Monday, August 21, 2006

Perpetual motion machine challenge...hoax?

A company by the name of Steorn claims it thinks it may have stumbled upon "free energy", a.k.a. perpetual motion. Of course, this has been claimed by many in the past, only to be proven hoaxes, scams, or just plain bad math.

The difference here is that Steorn is challenging all scientists to try to prove, one way or the other, whether their device works. And they say they won't take moeny until AFTER the scientific community has released their findings.

According to the company, they stumbled upon this accidentally, and now want the scientific community to verify what they believe to be a perpetual motion machine. And if scientists find that it is not the case, so be it.

At face value, this seems very legitimate...why would a hoaxer go through this kind of scrutiny? But since a perpetual motion machine is widely regarded as impossible according to the first law of thermodynamics, one must think what else could this be?

My thoughts? It could be one of three things:

  1. Legitimate claim, bad math. Steorn thinks they did it, but miscalculated energy input/output.
  2. A big social experiment. Let's see how many scientists are suckered into throwing away the basis of their beliefs on the remote chance this cold be real. Or what is the current public reaction to claims of this nature when money is removed from the equation.
  3. Someone finally reverse engineered alien technology and got it to work. Everyone knows that flying saucers are powered by magnetic forces.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is why aliens first landed on Mars. It was the iron core that sucked the magnetic engines to it and they were stuck there for years sending out SOS to earth hoping we could help them build a large craft to escape. All they could come up with where small crafts that could make it to earth but not all the way back home. Then they were forced underground because the water on the surface dried up. They are still stuck there today due to those darn magnetic engines and the large amounts of iron on Mars.

Oh yeah the perpetual machine is real too, I help Habbie the alien tweak it on a mission back in the 70's. Bastard took it with him, and right after I talked to Jimmy Carter about how it was going to save is presidency.