More free energy

Well, the steorn machine rolls ever onward. The guys in Mount Street in Dublin are getting a lot of attention for their claims, including items on ABC in the US and now on Fox News. (You can download an interview of Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn from here ). It has been featured on news programmes all over the world and in hundreds of newspapers. There is even an official sceptics group now, located at www.steornwatch.com.

The Guardian in the UK published a nice piece last week on this story, including the following:

According to McCarthy and Walshe, the marketing manager, there have been no fewer than eight independent validations of their work conducted by electrical engineers and academics "with multiple PhDs" from world-class universities. But none of them will talk to me, even off the record. I am promised a diagram explaining how the system works, but then Steorn holds it back, saying its lawyers are concerned about intellectual property rights. And that European partner, the one with the moving, almost perpetual, prototypes? It won't talk to me either and Steorn has undertaken not to name it.

"It's the Pons-Fleischmann factor," says McCarthy, and he and Walshe look at each other darkly. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann were the last experts to excite the scientific community with free-energy claims when, in 1989, they reported producing a nuclear-fusion reaction at room temperature - what happens in the sun at millions of degrees centigrade. The subsequent controversy resulted in the scientists being pilloried, even though the scientific community remains divided to this day over claims of "low-energy nuclear reactions".

This is possibly the ultimate wait-and-see. But if it's possible, just imagine a world freed from the shackles of energy consumation costs. Free travel, no pollution, ever lasting watches and mobile phones - there's a lot of neat stuff that could be done. And yet it's impossible. Or is it? Either way, it's certainly entertaining.