Steorn is a small company based in a two level office hidden in a nondescript corporate park in Dublin, Ireland. They’re inventors of things useful if somewhat dreary, like security devices to prevent ATM fraud. But one way or another, that’s about to change. Their latest product is either a brash scam, an onerous mistake, or the single most important discovery – ever.

Orbo is the name Steorn has given to the technology based on an effect that they’ve supposedly uncovered. We still don’t have many specifics about how it works, but here’s what we do know. It’s based on a specific arrangement of permanent magnets, and involves cyclical movement. Once one cycle is complete, more mechanical energy has been put out than was originally put in. Arrange this system so that it puts its energy back into the next cycle, and presto, you have the impossible – a perpetual motion machine. A wheel that will spin forever (or bob, or jitter – again we don’t know the details yet) and in the process seem to create energy from nothing. Energy that could run an iPod, or a car; a furnace, or a spaceship. All without batteries or any kind of fuel.

At this point, many of you will want to dismiss Steorn and its claims out of hand, to relegate them neatly into the class of fanciful dreams along with unicorns, faeries and Jedi mind tricks. And I don’t blame you. If anything at all can be called “scientifically impossible”, it’s the perpetual motion machine. The “free energy” produced by such a device would do much more than violate some obscure tenets of electromagnetic theory. It would fly in the face of what is probably the most fundamental and well established law in all of science – that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, they can only change form. If Steorn’s device does keep spinning indefinitely, it must be taking its energy from someplace, or else physics has to be rewritten from the ground up.

I agree, Steorn’s claims do sound extraordinarily unlikely. But I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for a few months, and here’s why:

1. To my eyes, the people at Steorn are acting like they’re convinced they have something real.
2. We’ll find out the truth this year – maybe as soon as July. Steorn is pressing ahead and has staked their credibility on going public with this technology in the coming months.
3. In the remote chance that they have what they claim, everything changes. No person on Earth, indeed no living being, would be unaffected by this.

I’m writing this blog for those of you who are interested in catching up with Steorn’s story and in following it forward.