President of Ireland Photographed with Steorn

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)

Also note that Sean McCarthy spoke as part of the Docklands Innovation Park Success Stories Session at the Anniversary conference. If anyone happens to have a transcript from the event or more details, please send them our way!

A Weekend Update and a Possible Theory

Over the weekend, Dr. Mike has made some progress on his experiment:

I have a microcontroller board from another project which I'm going to modify. It will use 5 analog inputs (3 accelerometer, 2 magnetometer) and spit out serial data, hopefully at 230400 baud. I'll try for ascii so I can just use a terminal emulator to capture the data. Modification parts are on order.

I've got rubber/plastic coated neos (N42 class) being shipped. Shapes are 1/2"X1"X1/4" with N-S thru the 1/4" and 1/2" diam X 1/4" thick disk. Not exactly what I wanted, but easily available and cheap.

Also, in the comments of The Tickets Have Arrived here on Free Energy Tracker, 15-india-street points us to toiz's attempt to explain how the Steorn effect might work:

http://www.madpages.com/fe/

Also, thanks go to alsetoken who posted this link to photos of Steorn's test machinery.
I hadn't seen some of those photos before, even though they were posted back in November!

One final note, this is the 100th blog entry here at Free Energy Tracker since March. We've had a lot to talk about! My favorite part about this whole experience is the collaboration, which is in full swing right now. Together I hope we can figure out what the heck is going on, be it galactic conquest or galactic embarrassment!

For Those Basement Mechanics Out There

Unfortunately it's been an extremely slow week for those of us tracking Steorn. Today, the most interesting thing that happened was Chili Fries sharing The Basement Mechanic's Guide to Testing Perpetual Motion Machines link with us here at Free Energy Tracker. I especially enjoyed section four on magnetic motors:

Magnet-motors are all the rage these days. But even folks who have had physics and engineering courses are often deficient in understanding of magnetic fields and magnetic materials.

Magnets In Motion

Today there was an interesting discussion in the forums debating Sean's claim of orbo's power density at around 0.5 watts per cubic centimeter. pcstru4 starts the thread off:

The probability of them breaking CoE might still be 0.000001% but the probability of 0.5w per cc using only the motive forces of even the most powerful rare earth magnets, is 0. Steorn's claim of 0.5w per cc is simply false in any configuration, stop/start or continous motion. Fact.

I haven't taken the time to do the math, so I can't say one way or the other if this is "Fact" or not. WhiteLite did a little digging and had this to say:

OK, I've seen figures of 2.5W/cc for electric motors, (which contain electromagnets and therefore magnets with field that can be switched on/off), so if we assume that permenant magnets can be more powerful than electromagnets for the same size and that Steorn's device doesn't have to rely on permenant magnets being "switched off" I think a figure of 0.5W/cc is easily reasonable.

cyrilsmith had some thoughts and a suggested experiment:

Something wrong with your math there. Forget about acceleration, just measure force.v distance. I have some NdFe magnets that are 25mm dia and 5mm thick, magnetized along the thickness direction. I can place these in a tube glued upright to the bench, put two magnets in opposing each other.

And finally Dr. Mike puts all of this into perspective:

Hi JiO,

I don't think there's any problem with physics. I do not think power density is useful, energy density is far more useful. It doesn't really matter how much time it takes to get the energy out, what matters is how much is there.

It takes energy to create a magnetic field. It takes energy to create a mountain lake. Once formed, the energy can be extracted later. Using a water wheel with a magnet tied to it you can create electricity. Using electricity and a superconductor, you can create a powerful magnetic field.

I don't think the power density claim is valid either, but I also don't think it really matters. There's no such thing as "free energy" or "over unity" or "perpetual motion". I'm really not to worried about "paradigm shifts".

It's unclear if pcstru4 was off on his calculations, or if anyone has reached an agreement on the topic. It's always fun though to read about other people's experiments with N42 grade neo magnets.

If there are past threads that you found interesting, let me know. I have a feeling we'll be focused on the past over the next couple of months while we wait for the July Demo.

Silent No More

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