Steorn is an Irish company that in 2007 promised to demonstrate their “over-unity” technology – called “Orbo”. That’s a fancy way of saying that they made a perpetual motion machine, or free energy, or that they discovered a way to break the pesky laws of thermodynamics. The demonstration failed – not, they argued, because their fundamental concepts were flawed, but because of a bad ball bearing.

In the last two and a half years they have teased the world, and their investors, with a carrot and stick routine – their promised demonstrations were always just down the road, as soon as they fixed some minor technical glitch.

Earlier this year an independent jury of scientists reviewed Steorn’s Orbo technology and concluded that it was bogus (surprise, surprise).

At the time I speculated about what Steorn was up to. Over-unity, or a process that creates more energy than it consumes, is impossible by the laws of thermodynamics. There is no free energy – energy has to come from somewhere. This law of physics is so well established that any claim for over-unity should be met with the highest degree of skepticism. Added to this is the fact that the last century has been met with an endless procession of failed over-unity claims. When a thousand impossible claims turn out to be false, it’s hard to get excited about the 1001st.

Steorn presents itself as a serious company – unlike the carnival show of someone like Dennis Lee. So what are they up to? Did they bamboozle themselves by building a complex motor and missing some hidden source of external energy, or by making some math error? Are they extrapolating wildly from what ultimately is a minor error? Or, do they know exactly what they are doing – building a brand through media hype and luring investors with perpetual false promises about perpetual motion?

Well – Steorn is back in the news again with a slick ad campaign and fresh promises about a demonstration. This video by Steorn pushes me in the direction of concluding the latter – that Steorn knows exactly what they are doing.

Rather than addressing the concerns of their critics, they have chosen to mock them – ironically embracing the terms used to mock Steorn’s claims. It’s a clever gambit – too clever, if you know what I mean. For example, they show their Orbo engine happily spinning away, and then quotes from critics calling the technology “fairy-powered” and “powered by blarney.” It is a version of the Galileo gambit – trying to make it seem as if those who are criticizing your pseudoscience are simply blind to your visionary genius. Michio Kaku says Orbo is a “fraud”, but here it is “working.”

Nice try, Steorn.

The bottom line is the same – generate demonstrable usable energy, or there is no other reasonable conclusion than your technology is a fraud. Showing a motor spinning is useless, until independent scientists can satisfy themselves that the motor is truly over-unity – that all sources and outputs of energy have been accounted for.

After viewing Steorn’s explanation of the technology, I am totally underwhelmed. It’s just another magnet scheme – really, Steorn, that’s it? Magnets? They hook up a motor to a battery. The battery spins the motor, which they also hook up to a generator, which returns some of the energy back to the battery. Wow. This is not even an original free energy scam. This is old-school nonsense in slick new packaging. And yet they would have us believe that this simple scheme has somehow broken the laws of physics.

Garage cranks and free-energy hopefuls, not to mention real engineers, have picked over the idea of using some configuration of magnets to generate free energy for years. It’s simply a lost cause.

Engadget also makes an interesting point. Recently Steorn marketed a “USB powered diving rod.” This is essentially a magnetometer. Engadget writes

Meet the €289 (that’s $400 mister) USB Hall Probe that turns your $1,000 PC into a $40 magnetometer.

When companies like Steorn start branching out into other dubious technological devices it is difficult for me to conclude anything other than selling pseudoscience is their business model.