Roll up, roll up to see the Irish perpetual motion machine!

Remember that zany Irish company Steorn, who claimed to have built a working perpetual motion machine that could produce clean, free energy out of a few magnets and some plastic discs? Well, they’re back again. Undeterred by the fact that their own hand-picked jury of scientific judges unanimously agreed that the technology didn’t work, Steorn has put its Orbo perpetual motion machine out for public display, and set up web feeds through which you can watch the thing in motion. But the demonstration has failed to impress critics, and for good reasons.

Perpetual motion, over-unity, whatever you want to call it, Steorn’s Orbo is the latest in a long line of wondrous devices that claim to produce energy out of nothing, in direct violation of one of the best-understood and best-proven laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics.

So many inventors have claimed they’ve built such devices over the years that the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris got sick of wasting time evaluating them and has refused even to read proposals dealing with perpetual motion machines for more than 230 years.

And yet, in the enlightened noughties, Irishman Sean McCarthy has still managed to convince enough marks to manage to keep a company running for more than six years based on the promise of limitless free energy.

Gizmag