IT IS the modern-day equivalent of turning base metal into gold, and Sean McCarthy believes that he has it cracked.

A free, infinite supply of pure energy could be sitting in a secure area of an unprepossessing unit in the Docklands of Dublin. Mr McCarthy claims to have created a perpetual motion machine, a device that can produce at least as much energy as it consumes, so that once it has been set running it can continue indefinitely.

Even Sir Isaac Newton, who spent years trying to turn base metals into gold, reputedly said: “The seekers after perpetual motion are trying to get something from nothing.”

The problem is that after allowing The Times and its physics expert, John White, into the office, Mr McCarthy decided not to let us see the machine. It is some form of an all-magnet motor and the only clue that he will give is that it looks like “a grandfather clock, without its pendulum”.

Having made its existence known through a full-page advertisement in The Economist, Mr McCarthy, 40, has been overwhelmed by interest from around the world — some of which has veered towards “death threat” territory. “We had one physicist who finished his rant by saying, ‘You had better watch your back’,” he said.

“We are getting bloggers putting out stories that this is a stunt to market Xboxes, that we are a call centre and that we have just closed down.”

The search for perpetual motion is considered heretical in the scientific community because it violates the First Law of Thermodynamics. Historically, those who set out to prove otherwise fell into one of three categories: sincere but wrong; a few cogs short of a self-blowing windmill; and money-grabbing fraudsters.

After the first British patent for a perpetual motion machine nearly four centuries ago, hundreds have followed.

Mr McCarthy is the head of an IT company that advises police forces across Europe on fighting fraud. “If I am proved wrong, this company is out of business and I will never work in this town again,” he said.

By the end of this month Mr McCarthy hopes to have assembled a panel of “the most qualified and the most cynical” scientists to test his machine.

Dr White, an atomic physicist at University College Dublin, had a straightforward question: “Why not publish your results in a peer review journal and go and collect your Nobel prize when you are vindicated?” He added: “If he is right, he will have solved the riddle of the Universe and brought peace to the Middle East.”

Mr McCarthy said that he had stumbled by accident across “a kinetic anomaly of magnetic fields” while developing a small wind turbine to power closed-circuit television cameras.

Some “very well-respected” scientists had tested the machine and achieved the same results, he said. But they refused to publish their findings because “this area is surrounded by fraudsters and the misguided. So we decided that either we should just drop this or find a different way to get science interested.”

The machine that could solve one of the world’s ills is shrouded in mystery. The Times got as far as a door marked “strictly no admittance” through which an animated-looking Frenchman disappeared.

Dr White’s verdict? “I haven’t seen a working device and he has created publicity in a way that is non-traditional to scientific verification.

“The onus is on him to prove it rather than for me to disprove it. I don’t want to pooh-pooh the greatest invention in the world, but I have my own things to work on.”

FREE ENERGY

In 1984 Joseph Newman gained investors for his “free energy machine”, before suing the US Patent Office when it refused to grant him a patent

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