Checking the calendar... Nope, definitely not April 1st. These must be genuinely real idiots, not jokers.
"And physics allows for the construction of resonant devices to detect and gather in that energy."
Yep. It's called an antenna. Or aerial, depending on where you're from.
"Steorn issued its challenge through an advertisement in the Economist magazine this week quoting Ireland's Nobel prize-winning author George Bernard Shaw who said that "all great truths begin as blasphemies". "
Asking people to think outside of the box. Good. But, 99% of blasphemies not only begin as blasphemies but end there as well. And I wonder why had they had to advertise in The Economist, and not made headlines on the front page of that same paper.
"What we have developed is 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," McCarthy said."
I think one of the basic properties of fields is that as you travel on the same fieldline, you can't gain or lose energy. But maybe I should've paid more attention in physics class. slapping forehead No wait, I'm missing the point, this is a radically new way of -creating- energy. Physics laws no longer apply.
"McCarthy said Steorn had not set out to develop the technology, but "it actually fell out of another project we were working on"."
Lemme guess. Converting lead into gold?
""For the first six months that we looked at it we literally didn't believe it ourselves. Over the last three years it had been rigorously tested in our own laboratories, in independent laboratories and so on," he said. "But we have been unable to get significant scientific interest in it. We have had scientists come in, test it and, off the record, they are quite happy to admit that it works. "But for us to be able to commercialise this and put this into peoples' lives we need credible, academic validation in the public domain and hence the challenge," McCarthy said"
Those cynical scientists. 100 years of disproving over-unity machines has made them so skeptic that they don't even keep an open mind when judging the merits of your project.
My idea, the next step: this marvellously new & radical free energy idea will be bought up by a major oil company and put in the biggest safe they have. No one should have access to such a free energy source. It'll ruin those companies.
I love it. Zero energy plans. Honest, well-intending project leaders. Looking for funding (to have it tested more thoroughly, no doubt). And who knows, maybe in the end a cover-up of the major oil companies. Or, gasp, maybe George W will cover it up for them.
Yawn.