I don’t know who first thought of scamming money off somebody by trying to sell them a perpetual motion machine, but the concept is apparently so brilliant people are still doing it today.  It’s a great idea except for one thing:

There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine.

I recently saw an ad on Facebook for a company called Magniwork.  According to the ad, you could get “off the grid” and save a lot of money using their machine which produces “free” electricity and doesn’t consume any resources.  Does this sound too good to be true?  That’s probably because it is.

I was skeptical, so I tried to check Wikipedia for something on the company.  Zip.  I looked on the company’s website, and it mentioned zero-point energy.  That’s in Wiki, but only as a theoretical concept.  I read a little further and came across the key phrase to the whole thing:

It uses magnets, and magnetic force to induce perpetual motion. It runs by itself, indefinitely without stopping, thus creating completely free electrical energy, which can fully power your home for free. A Perpetual motion device refers to a machine that runs perpetually i.e. indefinitely, and produces a larger amount of energy than it consumes.

There you have it.  Ignoring the poor (over)use of commas, this is saying it uses magnets to make something move indefinitely.  This is a physical impossibility.  I have a little magnetic toy on my desk similar to what they describe.  It’s a round thing suspended by magnetic force above a base.  I can spin the little round thing and watch it go, but it won’t go forever.  Air resistance alone, however minute, eventually drags the thing to a halt.

The site can’t even get the definition of a Perpetual Motion machine correct.  A Perpetual Motion machine is exactly what it says it is, something which is constantly in motion.  This says nothing about energy consumption or production.  The consumption / production part is significant, however, as it’s physically impossible to create a device which outputs more energy than it takes in.  Some things which produce energy might seem to output more than they consume, but this is an illusion.  It’s a matter of converting the input into a different, more usable output.

Consider a generator, for example.  You put fuel into it (e.g. gasoline), the fuel is used to create an energetic reaction.  The fuel doesn’t go away, part of it is simply converted partly into electrical energy.  That’s a very crude definition of what happens, but still essentially true.

Simply put, then, the “free energy” device marketed by Magniwork is a physical impossibility.  Nobody is trying to suppress its secrets.  The company is simply scamming folks with something which simply will not work.

I acknowledge the possibility there are energy-producing devices which are highly efficient, run on low-cost fuel and which the government and / or the oil companies, etc., keep secret from the general public.  This is not such a device.  Such things would be based on scientifically feasible things, not “perpetual motion.”

I will finish with a description of a hypothetical perpetual motion machine which would almost work.  I Stumbled across it the other day on a science questions site.  The question posed was what would happen if you drilled a hole through the center of the earth and jumped in.  The answer author sidetracked at first, saying drilling through the earth wouldn’t work very well because the earth has a hot core.  The author said the moon would work, as its core was cold and it had no atmosphere.  Drill your hypothetical hole in that and drop an object into it, and the object would fall through to the other side before reversing course and doing it again, returning to its starting point.  There’s no atmosphere to slow the object down, so it could go on perpetually, right?

Not quite.  In a perfect system, yes, this would be possible.  The moon would not work, as it is not a perfect sphere.  If you managed to account for the variations in the moon’s mass from one point to another (there may be holes here and there, thus making one region less massive than another) and drilled your hole just right, you might get closer except…well, the moon is not the only object in the universe.  Earth would exert a pull, however small, on the dropped object, as would the sun, the other planets, the other planets’ moons, to a lesser degree other stars, etc.  Eventually, the dropped object would stop.  It might go back and forth for a very long time–centuries or even millenia–but eventually it would stop.  So I repeat:

There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine.

Since such a thing does not exist, the Magniwork machine and anything like it is a lie.  It’s simple science.