On December 17th, Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy did give a lecture and take questions at the Dublin Institute of Technology, as promised. Audio recordings of the talk can be found here (downloadable) and here (streaming).

First off, once again no Orbo was demonstrated. Most of the talk consisted of information that we’ve heard before: Steorn’s early days and how they accidentally discovered the anomaly underlying Orbo, some background on the law of conservation of energy and on previous claimants of free energy devices. A brief overview was given of the principle said to underlie Orbo’s magic: the time variance of magnetic interactions is exploited to make these interactions asymmetrical, so that slightly more energy comes out than is put in. Finally, Sean threw in some mentions of well established physics mysteries such as dark energy, suggesting not only that science still has a lot of fundamentals left to learn, but also that there may be a connection between dark energy and the source of Orbo’s excess power. (Such wild speculations, especially in front of an audience with members who ask serious questions involving Atlantis and “levitational energy”, may do little service to Steorn’s goal of gaining establishment respect for their work.)

But one new morsel of information did come out of this talk: a road map of Steorn’s future. Besides continuing to wait for results to come in from the “jury” of scientists, Steorn will be inviting 300 engineers to license the Orbo technology, at no cost, in order to replicate it. This is intended to be another prong in the assault on the established skepticism regarding perpetual motion machines (the other prongs being the jury and a still forthcoming public demonstration of a working Orbo) and the first step in launching the technology. According to Sean, these engineers will be invited to begin working on their own Orbos starting in February, 2009.

Here are a few excerpts from the talk:

This is really the kick-off of a sequence of lectures that we’ll be doing over the course of the next six to nine months. […] Fifteen universities down in the Middle East in February and March, then about 30 in Europe then possibly in the U.S.

What we are prepared to do is to launch the technology starting next year.

We license the core technology to people who develop products. And that process starts in February of next year. […] But then understand what the technology is. We are a head-to-head company, we’re not going to be selling generators or turbines or anything like that. What we do is we license the core technology to people who develop products. And that process starts in February of next year.

We’re going to be asking 300 engineers or engineering organizations to start replicating this for us. […] The other thing I’ll say, to get away from the Nigerian scam artist claim, is access is completely free, we’ll not be asking anybody for any money, what we are asking people to do is they have to have a suitable qualification, they have to understand engineering, and we’re also asking them to sign a development license which is a right to use our patented technology, and the technology is patented, to develop and either prove it for yourselves or force it out into the market.

Q: Has there ever been a motor produced…
Sean: Yeah.
Q: …a self powered motor…
Sean: Yeah, absolutely.
Q: …that runs continuously?
Sean: Sorry?
Q: That runs continuously.
Sean: Nothing in the real world runs continuously.
Q: Only a 100% motor would run continuously.
Sean: Yeah, until something breaks on it.

The process of us engaging in a very public manner with the engineering world starts next February. We don’t expect the engineers to just come in so we’re putting in to the public domain an awful lot of information. That they’ll at least say maybe this is worth ten minutes of my time today.

In terms of complexity… this is not easy to build. This is incredibly difficult and incredibly complicated stuff to work with. Um, the only fair analogy that I think that I can give it, and if you do get involved with it you’ll probably find out, it’s kind of like building a hard disk drive. Now, the kind of accuracies and tolerances and balances that are involved are very difficult so, if you do try to get involved, […] virtually every engineer or scientist knows how a hard disk drive works. Very few of them can walk into their garage and build one. The challenges are not dissimilar. And we’ve had to develop all kinds of other stuff around this to build real systems, you know, we’ve developed magnetic bearings and all kinds of you know, um, stuff that we’ve had to wrap around this to allow ourselves to reliably build these reproducible items. So the engineering challenges are not in any way minuscule.

One question that audience members brought up repeatedly during this talk is: Why aren’t you demonstrating a device? If Sean intends to give at least 45 of these talks around the world starting in February, as he claims, he’d damn well better have a spinning Orbo up there with him by talk 3 or 4 if he doesn’t want to start getting laughed off stage.

For those of us watching with interest from the sidelines, the long dry spell seems to be over, and we’re now back to business as usual: Steorn promising exciting new developments …always just a few months away. Now our eyes are on February. Will hundreds of engineers really be invited to replicate the Orbo? Will any of them succeed? Will one of these engineers, or Steorn itself, finally show off a working device? Or, will we again be given a new date to look forward to, just a few more months further down the road?