Truth or hoax? The Searl Effect Generator

[CodeImp]

This guy makes a bunch of claims about how he invented a clean power source and how it also has "anti-gravity" effects as well. He says his invention was taken away from him (long story) and he is having a hard time putting a new one together.

April this year he made a mockup and published videos of it, but to me it just looks like an electric motor and doesn't prove it to be a power source (because you have to feed it electricity in the electromagnets in order to make it run) but my understanding of physics is limited.

Anyway there is a whole lot to read about it on the internet, but I am still wondering if this is actually possible or that it is just a big elaborate hoax.

His website
History and technical details
His recent mockup

[andrewj]

Pure and utter bunkum. These hoaxsters love magnets, sites about getting "free energy" out of magnetic fields are a dime a dozen.

[Colusio]

I checked his biography page, http://www.searlsolution.com/johnsearl3.html.
He calls himself a professor but he left school at the age of 14.

[CodeImp]

That's quite a lot of lying then. I wonder what his public and investors will say when (if) he completes his prototype and figures it doesn't work.

[CODOR]

In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

[fraggle]

At least Steorn went to an effort to pretend at having an air of plausability. This is just some crazy old man :-)

As ajapted says, it's interesting how these perpetual motion machine people always seem to involve magnets in their designs. I guess there's something compelling about magnets; almost everyone knows what a magnet is, and there's something "mysterious" about how they can generate a force between metal objects and other magnets. Of course, the actual science is far from mysterious, but most people don't really know it anyway :-)

It's quite incredible that after all these years, the media still falls for hype over perpetual motion machines, even though they violate the most basic laws of science that a high-schooler learns, even though every one of them ever announced has turned out to be a scam / hoax, and even though the patent office has rules that specifically reject any perpetual motion machines as fiction.

EDIT: interesting video about the crazy stuff John Searl has done in the past :-)

[Colusio]

Indeed interesting video :-)

[DooMAD]

Anything seemingly too good to be true, invariably is. The claims on his website are simply too far fetched. Not only can it supposedly be used to levitate and propel any object (even through space), it also generates electricty AND cleans and cools the air whilst doing so. All without any power source that they care to name. Not bad for a bunch of magnets. I suppose next they'll claim it cures cancer too.

[VileSlay]

I think they did a a couple of episodes of MythBusters with stuff like that. clean energy and anti-grav stuff. all busted IIRC.

[AndrewB]

VileSlay said:

I think they did a a couple of episodes of MythBusters with stuff like that. clean energy and anti-grav stuff. all busted IIRC.

That's if you consider "we tried to recreate the experiment and failed" enough to render a myth "busted." That seems to be the standard that MB holds itself to.

[GGG]

VileSlay said:

I think they did a a couple of episodes of MythBusters with stuff like that. clean energy and anti-grav stuff. all busted IIRC.

Well, anti-gravity works, if you want to call it that. (Magnetism is more powerful than gravity.) Hopefully one of these days, through diamagnetism, a human adult will levitate. The record, last time I checked, was 22 pounds, which means yes, you can levitate your cat.

EDIT: And yeah, I realize an anorexic midget could weigh 22 pounds.

[EarthQuake]

Permanent magnets weaken over time, so any perpetual machine made from such will not work forever. Eventually such machines will go into magnetic lock and stop themselves. However, it is possible to use small currents of electricity to power a carefully calibrated magnetic motor. Such machines produce much more power than it takes to sustain them, but in the end, it still takes energy to make energy. My local university has a series of them for testing purposes, but I couldn't find any online references to it. The motors are said to have an efficiency of something like 300%.

Also some guy over in southeast Asia has made something similar. He plans to manufacture computer cooling fans that are both silent and use only a fraction of the power of standard computer fans, with a claimed efficiency of 310%.

I've read alot of articles of such machines being made, and honestly it doesn't sound like bullshit to me. Of course, give it a couple of years and watch someone find a severe flaw in said designs.

[Bloodshedder]

How can you have a greater than 100% efficiency?

[Lüt]

Use something less efficient for the standard?

[CodeImp]

100% efficiency would be that all input energy is converted to the desired output energy. Anything higher would mean you get more energy back than you put in (which means the machine has to draw energy from somewhere else, because free energy is bullshit).

Well magnets are doing something to each other, so it doesn't sound so weird that you can have them do something and leech the energy from it. Hence this sounded somewhat convincing.

Searl says the energy comes from electrons (or was it ions? whatever, something) that are in the surrounding air, which is why it gets cold around the machine. So it isn't free energy, but it would still be many times cheaper than using oil. From what I understand the machine basically turns heat into electricity.

fraggle; here is why he did those things to the electric company as that interesting video shows: Reasons for his time in prison
I'm not defending him though, just gathering the pieces together. Doing those things is still nuts and also I'm not sure if what that FDM guy writes is true as he is an associate of Searl.

[Fredrik]

Bloodshedder said:

How can you have a greater than 100% efficiency?

A heat pump can have a greater than 100% "efficiency". It has to extract heat from a heat reservoir, but the neat thing is that the heat reservoir can be any bulk mass at any temperature. For example, you can heat a house to 25°C by drawing heat from ocean water or rock at 0°C, and the energy needed to power the heat pump will be much less than what would be needed to heat the house by an electric radiator (which has 100% efficiency). Not a free energy device, of course, but indeed very efficient.

[Colusio]

I think magnets can transport energy but they are not a source of energy. By changing mass into energy or by using the gravitational force of mass you can create energy, I thought.

[fraggle]

Bloodshedder said:

How can you have a greater than 100% efficiency?

I think the point is that it "rewrites the laws of physics" or something. That's usually the excuse they come up with.

[deathbringer]

I did once see a demonstration of an "anti-gravity machine" made from balsa wood and foil in a trianglar "honeycomb" which did atcually levitate. Problem is it weighed barely more than about 10 sheets of A4 and had to be wired up to the mains to have enough power to hover

[Sharessa]

Yeah, they have actually created gravity-defying material, but it can't weigh more than so-and-so many grams or whatever. Not very practical.

[fraggle]

deathbringer said:

I did once see a demonstration of an "anti-gravity machine" made from balsa wood and foil in a trianglar "honeycomb" which did atcually levitate. Problem is it weighed barely more than about 10 sheets of A4 and had to be wired up to the mains to have enough power to hover

One of these? It's an ionocraft, nothing to do with antigravity.

[Jonathan]

The press here in the UK love these sorts of stories. Even supposedly grown-up broadsheet papers usually just parrot from the press release, repeating verbatim whatever nonsense about magnets and energy they're fed for about ninety percent of the article. Then, in the interests of balance, there's a single sentence quote from some sceptical scientist in the final paragraph. The overall impression is always that this is a wonderful breakthrough, and boy are those spoilsport scientists going to be red-faced when their precious laws of physics are broken.

[EarthQuake]

Bloodshedder said:

How can you have a greater than 100% efficiency?

I was referring to the percentage of electricity used in regards to the electricity produced. Of course you cannot have a machine that's output energy is greater than it's input energy. Some will always be lost due to heat and such.

Guess I should have put quotes around "efficiency" or something.

[Guest DILDOMASTER666]

People will simply never learn. I've met people that think a human is born with one kidney, and I've seen people from my home country that cannot tell me the name of a country that begins with a "U". People probably flock over this shit because of a combination of stupidity and this whole "oil crisis" deal.

But what do I know.