SGU Episode 103

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SGU Episode 103
11th July 2007
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 102                      SGU 104
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
SL: Scott Lilienfield
Quote of the Week
There is not sufficient love and goodness in the world to permit us to give some of it away to imaginary beings
Nietzsche
Links
Download Podcast
SGU Podcast archive
Forum Discussion

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, July 11^th 2007 and this is your host Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. Joining me this evening are Bob Novella -

B: Hey everybody.

S: Rebecca Watson.

R: Hello everyone.

S: Jay Novella.

J: Hey guys.

S: And Evan Bernstein.

This Day in Skepticism (0.33)

E: Hi everyone. Couple of things to note in history on this day, July 11^th: in 1979, space station Skylab returns to earth, I'm sure we all remember that.

B: Yeah.

E: In 1991, a total solar eclipse occurred over Hawaii and Mexico.

R: And… come on - also 7-Eleven!

E: Yes, it's 7-11 day here in the wonderful United States and supposedly you can go into any 7-Eleven in the country and ask for a free slurpee.

S: Free slurpee. It doesn't get better than that.

R: No it doesn't.

E: Assuming they understand what you're saying, they should give it to you.

S: Also in 1937, 1937, you guys know what happened then? July 11^th 1937?

Various: Ummmmmmmm

S: Our mother was born. It's our mother's birthday.

J: Oh that's right.

R: Oh my god you guys are terrible.

B: Geez.

R: I can't believe you didn't know that. I mean I didn't know that because I'm not related to you.

S: Well, we did just come from her birthday party. We celebrated the whole day with her, so don't worry, we took care of it.

R: Ok.

E: Steve, that's not in wikipedia, so I'm not sure that that's really true.

R: You guys are sad.

S: Now, Perry's not with us this evening. He is feeling under the weather. He's not feeling well. But hopefully he'll be back with us next week.

R: Feel better Perry.

S: Yep, so get better Perry.

E: See you next week.

News Items

Most Distant Galaxy (1.47)

S: A few news items this week. The first one is an astronomy news item. "Scientists find the most distant galaxy yet observed."

R: Very cool.

B: This was kinda interesting. Astronomers using giant telescopes said they found a glimpse of the most distant and oldest galaxies ever seen. The light the researchers viewed originated when the universe was only 500 million years old. The implication according to Richard Ellis, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, is these are the early generation of stars switched on when the universe was in its infancy. Previously the most distant galaxy known had been found at a red shift of 7, which apparently corresponds to a time when the universe was 750 million years old. This time they found galaxies at a red shift of about 9, which corresponds to a time 500 million years ago. What really fascinated me, I mean that was interesting, but what really fascinated me about this discovery is that they were able to look deep in space not because of any novel hardware or software, but because of the gravitational lensing effect first predicted by Einstein. Gravitational lensing occurs when light from a background object is bent by the gravitational field of a closer object. Ellis said that we found areas of space which act as powerful magnifying glasses. Some of these places magnified the skies as much as 20 times. I thought that was very interesting.

S: So these galaxies about the 13 billion light years away, the estimated age of the universe being 13.5 billion years. Right. So these are among the first stars to turn in the universe, to come into existence as we're seeing them. Yeah.

B: It kinda reminded me of discovering when life originated on earth, it seems that it's getting discovered further and further back in time. It's very close to the time, say, when earth started cooling down cos you're not going to have much life when the earth is a glowing cinder! So soon after that, it seems life just kinda arose very fast and this way they're finding stars older and older, stars that happened relatively soon after the Big Bang.

S: I remember about 10 years ago, do you remember this Bob? When there was a time when the oldest stars were older than the estimated age of the universe.

B: That was a period of extreme frustration for astronomers, because that does not make sense.

S: Yeah, but of course we knew that the error bars were overlapping, but it obviously couldn't be the case.

B: Right, right.

