
Has college dropout done the impossible and created a perpetual motion machine? - nickb
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/300042
======
mixmax
If you tell me that Newtons theory of gravity is wrong I'll hear you out.

If you tell me Einsteins theory of relativity doesn't hold up I'll hear you
out.

But if you tell me that the second law of thermodynamics is wrong I'll tell
you you're a crackhead...

~~~
DaniFong
For what it's worth, you may find the fluctuation theorem
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuation_theorem>) interesting. It shows
that the second law is incorrect in the same way as Newton's theory of gravity
was: both are accurate, in their domain of applicability, but neither had such
boundaries well defined. Where Newton's law fails for very heavy systems, the
second law fails for very small (though by a far smaller amount).

~~~
mixmax
Yes I did find that interesting. Thanks.

------
juanpablo
Misleading title.

Form the article:

"There's no talk of perpetual motion. No whisper of broken scientific laws or
free energy. Zahn would never go there (...). But he does see the potential
for making electric motors more efficient, and this itself is no small feat."

------
pmjordan
I love how these guys never actually, say, create a website that describes the
machine. If he was really so keen to have it scrutinised by the scientific
community, he'd publish _something_ to go on. You know, enough to allow it to
be independently repeated?

With the limited information available, and assuming there's no hidden secrets
behind this device (it runs on batteries, say, and the whole thing is an
attempt to fool investors) then I suspect the crux lies in the permanent
magnets. They're not permanent if you extract energy from them...

------
davidw
No.

~~~
eusman
other articles imply it does give a boost.

is it a definite no?

~~~
mechanical_fish
Yes. Are you unfamiliar with the fact that crackpots invent perpetual motion
machines at the rate of several per year, and that they've been doing so for a
hundred years or more?

Believe me, there are few areas of technology that have been raked over as
thoroughly as this one.

Articles imply a lot of things. Some journalists will believe absolutely
anything.

And who knows what this MIT prof is doing, taking calls from guys like this?
Maybe he hopes to gently steer the poor guy into the therapy that he clearly
needs. Maybe he likes seeing his own name in print. Or maybe he's a crackpot,
too. The fact that he's an MIT professor is hardly very reassuring. I've met
some _very_ eccentric Ivy League profs...

~~~
mattmaroon
Interestingly, no matter how many times these people turn out to be crackpots,
the next one gets even more media coverage. It must be because the
significance of a perpetual motion machine (unlimited free clean energy)
brings out wishful thinking in everyone it touches.

That or our nation's physics education is not so hot.

~~~
pmjordan
If the purported energy source is really unlimited, could we really consider
it clean?

~~~
mechanical_fish
This is a fun way to approach the paradox of perpetual motion: if we had a
machine to generate energy from nothing, (or to magically teleport unlimited
amounts of energy from Alpha Centauri, or whatever) we'd soon fill up our
Earth with lots of extra matter (matter=energy, don'tcha know), and eventually
the planet would collapse into a black hole!

Or, much more likely, we'd heat the Earth up enough that we could successfully
radiate the excess energy out into space. Al Gore would not like that plan one
bit.

Of course, while you're violating the second law of thermodynamics, I suppose
you could always build a second machine that takes the exhaust heat from your
perpetual-motion-powered cars and planes and sends it back to wherever it came
from.

~~~
wallflower
I remember from my Thermodynamics class that modern gasoline engines are only
about 37% theoretically efficient (most of the energy is lost as heat). Even
if his invention doesn't violate scientific paradigms and is merely a more
efficient induction motor, it might build a market.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Well, sure, but you've got to ask yourself which is more likely: that the chef
with no science education, no professional experience with motors, no
understanding of thermodynamics, and so little knowledge of his field that he
allows his invention to be branded as a _perpetual motion machine_ (as if that
will enhance his credibility!) has made a previously unknown breakthrough in
induction motor efficiency? Or that he has merely constructed an insanely
complicated-looking but otherwise uninteresting variation on previously known
physics?

------
xirium
You may wish to evaluate this fellow with the Crackpot Index (
<http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html> ). The index is like
spamassassin for kooks.

~~~
dfranke
There's one item on that list that I've always had a gripe with:

> 10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves and/or finds any
> flaws in your theory.

This is legitimate, sometimes. See for example the prize offered for
cryptanalysis of Salsa20.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salsa20>

Oh, and the Galileo thing ought to be worth at least 75 points.

