Comments on: Perpetual motion is an attractive impossibility

By: Possibly the anti-christ

Possibly the anti-christ — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 07:02:14 +0000

Im a crackpot ^_^, I want to test 1 idea that I had but if it doesn’t work I will surrender to the laws of thermodynamics everyone seems to enjoy. I understand your and the worlds understanding of physics may seem infallible. I can understand why you would scrutinize anything that isn’t within your realm of understanding but that doesn’t mean that things that seem impossible and improbable can’t actually happen. If you close your mind you are destined to fail. In my opinion we have been beating our heads against the wall time and time again to come up with a free energy apparatus. People always make the same mistakes; as stated in the comment section above, they do not take the time to learn the physics which is necessary to understand what would work and what wouldn’t. As Einstein said, if an answer seems obstructed or impossible you are not looking at the problem in a fashion which would warrant the answer you are looking for. In actuality I am probably just a crackpot. But what good scientist isn’t?

Put a man on the moon? impossible!, Mind control pilot a wheelchair? Impossible! Create a bomb that can surpass the force of 10 million tons of TNT? Impossible? The list goes on and on. Don’t be isolated by the confines of normal thinking!

All been done. Perhaps for free energy, the right people have not been thinking about it.

P.S. I don’t think the oil companies are out to get me.

By: Pete Michaud

Pete Michaud — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:45:24 +0000

I think smart people tend to get excited about whatever they’re working on, then try to take short cuts through the boring bits, like actually learning the necessary physics. Combine that with a little sunk cost fallacy, perhaps a little cynical opportunism, and you have a crackpot.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:07:49 +0000

Really interesting post. Here's an apparent truism: if an event is possible at all, then it should also be possible if every event in the universe were translated forward in time by 1 second. That's called time translation symmetry. But a shocking theorem by Emmy Noether proves that if this is true, then there's a conserved quantity that (in everday circumstances) is exactly energy. So, local energy conservation is actually built into the symmetries of the Universe. Two hesitations. First, this only rules out perpetual motion of the first kind. Perpetual motion of the second kind is not strictly impossible, just very unlikely (by the 2nd law of thermodynamics). And perpetual motion of the third kind remains both possible and viable! (I assume the rolling ball video is something close to that.) Second, even perpetual motion of the first kind is possible on a large scale, where time-translation symmetry fails. For example: in standard big-bang models of cosmology, the Universe is expanding, while the total amount of matter-energy remains fixed. Obviously, this implies energy density is decreasing. And if the Universe were on its way to a big crunch, then total energy would be increasing -- giving us energy "for free." Maybe all those smart, crazy people were onto something....