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Perpetual motion machine examination rules, please.

moopet said:
Really? It doesn't take any energy to overcome the friction of the bearing? I suppose some form of magnetic bearing might solve that, actually. But it certainly requires energy to give it the initial rotational velocity. Someone hitting it with a stick or cranking a handle to start it seems like cheating to me.
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Hmmm.. what if you painted the blades of the fan light and dark on opposite sides, (like those toys you can buy), so sunlight will get it turning, have it in a vacuum and running on a magnetic bearing. Would it continue to turn, long enough, during the absence of sunlight until it returned? Not really PM but if it worked it would be a close approximation until the sun went out.

Or have I missed some glaringly obvious obstacle?
 
Beardon's MEG device

GzuzKryzt said:
I wonder why Mr. Bearden did not yet apply for the JREF Challenge?

Randi said in his lecture at Princeton (a couple of years ago - got no exact date, sorry) that he visited with at least two people who claimed to have a PMD. One even had a patent for it.
Randi also expressed his amazement as to why these patents had gotten issued, because the devices DID NOT WORK. For reason of friction.

Perhaps I am here will surprise us with a working model soon. ;)
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***********************************

Tom Beardon has been making claims about the Motionless Electromagnetic
Generator for years. James Naudin also claims he made it work.
BUT seems to have forgotten about it lately. I don't see it mentioned much
any more.

You can read a mailing list about free energy hosted by J.L. Naudin
JLNLabs at yahoogroups.com

James Randi already tried to get a simple answer from JLN about how the input power and output power of the MEG was measured and if it was self powered a couple years ago. Check the archives for randi.org

The MEG is a transfomer with a permanent magnet in the core. Allegedly makes more power output than input, but has never been made self powered. Excuses about "pontying energy flow" and "shorting the dipole"
are made as reason's you can't use the extra output power to supply the input power. They use special core material, etc. to try and get more "efficiency" but never PROVE it's over 100%.

When James Louis Naudin tested the MEG, he used a 100,000 ohm "conditioned" resistor as the load.
"Conditioning" the 5 watt carbon composition resistor was done by applying high voltage pulses to it until it overheated and the color bands changed.
So it was no longer 100,000 ohms and could also develop non linear voltage to current ratio since the carbon was burned in spots.

It's been a couple years since I read about it. One thing was how JLN claimed the resistor was dissipating 30 watts or so from the voltage measured, but wasn't overheating.

You can find more analysis of the MEG if you search for Eric Krieg's website
and others.

Getting a patent doesn't necessarily means it works. Just that you wrote a good description and paid the fee and it was different than previous patent.
There are lots of patents for devices that should produce "free energy" but they never get to the market it seems. But the patent avoids directly claiming "free energy" or "perpetual motion".
 
so in other words...

Supposing a car engine or aeroplane, for example wasn't invented yet and I wanted to patent it... I would only need to describe an engine running on gasoline and moving a land based vehicle, or a motored, heavier than air vehicle that flies in the air... and I could patent it, earlier than anyone else... and not having a working model!? Those that would later make it work would have to pay me royalties?

Oh I wish I lived a hundred and some more years ago and figured that one out in time...

Now, what would be a feasible contraption to patent that will likely work in the future that I can describe right now... How about a nuclear fusion reactor? Can I patent that?
 
Mendeli said:
Now, what would be a feasible contraption to patent that will likely work in the future that I can describe right now... How about a nuclear fusion reactor? Can I patent that?
Click to expand...

I imagine if you could come up with an actual design for controlling or operating it, you wouldn't need to design the actual reactor... if you were forward-thinking enough to anticipate its control or operational needs.
 
The Fool said:
I have one of those boxes too. People can look inside mine......ten bucks is all it costs for a look.
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Yeah, I knew somebody once that would charge 10 bucks to look inside her box. If you didn't have 10 bucks, she would accept a hit off a pipe.
 
Mendeli said:
so in other words...

