What is wrong with what Steorn is doing?

[Starthinker]

In the latest commentary Randi comments that perhaps someone was hired to engineer the device to receive secret energy from somewhere to make it appear that it's never stopping. But it never moved! You don't need to supply secret energy to an item at rest.

I won't give the secret away, but when the old clock museum was open in Rockford, IL, they had a clock with the hands mounted in plain glass and the time keeping mechanisms housed in a box at the base. No gears, chains, or anything were connected to the hands yet it kept time. I later learned the secret and can see how this can be used to supply secret energy to a "perpetually" turning wheel. And when I saw his device and what it was made of and his excuses for it not working, the first thing I thought was "he must have seen that clock!"

 

[BillyJoe]

I don't mind if someone wants to be a spoilsport on this one.

 

[gynxmonkeypaw]

perpetual motions and mathematical obviousness...

For the Steorn perpetual motion machine and the one it is compared to, the obvious problem is this:
(According to the diagram of the old idea) there are 12 chambers and 5! are dedicated to forward motion, 4 SEEM to be in drag and the other 3 are neutral.
THIS is a fallacy! Actually the 3 neutral are drag and therefore there are 7 of 12 which produce drag. and not the 5 vs 4 which seems to GIVE perpetual a chance.

The Steorn model TRIES to narrow this by having smaller and more chambers... but if you look closely you can see that a ratio of 7/12 will be drag and only 5/12 will be impulse and momentum!!! so there is a 1/6 LOSS not a 1/5 gain and the Steorn version will narrow that but the MAJORITY will be dragging NOT CREATING!!!
Very visual, but very obvious.

Another hard thing is that NATURE is physical, BUT creationists and WOOWOO are INSPIRATIONAL! not physical... ergo the claimants will ALWAYS FAIL as the inspirational over 6 Millenia has diverged from the physical Reality that the gulf of verbal and physical can NOT be bridged by words alone, if the person they are trying to convince is SOBER and EDUCATED! This shoots "charisma" in the foot, and why they target uneducated, OR find SOBER skeptics who have a VICE for altered states of conciousness. It is also an indication of economic exploiters trying to find weakness... Known as "AN OPEN MIND".

 

[Foolmewunz]

For the Steorn perpetual motion machine and the one it is compared to, the obvious problem is this:
(According to the diagram of the old idea) there are 12 chambers and 5! are dedicated to forward motion, 4 SEEM to be in drag and the other 3 are neutral.
THIS is a fallacy! Actually the 3 neutral are drag and therefore there are 7 of 12 which produce drag. and not the 5 vs 4 which seems to GIVE perpetual a chance.

The Steorn model TRIES to narrow this by having smaller and more chambers... but if you look closely you can see that a ratio of 7/12 will be drag and only 5/12 will be impulse and momentum!!! so there is a 1/6 LOSS not a 1/5 gain and the Steorn version will narrow that but the MAJORITY will be dragging NOT CREATING!!!
Very visual, but very obvious.

Another hard thing is that NATURE is physical, BUT creationists and WOOWOO are INSPIRATIONAL! not physical... ergo the claimants will ALWAYS FAIL as the inspirational over 6 Millenia has diverged from the physical Reality that the gulf of verbal and physical can NOT be bridged by words alone, if the person they are trying to convince is SOBER and EDUCATED! This shoots "charisma" in the foot, and why they target uneducated, OR find SOBER skeptics who have a VICE for altered states of conciousness. It is also an indication of economic exploiters trying to find weakness... Known as "AN OPEN MIND".

Welcome, GYNXMONKEYPAW (make some noise so we can come up with a nickname - I ain't typing that more than once!). Lovely meandering closing paragraph. And I use "welcome" advisedly - two posts in 16 months!

Credit due to Dr. Buzzo. Check his site for a recap of some of the info coming out of gruntled and/or disgruntled Steorn Developers' Forum guys.

http://depletedcranium.com/?p=54

 

[jimbob]

Looking at the pictures of Orbo, it reminded me of a variation of
the overbalanced wheel, only using magnetism.

I presume someone else has posted a link to The museum of unworkable devices


Jim

 

[Mojo]

Looking at the pictures of Orbo, it reminded me of a variation of
the overbalanced wheel, only using magnetism.

I presume someone else has posted a link to The museum of unworkable devices

Yup.

That's what it looked a bit like, but their patent is to do with some sort of means of turning magnetic fields on and off, or shielding them, so that suggests (if the patent is anything to do with the OU device) that it isn't any sort of overbalanced wheel.

