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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."
the server that hosted the site!
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
MS-Windows Museum :-P
(somebody had to say it)
Table-ized A.I.
...Lisa Simpson?
alias uptime="echo '5:33pm up 22342352324 days, 6:28, 2124315623 users, load average: 2432.40, 12312.31, 123123.19'"
For new bogus-physics product companies to get coverage from wired.com and get 10 million in funding
I think that the problem with these devices isn't the laws of physics per se, I think its just that they were never properly marketed.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
> scientists have been getting it wrong ever since.
No. NON-scientists have been getting it wrong.
It's just not possible. Energy will always be taken away in the process that can't be "recycled." It's neat to watch people try to make super efficient machines though...I wonder if any low friction fluids, etc. have come out through the development of these inventions?
Colossians 2:8
My nomination for the museum of unworkable devices is DRM
I for one have always been interested in perpertal motion machines and the related laws of physics. I believe so that if we could just improve effeciency we will achieve very near pertual machine like effects. I meen if we are using engines that are only 40% effiencent and we can improve that to 98% then that is still very possible. IMHO
Where's the cat with buttered toast attached to its back?
In theory a PM machine CAN work. Only one itty bitty problem... The machine needs to be perfectly designed and built. Also, no mass can be gained or lost (A perpetual waterfall can't work because water evaporates). PE(potential energy)=KE(kinetic energy) so you use the KE to make more PE. The major problem comes in when someone wants to use this machine to power somthing. Then some of that KE is used for other work than "recharging"(adding PE back to) whatever medium you are using to power your PM machine. This causes the machine to slowly lose its energy and come to a halt. There must also be no interferance at all (no wind, rain, or movement of the machine). Gravity and atmosphere wouldn't cause the machine to stop though. Again... it is possible to make on of these machines but: a) It must be designed and built flawlessly and b) It cannot be used to power anything other than its own movement.
Hydrogen Fuel Cells?
;-)
Surely they must be there, at least for another 10 years
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The quest for perpetual motion has been going on since at least the 11th century
Without ever stopping!
I am a scientist now and after studying physics I guess I am completely cured from the idea that there could be a perpetuum mobile, a machine that produces energy out of vacuum.
But I remember say 20 years ago I spent a long time trying to invent such machines. I kept trying to design it and kept asking people why it wouldnt work. It took a long (frustrating) time before I could sortof acknowledge that it didnt seem to work.
So honestly... who has undergone the same process?
Googlefight "Slashdot Troll" against "BSD is dying" 303:229. BSD thus cant die.
what of the timecube?
I have requested that the UCS, or
Union of Concerned Scientists, act
to evaluate Nature's Harmonic Time
Cube Principle of Creation - for the
welfare of children, nature and the
future of all humanity. The dumb,
stupid and evil bastards have ignored
their obligation to their humanity
fellowship to research Time Cube,
and deserve to be spit upon publicly.
It is their moral duty to test Time
Cube, and a curse of evil if they ignore
the greatest discovery of humanity.
I have offered $10,000.00 to the evil
bastards if they disprove Time Cube.
They can't disprove it, so they hide
like yellow-belly bastards they are.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In a superconductor, electrical resistance is ZERO. Electric current will move forever.
Of course, you need to keep your superconductor cold, so put it in outer space, or keep the liquid helium flowing.
And for you nitpickers: yes, there are superconducters that work at liquid nitrogen temperatures, but you can't make wire out of them yet.
A flawless design for a perpetual motion machine... the only thing I need to make it work are a couple monopole magnets and a room-temperature superconductor. Honest!
Send $1,000 to P.O. box 324, NY, NY 20002 to get in on the ground floor!!
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Try using the Atari 5200 or Atari Jaguar joystick without taking your eyes off of the screen.
I thouht I was terrible at Aliens vs. Predator until I realized I kept getting killed because I was staring at the controller more than I was looking at the game.
Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid. --John Wayne
I mean even the server follows the spirit of the exhibits!
I stole this Sig
This reminded me of the Anime Laws of Physics.
Fight or flight its all the same
Live to die another day
--Ryan
Regarding the rock, yeah, in theory it will spin forever. But, asides from the initial energy to get it into space and give it momentum... how do you harness the "energy" from the spinning? The short answer is, you can't.
The rock spinning isn't really energy as such since it is just obeying Newton's first law of motion - anything moving will continue moving unless acted upon by an external force.
And unfortunately the only way to harness the "energy" is to apply an external force.
The Troll Engine.
what it does is post a comment extoling the virtues of Windows 95 over Linux. It then uses the heat generated by the ensuing flamewar to power a small town.
When I was younger, in early high school, I discovered that my father was trying to build a perpetual motion machine in his basement workshop. It was a rotating wheel with slots that contained ball bearings. The idea was that the bearings would roll in the slots in such a way that the wheel would constantly be unbalanced, causing it to rotate forever. He hadn't quite gotten it to work, of course, and was concerned about the angle of the slots and friction at the hub. I had taken some physics by then, and tried to explain to my dad about conservation of energy and how his machine, in principle, could never work. Maybe he was already discouraged by then, but he quit working on it shortly after that.
