The laws of science are supposed to be non-negotiable, and therefore it is not recommended to include claims that your technology will rewrite them in your investor presentations. However, that hasn't stopped some investors from backing two clean-tech companies that say they have planet-saving technology that violates fundamental laws of science.

Blacklight Power is one "edge-science" company that's been attracting lots of attention. It's an enterprise with killer credentials. Its founder and CEO, Randell Mills, is a Harvard doctor, and he has an all-star board and a team of highly-pedigreed scientists working under him.

Mills claims that his company's technology can generate 200 times more energy than coal using only water, with no unpleasant byproducts like, say, nuclear waste. The projected cost of this technology? One cent per kilowatt hour, less than coal at its cheapest.

Not surprisingly, these assertions have skeptics scoffing. For a lot of people, if it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true.

But there is more to their caution than that. The technology is alleged to work by reducing hydrogen atoms to an energy level below their resting state, creating a particle Mills calls a hydrino, and then tapping into the energy released by that change.

It's an exciting idea with only one problem: according to many mainstream physicists, it's a scientific impossibility. Wikipedia puts it this way: "Physicists agree that the existence of hydrino states with the properties Mills attributes to them is incompatible with quantum mechanics."

Mills dismisses the skeptics. "They're arguing a theoretical argument," he's been quoted as saying. "We can show experimentally that we can create this new form of energy." And indeed, independent testing at Rowan University showed heat levels well above what doubters would predict. This has won over some skeptics but many have not been persuaded.

Chris Morrison of Venture Beat reports that Blacklight Power's chemical reaction, which combines an industrial form of nickel with sodium hydroxide, produced a burst of heat for only a short time in the tests undertaken by Rowan University. Further verification is needed to show that the reaction can be sustained to create power plants.  

Blacklight has attracted about $60 million in venture capital, including about $10 million from electric utilities Conectiv and PacifiCorp. It also recently inked its first commercialization agreement, with New Mexico's Estacado Energy Services to deliver up to 250 MW of thermal power.

And then there's the even stranger case of the Irish company Steorn. The company claims to have developed a technology, dubbed Orbo, that uses magnetic fields to produce "free, clean and constant energy … By free we mean that the energy produced is done so without recourse to external source. By clean we mean that during operation the technology produces no emissions. By constant we mean that with the exception of mechanical failure the technology will continue to operate indefinitely."

This is nothing less than your basic perpetual motion machine, which has long been held up as a scientific impossibility. The folks at Steorn do not dispute this: "The sum of these claims for our Orbo technology is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy, perhaps the most fundamental of scientific principles. The principle of the conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created or destroyed, it can only change form."

Management has forged ahead anyway. In 2006, the company took out a full-page ad in The Economist in which it announced its technology and invited the scientific community to test its claim. It explained that it was taking this unorthodox approach because it wanted to route around the red tape and delays associated with the usual peer-review process.

Later that year a credible jury was empanelled. It was expected to issue a report in 2007 but nothing has emerged yet. Meanwhile Steorn has been mostly silent, with the exception of a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt in July 2007 to publicly demo its technology at London's Kinetica Museum. The failure, according to CEO Sean McCarthy, was due to "excessive heat from the lighting in the main display area." The company's many skeptics responded with this comment (and we paraphrase): whatever.

At last report, Steorn remained committed to Orbo and was planning to launch commercially in the summer of 2009 without first demonstrating the technology. Since its 2006 announcement, the company has raised about £8M to support further development, a level of success sufficient to cause Steorn's skeptics to raise their eyebrows even further.

Unlikely as these propositions may seem, these investors could turn out to be not crazy but crazy smart. This is because scientific "laws" are really just theories, and theories can always be improved upon. The companies' backers are wagering that the technologies they're investing in are premised on "improved," not bogus, science.

Who's to be believed here, the entrepreneurs with their novel scientific claims or the debunkers who think they're incompetent or worse? It's a question currently without an answer, for a very simple reason: the evidence isn't in yet.

In the meantime, whether or not we give the benefit of the doubt to edge-science companies like Blacklight and Steorn says more about our psyches than the enterprises. Skeptics tend to be traditionalists who believe in the authority of the known. For them, mainstream science is not unlike a church: its truths are incontrovertible—and woe betide those who contradict them!

Supporters tend to be more subversive in nature. They look for the gaps in the known. Nothing pleases them more than when "authority" is shown to be a work-in-progress.

Whatever your inclination, one thing is clear: the stakes are enormous. There are disruptive technologies that turn an industry upside-down, and there are massively disruptive technologies that could change life as we know it. Blacklight's and Steorn's technologies, if proven to be true, fall into the latter category. If, and that's a very big if, their claims pan out, they will give us, almost overnight, the upper hand in the battle against climate change. The human and economic benefits would be incalculable.

There's no denying that conventional science rests on a mighty strong foundation--one bucks it at one's peril. Yet there is also George Bernard Shaw's memorable phrase, which Steorn quoted in its Economist ad: "All great truths begin as blasphemies."

The proof is in the technological pudding. Eventually the truth will out. Only then will we learn if our hope—or our skepticism—was well-founded.