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Has college dropout done the impossible and created a perpetual motion machine?
- davidw 19y agoNo.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- eusman 19y agoother articles imply it does give a boost. is it a definite no?
- mechanical_fish 19y agoYes. Are you unfamiliar with the fact that crackpots invent perpetual motion machines at the rate of several per year, and that they've been doing so for a hundred years or more? Believe me, there are few areas of technology that have been raked over as thoroughly as this one. Articles imply a lot of things. Some journalists will believe absolutely anything. And who knows what this MIT prof is doing, taking calls from guys like this? Maybe he hopes to gently steer the poor guy into the therapy that he clearly needs. Maybe he likes seeing his own name in print. Or maybe he's a crackpot, too. The fact that he's an MIT professor is hardly very reassuring. I've met some very eccentric Ivy League profs...
- mattmaroon 19y agoInterestingly, no matter how many times these people turn out to be crackpots, the next one gets even more media coverage. It must be because the significance of a perpetual motion machine (unlimited free clean energy) brings out wishful thinking in everyone it touches. That or our nation's physics education is not so hot.
- pmjordan 19y agoIf the purported energy source is really unlimited, could we really consider it clean?
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- mechanical_fish 19y agoThis is a fun way to approach the paradox of perpetual motion: if we had a machine to generate energy from nothing, (or to magically teleport unlimited amounts of energy from Alpha Centauri, or whatever) we'd soon fill up our Earth with lots of extra matter (matter=energy, don'tcha know), and eventually the planet would collapse into a black hole! Or, much more likely, we'd heat the Earth up enough that we could successfully radiate the excess energy out into space. Al Gore would not like that plan one bit. Of course, while you're violating the second law of thermodynamics, I suppose you could always build a second machine that takes the exhaust heat from your perpetual-motion-powered cars and planes and sends it back to wherever it came from.
- wallflower 19y agoI remember from my Thermodynamics class that modern gasoline engines are only about 37% theoretically efficient (most of the energy is lost as heat). Even if his invention doesn't violate scientific paradigms and is merely a more efficient induction motor, it might build a market.
- mechanical_fish 19y agoWell, sure, but you've got to ask yourself which is more likely: that the chef with no science education, no professional experience with motors, no understanding of thermodynamics, and so little knowledge of his field that he allows his invention to be branded as a perpetual motion machine (as if that will enhance his credibility!) has made a previously unknown breakthrough in induction motor efficiency? Or that he has merely constructed an insanely complicated-looking but otherwise uninteresting variation on previously known physics?
- Tichy 19y agoActually if you put a wire into a magnetic field and run a current through it, there will be a force on the wire (if it has the right orientation, I suppose). That's how conventional electrical motors work, too.
- xirium 19y agoYou may wish to evaluate this fellow with the Crackpot Index ( http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html ). The index is like spamassassin for kooks.
- daniel-cussen 19y agoSomeday, I'd like to draft an article that maxes out this scale, and see if I can publish it in a straight-faced student newspaper, or pseudoscientific special-interests publication.
- dfranke 19y agoThere's one item on that list that I've always had a gripe with: > 10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves and/or finds any flaws in your theory. This is legitimate, sometimes. See for example the prize offered for cryptanalysis of Salsa20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salsa20 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salsa20 Oh, and the Galileo thing ought to be worth at least 75 points.
- staticshock 19y agoWolfram offered prize money just recently to somebody to prove that some small automata he found was turing complete.
- dfranke 19y agoThat too. I didn't want to use that example because someone would have retorted that Wolfram wasn't really a false positive.
- stcredzero 19y agoI wonder how creationists score on this thing?
- curi 19y agoSuch an unbelievable invention would challenge the laws of physics, a no-no in the rigid world of serious science. The article contains other hints that the scientific community is a bit like the Church a few hundred years ago -- rigidly attached to the status quo. That's an odd thing to claim, considering all the new scientific ideas we've had in the last century.