Supposing a car engine or aeroplane, for example wasn't invented yet and I wanted to patent it... I would only need to describe an engine running on gasoline and moving a land based vehicle, or a motored, heavier than air vehicle that flies in the air... and I could patent it, earlier than anyone else... and not having a working model!? Those that would later make it work would have to pay me royalties?

Oh I wish I lived a hundred and some more years ago and figured that one out in time...

Now, what would be a feasible contraption to patent that will likely work in the future that I can describe right now... How about a nuclear fusion reactor? Can I patent that?
Click to expand...
I can think of a few real world examples that approximate this situation:

The Gilbert Hyatt patent.
Intel and TI are generally given credit for inventing the micoprocessor. Before either of these companies had patented the devices Hyatt claimed to have filed a patent claim for the idea of putting a complete computer on a single chip or perhaps a few chips. From the outside, it seemed like Hyatt had basically patented an anti-gravity machine and was fortunate enough to have Intel and TI invent one a year or so after he had filed for his patent. It seemed like complete crap to me, but Hyatt was granted the patent in 1990 and for five years there was a lot of litigation as to whether his patent was valid.

Based on the article posted by TI, it looks like Hyatt lost completely, but it looks like the reason that he lost is that he didn't have sufficient information in his original claim to describe the invention so the validity of his patent was denied. But it doesn't seem to be because the basic strategy of patenting the idea of something and then getting lucky enough that somebody actually invents it while your patent is still valid wouldn't work.

http://www.datamath.org/Story/Intel.htm

Symbol Patent of a hand held scanning device with a trigger
Here I'm not going to look anything up. I'm just going to give my understanding of the situation as a former competitor and then employee of Symbol Technologies and admit I might not have the details quite right.

Symbol was founded based on a patent for a hand held bar code scanner that used a trigger. Symbol didn't invent bar codes, or bar code scanners. But the founders of Symbol thought that a hand held scanner would be a good idea, but the idea was pretty obvious and a patent on such a device might not hold up. But one of the things that a hand held scanner needs is a mechanism for turning the scanner on and off (a switch in other words). Now what the Symbol guys came up with was the idea of implementing the switch as a trigger. This is an idea that seems so obviious that I would be completely amazed if 100 out of 100 people when given the problem would not come up with the idea independently. But no matter Symbol successfully patented the trigger and founded a very successful company based partially on that patent.

This is a little variation on the patent the idea of something really ingenious and then hope that somebody invents how to do it. In this scenario you have to wait for somebody to invent something really ingenious and then you patent really obvious derivative ideas based on it before other people are aware of the new, ingenius invention.


----
One caveat to this, in the case of perpetual motion machines the patent office has special rules. I believe that you actually have to have a working model which probably reduces the number of perpetual motion machine patents considerably. Of course there is a whole world of silly, or obvious, or bogus ideas out there that don't involve perpetual motion machines and the patent office seems to be reasonably open to granting patents for those. So I don't think PMD inventors need to lose heart completely, they just need to move to a different field.
 
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Hey T, watch your spelling. It's Bearden. We don't want you know who coming here to complain about our spelling. Welcome.

There are actually a lot of companies claiming to have perpetual motion devices, some even publicly traded such as Tathacus (Xogen, now defunct), Hydrogenerate (defunct), Alternate Energy Corporation, and GMC Holding Corporation. It's very rare for officialdom to interest itself in these scams. The only exceptions I am aware of are:
Dennis Lee - incarcerated by California in the 1990's for 2 (?) years
Paul Pantone - On trial now in Utah
Patrick Kelly and John Yoka - Indicted by New Jersey over United Fuel Cell Technologies (aka Genesis World Energy)
 
On PMM assessments ...

Reading through this thread, I feel tempted to collect my old notes on a generator design... I got it to pass the basic test on the Museum of Unworkable Devices - while still not working. So far, nobody has actually pointed out the basic flaw in the design - so I figured you guys would enjoy the puzzle. Interested?