S: I also remember arguing with some creationist who was trying to use that to basically say that we didn't know anything, right, that we don't know what we're talking about because there's this conflict that can't be resolved. But they all resolve, the error bars will shrink, I'm sure the universe will be older than the oldest stars, that's of course what happened.

B: Right.

R: Sadly, I think that that's still something that some creationists try to claim as a fact.

B: Yeah.

S: They're not going to let go of a good argument just because the facts don't support it. Come on.

R: Exactly.

Steorn Perpetual Motion Device (4.50)

S: The next news item is the follow-up from a story that was going around earlier. A company based in Dublin, Ireland, called Steorn made some news several months ago when they had claims that they had developed a perpetual motion device, a device that could generate energy.

R: It's actually last year that they announced it.

S: That long ago?

R: Yeah, I think it was August 2006 when they placed an ad in the Economist asking for scientists to step forward to be on their panel of experts to examine the machine.

S: That's right, yeah, that was last summer. Their device is called the Orbo. Now, they were promising, basically, a demonstration of their promised new Orbo perpetual device.

E: How'd it go?

S: Well, they were all set up to give a demonstration, I think initially on July 4^th, and a museum and

R: Live on webcam.

S: Live on webcam.

E: Very cool.

S: Everyone to tune in, tuning in at a certain time on July 4^th when they would demonstrate their machine, and then, you know, they ran into some technical difficulties. So they -

R: Not just technical difficulties.

S: Well they had to delay it.

R: The lights were too warm.

E: The delaying of a perpetual motion machine? That's never happened before.

R: Right, the perpetual motion machine, this thing that is supposed to generate the same amount of energy that it uses, was destroyed by heat.

S: Right, from the camera lights.

R: Yeah. Good design.

S: That was their excuse. At first they said it was just delayed until the 5^th, and then basically said "uhhhh" they had to cancel the demonstration, it's just not going to work. Sean McCarthy, the CEO stated "technical problems arose during the installation of the demonstration unit in the display case" and the problems were primarily due to "excessive heat from the lighting in the main display area." So that is a pretty delicate piece of technology they're dealing with.

E: Funny all of their tests of testable pieces of technology seemed to work just fine.

R: Presumably they actually made this work before their big public demonstration.

E: Why else would you have a public demonstration, if you didn't have it working?

R: Exactly. They didn't think to maybe put a light on it before?

J: Yeah, I guess they were testing it in the dark before this?

R: That would actually make sense, that might we why they thought they'd discovered perpetual motion, because all the lights were turned off.

J: Yeah, there's a perpetual motion machine in that pitch black room there, you see it?

(laughter)

E: Next, the invisible dragon!

(laughter)

S: There's been a lot of speculation about what their game is. Of course, just for a little background, perpetual motion machines don't exist, they violate the laws of thermodynamics. There's actually different types of perpetual motion machines: those that violate the first law of thermodynamics and those that violate the second law of thermodynamics.

R: You can pick which you prefer.

S: You can pick and chose which fundamental law of physics you want to violate.

(laughter)

B: You might want to quickly state, Steve, the first law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. The second law states that putting energy into a system will always result in a loss in potential output.

S: That's right. So you can't, machines can't make energy from nothing, nor can you get the same amount of energy out of, any time energy's transferred from one state to another, one thing to another, there's gotta be at least a little bit of a loss of energy. You can't maintain the exact same amount of energy.

E: That's a creationist argument.

B: And if those, one or both of those are wrong, we have trouble.

S: Yes. It's not just a good idea: it is the law. It is one of the most, if not the most (collectively the laws of thermodynamics,) validated laws in science. If anything deserves the title of a law of nature these do. To the point that anyone claiming to have evidence that violates either of these laws, has an enormous burden of proof to meet before they should reasonably make such claims. Now sometimes, we always speculate what's the game, what's going on in these guys' minds. Sometimes they are self-deluded cranks. And it's actually quite easy to make the mistake of thinking you have a perpetual motion machine when you don't, because you have to be actually quite careful to make sure that you're excluding all potential sources of external energy. The one that I saw that was the most subtle, and I'm like "gee I'm not sure I would have picked up on that" was a perpetual clock, a clock that never, didn't need any apparent energy source, didn't need to be wound or whatever, and actually it was being powered by -

R: A hamster running in a wheel.

