Perpetual motion device - Free Energy - Do you believe in it?

[Meizirkki]

Perpetual motion however, is against the laws of nature. Laws of physics may change, laws of nature do not.

You tell that to the universe with the accelerating expansion (that's our universe)....

Since only unconfirmed theories exist in this area I'd very much like to propose my own theory... Buuut we would get nowhere with it since it's too unfinished and not in every way agreeing with prevalent physics

[1715052342]

1715052342

[1715052342]

1715052342

[myrkul]

Now i have to ask, making energy with fuel..    

Yes, that's called "generating."

[mobodick]

Free energy DOES exist. Just build a stirling engine out of scrap parts and stick in on your back yard. It'll run most of the day when there's a temperature difference between ground and air. Big enough stirlingengine with heat pumps to bring in heat from larger area and tada, you can power your mining rigs from the thermal energy of your lawn.

Perpetual motion however, is against the laws of nature. Laws of physics may change, laws of nature do not.

And how much work can you do with this heat difference between ground and air?

Is this a challenge or question out of curiosity? Stirling engines efficiency depends on the temperature difference and power output depends on it's physical size. Maths available in wikipedia.

It's a challenge as i predict that the work you can do with this temperature difference is small compared to the heat exchangers that are needed and any large scale application of this technology would fail.

[mobodick]

Perpetual motion however, is against the laws of nature. Laws of physics may change, laws of nature do not.

You tell that to the universe with the accelerating expansion (that's our universe)....

Since only unconfirmed theories exist in this area I'd very much like to propose my own theory... Buuut we would get nowhere with it since it's too unfinished and not in every way agreeing with prevalent physics

No, those are actual observations.
So unless you don't think that light is limited to the speed of light there is no other way to explain the observable universe.
And it's current prevalent physics that are wrong, not the observation of reality.
That is the nature of science. Science is right untill reality shows its wrong.

[mobodick]

Now i have to ask, making energy with fuel..    

Yes, that's called "generating."

  

[Meizirkki]

Throughout the history people have tried to build perpetual motion machines. Mechanical things are easy to imagine and build, but magnets and electricity are like magic to the do-it-yourself man... Some have build up a professional career ripping off these blue-eyed people. See Konstantin Meyl. He does a speech and "demonstration" now and then and sells these ridiculously small Tesla coils for THOUSANDS OF EUROS. lol

Too bad Meyl ruins Nikola Tesla's reputation by marketing his own nonsense in the name of Tesla.. I hate Meyl for doing that.

[mobodick]

Throughout the history people have tried to build perpetual motion machines. Mechanical things are easy to imagine and build, but magnets and electricity are like magic to the do-it-yourself man... Some have build up a professional career ripping off these blue-eyed people. See Konstantin Meyl. He does a speech and "demonstration" now and then and sells these ridiculously small Tesla coils for THOUSANDS OF EUROS. lol

Too bad Meyl ruins Nikola Tesla's reputation by marketing his own nonsense in the name of Tesla.. I hate Meyl for doing that.

I love pseudoscience! 

The best one (or i suppose the funniest one) i know is from the audio world.
Hearing sound has its problems.
One of those problems is that hearing is pretty badly affected by something called confirmation bias.
It is a biological fact that our brain uses prior information when 'rendering' the sound you hear.
With rendering i mean the actual sound you precieve. In the physical world there is only vibrating air. What you experience as sound is a sensation entirely produced by your brain based on measuring and processing the air waves.
Anyhow.
The problem is that if i tell you that i will play a beautifull piece of music your brain will try to justify the music being beautifull and actively starts hunting for bits of beauty to confirm this. Subconsciously, that is. Effect is you perceive the music as more beautifull.
If i tell you that i have these magic pebbles that make the music more clear then your brain will lock onto the high frequencies and you will perceive more clarity. wooo!.
...
So some people have actually made a business out of magical audio pebbles.,., and some other stuff as well:
http://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm

Don't forget to check out their other 'products' and have a spare pack of pampers ready to go..

[Meizirkki]

I love pseudoscience! 

The best one (or i suppose the funniest one) i know is from the audio world.
Hearing sound has its problems.
One of those problems is that hearing is pretty badly affected by something called confirmation bias.
It is a biological fact that our brain uses prior information when 'rendering' the sound you hear.
With rendering i mean the actual sound you precieve. In the physical world there is only vibrating air. What you experience as sound is a sensation entirely produced by your brain based on measuring and processing the air waves.
Anyhow.
The problem is that if i tell you that i will play a beautifull piece of music your brain will try to justify the music being beautifull and actively starts hunting for bits of beauty to confirm this. Subconsciously, that is. Effect is you perceive the music as more beautifull.
If i tell you that i have these magic pebbles that make the music more clear then your brain will lock onto the high frequencies and you will perceive more clarity. wooo!.
...
So some people have actually made a business out of magical audio pebbles.,., and some other stuff as well:
http://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm

Don't forget to check out their other 'products' and have a spare pack of pampers ready to go..

