Trends That Will Affect Your Future … Where Were You?

Where were you when you learned that President Kennedy had been shot? Where were you when you learned of 9/11? Could we be at another of those moments when destiny shifts? This occurred to me when I saw the mid-August ad in The Economist, one of the world’s most respected journals of business and news. I could hardly believe it. Few in science can have forgotten the saga of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, two chemists at the University of Utah. In March 1989, they announced that they had produced a room-temperature fusion reaction, using a simple rig of palladium rods in a solution of lithium hydroxide (with deuterium in place of the hydrogen) and “heavy water” (water with deuterium replacing the hydrogen as well). They called it “cold fusion” and claimed over-unity energy output. Their stature in the research community got them a ready hearing, but it soon turned into a reputational massacre, as many replication efforts failed. Today, for most physicists and engineers “cold fusion” is dead, although for a committed minority—including at least one Nobel Laureate in physics—it continues to be seen as a viable area for research.

Yet here was a tiny Dublin-based technology company, called Steorn, claiming it had discovered an over-unity technology it was so sure of that it challenged the scientific community to prove it wrong. And it did so in a full-page advertisement in The Economist.1 It was either a mad act of hubris or a play of rare genius. As I write this, it is not yet clear which.

The CEO of Steorn, Sean McCarthy, chose this extraordinary “in your face” strategy after deciding that there was no possibility his small firm could make so grand a claim as saying it had achieved what is popularly known as “free energy” without calling down a vast calumny such as befell Pons and Fleischmann. Rather than run from such attacks, McCarthy decided to use them as his principal path to funding and success.

“We are under no illusions that there will be a lot of cynicism out there about our proposition, as it currently challenges one of the basic principles of physics. However, the implications of our technology go far beyond scientific curiosity: addressing many urgent global needs including security of energy supply and zero emission energy production. In order for these benefits to be achieved, we need the public validation and endorsement of the scientific community.”2

McCarthy explains his confidence: “During the years of its development, our technology has been validated by various independent scientists and engineers. We are now seeking 12 of the most qualified and most cynical from the world’s scientific community to form an independent jury, test the technology in independent laboratories, and publish their findings.

“We’re playing our part in making that happen by throwing down the gauntlet with today’s announcement—now it’s over to the scientists to ensure that the real potential and benefits of our technology can be realised.”2

How could a technology this radical get to this point with hardly a ripple in the scientific community? Because no patent office in the world will grant a patent for a “perpetual motion” machine. Steorn could not submit its core technology as such. But it seems to have turned this into a plus. Steorn has filed multiple applications to the various pieces and processes, which collectively make up the technology with no reference to the ultimate purpose. Nobody noticed.

That Steorn expects the “12 men good and true” verdict to go its way is clear. The company has already announced that it intends to license its technology to organizations within the energy sector. In keeping with the growing sense of social responsibility one is seeing in certain businesses, it will also allow royalty-free use for projects it deems in the service of the common good, such as water and rural electrification projects in underdeveloped countries.

Happily, with the formal challenge to test it, the technology is not the usual black box that so plagues this realm of research. However, how it exactly works is not yet clear from the public documents. “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; an answer that is not very satisfying.3 McCarthy also addressed, but did not explain away, the central criticism of all technologies that claim to produce more energy than they consume: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form. It is one of the foundations of physics. “Free energy” by definition says this is wrong.

With a certain sense of bravado McCarthy asserts, “The energy isn’t being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It’s literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy,” he said in a radio interview, adding that the technology can be scaled virtually to any energy-consuming device, from cell phones to automobiles.

McCarthy claims the technology, in its present stage, already provides five times the amount of energy a mobile phone battery generates for the same size and does not have to be recharged.

Within 36 hours of his Economist ad appearing, he had been contacted by 420 scientists in Europe, America, and Australia, and a further 4,606 people had registered to receive the results.

This fall we may see the dawn of a new era, or one of the most public crash-and-burns in decades. But that’s only part of the story. Beneath the specifics of the Steorn saga, there beats a deeper tone: we must, and will, break through our addiction to petroleum, a process that is evolving with increasing urgency below the radar of the sensoid-driven media. A planetary-wide consensus is emerging on this. In America, at least two major governmental study groups are passionately and devotedly working to develop a scenario to guide the U.S. through the transition from Middle East-based petroleum. They are not alone, and we are not leading. The American teams are guided in part by the leadership of Brazil and Iceland. Each has chosen a new model based on its national strengths—agriculture in the south, geothermal and water in the north—and gone a long way toward achieving its goal.4 What their history, and our experience, is showing is that the hard part is not the technology. The principal problems are political. Petroleum is so pervasive, so much more addictive than heroin, that there are all manner of special interests dedicated to its perpetuation. The challenge is: to find a path of consensus. The obstacle to overcome is: how do we build a new national infrastructure without tearing ourselves apart? We may not have long to think this through. There is always the historically proven probability that a small company, in a small country, will come in stage left, and turn everything on its head. If it is not this small Irish company, it may be one like it, forever changing the power structure of the world.