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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!
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.
In this house we obey the laws of Thermodynamics!
> scientists have been getting it wrong ever since.
No. NON-scientists have been getting it wrong.
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?
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!
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
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...
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.
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.
You're defining a PM machine by excluding the 'machine' bit. Part of the definition of a machine is that it has to do Work (technical definition - The transfer of energy from one physical system to another).
A body set spinning on a (somewhat miraculous) journey along an isopotential of gravitational force in the universe will continue spinning for eternity (or thereabouts. The universe might collapse...)
The spinning body's still not a perpertual motion machine because it doesn't interact, and should it ever interact, it'll be subject to the laws of motion and thermodynamics and still not be a perpetual motion machine.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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?
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.