Slashdot Mirror
Perpetual Energy Machine Getting Lots of Attention
Many users have written to tell us about a magnetic machine promising "infinite clean energy". Engadget has the first picture of the device and is reporting that the announcement (along with a short video) of this supposed device will be released later tonight. "CEO Sean McCarthy tells SilconRepublic how it works. Namely, the time variance in magnetic fields allows the Orbo platform to 'consistently produce power, going against the law of conservation of energy which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed.' He goes on to say 'It's too good to be true but it is true. It will have such an impact on everything we do. The only analogy I can give is if you had absolute proof that God wasn't real.'" In my experience if something seems too good to be true it generally is. I wouldn't get your hopes up.
If it draws power from fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field, it isn't perpetual motion any more than a tidal generating station, for example. It draws power from an external source, therefore it doesn't violate the laws of thermodynamics.
Here's an older story on Slashdot covering the same company and technology.
Except it doesn't do that, making your comment irrelevant.
http://quthoughts.blogspot.com/2007/06/steorn-it-j ust-keeps-going-and-going.html
He gave a talk in UCD the other week, this blog has links to the youtube videos. Check out the second video. About 4 or 5 minutes in, he switches over to talking about some unsolved questions in physics. Turns out, there is no dark matter or dark energy. Apparently it's trivial to fix this problem by incorporating "time variance" in Newtonian Mechanics, which is what they had done with their Orbo deviece. What exactly the nature of this time variance is, or what the nature of the solution is is unfortunately not forthcoming though.
Technically IIRC, this would not violate the laws. There is an outside force acting on it in the form of the magnetic fields. The real test of the devices is if it can create more power before the magnets degauss than it takes to create the machine and magnets.
lol: You see no door there!
We don't see anything of his just yet. This guy's made a lot of noise about how many people have been testing it but nobody seems to know anything about it. We don't even know if it really exists.
On the off-chance that it does exist: from the pseudo-scientific babble that he's been putting out, I'm betting that he's reinvented the magnet engine. People have been mistaking that for perpetual motion for years (it actually turns out to be running on fixed magnets, which become gradually demagnetised by the process, but so slowly that you don't notice in a small lab demonstration that only runs for a few minutes). Magnets are like batteries, just not particularly efficient ones. Magnet-powered engines are sneaky things - all the math looks like you're getting energy for free, because nobody ever remembers to incorporate the energy of the magnet itself into the equation (it's not in any high-school textbooks).
> This team is NOT following any of the "Fraud" or "Fake" technology pattern.
Hmmm. I can think of two big perpetual energy machine scams and a couple of more down-to-Earth tech scams over the last couple of decades, and let me tell ya, this is is *absolutely* following the same pattern.
First up, Joseph Newman. Newman was around back in the 80's and claimed to have a device that -get this- uses magnets to generate unlimited power. The company was completely privately funded by angel investors. Quite a bit of money IIRC. Enough to travel around the US giving down-home-revival style shows about the device. He even made it all the way to the Tonight Show. So little difference here it's hard to tell the stories apart.
Next up, Madison Priest. Priest claims to have created a "magic box" (his words) that tapped into zero-point energy. He used this to create -get this- a video compression system! He planned on selling it to the cell phone companies, allowing them to send broadcast quality video over existing low speed channels. He worked up *serious* funding from a wide variety of investors, including Blockbuster, and gave numerous demos that were all apparently faked with hidden cables. Disappeared soon after.
Then there was the Great Oil Sniffer Hoax. An Italian guy named Bonassoli approaches Elf with a device he claims is a gravity wave oil detector. Ends up fleecing them for about $150 MILLION before they finally catch on. Disappears with most of the money soon after.
So:
1) lots of funding
2) public demonstrations
3) often with patents
Please demonstrate how this is any different, as you claim.
> Is this not by definition perpetual motion?
That's the clueless noob definition, yes. The real definition can be found on the wikipedia. Educate yourself.
> haven't done anything here but skewer about a thousand sacred cows.
Yes, I'm sure all the physicists out there are shaking in their shoes. "Oh no, someone on Slash called us dumb! Run for the hills, they're onto us!"
> accept that another opinion might exist.
I'm sure we're all perfectly aware that other opinions exist. After all, Shrub got re-elected.
Maury
Good ole English confusing things and people again. We need to define some terms here.
If an object at rest remains at rest unless acted on by an outside force and an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.... Is this not by definition perpetual motion? It keeps on doing whatever until forever.... Pretty obvious folks.
English definition wise, yes, any object put into motion will remain in motion forever, or until acted on by an outside force. The problem is you cannot get anything useful like a source of energy out of it. Say you have a wheel you can start spinning with no outside forces on it. It will spin forever. Sounds great right? Now say you attach it to a shaft driving a generator. Free power forever right? No. Spinning the shaft to power the generator is now putting an outside force (resistance and all that) and your wheel will come to a stop eventually. Not too useful.
What perpetual energy/motion machines are supposed to do is provide more energy/motion than is being acted upon them from the outside force that is putting their motion/energy to work. Let me say it again another way, they create energy/motion out of nothing, and then the surplus is used for some kind of *work* (charge a battery, power a motor, etc. etc.) If they were creating energy/motion and you did not tap the power, then the device would speed up, and speed up, and continue to speed up to infinity.
