I do love a good crackpot. Not me as a crackpot; that’s a different kind of crackpot. I’m referring more to the crazies that gain massive publication attention by claiming to have created a perpetual motion machine, or somehow discovered that there’s actually a black hole in the core of our sun.

Just today, these guys were scheduled to display a perpetual motion machine based on “…the principle of time variant magneto-mechanical interactions”, whatever that means. The thing about Steorn is that they went very far to prove their claim in the standard pseudoscientific method: they went straight to the media. What amazed me about this case is that they actually took out a full page ad in The Economist to “validate” their research. Needless to say, there were “technical difficulties” caused by the “intense heat of the lighting”, and their device did not work on command. What is alarming to me is the response they received: over five thousand people responded to the call to test their research. When something like this happens I get a little perturbed, largely because someone could have been working on actual research rather than wrestling to prove that something actual violates energy conservation.

For the crackpots, I offer the following advice, reiterated over and over and over again: if you think you’ve figured out a way to violate a very fundamental law of physics, you probably haven’t. There is a very good reason for this, and I will use energy conservation as an example.

Let’s suppose, just suppose, that you’ve managed to find a way to generate work with a magnetic field. The fact that you can do this screws up the Lorenz force law, which predicts the motion of charged particles in an electromagnetic field. Okay, so we have to toss the Lorenz force law. Here’s another problem, though: the relativistic equations of motion imply the Lorenz force law, so either our relativistic formulation of the classical dynamics of a charged particle is wrong, or special relativity doesn’t work.

Both of these would be catastrophic, since our particle accelerators, such as the Tevatron, SLAc, RHIC, the LHC, all synchotron light sources, et cetera are based on these two theories. Those technologies work very well, so it would mean that we somehow managed to come up with a theory that works exceptionally well at everything except predicting energy conservation.

The point here is that science is this giant web of information, and if you pluck out one vertex everything collapses. When you take a shot at energy conservation for one fundamental system, you are attempting to devastate the entire field of physics. Physicists react so strongly to this because physics works rather well, and to demolish it requires more than a few cryptic notes from somebody who requires non-disclosure agreements for anyone to even look at his contraption. In science, the burden of proof is on the claimant; it is not our job to prove you wrong until you manage to create some compelling evidence that you are right.