Make a difference: move to a swing state.
I have a design for a perpetual motion machine that almost works.
It was cool !! Metal wheels and magnets to pull itself along !! Never figured out how to stop it though.
The problem with your idea is thermodynamics. Thermodynamic analysis will tell you the maximum efficiency that an engine can acheive. Look up the Carnot engine (or cycle) for a good discussion. A Carnot engine is the most efficient engine possible, nonetheless, the thermodynamic limits are a killer. Throw in friction, realistic melting points for materials, etc. and the world is a dreary place. Engines will NEVER approach 98% efficiency.
I feel like (as a non-scientist, non-physicist) that I have an intuitive understanding that all self-contained devices relying only on their own mechanics would never attain perpetual motion due to the dragging forces of gravity, friction, and other forms of external resistance.
But I don't have such an intuitive understanding that a machine that takes advantage of outside consistent forces as a source of energy (like gravity) could not attain perpetual motion. Especially if we loosen the definition of "outside consistent forces" from the scientific definition (those natural forces that always balance themselves) to the practical definition, like those forces that aren't naturally occuring but happen all the time anyway, like the directional airflow in a building's exit corridor, or the vibration of a dance floor, or all the other places in the world where energy is being expended and not captured. If we made machines that were built to rely on those forces always happening, and capturing them to convert them to energy, wouldn't that be generating more energy than is expended to run it, considering that the expended energy it depends on would be happening anyway? I know it's mathematically lazy but there's no reason why we can't double-count that stuff.
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
I got the page to load before it got slashdotted, and it looks like these are all perpetual motion machines of the first kind. These machines violate conservation of energy.
Perpetual motion machines of the second kind don't violate conservation of energy, but they rely on a decrease in entropy. With a machine like that a ship could run an engine that extracts energy from the ambient water temperature to do work, leaving a trail of colder seawater behind the ship. That doesn't violate conservation of energy, but it does cause a global reduction of entropy.
It takes more cleverness to come up with a machine of the second kind, and it's usually less obvious why they don't work.
Here's a machine like that. Assume we have a propellor made of some heat resistant material like ceramic, inside a larger ceramic housing in which it is free to rotate. Stick a big permanent magnet around it so that there is a magnetic field running through it, parallel to the propellor axis. Now inject a hot plasma of some sort into the device. Electrons in the plasma move in tight little counterclockwise circles because of the field. Protons move in much wider clockwise circles (they're heavier), so they hit the propellor blades preferentially in one direction and make it rotate.
Of course the plasma is going to cool down quickly if the protons in it are imparting kinetic energy to the propellor. So as a perpetual motion machine of the first kind, it's obviously going to run down and stop. But take the whole machine and drop it on a planet where the ambient temperature is high enough to keep the plasma hot. As the propellor extracts energy, more heat flows into the machine. What's wrong with it now?
And until it slams into something, it's simply in perpetual motion, it's not a perpetual motion machine...
A machine must do Work (definition: The transfer of energy from one physical system to another).
Perpetual motion is easy. A perpetual motion machine is impossible.
Simon.
(Getting tired of pointing out that machines have to DO something)
Physicists get Hadrons!
One cannot expect to use permanent magnetism as a source of perpetual motion because when a permenant magnet does work, it loses a certain amount of its magnetism in the process. This phenomenon can be seen directly with the following simple home-science experement: Place two magnets side by side, such that like poles are adjacent to eachother. Let go of one and note how far it gets pushed away. Now in a PM device, the magnets will obviously have to be brought back together at regular intervals -- so tape them together so that you effectively create an environment where the repulsion action is perpetual (which is what you are trying to achieve). Leave it alone for a few weeks. Come back after that time and remove the tape. Repeat the experiment that you did at the beginning and you will notice that the free magnet gets pushed quite a bit less than before -- sometimes not even at all! What is of particular interest is the stronger the magnets were originally, the more pronounced this loss of magnetism is, so powerful magnets quickly become weak magnets, which are capable of doing less work, and therefore require more time to lose a measurable amount of their magnetism.
tanstaafl
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You're sort of mixing up what you're talking about, but mostly, you're on track. It's trivially easy to cause something to obtain perpetual motion - as many other posts have pointed out, just toss something into space. Odds are it'll keep going forever. Perpetual motion isn't hard at all (after all, Newton's laws effectively demand that it be possible). A perpetual motion MACHINE, on the other hand...
:)
As for weather, the problem is you're relying on an external power source - the sun. Turn that off, and boom, no weather (well, eventually anyway). You are correct though, we can use this energy that's just sitting around and gain more than we put into something. In fact, this is how our entire planet survives - both its organisms and our modern society. Think hydroelectric damns and wind turbines - they're just using something that's there anyway. And plants take advantage of the ever-present sun to store chemical energy within themselves, which other organisms then use when they eat said plants, etc.
