Orbo Watch
Apparently, something may or may not be revealed about the Steorn Orbo saga on Friday. For a rundown on what Steorn Orbo is, either check out my prior blog post on it, or read this blog on Orbo developments, but the Reader’s Digest version is that a company called Steorn says that it accidentally stumbled upon a way of arranging magnets so as to create a system which produces more energy than is put into it–the classic perpetual-motion “free energy” machine, which the company has now dubbed “Orbo.” Sounds just like any number of hoaxes and false claims that litter the landscape every year–but the twist is that the company isn’t acting like a bunch of fraudsters: they stopped sales and solicitations, took out a very expensive ad to call for a scientific jury to study and verify the technology, and are otherwise making the kind of noises that one would not expect from those perpetrating a hoax.
Now, Steorn has announced that on Friday, April 13, they “will be releasing the update on the Jury process and so on.” People are expecting this to mean that the company will be releasing at least preliminary results on what the jury has found, and perhaps identifying members of the jury and publishing some of their statements. “Other info,” possibly including some specs on the technology, are also expected. Steorn claims that they are producing around 100,000 devices that use the technology as samples, and that could be released anytime between now and July.
Will it turn out to be a hoax? Will it change the world? Is it just an incredibly elaborate publicity stunt to promote the TV show “Lost”?
One hopes, and yet one suspects.
UPDATE: False alarm. Steorn was just releasing an update to information already released. The only new information is the number of people on the jury, which is 22. Ho-hum. So wait until July, which seems to be the next date where they might come out with something. Or, from today’s experience, not.
I’m just wondering about this whole Orbo thing. Breaking the first law of thermodynamics by just twiddling some magnets is highly unlikely (to say the least); if not downright impossible, no matter who you are or how godly your powers. However the idea is intriguing: perhaps the Orbo magnetic mechanism is in truth interacting with some gigantic energy source, such as the rotational momentum of the Earth. Consider this: one of the effects of the tides, the continuous sloshing back-and-forth of the entirety of the Earth’s oceans, is to slowly but surely slow down the rotation of the Earth on its axis. Eventually the Earth will come to a complete stop relative to the Sun, in the same way that the Moon has come to a complete stop relative to the Earth; and which is why to this day we only see one face of the moon from our vantage here on Earth.
(On an unrelated note, just imagine where mankind would be this very second if the moon had just a slight amount of rotation left in it; that tiny bit of rotation would have been the only evidence necessary to definitively prove the solar system model millenia ago; Galileo himself would have walked on the Moon! Probably, owned property on it…)
Anyway, we all can clearly see that the amount of power it takes to slosh the oceans around all day is unbelievably enormous, but from whence does it come? From the stored kinetic energy of rotational momentum of the mass of the planet. The oceans are only a slight fraction of the Earth’s total mass; the effect that their sloshing around has on the duration of the day (which, in case you haven’t figured out already, is growing longer and longer each and every moment) is astronomically negligible (relative to human experience, that is). The exact figure I don’t have at hand; but it’s of the order of something like 1 second longer per century, or something like that.
Anyway, the point is, the amount of power it takes to slosh a whole planet-worth of oceans is staggering; the amount of energy that represents relative to what exists as rotational momentum of the planet is vanishingly small. It is entirely possible that what Steorn are tapping into is some gigantic yet basically invisible energy pool such as the Earth’s rotational inertia.
Sorry to be so long-winded.
(Oh, and another “conspiracy theory”: lets say you have just invented a perpetual motion machine that could power the Earth and devastate pretty much all established industry and economies; what sort of payoff would it take to bury that technology? Wouldn’t it make sense notify the world, then stall for a few months and seek independent verification while you get down to the “real” business, that of making the back-room deal to bury that funny little machine? I mean, come on.. what are people going to think if/when Steorn finally comes clean that it was all a hoax or silly mistake? And the principals walk away to their new lives in comfort on the beaches of the Caymans, or wherever?)