What is the best perpetual motion machine?
Energy prices are skyrocketing, so what could be better than free energy? The good news is that countless inventors have taken a stab at fulfilling this ultimate dream in developing highly creative zero-point energy generators and other perpetual motion machines. The bad news, well, we’ll get to that in a moment…
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The Iron First and Second Laws
The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics were once summed up as: you can’t win the energy game and you can’t even tie.
The first law states that energy cannot arise from nothing. Also known as the law of conservation of energy.
The second law is a bit more difficult to explain. This one says that chaos is always increasing. For example, if you clean up your room, you reduce the chaos, but meanwhile your breakfast turns into a cloud of water vapor and CO2. The disorder, with a difficult word entropy, therefore increases in net terms, because the gas cloud is much more chaotic than your room was before.
Violation of the law of the first and second order
If an inventor claims that his device can extract energy from nothing, it is a perpetual motion machine of the first order (because it violates the first law of extracting energy from nothing).
If his (more modest) colleague claims that his generator can cool the environment while producing electricity, that is a second-order perpetual motion machine. For according to the second law, disorder may never decrease in a closed system. And that is exactly what happens when the zero point generator cools the environment and extracts free energy from it.
Leonardo da Vinci’s gravitational wheel, a perpetual motion machine of the first order
The well-known artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci saw sharply that energy is the real magic. And the only sources of energy in the 15th century that could get his inventions moving were muscle, water, and wind. So he thought about ways to get free energy. Like this construction, where gravity will supply energy to move a wheel.
Unfortunately, this ingenious device, like Leonardo’s other perpetuum mobiles, turned out not to work. Now we know why. It is not possible, even for a genius like Leonardo, to outwit gravity. The falling spheres provide energy, which is completely absorbed by the rest of the wheel as it moves upwards. If this device had worked, it would have been a violation of the first law: energy from nowhere. But they didn’t know that in Leonardo’s time.
Maxwell’s Devil, second order perpetual motion machine
A second-order perpetual motion machine was invented by the Scottish physicist Sir Robert Maxwell. In a gas, the gas molecules move at different speeds. In a hot gas, the gas molecules move much faster than in a cold gas.
What, Maxwell thought, would happen if you had two chambers filled with gas, A and B? What if you had a devil that only let gas molecules through if it was moving fast, from A to B, and if it was moving slowly, only from B to A? At a certain point you will only have slow gas molecules in A, and fast moving gas molecules in B. In other words, A has become colder than B.
Energy from nowhere, so a perpetuum mobile. Because you can, for example, run a Stirling generator on that temperature difference, so you have free power to run your toaster. Eureka!
But unfortunately. The devil is in the details here. Because how does the little devil know that a molecule is moving slowly or quickly? That means a measurement. And a measurement means that information is created. So, loss of free energy. Incidentally, scientists have succeeded in making a variant of Maxwell’s devil work. So who knows, just maybe, there is still hope for the perpetuum mobile believers…
