To: sci.misc
According to the laws of physics - at least in simplified form - an
object in motion will stay in motion, at least if no other forces act
on it. That's all well and good in the realm of theory, but here in the
complex reality of Earth, there always seems to be one force or another
getting in the way. Not that this has ever completely shut down
mankind's desire to build a perpetual-motion machine. According to
Google Arts & Culture, that quest dates at least as far back as
seventh-century India, where "the mathematician Brahmagupta, who wanted
to represent the cyclical and eternal motion of the heavens, designed
an overbalanced wheel whose rotation was powered by the flow of mercury
inside its hollow spokes."
More widely known is the successor design by Brahmagupta's
twelfth-century countryman and colleague Bhāskara, who "altered the
wheel design by giving the hollow spokes a curved shape, producing an asymmetrical course in constant imbalance." Despite this rendition's
memorable elegance, it does not, like the earlier overbalanced wheel,
actually keep on turning forever. To blame are the very same laws of
physics that have dogged the subsequent 900 or so years of attempts to
build perpetual-motion machines, which you can see briefly explained in
the TED-Ed video above.
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"Ideas for perpetual-motion machines all violate one or more
fundamental laws of thermodynamics, the branch of physics that
describes the relationship between different forms of energy," says the narrator. The first law holds that "energy can't be created or
destroyed; you can't get out more energy than you put in." That alone
would put an end to hopes for a "free" energy source of this kind. But
even machines that just keep moving by themselves - much less useful,
of course, but still scientifically earth-shattering - would eventually
"have to create some extra energy to nudge the system past its stopping
point, breaking the first law of thermodynamics."
Whenever machines seem to overcome this problem, "in reality, they
invariably turn out to be drawing energy from some external source." (Nineteenth-century America seems to have offered endless opportunities
for engineering charlatanism of this kind, whose perpetrators made a
habit of skipping town whenever their trickery was revealed, some
obtaining patents and profits all the while). But even if the first law
of thermodynamics didn't apply, there would remain the matter of the
second, which dictates that "energy tends to spread out through
processes like friction," thus "reducing the energy available to move
the system itself, until the machine inevitably stopped." Hence the
abandonment of interest in perpetual motion by such scientific minds as
Galileo and Leonardo - who must also have understood that mankind would
never fully relinquish the dream.
https://www.openculture.com/2024/01/why-perpetual-motion-machines-never-work-despite-centuries-of-experiments.html
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