What the inventor (and all inventor of perpetual motion devices claim) is that they have found some method of doing this. Creating something that creates energy out of nothing (as opposed to all other sources of energy, which require something. An engine requires fuel, a solar power requires sunlight (or other light) the light from the sun requires hydrogen and other elements to be spent or transformed in a nuclear reaction, etc, etc.
If a perpetual motion/energy machine is ever really devised, it will likely be found later on that the machine is simply running on an formerly unknown form of energy. (As mentioned on here in other posts).
Agnosticism is more properly defined as the belief that god is unknowable, or that the question of whether or not there is a god is not a proper question. Sort of a "we can't know so don't ask" position.
The definitions are quite often mangled such as you have done. Start hanging around on Pharyngula.org to get a better idea of what atheists are all about.
This space available.
Spinoza (a devout believer in God, btw) made a pretty convincing argument that if God does exist, he couldn't take the form of the traditional Jewish/Christian/Muslim diety.
The gist of the argument is thus: the premise of most monotheist religions is that God is singular, perfect, and omnipotent. However, the Torah/Bible/Quaran also ascribes to him qualities such as loving his creations and wanting them to live a just life. These views are contradictory. First, the premise that God is separate from his creations implies that God is finite. The premise that God is finite screws up a lot of assumptions. If God is finite and separate from his creations, then the two must be contained in some greater thing, and this greater thing would be more perfect than God, by virtue of being a superset of him. Moreover, if he's finite, that opens up the possibility that he is not singular. Second, something which is perfect must logically be immutable. Any change in the state of a perfect thing would render it imperfect, or imply that the original state was not perfect to begin with. Thus, God cannot love anything, or want anything for his creations. He cannot think, feel, reason, or want, because all of these things imply mutability. Indeed, perfection and omnipotence are incompatible, because action implies change!
It's very hard to logically reconcile these concepts while still believing that God sent his son to die for our sins, because he wants humanity to be saved. The traditional mono-theistic religions basically give up on the idea of God as perfect and omnipotent in order to maintain the "big man in the sky" idea. Spinoza couldn't deal with that, he posited instead that God was infinite and immutable, not just being a separate entity in the universe but being the entity of which the universe itself was an expression. The problem with this idea, though, is that you can't expect such an entity to answer your prayers, to offer opinions regarding reproductive practices, etc.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That's true -- but Einstein worked out relativity on paper and we spent lots of time trying to figure out how to test the theory long before a nuclear power plant or bomb was produced. These were engineered using the physics that he and others had worked out since 1905. No one "accidentally" stumbled upon a working atomic reactor while messing around with turbines.
If you read the article, you'll see that that's what they claim -- that they "accidentally" stumbled upon this amazing technology.
It's quite rare that anything of any complexity is discovered by accident -- generally, science advances in small steps, not great leaps. In the case of Einstein, people (like Michaelson and Morley) were doing experiments whose results did not agree with the predictions of the prevalent theories of the day, and someone stepped in to explain why. It took us nearly 40 years to do anything like "convert matter to abundant energy" from those initial baby steps.
In the same way that monkeys randomly banging on keyboards don't produce fine works of literature, people messing around with simple machines whose fundamentals have been understood for hundreds of years don't suddenly revolutionize physics.
Of course, both are technically possible, but you'd be a shitty gambler if you bet on those odds.
Actually, there is a way to "tie gears to the planets". Tidal power extracts the kinetic energy of the earth's rotation using the moon as a brake.
And your examples are not free energy. Hawking radiation subtracts from the mass of the black hole perfectly in accordance with E=Mc^2 (as far as anyone knows, at least; AFAIK it's never been measured). And a high-energy photon might well materialise into, say, an electron-positron pair, but the mass energy of that pair is still less than the energy of the photon. None of this vioaltes the laws of thermodynamics. Failing any of the big payoff candidates like black holes or tapping the sun, maybe you could harness the magnetic properties of the earth? I think they're mostly a product of the earth's kinetic and maybe heat energy The Earth's magnetic field is a product of electric currents in the liquid outer core. And no, you can't get energy from a static magnetic field. You can get it from a changing magnetic field, however, and the Earth's magnetic field is changing; but it's doing so over a timescale of hundreds of thousands of years, so the energy you'd get would be very, very small. Yes, I know, this has the earmarks of a scam, but why not wait until we get a chance to find out more before we dismiss it entirely? You're not spending anything but your time, and to my way of thinking, anything that makes you think and reconsider your notions of what is possible is not a waste. There have been hundreds of thousands of 'free energy' devices around. Most are scams; some are by honest people just don't understand the science of what they're doing. None (to my knowledge) has come out of actual scientific research; most are by lone 'entrepreneurs' who get investment money from guillable people and then disappear. At any particular time there are usually OTOO 10 or so 'free energy' companies around. There's nothing new or even particularly original about this one, trust me.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
No. Stainless steel will always outlast steel in a marine environment. I grew up at the seashore, and I worked at a corrosion/coatings laboratory. Unprotected steel will rust in a matter of hours, and become unrecognizable by the end of a season. Galvanized steel is suitable for things like nails and railings. Aluminum can be used as a propeller or boat hull as long as you protect it with zinc anodes. Stainless steel is the only "no maintenance" metal, suitable for cleats, screws, propellers, clamps, etc. It will corrode, too - but at nowhere near the rate of the other metals. If used in a high-stress condition, it will suffer hydrogen embrittlement - but this is true of normal steel as well.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.