You might remember an Irish company called Steorn: in August 2006 it took out a full page advert in the Economist to announce that it had discovered a source of free energy, a perpetual motion machine no less, in triumphant defiance of that stuffy first law of thermodynamics.

Almost every newspaper gave it lavish coverage in return for this modest expenditure. Steorn has claimed that its machine is validated by eight independent scientists and engineers "with multiple PhDs from world-class universities" (although sadly it declined to name them, citing mutually binding non-disclosure agreements). It now also has a panel of 22 scientists on a "jury" recruited from the ad.

I should therefore like to posit the first law of bullshit dynamics: "There is no imaginable proposition so absurd that you cannot find at least one person, somewhere in the world, with a PhD or professional post, who is happy to endorse it."

As we've already seen with the long history of perpetual motion claims you only need one or two experts, and as far as the media are concerned, there's a story. And when the negative evidence comes in - like this week with Steorn, say - there is a deathly silence. Shh.

So, on July 4 a scaled down version of Steorn's technology was to be displayed at the Kinetica museum in Spitalfields, east London, in front of live webcams and blinkered naysayers. But sadly the doors have remained locked, and the most you can see on the live webcam is an immobile perspex disc - designed to show some special arrangement of magnets - and a statement about technical difficulties possibly caused by "intense heat from the camera lighting".

I was looking forward to it. At first the device was supposed to lift a weight, but then Steorn announced that it would simply rotate. Steorn's chief executive, Sean McCarthy, said that the company "decided against using the technology to illuminate a light bulb, because the use of wires would attract further suspicion from a scientific community that has denounced the invention as heretical".

Let's be clear: this invention is not heretical, it's just highly improbable (although I recognise that heresy is an important part of the branding, because even if it's a thermodynamic one, there's still something attractively transgressive about getting one over on the law. Very Billy Idol. Very Guns N' Roses.).

But in any case I wouldn't worry about the wire, Sean, because if I see magnets arranged on a perspex disc then I can imagine a simple way to keep a disc spinning, by creating a fluctuating electromagnetic field around it.

And of course, it's amazing to think that the machine might work, but even more fortuitous is finding a source of unexpected modest and readily contained energy in the universe - like it did with nuclear fission.

Look, I'm with everyone else in the media, and indeed the world. I want fish oil pills to solve complex social problems in education. I want one injection to be a major reversible cause of autism. I want one invention to solve the world's energy problems and I want my jetpack. It's 2007 for God's sake. Give me my jetpack, and give me my x-ray goggles. This future is rubbish.

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