Green IT Toolkit

Steorn's free energy seems curiously expensive

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 22 Aug 2006 10:35 BST

...you go and look and, if you find what you're looking for, your theory is all the stronger. Unpredicted science is even better, when you see something happen, go "Hold on a sec..." and try and work out why. If you can't work that out using the very best science of the time, then you could be onto something.

Chances are, you're not. You've missed experimental error, an aspect of existing theory, even a straightforward misinterpretation of results. To catch this, you put out a paper saying: "I've found this, and I think it's important". Others — not as attached to your discovery as yourself — then check what you've done. They repeat the experiment, but not to reproduce the results: instead, the idea is to pick holes in your logic, find problems, show why it's not important after all. Get past that stage and then and only then is it deemed good enough to build further theories.

McCarthy says Steorn won't do that bit, and won't really explain why. Or rather, he says it will — but in private with hand-picked scientists, because it wants to have a really good explanation of how it works before it's prepared to demonstrate that it does. Despite returning to this point repeatedly with him, I could never quite fathom that. Put the plans up on the site, I said. What would it hurt? Multiple independent demonstrations are difficult to refute.

The conversation ended up with him saying in effect: "This is how we've chosen to do it". There was talk of intellectual property and patents, yet if you want to patent something you keep quiet about it, not take out full-page ads in the Economist. And basic physics has no IP anyway — although I'm sure somebody in America is currently trying to patent the photon.

And thus, despite their claims to the contrary on their website, it's pseudoscience. They don't have to have a theory for it to be science — in fact, it's clear that they don't — but that doesn't matter. Build a box. Show it working. That's enough. Hans Christian Ørsted showed electromagnetism in 1820 and it wasn't fully explained until James Clerk Maxwell's masterwork nearly 50 years later — but it was all science.

A working journalist gets a nose for this sort of thing. I've had a similar experience with a company called SilkRoad, which had an amazing change-the-laws-of-physics optical data transmission method. I've had one with a British data compression outfit set up by a university professor. I've been assured of unbelievable wireless transmission methods that will change the world. Grand claims with no evidence sink. By comparison, look at Intel, HP, IBM and Hitachi: amazing results through the scientific method that flow through to real products.

Whatever Steorn is doing — and in the utter absence of any testable data, the chances of it being a significant scientific achievement are closer to absolute zero than the contents of Lord Kelvin's freezer compartment — it's an expensive experiment. For the price of that Economist advert and whatever they're paying their PR company, they could have built 10 apparatuses that actually demonstrated their effect and Fedex'd them to the major centres of scientific excellence on the planet.

It wouldn't even cost them that much. If they'll send me the plans, I'll build one. Having built it, I'll convince myself that it does produce more energy than it takes in — which will take a glass of water, a resistor, a thermometer, a couple of test meters and some basic mathematics, all of which I already have. I shall then get on the train to Cambridge and refuse to leave until the nice people at the Cavendish take a look at it.

I shall do all this at no charge to Steorn, because it will make me very famous if it turns out to be true and I'll get a great article out of it if it isn't. Furthermore, I don't think it will happen.

Neither will Steorn's amazing machine. Whether it's being driven by madness, genuine misapprehension or some ulterior motive yet to be revealed, it's not being driven by science. Producing rotational energy out of nothing is a great trick and one that its PR company is clearly very good at, but once the silly season's over the spin will die down.