My Steorn prediction

[lumen]

Well, if nothing else, we should all find out by years end when they release the restricted learning modules. I believe they already started releasing these at three a week, to the chosen 300, and will continue through August.

[stprue]

I spent so many times going over the math time after time. It is so clear cut. It's too bad that Tom Schum persistently asked me to study his diode array, when I was just ~ two months away from building my first "free energy" machine based on my magnetic theory! 

PL

I f you are so sure you can build it then why haven't you? Cost? Buying thousands of diodes aren't cheap either.

Build it now!

[canam101]

My guess is that steorn has found an anomaly they can't explain, but that they can't scale up.

They hired the jury and gave them data from their tests. The jury looked at the data and said 'this anomaly could be due to lots of non-OU things, but we need more data to decide exactly what it is due to'.

Steorn gave them more data, but that did not eliminate the non-OU possibilities.

After several cycles of this, both Steorn and the jury had had enough and the jury quit.

Steorn now makes a MarkGoldes-type announcement:

during 2009 the company had resolved the key technical problems related to the implementation of Orbo and is now focused on commercial launch towards the end of this year

They're focused on it all right. My prediction is that the company will fold by the end of the year.

[Bobbotov]

They're focused on it all right. My prediction is that the company will fold by the end of the year.

I understand where you are coming from but many of these free energy companies go on for years without really having anything. For something that you would think is so clear cut (free energy) the truth is these companies are very murky in their operations. They make many promises and are always holding the carrot out to keep the interest going but like the fate of Tantalus, you can never really get a good bite out of it. They do however excel at getting funding to keep them going and in the final analysis that may be what they are all about. Few technologies that actually see the light of day have so many opposing forces: scammers, frauds, MiBs, delusion, etc. It makes the whole field of endeavor suspect.

If Steorn never delivers anything they will just be another company that exploits free energy to acquire things for themselves. It is human nature unfortunately to exploit bad situations; in this case the world's energy crisis. You see it after major disasters, pandemics, wars, etc. There will always be those who have few scruples and cash in on people's anxiety, misery and desire to hope.

This is not to say that there aren't those who truly and earnestly work to achieve what has been perceived as impossible but their efforts are clouded by so many that have less than altruistic aims. Essentially it becomes the definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Then there is the resistance of classical science. Trying to get respect for working in this area is an uphill battle and Steorn took advantage of that with its jury approach. Now it is being said that the jury did not do due diligence because of their propensity in securing Conservation of Energy. I am not so sure about that but the perception of science being the deal killer is prevalent.

In any case it will be interesting to see how this plays out in the long run. With Steorn's commitment to go commercial by years' end they have painted themselves into a corner if such does not come to pass. I have followed the story since the Economist ad and it has been a very bizarre journey full of secrecy, prevarication, failed deliverable, broken promises, change in direction, etc. Steorn as a company since the dot com days has changed its focus many times and who knows if this is not just another area that they exploit and then abandon to move onto something else.

We'll see said the blind man.

[solinear]

I think that they did find an anomaly, but it's one that could probably be explained with physics and won't scale up beyond a very small scale and probably isn't over unity.  The fact that they can't scale it up tells me that there is something suspect about their design.  Kinda like those pendulum/vibrating bar over unity designs - they're based on something that can't scale up beyond the small scale (25-50 watts).  Those may be over unity, but they're useless without a gravity well and can't scale up very well.

If they can keep getting money, then they won't fold.  It's not uncommon for someone to keep chasing after that golden ticket.  It's the reason people go to Las Vegas,  play the lottery and those sorts of things.  I don't think that they're purely fraudulent, I just don't think that they've found anything that can be used in a large scale design, even if it is over unity. 

There's one simple reality: It either scales or it doesn't and theirs looks like it doesn't.  It shouldn't take them three years to scale up from the <1 watt level to >1kw scale.  Heck, it shouldn't take them more than six months.