The problem still lies in self-contained systems. A friend of mine took years to believe me that you couldn't run a ship (assuming no wind outside) with windmills powering a motor that actually powers the ship. Friction is a bitch
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Weird News
Regarding perpetual motion, however, the US has a strict patent policy. According to federal statute, 35 USC 101, perpetual motion machines are explicitly unpatentable as inoperative.
atoms seem to be stable. electrons are moving. Isn't this perpetual motion? I know it's not the same but i've never heard a good reason why.
Now there's been a fair bit of scoffed at yet strenuously researched scientific endeavour in this area, but all the successes seem to be in the snake oil category, though there are some humble curiosities like John Hutchison's work. Still, we don't understand dick about it: it doesn't really fit into the currently popular physics models, it is beyond the reach of our current instruments, and so any use of it, if it's really there, is either impossible or really dangerous.
So what's the point? We aren't ready.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I read a good book on this a long time ago, Tapping the ZPE by Moray B. King. The idea is that there are a set of circumstances that can cause a random system to move toward order. The work was based on the 1977 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, who discovered the circumstances that can cause that to happen. This was done without violating the second law of thermodynamics, and is probably why the guy got the Nobel Prize. I don't know his name.
If I remember right, the circumstances were that the system had to be non-linear, far from equilibrium, and energy had to be expended to maintain that state.
The question is if you can build some sort of device to make the ZPE less random and extract energy from, literally, nothing. Just to say that "that's impossible" discounts the fact that we realy do not have a unified theory of everything, and there is likely a long way to go before we do have a GUT. I would perfer to keep an open mind about these things, and look for results. It is especially difficult to attempt to apply science - engineer a device - when the science is a great unknown to even the best minds on the planet now. Nothing is impossible, and everything in the universe came from nothingness originally!
One problem of any device like that is the energy density of the ZPE is absolutely insane. You could make a very deadly weapon from it. Nikola Tesla, one of the oldschool proponents of ether theories oft noted that unlimited energy would not be a good thing for mankind. He was probably right.
We don't need a free energy device anyhow. There's a huge ball of free energy 93 million miles away. We just need to engineer better ways to use that "free energy", first.
..don't panic
...everything is invested in helping a destitute royal from Nigeria. As soon as I get the millions promised in the email, I will invest in your project.
What do you know about World Politic? Find out in this quiz
This got modded up as interesting? Yeesh. I don't even know where to start.
What proof of perpetual motion would physicists accept? The answer to that question is this: none.
Not true. You build a machine that operates forever, and it works, and it can be reproduced...well, then, you would've rewritten physics. Rewriting physics, you see, happens every once in awhile. Newton, Gauss, Einstein -- someone comes along and provides a better way things work. And, here's the thing: if they can show that they're right, they'll be accepted. The reason perpetual motion inventors are ridiculed isn't that physicists have some secret cabal out to discredit them, it's that none of them have ever worked.
Should anyone ever succeed, I don't think paying back the mocking will be high on their list of priorities -- I would rather go for cashing in the big, fat checks.
I don't know of any other law of physics that everyone accepts to an infinite number of decimal places without question...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.
The universe is not an Intel Pentium CPU. It doesn't do floating point arithmetic, and applying ideas like decimal points and algorithms to it is kind of silly.
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?
Well, geewillickers! Why hasn't anyone ever seen this before? You must be right! Whole fields of science will be revisited now that you've pointed out...oh, wait. Except a star collapsing to a singularity doesn't release an infinite amount of energy (a singularity has infinite density, not infinite mass). Nevermind.
Good job on splitting your reply into two posts. That's truly evidence of good thinking and planning.
As to Scientific American: Who the hell cares? If you have a perpetual motion machine, and you can demonstrate it, and it's replicable, then all the naysayers will come around, or be laughed at themselves. Same thing with every other physical 'law' that's been overturned. But...until you get that proof, expect to be laughed at and called a fraud, since you're filling the same shoes as the last ten thousand frauds who thought they had a perpetual motion machine, as well. As humans, we get this thing called "learning from past experience".
As for the formula: that's funny. I was going to use the 'will run their mouths on subjects they know nothing about' to describe you.
First: It's pretty obvious that a star compressing into a black hole does not release an infinite amount of energy:
1) Stars compressing to a black hole release some percentage of energy as heat.
2) Any non-zero percentage of an infinite amount is an infinite amount.
3) Stars have collapsed into black holes already.
4) An infinite amount of heat subsequently failed to wash through the universe.
The amount of energy released by stars collapsing into black holes has been theoretically examined, and while large, is certainly not infinite.
Second: You can't say anything about what happens within the event horizon for sure, so trying to use any formula on anything going on within it is pointless, whereas (gasp, shock) if you use the event horizon for the radius, the numbers actually seem to make sense.