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Yet Another Perpetual Motion Device
The Star reports on this inventor breaking all the laws of physics as far as free energy goes. It even provoked interest from "esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Markus Zahn". I would like to know how this seemingly backyard enthusiast's experimental set up has not been tried a million times over the years. It seems so simple and too good to be true. The article has links to a multi-part video demo of the device accelerating an electric motor under load for free!
The problem is the magnetic field degrades.
The people involved are going out of their way to say it's not perpetual motion; rather, the experiment is not working as predicted. There are many explanations for that. The guy involved has basically wrecked his life over tinkering with it.
And the articles don't give enough details to judge much.
But so far, slashdot is the only article that talks about perpetual motion.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Thermodynamics just says you can't win when you're talking about the whole Universe. Once you start to get into smaller sections of it you can increase organization locally but it is always at the expense of more global energies. Life here on Earth is an example of this - we're more organized but the Sun pumps out a lot of wasted energy to feed that organization. It's entirely possible that some kind of machine could be built to extract energy locally which ultimately has a global source but that does not mean its perpetual, the Universe will still wind down total energy wise in the global space.
Shh.
I build residential, commercial and industrial power factor correction devices. I've seen some large water treatment plant motors operating at below 50% efficiency. Before we start blowing money on free energy we should look at how much is wasted right now. As a test I went to a local applicance store and tested five identical EnergyStar refrigerators for the efficiency of the compressor motor. Every one of them was less than 95% efficient because motors must be sized larger than the actual load to account for loss over time. I had one Subway restaurant save about forty percent on their monthly electric bill due to increase in inductive energy efficiency. For whatever reason we can't seem to see the forest through the trees.
I think you're missing an important part of the puzzle.
When I watched the video, I was struck by how the coil on the right doesn't have a pole piece on its far end to take the magnetic flux back to the permanent magnet wheel. Then I saw him demonstrate the difference between having a brass motor shaft and a steel shaft, and I had an inkling of what was going on.
An induction motor is a very complex device whose complexity is masked by its physical simplicity. The induction motor builds a rotating magnetic field in the rotor by inducing current flow into the aluminum rotor windings from the AC stator coil (as any power transformer does). The interaction between the induced field and the stator field causes the motor to turn. The rotor has specific requirements with regard to the shape of the windings to achieve maximum efficiency. Understanding the current flow and the magnetic flux is a job for theoretical experts (which I'm not).
Notice that the apparatus is mounted on a steel table. This provides a flux path from the motor housing to the black coil at the right end of the machine. The addition of his steel shaft has "completed the magnetic circuit" between this coil (an AC generator) and the induction motor rotor, which will do very interesting things to the magnetic field on the rotor! Especially since the field he generates is an AC field with what, 16 poles? I think he has a four pole 1750 RPM induction motor.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
I'd be willing to bet that if you asked the professors off the record they would give you an explanation in the line of what the GP did, but they have to be more restrained in their public declarations. They are careful not to make public guesses about how it works, because, inevitably, they would be wrong about some small detail and the "inventor" would be able to say the scientists know nothing.
Or do you think scientists are so stupid that, after more than a hundred years of research, they would have overlooked a basic principle that a dyslexic cook can discover by himself? The scientists have not studied the invention at all, the only reason why they cannot explain the result is because they have insufficient information. It's not as if this guy had published the plans for his machine, all the professors could see was a demo presented by the inventor.
This guy seems to be crook who tries to do his job by letting the victims read between the lines. He has *wink, wink* NOT invented a perpetual motion engine, and he is *wink, wink* NOT after investments for "further development".
First, allow me to correct you. Radioactive decay is also a state transition.
But, here's the thing. The law of conservation of energy is derived from the inherent symmetry of the universe. Any system that live in a universe where the laws of physics are the same for left/right/up/down/front/back is doomed to be governed by fixed amount of over all energy.
But these are not absolute laws. If you manage to devise a pair of rings where what goes into one pops out the other with no change in temperature, you CAN create energy out of nothing. In fact, merely placing the rings at different altitudes will cause air pressure to generate a wind from the lower ring to the higher ring. You can easily use this wind to power a turbine, and you WILL get free energy.
Is the law of conservation of energy being broken here? No, it's just being subverted. The rings create asymmetry.
Of course, the opposite is also true. So long as symmetry was not broken, it is not required to delve into the details of the machine in order to conclude that it does not produce energy.
Shachar
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
I can do the same, by applying a brake for the first case, and not applying it for the second case. Now, if he shows that the first case's efficiency is close to 100% (with the brake), then we've got something noteworthy.
"Lenz's law simply states that, like Newton's law of an "equal and opposite reaction," there's an opposing force counter-acting the force in play. It's like the opposite reaction of an astronaut falling towards a planet: inertia. Neither force is created, nor destroyed. All energy is conserved. Idiot troll"
So how hard were these laws faught before it was the common standard taught to us?
These laws do not address where forces like magnets and gravity come into play and if they could ever be tapped or not. Just because they haven't been made into laws before doesn't preclude them from ever being added to the established laws as footnotes. If we discover that the magnet like the sun degrades over time because it uses stored energy this would be all common place in a few generations and magnetic generators would be standard. If we learn to tap the constant pull from magnets and use them to create work but at the cost of the magnetic pull over time, this would stay within the "laws" and everybody would be fine with it. You use a resource until it's depleated and no one argues over it and claims that they are the greatest scientific voyer ever and can prove the underpinnings of the universe obey their assumptions and not the theories of others. Until ot was proven imagine someone claiming that they could take a gallon of liquid and move an object 30 miles. The energy stored in gasoline just had an easier method of extraction and left a more altered residual. Now take a rechargable battery in the tesla raodster that can move a vehicle a couple hundred miles and doesn't leave an empty tank, but a depleted battery that can be recharged with invisible electrons and go again without adding an observable amount of mass. This is no fantasy of the loose minded but a natural extension of the valid science applied in the persuit of extracting energy from material properties and interactions, fusion, nuculear reactions, charged states, magnetism. Just because we understand some part of our environment doesn't mean that we know the rules of the whole game. Black holes that have been discovered still don't follow the rules of thermodynamics since they absorb energy and do not release it in the same amount unless you count gravity as energy, which it that case you can't say that gravity will never let us convert it back to energy that we can use. The "Laws" don't address the one way principle that people like to use against these kinds of ideas to dismiss them. And just because poeple haven't done something before should be no excuse why some shouldn't try. Remember that every major scientific advancement was not done in the past, but the present for the experimenter. Before it was known and accepted. Not after everybody thought it was allowed.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Many people seem to believe that, but it's not how science works. (Or even art, for that matter, Picasso took extensive training in classical art before he started his revolution in painting, for example...)
Look at any big breakthrough in science, it has never, ever, been done by an outsider. Big fundamental changes in the current thinking process always come from a scientist, usually young, who has thoroughly studied the subject before concluding a change is needed.
It's not that there is a "box" limiting scientific thought, but theories are created for specific sets of circumstances. When science and technology expands beyond those circumstances, new theories are needed. However, when you are creating new theories, it's never helpful to be ignorant of the current theories. You cannot circumvent the limitations of current theories if you don't even know those theories.