~~~
staticshock
Wolfram offered prize money just recently to somebody to prove that some small
automata he found was turing complete.

~~~
dfranke
That too. I didn't want to use that example because someone would have
retorted that Wolfram wasn't really a false positive.

------
dkokelley
The best way to gain credibility for his device is to employ his invention to
create some sort of useful device. Maybe create a car that never needs any
sort of fuel, or provide free energy for everyone. If he comes out with that,
I'll be a little more inclined to hear him out.

------
nickb
Check this out:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIvZJ9xGutI>

Brighter version:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9UKcGTcfwo&watch_respons...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9UKcGTcfwo&watch_response)

------
kul
i haven't read this, but can confidently answer "no".

------
michaelneale
No. If anything like this is ever legitimate, then it is harnessing of zero
point energy. And a big middle finger extended to the universe and the laws of
thermodynamics.

Presumably shortly after, if the universe is a VR simulation, it will stop as
the people running it get annoyed we hacked into the system/power source.

------
henning
As a hidebound self-appointed defender of the scientific orthodoxy [1], I say
this is almost certainly a bunch of bullshit.

[1] <http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html>

------
curi
_Such an unbelievable invention would challenge the laws of physics, a no-no
in the rigid world of serious science._

The article contains other hints that the scientific community is a bit like
the Church a few hundred years ago -- rigidly attached to the status quo.

That's an odd thing to claim, considering all the new scientific ideas we've
had in the last century.

~~~
aristus
"Science progresses one funeral at a time." -- Max Planck

To be fair, revolutionary scientific advances spend a long time in the heresy
box. The most recent I can think of was the bacterial causes of ulcers... took
20 years and some dramatic self-experiments before it was taken seriously
enough to confirm.

That said, the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the
evidence required.

~~~
ced
_The Nature of Scientific Revolutions_ develops that idea a lot more, for
anyone interested.

~~~
curi
That book is mistaken (it goes so far as to deny the possibility of scientific
progress), see instead The Fabric of Reality which comments on Kuhn and
provides a better theory.

[http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-
Impl...](http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-
Implications/dp/014027541X/)

Edit: btw you got the title wrong.

~~~
ced
Right, it's the _Structure of scientific revolutions_.

How is the book mistaken? Did you read it? Can you condense what you think is
wrong?

I don't think he denies scientific progress. He addressed that point in the
post-scriptum, if I remember correctly.

~~~
curi
Page 160 (start of chapter 13):

"The preceding pages have carried my schematic description of scientific
development as far as it can go in this essay. Nevertheless, they cannot quite
provide a conclusion. If this description has at all caught the essential
structure of a science's continuing evolution, it will simultaneously have
posed a special problem: Why should the enterprise sketched above move
steadily ahead in ways that, say, art, political theory, or philosophy does
not? Why is progress a perquisite reserved almost exclusively for activities
we call science? The most usual answers to that question have been denied in
the body of this essay. We must conclude it by asking what substitutes can be
found."

Page 162:

"Viewed from within any single community, however, whether of scientists or of
non-scientists, the result of successful creative work _is_ progress."

163:

"These doubts about progress arise, however, in the sciences too. Throughout
the pre-paradigm period when there is a multiplicity of competing schools,
evidence of progress, except within schools, is very hard to find."

"part of the answer to the problem of progress lies simply in the eye of the
beholder."

\-------

He also manages to compare scientists to characters form 1984, and claim that
we choose which fields to call science based on which ones appear to make
progress, so science seems to achieve progress in part through a selection
effect.

So, he takes it for granted that we don't make progress in a variety of
fields. He attacks scientific progress as subjective -- a matter of biased
points of view. He has doubts about progress in general which extend to
science. Part of the answer, he says, is that science doesn't actually make
progress. And, he says, the last 12 chapters denied the common sense views on
why and how science makes progress, and he hopes to come up with a substitute,
but he isn't even trying very hard (because he doesn't really believe in
progress very much, in general).

OK, I read some Kuhn for you. _shudder_. Someone go read Fabric of Reality now
:) It is full of good explanations.

~~~
ced
Thanks a lot for the citation tracking. From the passages you quote, maybe he
does deny progress in some sense, so you were right... Still, his position
seems at least defensible, and anyway, that topic wasn't central to the theme
of the book.

I thought that the book was very interesting for the perspective it cast on
discoveries in the physical sciences. The description of the state of
confusion preceding paradigms, the establishment of paradigm, and so forth,
that was a nice way of looking at it.

