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.\u00a0 It’s a great idea except for one thing:<\/p>\n
There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine.<\/strong><\/p>\n I recently saw an ad on Facebook for a company called Magniwork.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Does this sound too good to be true?\u00a0 That’s probably because it is.<\/p>\n I was skeptical, so I tried to check Wikipedia for something on the company.\u00a0 Zip.\u00a0 I looked on the company’s website, and it mentioned zero-point energy.\u00a0 That’s in Wiki, but only as a theoretical concept.\u00a0 I read a little further and came across the key phrase to the whole thing:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There you have it.\u00a0 Ignoring the poor (over)use of commas, this is saying it uses magnets to make something move indefinitely.\u00a0 This is a physical impossibility.\u00a0 I have a little magnetic toy on my desk similar to what they describe.\u00a0 It’s a round thing suspended by magnetic force above a base.\u00a0 I can spin the little round thing and watch it go, but it won’t go forever.\u00a0 Air resistance alone, however minute, eventually drags the thing to a halt.<\/p>\n The site can’t even get the definition of a Perpetual Motion machine correct.\u00a0 A Perpetual Motion machine is exactly what it says it is, something which is constantly in motion.\u00a0 This says nothing about energy consumption or production.\u00a0 The consumption \/ production part is significant, however, as it’s physically impossible to create a device which outputs more energy than it takes in.\u00a0 Some things which produce energy might seem<\/em> to output more than they consume, but this is an illusion.\u00a0 It’s a matter of converting the input into a different, more usable output.<\/p>\n Consider a generator, for example.\u00a0 You put fuel into it (e.g. gasoline), the fuel is used to create an energetic reaction.\u00a0 The fuel doesn’t go away, part of it is simply converted partly into electrical energy.\u00a0 That’s a very crude definition of what happens, but still essentially true.<\/p>\n Simply put, then, the “free energy” device marketed by Magniwork is a physical impossibility.\u00a0 Nobody is trying to suppress its secrets.\u00a0 The company is simply scamming folks with something which simply will not work.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 This is not such a device.\u00a0 Such things would be based on scientifically feasible things, not “perpetual motion.”<\/p>\n I will finish with a description of a hypothetical perpetual motion machine which would almost work.\u00a0 I Stumbled across it the other day on a science questions site.\u00a0 The question posed was what would happen if you drilled a hole through the center of the earth and jumped in.\u00a0 The answer author sidetracked at first, saying drilling through the earth wouldn’t work very well because the earth has a hot core.\u00a0 The author said the moon would work, as its core was cold and it had no atmosphere.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There’s no atmosphere to slow the object down, so it could go on perpetually, right?<\/p>\n Not quite.\u00a0 In a perfect system, yes, this would be possible.\u00a0 The moon would not work, as it is not a perfect sphere.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Eventually, the dropped object would stop.\u00a0 It might go back and forth for a very long time–centuries or even millenia–but eventually it would stop.\u00a0 So I repeat:<\/p>\n There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine.<\/strong><\/p>\n Since such a thing does not exist, the Magniwork machine and anything like it is a lie.\u00a0 It’s simple science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 It’s a great idea except for one thing: There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. I recently saw an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=323"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":324,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions\/324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}