On the importance of opening the box: anyone seen any of Dr David E Jones' fake machines. There's one in a museum in Vienna (I think). In these you cannot actually get at them so it's anybodies gues how they go. However, I notice a similarity in design between each of his devices.

On the secret inner workings ... while a closed box PMM would not be a reasonable entrant for the challenge, it would be possible to investigate the principles without knowing exactly how the device utilises them. This could produce a quick reality check for the hopeful inventor.

Unfortunately, the reactions of "I am here" seem to be typical for PM inventors. Note the paranoid: "someone will steal my design" (which will presumably happen once the first commercial model is running anyway), and the hyper-sensitivity to the suggestion of an untruth... apparently we are to consider this inventor to be a paragon of honesty and integrity.

<sigh>
 
Hmm, just yesterday I came across an excellent site addressing this very topic:

http://www.phact.org/e/z/freewire.htm

Conclusion
No arrangement of wires and magnetic fields and moving parts is going to generate more electrical power than the input mechanical power or generate more mechanical power than the input electrical power. If you want to experiment, by all means have fun, but please don't think you are going to bring about an energy revolution. Above all, spend only your own money, not other people's unless you want to spend the rest of your life dodging irate investors.

Well, if there is one thing which free energy promoters seem to have in
common it is a massive ignorance, real or feigned, about what energy is
and how to measure it. Luckily for them, their audiences seem to share
this failing and thus cannot readily distinguish between the plausible and
the possible. To remedy this lack, this note attempts to summarize the
basics of energy in two thousand words or so.

If any device
were really "over-unity" it would be easy to connect its output to its
input. There's a good reason why that demonstration is never shown, it's
too hard to fake.
Click to expand...

Now There's a site with some darn good science!
 
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From the site...
For example, one of the earliest perpetual motion machines proposed to use a lodestone, (a lump of naturally magnetic iron ore) to pull a ball up a slope towards a hole through which it would drop to cycle back to the start. This didn't work.
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Actually, you could use loadstone to generate electricity - using the energy stored in the ordered arraingement of magnetic domains it contains in order to exhibit magnetic poles. Of course, this is not PMM - but the site simply says you cannot get energy from magnets and then uses loadstones as an example. As they are naturally occurring, they can be used much as oil and gas can. You still get less energy out that went into their creation, but you didn't have to do the creating.

My design don't use magnets. It's the old moving dielectric capacitor farce.
 
AnotherSillyAlias said:
Hmmm.. what if you painted the blades of the fan light and dark on opposite sides, (like those toys you can buy), so sunlight will get it turning, have it in a vacuum and running on a magnetic bearing. Would it continue to turn, long enough, during the absence of sunlight until it returned? Not really PM but if it worked it would be a close approximation until the sun went out.

Or have I missed some glaringly obvious obstacle?
Click to expand...

Well, you've extracted energy from the photons. The reflected photons will have lower energy and momentum than the incoming photons.

anyhow, those 'toys you can buy' usually work by heating the residual gas in the bulb, _not_ by photon pressure. You can tell this because they rotate the wrong way. If phton pressure was the mechanism, they'd rotate towards the black face -- both faces receive equal photons impinging on them, but the white face reflects them back, thus those undergo twice the momentum change. If gas is involved, the white face will lead -- both faces receive equal gas molecules, but the black face, being hotter, will heat those molecules and thus they'll bounce off faster and undergo greater momentum change than those bouncing off the white face.
 
Simon Bridge said:
From the site...Actually, you could use loadstone to generate electricity - using the energy stored in the ordered arraingement of magnetic domains it contains in order to exhibit magnetic poles. Of course, this is not PMM - but the site simply says you cannot get energy from magnets and then uses loadstones as an example. As they are naturally occurring, they can be used much as oil and gas can. You still get less energy out that went into their creation, but you didn't have to do the creating.
Click to expand...

People say this a lot, but there are no known ways of extracting energy by destroying magnets.
 