- aristus 19y ago"Science progresses one funeral at a time." -- Max Planck To be fair, revolutionary scientific advances spend a long time in the heresy box. The most recent I can think of was the bacterial causes of ulcers... took 20 years and some dramatic self-experiments before it was taken seriously enough to confirm. That said, the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence required.
- curi 19y agoI don't see how that's fair. What non-scientific fields are more reasonable than, say, physicists? Scientists may not be perfect. But they have certain standards, which make them better. For example, scientists have a tradition of disregarding the source of an idea and focussing on examining reasons it is correct or not. Edit: BTW it's ironic that Planck would say that. I think it's pretty clear that his own life, not his death, advanced physics.
- iamwil 19y agoHe didn't mean his own death, necessarily. But the death of older physicists that founded previous revolution stuck with the old (and wrong) ideas that were against his new (and right) ideas. You'll find that historically, older scientists in prominent positions will be adamant against an uprising revolution in his field. If he/she wields enough power in academia, he'll crush it...at least delay it for a while, until he dies. Newton was rather notorious for this sort of stuff. He held some high position(forgot what it was called) in academia and made it difficult for lots of other younger scientists that came after while he was in power.
- mixmax 19y agoIf you tell me that Newtons theory of gravity is wrong I'll hear you out. If you tell me Einsteins theory of relativity doesn't hold up I'll hear you out. But if you tell me that the second law of thermodynamics is wrong I'll tell you you're a crackhead...
- DaniFong 19y agoFor what it's worth, you may find the fluctuation theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuation_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuation_theorem) interesting. It shows that the second law is incorrect in the same way as Newton's theory of gravity was: both are accurate, in their domain of applicability, but neither had such boundaries well defined. Where Newton's law fails for very heavy systems, the second law fails for very small (though by a far smaller amount).
- mixmax 19y agoYes I did find that interesting. Thanks.
- Alex3917 19y agoDidn't Einstein himself predict zero-point energy, meaning that you can have perpetual motion without violating the second law of thermodynamics?
- derefr 19y agoI've not looked very far into zero-point energy, but, assuming it's thermodynamically valid as you say, wouldn't truly harnessing it lower the zero point of the particles involved to balance the system? Therefore, you'd either run out of energy when all the zero-points became literal zero, find that the energy harnessed is linear while the zero-point drop is inverse-exponential (an amazing fact indeed), or find that the zero-point is able to become negative.
- Alex3917 19y agoDon't think of it as an infinite gas tank, but rather a gas tank that's roughly the size of the universe. Theoretically you'll empty the tank eventually, but it'll take a good while.
- kul 19y agoi haven't read this, but can confidently answer "no".
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- dkokelley 19y agoThe best way to gain credibility for his device is to employ his invention to create some sort of useful device. Maybe create a car that never needs any sort of fuel, or provide free energy for everyone. If he comes out with that, I'll be a little more inclined to hear him out.
- michaelneale 19y agoNo. If anything like this is ever legitimate, then it is harnessing of zero point energy. And a big middle finger extended to the universe and the laws of thermodynamics. Presumably shortly after, if the universe is a VR simulation, it will stop as the people running it get annoyed we hacked into the system/power source.
- henning 19y agoAs a hidebound self-appointed defender of the scientific orthodoxy [1], I say this is almost certainly a bunch of bullshit. [1] http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
- pmjordan 19y agoI love how these guys never actually, say, create a website that describes the machine. If he was really so keen to have it scrutinised by the scientific community, he'd publish something to go on. You know, enough to allow it to be independently repeated? With the limited information available, and assuming there's no hidden secrets behind this device (it runs on batteries, say, and the whole thing is an attempt to fool investors) then I suspect the crux lies in the permanent magnets. They're not permanent if you extract energy from them...
- juanpablo 19y agoMisleading title. Form the article: "There's no talk of perpetual motion. No whisper of broken scientific laws or free energy. Zahn would never go there (...). But he does see the potential for making electric motors more efficient, and this itself is no small feat."
- nickb 19y agoCheck this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIvZJ9xGutI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIvZJ9xGutI Brighter version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9UKcGTcfwo&watch_response http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9UKcGTcfwo&watch_respons...