The link made me laugh haha stones you put around cables I can't believe it. But yea I did know about the "you hear what you want" thing. My brain actively blocks my hearing when I'm focused on something. I can completely miss a "What are you doing?" from a friend if I'm too focused doing something. It's like I have a 5 second hearing buffer. I can miss a question when it's asked but remember it after 5 seconds if I change focus to the person asking. Funny.

[Meizirkki]

It's a challenge as i predict that the work you can do with this temperature difference is small compared to the heat exchangers that are needed and any large scale application of this technology would fail.

I've held a stirling engine that rotates only from the hands heat. It's quite impressive. Lets imagine a situation:

You have a rather constant temperature of ~4 degrees C at the bottom of a lake and a big bunch of evacuated tube solar collectors on your roof giving you ~55C. From this you get a ~50C temperature difference, allowing a theoretic efficiency of 1-277/327=0.152 => 15.3%. A well constructed stirling engine can do about 10% in this particular case. Sounds little, but there's a lot of heat to be transferred (tens of kilowatts). The concept is not flawed.

Because it's impractical to connect stirling engine directly to the bottom of a lake we need a heat pump there as well (Solar collectors have their own heat exchanger thingy already). This lake-source heat pump would work at COP 6, warming the water and cooling the exchanger at stirling engine to -30C. The temperature difference is now 85C this means theoretical efficiency of 1-243/320=0.24 => 24%. Again a stirling engine is likely to do 16%. The efficiency is higher now, making up for the energy dissipated while operating the heat pump. Again, there's nothing wrong with the concept. It's just renewable energy like any other.

I'd like to build this kind of contraption some day. Stirling engine materials are cheap and they are easy to build. But to tap into the natures largest heat sources and sinks I would need heat pumps and they are expensive. :/

[mobodick]

The concept is not flawed.

True!

Because it's impractical to connect stirling engine directly to the bottom of a lake we need a heat pump there as well

I was thinking more from the point of sustainability.
Not everyone has a cold lake in their back yard, but even if that was true then our sociaty would be warming up lakes at a massive scale and do other thermodynamical things to our atmosphere that are propably not so good.
You could make it not work on natural temperature differences but that needs a fuel to create an artifical temperature difference.
I think that there is a big future for heat engines in miniaturisation. Things like using body heat to drive personal electronics.

[mobodick]

I've held a stirling engine that rotates only from the hands heat. It's quite impressive.

Yes, but that requires very little power.
The real question is, what can you power from that?
Would this engine be strong enough to lift a weight the size of your hand when powered by the hand?
And if not, how much bigger or hotter would your hand have to be to lift this weight?
And how would that scale to industrial proportions?

[Lethn]

Throughout the history people have tried to build perpetual motion machines. Mechanical things are easy to imagine and build, but magnets and electricity are like magic to the do-it-yourself man... Some have build up a professional career ripping off these blue-eyed people. See Konstantin Meyl. He does a speech and "demonstration" now and then and sells these ridiculously small Tesla coils for THOUSANDS OF EUROS. lol

Too bad Meyl ruins Nikola Tesla's reputation by marketing his own nonsense in the name of Tesla.. I hate Meyl for doing that.

..... Ruining Nikola Tesla's reputation? You know he wanted to build a death ray right? LOL!

[Anon136]

A rule of thumb is: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
None of these free-energy types has come up with any evidence so far.
I think you can safely dismiss any youtube videos about free energy without actually watching them..

Probably true. Key to science, though, is an open mind. If you dismiss all claims without even looking at the evidence, you could miss something groundbreaking. That's why I requested schematics. If I can build it myself, and it works, pulling energy out of thin air, I'll believe it.

If you invented a free energy machine you would not present the evidence in a youtube video...
There are many places that would gladly investigate such claim so there are enough ways for thee people to verify it actually works how they thin it works.
Again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
In this respect a youtube video is useless unless it provides verifyable data collected blindly over many trials. Which is much more convenient to do in text so usually people write papers. And that is when you know you can at least put some effort into taking it seriously...
You simply cannot prove this stuff with a youtube demonstration.