I have a question concerning what would be considered perpetual motion. If you could rearrange weights on a disc as it was spinning and with that rearrangement of weights cause the disc to continue to spin would that be considered perpetual motion. I think that most applicants have 2 questions concerning the Randi contest. One is 'what is the definition of perpetual motion?', and 'is it possible to not violate any laws of physics and be able to win the Randi contest?'

I was also wondering what is meant by gravity being a conservative force.

A. Gene Young
 
Welcome to the forum AgingYoung,

I believe the generally accepted definition of a perpetual motion device is a device that can run indefinitely without consuming energy.

Perhaps other working definitions might include the idea of a device that produces more energy than it consumes.

I think your question goes to the idea of creating a device that can make some motion indefinitely by completely eliminating friction. I suspect that this would not be thought of as a perpetual motion device by most people.

It might be something of a paranormal device in that completely eliminating friction might be impossible using known physics and engineering.

But there are devices that can come very close to eliminating friction. The gyroscopes that are part of the gravity probe b experiment consist of nearly perfect quartz spheres and they could spin a very long time without needing a source of energy to keep them spinning. I don't think anybody would call them a perpetual motion device though. No more than a planet that orbits the sun is a perpetual motion device. Planets might orbit almost unchanged for billions of years but the planets are slowed by running into molecules in space and thus planetary motion is consistent with standard rules of physics and not consistent with the motion of a perpetual motion device.
 
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AgingYoung said:
I have a question concerning what would be considered perpetual motion. If you could rearrange weights on a disc as it was spinning and with that rearrangement of weights cause the disc to continue to spin would that be considered perpetual motion. I think that most applicants have 2 questions concerning the Randi contest. One is 'what is the definition of perpetual motion?', and 'is it possible to not violate any laws of physics and be able to win the Randi contest?'

I was also wondering what is meant by gravity being a conservative force.

A. Gene Young
Click to expand...

A couple questions there, so I'll swing at the easy two now.

For a definition of perpetual motion wrt the challenge, I would say "any device which clearly violates known laws of science (especially thermodynamics)".

As for winning the challenge without violating laws of physics, I'll say it is possible but it would require violating some other established law of science. If the demonstration is consistent with all known laws of science, it would be deemed 'normal' and therefore clearly not 'paranormal'. Protocols are designed specifically to require violation of one or more known laws.

Someone else can tackle gravity as a conservative force, or google it.
 
I think all that is meant by gravity as a conservative force is that the kinetic energy of a falling body is exactly equal to the potential energy that the body had when it was released in the gravitational field excluding losses of kinetic energy to firiction.

What forces are not conservative?
 
Thank you for the replies Petre & Davefoc and the welcome.
It might be something of a paranormal device in that completely eliminating friction might be impossible using known physics and engineering.
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Davefoc, I think that devices that operate at absolute zero have no friction yet a problem they also have is that molecular motion ceases. I'm going from memory here and it's not what it used to be. Also it's never been that reliable when it was sharper. Considering absolute zero is a theoretical value I'd say devices with no friction can only be simulated in a cad program.

Gene
 
What forces are not conservative?
Click to expand...

Davefoc,

Liberal forces aren't conservative. Thanks for the understanding of gravity as a conservative force. It would seem that if you could make a disc to turn perpetually by rearranging the weights on it that it would violate the notion that gravity is a conservative force. I think your understanding is what Randi means in stating that perpetual motion of that sort is impossible. I read thru this thread and followed a link where he said:
We are only concerned with the claim as stated above. You will produce a motor that turns a shaft perpetually without the input of any external power; if you do that under proper observation, you will win the prize.
Click to expand...
in an email reponse to Kirk Gustum.

Again, thank you.

A. Gene Young
 
The thing is, a perpetual motion machine that produces useful amounts of energy is worth, conservatively, about a quadrillion dollars. So anyone with a workable idea is going to be buried in funding the moment they announce it. A million dollars vanishes into insignificance beside the real value of such a device.
 
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