap things off:
Steorn: ...You have as I said in a recent e-mail to you, zero, repeat zero trust from this company.So it's pretty clear now where this whole hairykrishna saga has gone. I like this one the best:
Steorn: Ok, I have to admit that I banned HK there - the only excuse that I have is that it is my birthday present to myselfNot only do we know where the saga is gone, but it seems to be over as well! As Speccy put it, happy birthday Sean!
I've seen the list, but only remember the two names from it that I originally researched. So can't give any more info than that.If you didn't know already, last year, Crank was selected as a forum representative to do some due diligence for the entire forum. She got to see a lot of things that no one else has. She's still doing some investigative work:
I haven't verified as in 'phoned them up and asking them if they really are on the jury'. I checked them out on the websites of the places where they work.Very interesting. It'll be fun to hear what Crank has to say after speaking with one of the original investigators of this technology.
However, at some stage Steorn will have to give out the names of the jury members, so they'd hardly risk giving me the names of scientists who aren't on the jury.
And at some stage over the next week or so I'm to have a chance to speak to a physicist from the first lot (The Disputed-Reality Eight).
On the 19th of August, 2006, I saw the headlines on a lot of the tech sites I read: "Irish Company Claims Free Energy". I eat this stuff up, so I started monitoring Steorn's forums and other sites like SteornWatch.com. Unfortunately SteornWatch.com burnt out very quickly, and no other site really focuses their energy on a daily discussion of Steorn.
I don't blame them really. There is a 99.999% chance that Steorn is full of it, and that they have some other agenda other than what they claim.
So why my interest in Steorn? Well, first off, if there is a 0.001% chance that they have what they are claiming, that's pretty amazing. But more interesting to me and more realistically I want to get to the bottom of what Steorn is all about. Current theory's abound. During the time I've spent on the forums reading, I've seen a lot of deep thought go into possibilities. I've also seen Sean, the CEO of Steorn, do his best to answer questions on the forum. In fact, I would have to say that for a CEO of a well funded startup with outrageous claims and a world of industry to tackle and a scientific community to convince, he's made it one of his priorities to discuss Steorn and it's claims on their forum.
To date I haven't registered or posted on their forums. I've had discussions with friends, including physicists, about this whole thing. We are all interested in getting to the bottom of this. To me this is as good as waiting for the next week of Lost. With Steorn's current claims, we should all have a good feeling for whats going on by the end of this year. In the mean time, I hope to elucidate some of the conversations that Steorn participates in on the forums so that more people out there can get a feel for what is going on. I also hope to dig into any interesting developments.
Enjoy,
SteornTracker
