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YouTube and the Modern Mad Scientist (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Making change for $1.00 and getting $1.10 back. That's the premise of overunity, free energy, and perpetual motion experiments. Using money as the the analogy is fitting because these concepts are heavily aligned with scams trying to land a payday for their "research". But there is another branch of people working on them: tinkerers who believe they can actually solve the problem. Laws of thermodynamics say otherwise, but this isn't necessarily wasted time. Other breakthroughs are waiting to be discovered as these mad scientists try to remove all efficiency losses from their doomed systems. YouTube can be an interesting place to look for ideas on low-friction, high efficiency fabrication.
I came here to post the same thing... except that instead of sub-space sci-fi... I was going with mother nature... like your compass spinning when standing at magnetic north, I suspect they will stumble upon a method of extracting a minute amount of energy from the environment, and due to their lack of scientific understanding they will attribute it to perpetual motion rather than simple energy balance accounting. Then some scientist will come along and explain it in a few minutes and the "inventor" will be all sad because science crapped on their idea.
The bottom line is they spend years tinkering with an idea, that a scientist armed with a little math and chemistry can debunk in a matter of minutes... leaving the rest of the time to do real science.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Yeah, I perform my own "perpetual" motion experiments, but I have never shared my inventions with anyone. I have a PhD... in pharmacy, but I've never seriously entertained the idea that I might succeed. My goal has always simply been to come close. We don't need true perpetual motion, for example, just something that doesn't need to be reset very often. If I only have to raise a weight, reset a machine, wind a clock, etc, etc, weekly who cares. It's a minor inconvenience. For some reason these machines are dismissed and treated as black or white; complete success or complete failure. I live in the grey area.
One of my favorite sci-fi short stories had a similar premise. Some guy discovers a way to make an inter-dimensional portal. No one knows where the other end is, but it's blazing hot on the other side. Everyone starts building simple heat engines to harvest the energy. And all is well until .... ... the Devil sues the guy. Heat was being drained from Hell and was predicted to cause widespread problems. Epistemological (as opposed to ecological) disaster of biblical proportions.
Funny stuff.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
It's worth pointing out that "conservation of energy" is not a property of the universe we inhabit. Sure, at human-tinkering scale it is, and these guys won't achieve over-unity, but in the greater scheme of things: energy is not conserved in general relativity.
Conservation of energy is mathematically equivalent to "current age of the universe is not an input to the laws of motion" (time intervals are unrelated). It doesn't work out that way in GR, mostly because the idea of "current age" doesn't apply.
Relativity is odd that way. The mass of an object depends on it's total potential energy (a compressed spring is heavier). That concept of potential energy having some absolute total value, not just relative values to an arbitrary "floor", doesn't exist in "normal" physics. All that matters is potential difference (aka "force"). That change makes most of our intuitions, heck most of the stuff engineering is built on, wrong.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
We don't even know if the Universe is a closed system, and the "Big Bang" is pure hypothesis since nobody has done an experiment to make sure that photons look the way we expect after 10 billion years of travel. Subtle effects we couldn't detect on Earth because of local noise might easily alter the implications of that sort of work. It is largely speculative, because it represents the edge-data of the sensors. Edge data from every type of sensor is low quality. If you really honestly apply the scientific method, then if the Big Bang is true we could never establish it, because we'd never be able to do the needed experiments to verify the sensor calibration. That proponents of the hypothesis insist it is "proven" is a giant red flag for mindless consumption of received knowledge.
"In a closed system entropy always goes up." Great, now prove that any system that exists or ever existed is closed. It can't be done, it would require proving a negative. Even to the extent that we understand the laws of thermodynamics, we can't assess what they do or do not exclude. We can only assess the parts of in the middle that overlap our engineering capabilities.
Theoretically, everything will balance eventually. Eventually can be a really long time, but it's usually a really short time.
OK - so how about http://www.genchem.net/thermo/... or http://www.physlink.com/Educat... or https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k...
None of them are talking only about heat engines - they carefully point out that historically, thermodynamics was all about steam engines. But nowadays, it's realized that the laws are far more universal than that.
Not one of them talks about "the triple of volume, pressure and temperature" - that stuff is a tiny, tiny subset of what modern thermodynamics covers. You're still back in the Victorian era of steam engines.
Anyway - I'm done arguing with you. I guess that 99% of other people here agree with me.
www.sjbaker.org
I submit to you an electron around a hydrogen atom. It's been in perpetual motion for billions of years already, and will likely be for many many billions more.
In a properly controlled environment near perpetual macroscopic motion is achievable (Simple - orbit two rocks around them selves in space away from other gravitational disturbances), but obviously you can't pull power from nowhere on a statistically averaged and continuous basis.