(laughter)

S: Now, we missed the hamster.

J?: Powered by stupidity.

S: It was temperature differences causing flexing of metal.

B: Wow. That's clever. That's cool.

S: And that was -

J: And wait, was it clever, or did the guy build it and didn't even know what he'd built.

S: The one I was looking at was designed to function that way.

B: Yeah.

S: I defy you to figure out where the energy's coming from in this device, it was that subtle. But people can make those kind of honest mistakes, they don't realize that external heat is playing a role or even humidity or light energy, whatever. The other thing is with, the other way you can make a "honest mistake" is if you have a process that requires some activation energy. And then you get energy at the back end. And it's a matter of adding up all the energy going in, adding up all the energy coming out, and making a comparison, and they basically just do the addition wrong. They're missing some sources of input, of energy or they're overestimating the output, -

E: Forgot to carry the two

S: They did the mat wrong.

R: And there are the conmen.

S: And then there are conmen, right, there are those who, they have no delusion about what's going on, they know it's a total farce, and they're doing it to lure investors, usually.

E?: They lie about it?

R: And you've got to wonder with a company like Steorn, because they did pursue investors before. Looking on their website's kinda difficult to piece together what they used to do before and what they do now. They had investors but then they stopped taking on new investors until they perfected their model, is that right?

B: Initially, Steve, correct me if I'm wrong, a lot of these people would initially they would try to sell the machine, "here's my perpetual motion machine" and try to make money out of it.

S: Right.

B: And of course they ran into lots of problems with that because it doesn't work, so now, as this guy was doing, they sell, you know, the potential, like "look it we're so close, help us go these last few yards. And we'll have it and you'll be piping energy back into the grid and they'll be paying you for it." And that's much harder to catch it with that.

S: Yeah, because not demonstrably fraud that your research program just didn't pan out as expected - "well, it's research, it never pans out exactly as you'd expect." So it's harder to demonstrate equivocally that it was fraudulent.

R: According to Steorn's website, they say "due to the contentious nature of our technology claim, the company made a decision that during the process of validation, we would seek no further funding."

S: Right.

E: Did Ireland issue them a patent for this? Because that's a big part of the whole perpetual motion problem, is that it gets legitimized by governments because they, to some degree, because they issue patents for these things that blatantly don't work. Of course Randi has gone to great lengths in writing about it and talking about it.

R: Steorn had claimed that they were going to give away the instructions for making it. According to Steorn's website they say "our free energy technology will be made widely available to the development community immediately after the independent scientific validation process. Under the terms of a modified general public license and for a nominal fee, Steorn's intellectual property will be made available concurrently to all interested parties, from individual enthusiasts to larger research organizations."

J: So these are scam artists?

R: Well, that's what so difficult to determine is because if they aren't taking money from investors, and if they aren't claiming to have any interest in selling the machines, then are they scam artists? Or are they a company that actually thought that they had this great idea, which turned out not to work?

S: And here's the great idea, they say "Orbo is based upon the principle of time-variant magnetic-mechanical interactions" which basically means it's magnets. It's frequently at the core of perpetual motion machines because the attractive energy or whatever of magnets can fool people into thinking that they're creating some kind of perpetual motion. But the bottom line is you can never use magnets to generate energy or to generate work.

R: And why is that?

S: The reason you can't extract energy from a magnet is because if you extract energy from it, the magnetic field must get weaker. So then it will, you know, go away eventually. You can't extract energy from it while maintaining the field at the exact same strength, that's the bottom line.

B: Yeah, so in other words you can think of the magnet as a battery.

S: Right, it has a little bit of energy stored in its magnetic field and if you really did extract that energy, the field would have to go away.

