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The Museum of Unworkable Devices
Jippy_ writes "The quest for perpetual motion has been going on since at least the 11th century according to this site, and scientists have been getting it wrong ever since. Take a gander at some of the most valiant efforts (and ultimately the biggest failures) in trying to beat the laws of physics through the last 1000 years, along with other impossible inventions and devices."
Your father was a fish. You evolved from an egg laid in water, fertilized by a sperm fish swimming upstream - just as salmon swim up stream to fertilize female egg laid in the water. Maybe, you should worship a fish god.
I like this quote. At first it's funny, but then it starts to make sense in a post-modern/ideas-are-bound-by-words way... Anyone know if this web-site is for real or not?
Maybe I *should* worship a fish god.
apt-get install deathstar && deathstar alderaan && echo "You're far too trusting"
What proof of perpetual motion would physicists accept?
The answer to that question is this: none.
If someone were to build a working perpetual motion machine the response of physicists would be "That is impossible so he must be running a fraud of some type. We don't know what the fraud is but we know it is impossible."
Physics is the study of the real and the possible. It is not the study of the unreal and the impossible. Because of this when ever a physicist says "That is impossible." He is talking about a subject he has never studied, and about which he quit literally knows nothing.
I know that mocking people is considered great sport in today's society, and that physicists have been mocking inventors on this subject for at least 150 years; but there is great risk in doing so. If anyone should ever succeed - all of that 150 years of mockery would be paid back with interest.
Taken to its essence the law of conservation of energy says "To an infinite number of decimal places the sum total of the mass and energy in the universe is a constant value." I don't know of any other law of physics that everyone accepts to an infinite number of decimal places without question. In other words: the law of conservation of mass - energy is a statement of physical perfection. We all know that we live in a perfect - flawless universe.
Instead of mocking inventors - physicists would do well to spend their time trying to find out if there are any bugs in the algorithms nature uses to calculate energy.
One place that bugs appear in algorithms is at singularities. For example: The laws of physics predict that when a star collapses to a singularity during the formation of a black hole that an infinite amount of energy is released. Is this a problem?
Here is the physicist's response to that question: "Everybody move along, nothing to see at this train wreck.", "La La La I can't hear you.", and off in the background I think I hear Sgt Schultz: "I zee nothzing!"
If I were a physicist I would be very careful who I was mocking; pay back is a real bitch.