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Innovation

Steorn sets up for second bite at perpetual cherry

Perpetual motion - a technology so outside the laws of physics that even the patent office refuses to touch it - is back.Or it will be when Steorn, the Emerald Isle's leading proponents of the art, shows off working machines and opens the tech up to anyone who wants a licence.
Written by Rupert Goodwins, Contributor

Perpetual motion - a technology so outside the laws of physics that even the patent office refuses to touch it - is back.

Or it will be when Steorn, the Emerald Isle's leading proponents of the art, shows off working machines and opens the tech up to anyone who wants a licence. This exciting event is due to happen sometime in the next week at the Waterways Building in Dublin, where Steorn is reported to be setting up something along the lines of their 2007 demonstration at Kinetica in London - only, one trusts, without the fail.

To back this up, the company has produced a brash new video advert consisting mostly of quotes from Steorn denialists; the only positive quote is Steorn's own from that original Economist advert in 2006 which kicked off the whole business.

But then, there hasn't been much call for positive quotes in the intervening three and a half years. Aside from the Kinetic kalamity, Steorn assembled a 'jury' of engineers and scientists who were made privy to the secrets - only for the panel to announce that nope, there was nothing there. Steorn's battle-hardened CEO, Sean McCarthy, has toured universities and the Middle East giving a talk (but no demos) that majored on 'magnetic viscosity' as the underlying phenomenon, but didn't manage to convince many of his magnetic veracity. And the company's own online forum degenerated into a strange place of ritual chanting, before being shut down abruptly last month - presumably in anticipation of Steorn's rebirth.

Yet the company did promise to show things off and open things up by the end of 2009 - and as that particular deadline comes thundering over the festive horizon, it appears that it is going to do just that.

If I can get over to Dublin to participate in the great unveiling, I shall - I'm supposed to be on holiday, but who could resist?

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