If this works, if it is not a hoax, if it is validated by the scientific community then it will amazing.  Apparently the company Steorn has stumbled upon a technology that puts out more energy than goes in and they are in the process of getting public unbiased scientific validation for it right now.  In an open advertisement in the The Economist, they have solicited the help of the science community to perform unbiased tests on their technology, and after recieving 79,231 applicants they have narrowed it down to 492 for their first phase of testing.  If it is proven to work or proven false they say they will abide by and step up to the results.   The thing is that they are a real company with a long history.  On the surface they would appear to be little to gain in the long run from making such a fantastic claim.  This may be naive on my part however, any way to publicize a business seems to go these days.  I hope it works though  (do I?).  Reminds me of the movie Primer, the concept of creating a technology for one purpose and then finding that it has properties that were unimaginable and unexpected.  The premise being that most breakthroughs happen in this fashion rather than a person sitting down to ‘design’ a revolution.  I think every kid in the world has had the dream of making a perpetual motion machine once they discover the magic of rubber bands and magnets, squashed of course by any grimfaced rudimentary science teacher and the first law of thermodynamics.  Maybe they should go on Myth Busters.

Here is a brief description of what they claim they can do

 1. The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%. 2. The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts. 3. There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).