Has this 'mob' changed the laws of physics?

They make a claim that contradicts the known laws of physics. They provide no direct evidence for this claim. They advertise their claim in The Economist instead of submitting a scientific paper to a scientific journal.

Cold, Dark Matter anyone?

no.

They make a claim that contradicts the known laws of physics. They provide no direct evidence for this claim. They advertise their claim in The Economist instead of submitting a scientific paper to a scientific journal.

This has been done before, hundreds of times. For centuries people have been claiming to produce perpetual motion machines, not once has any of these claims been verified. Am I skeptical? Yes.

Talking about perpetual motion machines, are satellites that orbit the earth not perpetual motion machines????(I have always wondered about this) and if we sent a huge magnetic satellite into the earth's orbit and put a piece of copper wire all the way around the earth, would that not produce vast amounts of free energy?????

Firstly, the sattelites do experience some air resistance as whereas space is pretty much a vacum, there are still some particles flying about, and this very slight air resistance will eventually cause them to slow down and fall towards the earth, at which point they burn in the atmosphere.

Secondly extracting the kinetic energy of the sattelite using some sort of electromagnetic setup will undoubtly slow the sattelite. Its the same reason why you need stronger wind to draw more power out of a wind turbine, drawing power out of it will slow the blades of the proppeller ( due to the induced electromagnetic fields in the generator attached to the turbine ).

It is nevertheless possible to power sattelites for extensive periods of time by using a so called sky-hook. A sky-hook is a charged wire extending bellow a sattelite towards the earth. As the charged wire moves through the earth's magnetic field, currents are induced in the wire and the electromagnetic force due to the earth's magnetic field acting on the charges will keep the sattelite in it's orbit. The energy comes from the earth's rotation, so technically this slows down the day-night cycle, but because the earth is so massive this effect is several orders of magnitudes smaller than the tidal forces acting between the moon and the earth.

So what if you had a planet with zero atmosphere and a true vacume, as opposed to the almost-vacume you find in outer space. Woudl that be a perpetum mobile machine? As it turns out, no it wouldn't. Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts that the circular motion of the sattelite's mass would emit gravity waves, causing the satetelite to lose energy , albeit very slowly. This effect is too small to be measured for ordinary satelites, but for massive objects such as twin stars orbiting a common centre of mass it becomes important. Measurements on pulsars have confirmed this effect with remarkable levels of accurace. Tho the effect is very low, the huge mass of a spinning star couple, together with the low freuency of their mutual revolution, can make such measurements remarkably accurate. We can measure time within nanosecond accuracy, so even a very small decrease in energy causing the stars to slow down by just a few minutes over a period of a decade or more can be measured easily.

So what if you had a planet with zero atmosphere and a true vacume, as opposed to the almost-vacume you find in outer space.

Now what about the churchill dog's head in the back of a car?