Devangshu Datta: This science is stranger than fiction

VIEWPOINT

On August 18, readers of The Economist were piqued by a full-page advertisement that said: "All great ideas begin as blasphemies. Imagine""a world with an infinite supply of pure energy; Never having to recharge your phone; Never having to refuel your car".

The ad, which cost around £75,000, claimed Steorn, a Dublin-based company, had discovered a technology that "produced free, clean, constant energy". It claimed that the technology had been validated "off the record, behind closed doors" by eight scientists and it had "always been proven to work".

Now, Steorn was issuing a challenge to the scientific community to test and publish the findings. It invited scientists to sign up for a 12-member jury, to receive the schematics and test at leisure. Steorn said that it would attempt commercialisation only after this process was complete.

In an interview, the company's CEO, Sean McCarthy, said: "We have developed a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy. The energy isn't being converted from any other source. It's literally created. It provides a constant stream of clean energy."

Not surprisingly, the claim caused near-hysteria. Every so often, cranks and fraudsters claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine (PMM) running on heat, magnets, hydraulics, whatever. Some inventors are deluded; others are out to delude the ignorant. Cartoonists such as Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson have come as close to making a PMM as anyone!

Few "inventors" have the wherewithal to take out full-page ads in the mainstream media, however. And, the normal route to validation is to publish papers and enter peer-review, rather than to throw out challenges to scientists at large.

As any high-school philosopher will tell you, a theory is scientific only if it can be subjected to falsification. That is, it must be possible to design experiments that throw up counter-examples if a given theory is false. There are disputes about certain cutting-edge theories such as the possibility of fusion at room temperature.

But some laws have passed the point of debate""centuries of experimentation and observation have failed to find counter-examples. One such is the immutable law of Conservation of Energy (which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed), otherwise known as the First Law of Thermodynamics. Another is the Second Law of Thermodynamics (also called the Law of Entropy), which says that in a closed system there is a loss of energy. There is absolute consensus on these. So much so, most patent offices refuse to grant PMM patents.

Steorn (a Gaelic word meaning "to guide or manage") is a 19-person outfit specialising in fraud! It develops core technologies that address counterfeit crime in areas such as plastic card and optical disc. The company has also provided forensic and expert witness services to British, Irish and international law enforcement agencies.

It made a £200,000 loss in 2003, when it last published its balance sheet. Since then, it claims to received over ¤2.5 million as capital infusion from high net-worth individuals. It is being represented by a high-profile PR agency, Citigate Dewe Rogerson.

In a demonstration to The Guardian, a computer display reported the device (an all-magnet motor with no electromagnetic components) to have an efficiency of 285 per cent (thereby violating both laws of thermodynamics). Steorn also claims that the device can be scaled to power anything from a "flashlight to an airplane".

In media interviews, McCarthy has stated that they discovered the technology while fooling with magnetic configurations in 2003. After three years of experimentation, they are looking for validation. They intend to license their patents once they have that.

Is this an attempt to sell the scientific equivalent of the Taj Mahal? Or is it some sort of viral marketing campaign for a new anti-fraud technology? Perhaps we'll know on September 8, when Steorn will close registration and choose its jury.