What the Steorn wheel actually looks like to me, now that I think of it with reference to Randi's mention of puffs of air in the current commentary, is a waterwheel. Remember that the device was to be made of plexiglass to show that there was no visible means of power, air currents are invisible, and the device was to be set up in what looked like a sealed case.

 

[BillC]

It would actually be easy to conceal a very small brushless DC motor together with a watch battery within the axle of the disc. With low friction bearings, such a device would be capable for running for some time before the energy source was discharged.

 

[jimbob]

It would actually be easy to conceal a very small brushless DC motor together with a watch battery within the axle of the disc. With low friction bearings, such a device would be capable for running for some time before the energy source was discharged.

Some discussion on Badscience.net, now up and running again.

Magic Sean said:

The wind down time is usually about three minutes

Ah, interesting, that could be a useful little number to know actually.
That puts the load due to bearing friction (the only load this thing's driving) at about 0.5mW,
so a half-inch watch battery could power the gizmo for about 7 days.

I have a very strong suspicion that this number's going to be worth remembering around the time of the next demo.

 

[jimbob]

Mojo's idea of a "airwaterwheel" has a lot going for it: simplicity, the plexiglass as a classic bit of misdirection, and maybe even the lights setting up convection currents and snafuing their original "demo".

 

[Horatius]

That's what it looked a bit like, but their patent is to do with some sort of means of turning magnetic fields on and off, or shielding them, so that suggests (if the patent is anything to do with the OU device) that it isn't any sort of overbalanced wheel.

Actually, when that application first came to light, Steorn made it clear that it wasn't a part of their OU device. So we either still have no real information, or they were lying. Either way, we're still in the dark!

 

[Foolmewunz]

As I mentioned in that other thread (pesky mods wouldn't merge them, and they're running concurrently on the same topic....)

The night of the debacle one of the Steorn forumites posited the idea of the slots being, as Sean said, for air, and the possibility of the lights and cooling system being used for creating thermals.

ETA: Link to long-winded post of July 7... http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=2748067#post2748067

 

[volatile]

An interesting (but very evasive) interview with the enigmatic Sean was just posted over at Engadget...

 

[Foolmewunz]

I think the quote from the semi-anonymous Dr. Mike in that article pretty well sums up my take on this at the end (if this is the end...).

"My conclusion after going through all this is that Steorn is neither hoax nor scam. It is delusion. (snip) QUOTE]

 

[Horatius]

Something for anyone else who might be interested, while searching for something else at work today, I ran across the Canadian version of their only patent application to date:

http://patents1.ic.gc.ca/details?patent_number=2581726&language=EN

Still nothing to do with their OU device, alas!

 

[Michael C]

An interesting (but very evasive) interview with the enigmatic Sean was just posted over at Engadget...

Having read that interview, I'm becoming more and more convinced that Sean McCarthy hasn't tried to mount a scam: he seems to be truly deluded.

Can anyone make sense of what he says here (quoted from above-linked interview)? :

"I think the largest efficiency that we would have physically measured would be about 485%. These numbers can be misleading. For example we might be getting 485% per joule, which means were getting 4.85 J out, but there could be a configuration that's could be delivering 130% efficiency yet delivering 10 joules. So, the technology itself is pretty well researched in terms of punch line efficiency it's 485%, but that wouldn't be the optimum output of the system. Obviously we're more focused on direct power output of a device than the punchline numbers. 485 to 1 is 4.85, but we could easily say, 10 to 12 joules off of a system is going to have a lower punch line efficiency. And power output is obviously the key factor, energy output is obviously the key factor."

 

[BillyJoe]

Perhaps a device that is 485% efficient is so fragile it can only accept an input of 1 joule before falling apart (it would put out a maximum of 4.85 joule). The device that is 130% efficient is a little more robust and can accept 7.5 joules as input and put out 10 joules.

Surely there will come a time when Sean will choke on his words as he realises just what bs he is regurgitating.

 

[Mojo]

We came up with an explanation for the recent debacle at Skeptics in the Pub last night.

The clear display case was the giveaway: they were planning to miniaturise David Blaine and get him to run around in a little wheel for a week with no visible input of energy. It seems that the miniaturisation procedure would only work in Dublin.

 

[a_unique_person]

So is this thread dead now? Is Steorn going to quietly close up shop, grab what's left of the money, and disappear?

 

[hdeasy]

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’.

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.

 

[volatile]

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