About keeping an open mind, you would be way better off just reading some physics books as the whole playingfield of these quacks has been thoroughly mapped out decades ago by science and there was no free energy found despite the scrutiny. There just is no thing like free energy in a closed system on our macro level. There is a slight possibility there is a source of free energy at the absolute lowest quantum level but that happens at a scale of 10^-37m or something like that. Interfacing with something so small requires you to use tools operating at that level. Needless to say that any macroscopic ontraption could never be precise enough.
All these people playing around with macroscopic objects will never ever be able to magically tap energy out of thin air. It is just not how our univers happens to work.
So unless someone opens a 52th dimentional portal to c'thuluville they just cant be talking about really getting free energy and i'm not taking it serously.

Can't really argue, there... though it may be possible to tap power from the Earth's magnetic field, or something like that, not "free' or "perpetual" energy, just generated in unconventional means. Thus, it pays to examine the ciaims.

Perhaps the cosmos its self is a perpetual motion devise?

Nope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

i think you may be conflating the cosmos with the universe. It may be the case that the universe is the cosmos but it may also be the case that the cosmos is greater in scope than the universe. If it is the case that the cosmos is greater in scope than the universe than it still stands that the cosmos its self may be a perpetual motion devise because entropy may be a property specific to certain universes and not the cosmos its self.

Where can i find the definition of the difference between the word universe and cosmos?
In my definition they mean the same thing.
The universe includes the known univere so it is already defined as bigger than we can ever hope to see.

A universe has a specific set of laws, in our universe we call these the laws of physics. Theoretically there could be other structures similar to our universe that exist outside of our universe and have laws different than the ones we are used to. Cosmos is a term we use to describe all that is.

[myrkul]

Throughout the history people have tried to build perpetual motion machines. Mechanical things are easy to imagine and build, but magnets and electricity are like magic to the do-it-yourself man... Some have build up a professional career ripping off these blue-eyed people. See Konstantin Meyl. He does a speech and "demonstration" now and then and sells these ridiculously small Tesla coils for THOUSANDS OF EUROS. lol

Too bad Meyl ruins Nikola Tesla's reputation by marketing his own nonsense in the name of Tesla.. I hate Meyl for doing that.

..... Ruining Nikola Tesla's reputation? You know he wanted to build a death ray right? LOL!

He wanted to provide unlimited and unmetered (read: free) power to everyone. The death ray was just an offshoot of that.

[cbeast]

I highly recommend reading Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World" or for that matter anything written by Sagan.

[Lethn]

As I said before, you can have extremely plentiful and cheap energy but from what I know so far, never free, unless someone stumbles on something like magic.

[misterbigg]

I really want to ridicule the OP for posting about perpetual motion but considering that I'm posting rooster / cock pictures can I really take the moral high ground here?

[cbeast]

As I said before, you can have extremely plentiful and cheap energy but from what I know so far, never free, unless someone stumbles on something like magic.

Perhaps we are just looking at the problem all wrong. Science has a way of doing that. Energy may not be the scarcity we think it is. We just need more raw science.

[mobodick]

i think you may be conflating the cosmos with the universe. It may be the case that the universe is the cosmos but it may also be the case that the cosmos is greater in scope than the universe. If it is the case that the cosmos is greater in scope than the universe than it still stands that the cosmos its self may be a perpetual motion devise because entropy may be a property specific to certain universes and not the cosmos its self.

Where can i find the definition of the difference between the word universe and cosmos?
In my definition they mean the same thing.
The universe includes the known univere so it is already defined as bigger than we can ever hope to see.

A universe has a specific set of laws, in our universe we call these the laws of physics. Theoretically there could be other structures similar to our universe that exist outside of our universe and have laws different than the ones we are used to. Cosmos is a term we use to describe all that is.

Aah, then i think your definition of the word 'Universe' is not wide enough.

We know that we cannot see (even in theory) the whole universe so we can only speculate about how our local laws of physics behave there. We know that a lot of the laws hold in the Observable Universe but we also know that that is not the whole Universe.
So in fact we cannot know if every part of the whole universe acts according to laws of physics.
Structures outside of the 'universe' are still considered to be part of the universe. You just have to consider a bigger, more complete universe. The universe used to be our earth with a sphere of lights around it. Now we know th universe is so big we only can see a small part of it.
Some theories have use new words like multiverse to avoid confusion but ultimately everything is part of the universe, or indeed, the cosmos.

[mobodick]

As I said before, you can have extremely plentiful and cheap energy but from what I know so far, never free, unless someone stumbles on something like magic.

I propose 'free' is a relative word...