R: So there are actually other options, we've got the fact that, the possibility that they are scam artists, or the possibility that they were just mistaken. But I have seen some other theories floating around like -

S: Yeah.

R: - maybe they are actually just trying to prove something about viral marketing, maybe they're a -

J: Yes, I heard that as well

R: - marketing company.

E: Ah.

R: Though if they are, I don't think they're a very good one because, I think if you asked anyone in, like a random person on the street, they would have no idea who Steorn is.

S: Yeah

E: Right

S: We pay attention to this kind of thing but I don't know how much it's out there.

B: But not just from marketing. The take I heard was that one possibility is that they were trying to show just how gullible the media is and how easily they get sucked in -

S: Yeah.

B: - to nonsense like this.

S: Is it a Randi Carlos hoax, in other words?

B: Right.

S: We'll see eventually, you know, either they'll.. if they are con artists, then they'll continue to try to extract investor's money and they'll just vanish somewhere. If they are deluded cranks, they'll never give up their claims but they'll sort of face into obscurity and they'll say "well we have to work on this." And if it's a hoax then that's only viable if they at some point reveal and go "aha, we were kidding all along."

R: And if they're legitimate company that made a mistake, they'll move on to other ventures, so time will tell.

E: They should go with option number three, that's their best bet at this point.

S: Yeah.

E: We were just kidding. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. What a good joke.

B: And one option we're not considering -

S: What's that?

B: One option

S: That it works!

B: It really works. And they turn all of physics -

R: That's true, let 's not be -

E: That's a good option.

S: We'll include that for thoroughness. We tell patients, you know, "I'll include that diagnosis for thoroughness but it's so unlikely, it's a distant last on the list."

E: Alright Steve, I say that that one is the fiction. Oh wait, sorry, wrong…

S: Oh please.

B: If you think about it, any of the engineers and scientists that they have working on this, they have to know it's bullshit, you know what I mean? I mean come on.

S: You would think. It's so obvious. I mean, you really, it's hard to imagine they've any sense, that they've any consultants that they don't know that it's just impossible what they're claiming.

B: I saw an exploded view of the device and it's fairly simple -

S: Just a bunch of magnets.

B: You don't need extreme engineering skills to put this together, I suspect they don't have any real engineers on their payroll, I don't think, I haven't specifically looked for it,

S: That's because all the engineers are paid off by the big oil companies, Bob, come on.

B: Oh, I forgot about that.

E: No, big pharma, big pharma.

S: And all this, big pharma is like medicine, psychiatry; perpetual motion's big oil, Evan, get it straight.

E: Whatever.

S: Alright

R: Go on their forums, you can see all the people whining about big oil.

S: Yeah.

J: Maybe they just paid these engineers and scientists a ton of money and they're just "whatever I'll do it."

E: Woo hoo!

S: They got some whores or shills or whatever you want to call them.

R: Whores?

S: If you compromise your scientific integrity for money, we call those people whores.

R: Oh, I thought you meant you got the scientists whores so they did it.

(laughter)

S: No.

E?: That would have worked too.

S: I can see where your mind is, Rebecca. Alright.

Science or Fiction (1.05.20)

Question #1 Boiled hair taken from the mane of a lion.

Question #2 Coffee made from coffee beans taken from the feces of a civet - a small cat-like mammal.

Question #3 Goat cheese deliberately infested with maggots

Skeptical Puzzle (11.46)

This Week's Puzzle:

A dog in Romania
A vulture in Chile
A fox in China
A bear in Iceland
A boar in Greece
A buffalo in America

Identify the psuedoscientific pattern.

Last Week's puzzle:

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1.14.00)

"There is not sufficient love and goodness in the world to permit us to give some of it away to imaginary beings." Friedrich Nietzsche

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at www.theskepticsguide.org. Please send us your questions, suggestions, and other feedback; you can use the "Contact Us" page on our website, or you can send us an email to info@theskepticsguide.org'. 'Theorem' is produced by Kineto and is used with permission.

References