feedback on... perpetual motion

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MOTHER's children are seeking, presumably, a useful device, an energy supply . . . not a curiosity for the local museum of gee-whiz "science". The rotor I've described has no such potential. The moment we tried to take power out of our spinning wheel—by hooking it up to the cream separator or the 12-volt generator or whatever—the apparatus would slow down and then come to a stop . . . because we'd be putting a load on that machine, thus introducing additional frictional, viscous, and other drag forces. The load would act just as it would on a Pelton wheel, a diesel engine, or a steam turbine: it would consume power, tend to decelerate the "engine", and require an additional energy input to keep speed up and prevent the whole system from grinding to a halt.

YOU CAN'T GET SOMETHING FOR NOTHING. This "ecological" principle—first discovered through physics experiments—governs everything in the universe, and, is the unbeatable rule which promoters of so-called perpetual motion machines try to evade. They demand more energy "out" than energy "in" (the same thing as more power out than power in, since power is simply energy per unit of time). To put it another way, they demand what engineers justly deride as "an efficiency greater than 100%". They demand, in short, something for nothing.

As even Mr. Atma admitted, the concept of the unbalanced wheel is quite old . . . yet the machine hasn't rolled anywhere yet, because it can't. My advice is, "Stick to waterwheels and windmills and solar power and methane engines, and forget perpetual motion."

H.M. GREENWOOD:

In MOTHER NO. 33, Rainbow Atma described an overbalanced "perpetual motion" wheel he saw in a museum and added that he'd "heard lots of reasons why it shouldn't work".

For the benefit of Mr. Atma and any of MOTHER's readers who—in common with about 92% of our population—had no physics course in school, I'd like to expand on that comment. There aren't "lots of reasons" why the machine "shouldn't" work, there's just one reason why it won't work: the principle of conservation of energy (or energy plus mass, after Einstein). This concept was fully developed in the nineteenth century, beginning with James P. Joule and ending with Clausius, and is rendered in the vernacular as "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".

You see, Mr. Atma, gravity is not a "free" source of energy. An object raised above a reference level (the floor, the ground, etc.), does indeed have "potential" energy . . . but it took exactly that amount of energy to lift the article in the first place. So—apart from waterfalls and tidal forces and ocean wave action and sunlight and radioactivity and wind—no source of energy can be called "free".

Sorry, Rainbow, but neither you nor anyone else can brainstorm the old perpetual motion wheel into an electrical—or mechanical—power generator. In fact, even unloaded, your wheel won't run very long . . . at most, a few hours. (Magnet arrangements won't work either.) Once again: To get energy out of the machine, you have to put energy in.

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