Infinite Clean Energy
 

The Irish based company Steorn has laid claims that they have invented a perpetual motion device called the Orbo which produces infinite clean energy. They are currently in the process of demonstrating the technology at London's Kinetica museum. If the device actually does what they claim it to do, this new technology will revolution the world and change all our lives.

Links:

Engadget


Wired


AP

Or maybe not...

I wonder if it's a prank, or if they're just victims of their own hype.

Violators of the Third Law of Thermodynamics don't last long. Entropy quickly claims their careers.

We don't really need perpetual motion, we should just re-use some of the wasted motion we already have (like using the braking system in a vehicle to help power the propulsion system - brakes currently dissipate that energy as waste heat) ...

At any rate, how does a perpetual motion machine constitue a power source? If it were a perfect, frictionless machine, the minute you tapped into it to power something, you'd introduce a friction which would drag it down...right?

These guys are claiming that not only have they broken even, they've got extra.

it's call a Prius

The Insight does the same thing. The other benefit is that the brake pads last a long time.

You don't get something for nothing. The closest thing I have ever seen to free energy, is a farm methane gas plant. I have built these on a small scale, using everything from kitchen scraps, to human waste. These things work, if we could get past using human waste we could have an unlimited power source in our homes.

This probably is a hoax, but the whole idea of Laws of physics is a bad idea. Being able to fly used to be against the laws of whatever. I'm sure there are a lot of unimaginable things we will some day do.

How do you feel about the Friendly Suggestions of Physics?

Being able to fly was never against the law of physics.

Here is a list of the laws of science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laws_in_science

It actually is possible to break these laws but we have no control over that and that is a completely different topic.

It used to be the law, that no human could run a mile under 4 minutes. Then in 1954 some one finally did. Shortly after that, lots of people did.

I don't think we have even close to a full understanding of how the universe works. I think we have theories, that are either correct, or incorrect. Take the law of gravity for instance. It sure makes sense to me. I was taught it in school, and I just accept it as the truth, but what if it's wrong, what if it is basically right, but there is an exception to the rule.

As I said before, this perpetual motion machine is probably a hoax, but I don't think progress is made, by accepting what has been taught to us as absolute truth.

Can you give me a definition of a physical law? I think that might be our misunderstanding. I think we are talking about two different things.

You are right about that but the definition of theory is much different than most people take it as. For a law of physics to be a fact, lets take gravity for instance, it has to be proven to work in every instance possible. That means we would have to make sure gravity has worked in every instance and that is impossible so it impossible for some theories to become laws. But, out of millions of tests, there has not been one test that has even made a hint that the theory of gravity could still be wrong. We are 99.9999999% sure that gravity is right, there is a possibility that it is wrong, but that would most likely because of a unified theory and everything would be different when/if that happens.

Yes, but there are no alternate theories to gravity or evolution that has any scientific backing so we can only teach one theory.

Every known instance.