Nearly five centuries separate Thomas More, saint and author of Utopia, from Sean McCarthy, engineer and genial CEO of Steorn, Ltd., an Irish technology development company. Both men have laid claim to utopian discoveries. More's discovery -- related through the voyager Raphael Hythloday -- involves a 1760-year-old society that provides a model of social and economic perfection. McCarthy offers a no less extraordinary claim. His company, so it goes, has stumbled upon a configuration of magnets producing the equivalent output of a perpetual motion machine. Its applications will solve the world's most pressing concerns: energy production, fresh water supplies, even Global Warming. Instant Utopia. Both men's claims have been met, each in its own day, with responses ranging from fawning discipleship to scornful disbelief. After Utopia was published, one theologian asked for directions there so he might convert its inhabitants. In a later edition, More had to drop hints the island was not real, although he still enjoyed pointing "the long nose of scorn" at those naïve enough to take his account of this New World island seriously.

Steorn has had to deal with "the long nose of scorn" pointed in its own direction. Scientists from several universities, McCarthy claims, already have independently validated Steorn's technology, but "always behind closed doors, always off the record, and always proven to work." Perhaps plagued by the memory of Pons and Fleischmann, the largely discredited "discoverers" of cold fusion, not one of these scientists will go on record as having validated Steorn's claim. Publishing a £75,000, one-page ad in The Economist in August of 2006, the company challenged scientists to come forward either to confirm or invalidate its claim. Steorn has selected a twelve-person jury of "the most qualified and the most skeptical" scientists from a pool of 492 applicants to take on the task.