Today I got reminded that in order to keep track of things, it’s not enough to follow the news. You need to predict the news. And to do anything remotely interesting, you need to make conclusions of the predicted news and act accordingly.

Last summer I got an ad about a deal my bank was doing with another company and based my choices of handling accounts according to that information. Today that deal was announced and covered in news. Yesterday I got a future research technology alert about a company that behaves as if they really had discovered a perpetual motion machine. Only today I realized that the important question is not if it is true, but what will follow if it is true.

Is free energy safe energy?

Intro

An Ireland based company called Steorn has announced it is working on a “free energy” technology they have branded “Orbo”. They describe it:

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 mean 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.

In other words, it is a “perpetual motion machine” – a device considered as the holy grail of physics, something deemed utterly unachievable and contradictory to the laws of nature. In fact, the company itself believes the technology contradicts the principle of conservation of energy:

The sum of these claims [stated above] 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.

Still, if it works, it has to be possible. Steorn says it has had the technology reviewed privately with 8 unnamed scientists. From what I have understood, the scientists themselves preferred to remain anonymous. I can credit them for that. In the current academic climate, a physicist giving a professional scientific statement supporting functional perpetual motion machine (PMM) is equivalent to one committing a professional suicide.

Last August Steorn launched a major PR campaign to find a group of scientists as sceptical to the idea as possible to study it and publish their conclusions. A full page ad in the Economist attracted attention, and reportedly a group of 22 scientists was selected. Steorn has indicated that progress is happening and that results are expected by the end of this year (2007). The scientists are working incognito, again understandably. Who’d get any research done if yelled all the time how insane they were even attempting

The campaign also attracted public attention, and a “watchdog” group demanded more transparency. They elected a representative by vote, and she was granted access to the company and much of the disclosed data. Her account – while devoid of touchy details – answered many of the questions the community had posed.

There have been some arguments claiming that Orbo is a faux. One is that because it was announced first to public media instead through of scientific peer-reviewed publication, it would not likely have survived such scrutiny and thus be unscientific. They may be right, thus pointing actually to a fault in the peer review system: a paper claiming PMM might never even get to the peers. On the other hand, Steorn is a privately owned company which might well have an interest in gaining back at least their own investment, and for that they need to protect their intellectual property somehow. Giving it out in effectively public domain would not serve that purpose. A third counterargument is that we have examples of scientific breakthroughs being first announced thought public media, cloning of Dolly being one of the most spectacular. Then, like now, the scientists had perfectly valid and defendable reasons for this course of action. And finally, they are only calling out to be shown to be right or wrong. If PMM works, who cares how it was announced? If it doesn’t, well, we at least have found one more way it won’t work, and the only losers are the investors of Steorn.

Steorn has also announced that it is not accepting new funders for it’s work, so the argument that they do a hoax for money doesn’t seem to be plausible either. In fact, any clues we have about their future business model seem to be based on the assumption that Orbo works.

However, all this is just tomorrow’s news. If you are interested, go check their site, the Wikipedia entry and the Steorn.net forum. I just wanted to give an introduction. Next comes the beef.