This evening, I was playing with my son. We had four of these elongated egg-shaped magnets in our hands and we were talking about magnetism. To an 8 year old kid, and to an adult too, magnets are something magical. While all magnetic materials just fall to the ground, two magnets interact with each other in a totally different ways. We take magnets for granted (to stick stuff to refrigerators for example). But magnetism is still a mysterious, highly interesting aspect of physics.

I am no physicist. But after this whole Steorn story broke I have a totally new respect for magnetism. I’ve been blogging about the story quite obsessively (not as obsessively as the guy behind the Steron focused blog Steornwatch.com or as the people debating the hell out of the claims on Steorn’s own discussion forums).

Why blog about it?

Well, it’s either that we’re witnessing the second re-invention of fire, with unthinkable implications for the entire human race.

Or we’re witnessing one of the biggest media hoaxes, social experiments or even scams, of our time.

Or we’re witnessing a well-intentioned company about to make themselves the biggest fools of the 21st century.

If that’s not worth my blogging time, I don’t know what is.

One of the questions that I asked Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn, yesterday during the live online chat the company held was: “you claim is one in a string of free energy claims that goes back centuries. What makes Steorn different”. That question was not answered.

The science and the string of failures that stand against free energy claims are staggering. But, as I discovered, the internet is full of people who firmly believe in the possibility of free energy. From scientists, to strange companies to nut heads. The world of free energy claims on the net is fascinating.

One of the people I learned more about while trying to follow this story is the well know, Yugoslav/Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), who invented nothing less than Radio communication, just for example. Although he is considered to have gone eccentric in his later years with some of his theories and claim, he is named by many “the inventor of the 20th century”.

One of the things that Tesla said was that “one day man will connect his apparatus to the very wheelwork of the universe… and the very forces that motivate the planets in their orbits and cause them to rotate will rotate his own machinery,”

This quote is used by many who believe that energy can be gotten from ‘hidden’ sources in the universe. For sure, this quote is resurfacing again in the context of the Steorn story.

In the past 24 hours there have been a number of interviews with McCarthy. Big media outlets are still uninterested in this story it seems although ABC News covered it (skeptically, quoting a famous physicist). Today there was an amazing article in the Guardian and two voice interviews with McCarthy (one on Steronwatch and one on SciScoop).

McCarthy and his company are coming across as straightforward, sincere and confident, denying any hoaxing or scamming and insisting that the only reason for their high profile challenge of the world’s scientific community via the web and using an full page ad in the Economist was that they wanted to get science angry enough and, consequently, get their technology claims validated by a jury of 12 of the “most cynical” and not just “skeptical” scientists.

But it was the Guardian article today that had the most startling news. The Guardian writer Steve Boggan, says that he actually saw the machine in action and that he saw the reading coming out of the test equipment:

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.

This was the first time during the past seven days that any details about the machine’s construction or level of energy output have emerged.

Yet a Guardian journalist is not a 12-scientist-strong jury. Steorn’s CEO said that he is aware that the testing of his technology could take months or even years. But he is confident of the outcome: a confirmation of his claims to have discovered free energy!

A lot of people on the net are up in arms over the claims. The first law of thermodynamics, something that is a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe is supposedly broken by this claim. It’s either that or the Steorn engineers have accidentally hit upon a way to harvest a source of energy that has been theorized about and called things like Dark Energy or Zero Point Energy by some.

Others are providing links to older, apparently failed claims of similar technologies. Like this one from 1980:

Shadows of other failed experiment are also looming, like the claim of ‘cold fusion’ by the scientists Pons and Fleishmann in 1989. Steorn are aware of what happened then. It was mentioned in the Guardian article:

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”.

The Guardian interviewed Fleishmann for the article:

“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 to come 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.

If there is one thing I learned from this whole Steorn story so far it’s that we, as a human race, need to rethink our sources of energy. Wether Steorn technology turns out to be Fire 2.0 or a hoax of universal proportions, we need to realize that ‘free energy’, be it from the sun, the wind or the movement of ebb and flow is all around us. We are, perhaps witnessing the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel economy. It’s a process that might takes decades (if not a century). But think of that anyway.