After nearly three years of review, the jury selected by Steorn to validate their claim to a free energy device has issued a verdict: Steorn's process does not produce energy. Despite the negative results of this jury, Steorn continues to allege that they will have such a product available to go into production by the end of this year.
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After nearly three years of review, the jury selected by Steorn to validate their claim to a free energy device has issued a verdict: Steorn's process does not produce energy.
Despite the negative results of this jury, Steorn continues to work on the project and say they believe they will have such a product available to go into production by the end of this year. Members of the private forum who have been given information about some of the key ingredients seems optimistic as well.
When I interviewed Steorn CEO, Sean McCarthy just after they first made their announcement in 2006, he revealed to me that the free energy device was an all-magnet motor.
On June 24, 2009, the Jury Chairman, R. Ian MacDonald wrote:
In August 2006 the Irish company Steorn published an advertisement in the Economist announcing the development of "a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy". Qualified experts were sought to form a "jury" to validate these claims.
Twenty-two independent scientists and engineers were selected by Steorn to form this jury. It has for the past two years examined evidence presented by the company. The unanimous verdict of the Jury is that Steorn's attempts to demonstrate the claim have not shown the production of energy. The jury is therefore ceasing work.
The jury consists of scientists and engineers in relevant fields from Europe and North America, from industry, universities and government laboratories. Information about individual members can be found at http://stjury.ning.com/
Dr. MacDonald holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, and is a Senior Member of IEEE, as well as a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and a Professor (Emeritus) of Electrical Engineering at the University of Alberta. Such credentials would have been of great benefit to the credibility of Steorn's announcement if the jury's ruling had actually ended up being affirmative rather than contradictory to Steorn's original claim.
The negative ruling, however, has not deterred McCarthy. In a response on Steorn's website, he pointed out that the Jury process had actually commenced at the end of 2008, and new developments through the beginning of 2009 have "resolved the key technical problems related to the implementation of Orbo." He said the company "is now focused on commercial launch towards the end of this year, at which time academic and engineering validation [will] be released concurrent with public demonstrations".
I talked to a person who has been involved in a private Steorn forum that has been given quite a bit of information under NDA regarding the Steorn technology for the purpose of replication and the development of instructional materials. He said that from the beginning McCarthy had been very quiet about all matters regarding the jury, which was a separate body, so he didn't know what information they had been given to analyze. Regarding the positive spin that McCarthy was putting on expectations for the near future, he said that it was his observation that this optimistic sentiment is probably shared by most of the private forum members, including himself, though no successful replications have yet been achieved.
Products
While they don't have magnet motors for sale yet, Steorn has developed a couple of products for those involved in magnet motor research and development: a Magnetic Torque Measurement System and a USB Hall Probe. Again, while these tools may have been involved in the Steorn Jury's determination that the Steorn magnet motor technology did not result in energy gain, at least as a byproduct of the process of running vigorous tests, now they have an item they can sell to others involved in similar research. Hence, the analysis efforts of the Steorn Jury can be propagated to other similar technologies.
According to Steorn's site, the Magnetic Torque Measurement System "is specifically designed to measure the 'pure torque' of permanent magnetic interactions during rotary motion. 'Pure Torque' refers to the torque that the system experiences due to magnetic interactions only."
Steorn's USB Hall Probe "represents a unique approach to magnetic field measurement, replacing traditional gaussmeter / teslameter hardware with a real-time USB software interface that integrates seamlessly with standard PC hardware. The SteornLab USB Hall Probe uses Hall Effect sensing to measure magnetic flux densities, while the USB software toolkit replaces traditional gaussmeter display features by providing enhanced graph visualisation and data logging support, all in real-time at a high display sampling rate."
A June 26 article in Wired magazine article picked up by many news services chides the company and product as "Snake oil salesmen hawking [a] $400 magic wand." They seem determined to not let Steorn live down the botched Orbo demonstration two years ago, calling the attempt a "perpetual motion device", not allowing their imagination to consider that magnet motors could be harnessing a principle of magnetism no more magic than the tidal forces that cause the ocean to rise and fall.
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SOURCES:
- http://stjury.ning.com/forum/topics/jury-announcement - The official jury announcement
- http://www.steorn.com/news/releases/?id=1151 - The official response by Steorn
Related Stories on Steorn Jury Results
- Irish 'energy for nothing' gizmo fails jury vetting - (Irish Times; June 24, 2009)
- Steorn's free energy device rejected - (Gadget Republic; June 24, 2009)
- PERPETUAL-COMMOTION - Report by Mark Goldes (OpEd News; June 24, 2009)
- Steorn Jury Quits Orbo Study - (OhMy News; June 26, 2009)
- Steorn Jury Announcement - (ZPEnergy; June 24, 2009)
See also
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Comments
You can't possibly THAT stupid!
Gee, what a surprise!
By the way, any idea how many of those products Steorn has actually delivered? Some people on the Steorn forum tried to find out. Nobody copped to owning a single one. One person had ordered a Hall probe some time ago and it had not been delivered nor had the order been acknowledged. Hell of a way to run a business!
First off let me say Im surprised Steron actually used real scientists with some very good backgrounds. I thought they were scamming on that part but they werent so I have to given them some credit. However Steron never had a working device and its obvious the scientists got tired of being strung along for two years with nonsense.
I am going to make another one of my famous predictions (Ive been 100% correct) Im going to predict Steron doesnt have a working device released by the end of this year (2009) as they are claiming they will. I will predict they come up with some excuse to delay it until next year then even more excuses will follow next year.
Steorn remains at odds with the facts. The jury issued a statement clarifying that they evaluated equipment demonstrations and reports from Steorn until June 2009. The jury report site at www.stjury.ning.com will come down 7/10.
Steorn's story that jury disbanded in 2008 is false. Steorn's story that they had technical problems that prevented demonstration of energy generation through 2008 is at odds with their claim from the outset that their scheme was "always proven to work". Steorn's claim that they fixed whatever they claim was wrong in 2009 runs contrary to the jury's statements that Steorn never demonstrated energy generation and that the jury functioned into June 2009.
Wake up! Steorn are just the latest in the long line of liars and fools who promote magnet motors and other perpetual motion machines that will never work.
Steorn are on the MPI infinite year program. They will forever promise something next year.
I hope that the investors sue them and the big fish go to jail.
Steorn is and was just a bunch of people sitting at their Macs surfing the net and burning off the investor cash until it runs down to zero.
“The jury issued a statement clarifying that they evaluated equipment demonstrations and reports from Steorn until June 2009.”
Penny, can you please link to where the Jury said this and what they got to look at? Even though it irks me to say so I’m still a fence sitter. While there is tremendous evidence that Steorn is run by a bunch of twits. There’s still nothing I can look at and out right dismiss as far as their device and claim is concerned. Yes “because there is nothing to look at” or “CoE.” On CoE at least, the laws of physics have been overturned or expanded before. The “laws” are really more just guidelines for engineers so they can take theory and apply it on a practical level. Parts of physics are still really just some very clever guess work I.E., dark matter, gravitons, string theory, etc. Though, the probability of all this Steorn stuff being a scam has steadily increased from “benefit of the doubt” to “I wonder when they are going to jail?”
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