ELFT HÍRADÓ

[Toro Laszlo <torolaszlo AT yahoo.com>]

Tisztelt Kollegak,

Mashol is vannak ingyen energiat eloallito
felefedezok.
Ami meg eredekesebb Fleischmann-tol kertek velemenyt!

Toro Laszlo 

These men think they're about to change the world
Friday August 25, 2006
The Guardian
Heard the one about the two Irishmen who say they can
produce limitless amounts of clean, free energy?
Plenty of scientists have - but few are taking them
seriously. Steve Boggan investigates

Do you remember that awful feeling as a child on
Christmas Day when Santa left you the toy you wanted .
. . without any batteries? This feeling comes to me as
I meet Sean McCarthy and Richard Walshe, two men
making the claim that they are about to change the
world - for
ever.
These dynamic and personable businessmen from Dublin
insist that they have found a way of producing free,
clean and limitless energy out of thin air. And they
are so confident that they have thrown down the
gauntlet to the scientific community in a bid to prove
that they have rewritten the laws of physics. Last
week, frustrated that they couldn't persuade
scientists to take their work seriously, McCarthy,
Walshe and the other 28 shareholders of Steorn, a
privately owned technology research company, took out
a full-page
advertisement in the Economist. In it, they called
upon scientists to form a 12-member jury to decide
whether their free-energy system is real, hoaxed,
imagined or incorrectly well-intentioned.

So, as they prepare to demonstrate this wonder of
science to me at their modest offices near the Liffey,
I feel all the excitement of Christmas Day. There is a
test rig with wheels and cogs and four magnets
meticulously aligned so as to create the maximum
tension between their fields and one other magnet
fixed to a point opposite.
A motor rotates the wheel bearing the magnets and a
computer takes 28,000 measurements a second. The
magnets, naturally, act upon one another. And when it
is all over, the computer tells us that almost three
times the amount of energy has come out of the system
as went in. In fact, this piece of equipment is 285%
efficient.

That's a lot of "free energy" and, supposedly, a slap
in the face for one of physics' most basic laws, the
principle of conservation of energy: in an isolated
system (the planet, say), energy can be neither
created nor destroyed; it can only be converted from
oneform into another.

"We couldn't believe it at first, either," says
McCarthy, chief
executive of the company. He is a 40-year-old engineer
born in
Birmingham but brought up in Dublin. After a couple of
decades in
the oil industry, McCarthy, Walshe and two others set
up Steorn as a
technology and intellectual- property development
company. "We did
difficult things. If someone had an idea that they
wanted to make
work, we'd work on it with them, help them recruit
staff and get
them through to their first product."

Then, by chance, came their "discovery". They were
called upon by the police to help gain forensic
evidence against "skimmers" who cloned the cards of
people using ATMs. Subsequently, when banks approached
asking how they could prevent such fraud, Steorn
advised that the best way was to catch the small
number of people committing most of the crime. They
came up with a system of 16 tiny CCTV cameras that
could guarantee recording the identities of the
perpetrators.

"We wanted the cameras to be independently powered, so
we tried out small solar and ambient wind generators,"
says McCarthy. "We wanted to improve the performance
of the wind generators - they were only about 60-70%
efficient - so we experimented with certain generator
configurations and then one day one of our guys
[co-founder Mike Daly] came in and said: 'We have a
problem. We appear to be getting out more than we're
putting in.'"

That was three years ago. Since then, McCarthy says,
the company has spent £2.7m developing the technology.
Steorn has also gone into partnership with a European
micro-generator company to develop prototypes.

In Steorn's theory, fixed magnets could act upon a
moving magnet in such a way as to make it a virtual
perpetual motion generator. In an electrical appliance
- a computer, kettle, mobile phone or toy - that would
provide all the power for its lifetime. Of course,
free- energy cars, power plants and water-pumping
systems could follow. A better world indeed.

But then that Christmas Day feeling kicks in; doubts
about the power source. 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".

"No one in the scientific community wants to become
embroiled in the kind of controversy that Pons and
Fleishmann faced," says McCarthy. "With our challenge,
we're hoping to provide a respectable public platform
for serious evaluation of the technology. Then,
perhaps, scientists will feel confident enough to
challenge the conventional view."

Certainly, the Steorn team seems genuine and
well-intentioned. Walshe says that if the technology
is accepted it will be licensed to manufacturers, but
given away to electrical and water projects in
developing countries. And, until their claims have
been assessed by the jury, McCarthy says they won't be
accepting any investor offers. So if this is a hoax,
it would appear not to be a money-making scheme;
Walshe says the Economist ad alone cost £75,000.

"Before we went public, we realised that if we're
wrong it could have a very adverse effect on our
business, so we're not doing this lightly," says
McCarthy. "We expected stick, and we're getting it
already. We've had a lot of abusive emails and
telephone calls - people telling us to watch our
backs, that sort of thing. Someone even published my
home address on a website."

The conspiracy theorists are, indeed, having a field
day in a forum section set up by the company on its
website, www.steorn.com.

"We've been accused of being a publicity stunt for the
next Microsoft Xbox gaming system because some of the
artwork on our website was similar to theirs," says
Walshe. "Some people have said our offices don't exist
and one accused us of simply being a call centre in
Australia because one of our telephonists has an
Australian accent. My favourite is the one that says
we are a CIA or oil-industry front intended to
discredit research into free and clean energy. In
other words, our claims are deliberately false and
when they are found out to be, it will be a blow for
all free and
clean research."

Steorn says it has seven patents pending on its
technology, though it is difficult to see what can be
patented; magnets already exist and so do the 360
degrees of a circle. Yet it is the positioning of
the magnets that seems to be at the heart of this
"new" energy. And, as McCarthy points out, the Patent
Office rejects inventions that fly in the face of such
fundamental principles as, say, the conservation of
energy. Nevertheless, as of yesterday, almost 3,000
people claiming to be scientists had expressed an
interest in sitting on the Steorn jury. The 12 best
will be chosen at the end of the month and then
testing will begin.

"We've been advised it could take between a week and
10 years," says McCarthy. "We don't have any doubts.
We've conducted meticulous research and we're getting
such phenomenal results - up to 400% efficiency - that
small glitches and errors in testing can be ruled out.
We really believe we've found something that can
change the world."

The rest of us can only wait and see. In the meantime,
I ask Martin Fleischmann, the cold-fusion scientist,
now 79 and retired, what he thought of the Steorn
project.

"I am actually a conventional scientist," he says,
"but I do accept that the existing [quantum
electro-dynamic] paradigm is not adequate. If what
these men are saying turns out to be true, that would
be proof that the paradigm was inadequate and we would
have tocome up with some new theory. But I don't think
their claims are credible. No, I cannot see how the
position of magnetic fields allows one to create
energy."

With great charm, Dr Fleischmann wishes the Steorn
team luck. And if their "free" energy can light up a
developing-world village or the eyes of a child with a
toy, then perhaps we all should.


======================================================================
Laszlo Toro PhD
senior scientist

Institute of Public Health Timisoara
Radiation Hygiene Dept.

RO 300226 Timisoara
Bd. V. Babes 16-18
Romania
ph. +40 256 492101 ext 34
fax +40 256 492101
e-mail 
toro AT ispt.ro
       
torolaszlo AT yahoo.com
======================================================================

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