Browsing through this wonderful site, a description of some of the elaborate designs of the past that were intended to produce perpetual motion, I wondered whether developments in quantum physics might make such a machine feasible one day.
I may be remembering this wrongly, but can’t particles (in other words, energy) pop out of nowhere at the quantum level? Apologies in advance if this is complete nonsense!
here is some more complete non-sense, if you where to reproduce perpetual motion you would have to invent another universe for it is the only thing perpetual.
Well ,Albert Einstein famously tried to disprove quantum physics by showing that it meant the creation of a perpetual motion machine was possible. However the next day (it was at a conference) Niels Bohr showed that Einstein was mistaken and had forgotten the effect of GPE.
Particles can ‘borrow’ energy for short periods of time from the Dirac zero energy sea, but they have to pay it back so the net energy gain is zero.
particles do come out of no where on the quantum level, however conservation of matter does not get violated. for each particle that pops out of no where a second particle that has negative mass pops out of no where too. they immidiatley cancel each other out. so the mass as a whole in the universe stays the same. the particles also cancel and wink out of existance before they have a chance to affect anything. they are known as virtual particles. while not a true perputal motion machine if you were to some how capture and seporate the virutal particles before they cancel you could convert the pasitive mass particles to enegy and shoot the negative mass particle off in to space to let someone else deal with it. you would have a mchaine that would run forever. however it do this by repeatedly “eating” the universe. better yet you could keep the negative particles till you have enough, convert them to negative energy and open wormholes.
the more i type this the more it seems to good to be true. so it probaly is.
true perputual motion machines would violate conservation of energy as we currently understand it. there is the possibility that we are wrong about conservation of energy, however conservation of energy is about as proven as gravity, if i throw a rock it will back down (unless it lands a tree or something of course). black holes eveporate by seperating virtual particles.
figuring out perpetual motion machines and then figuring out why they will not work can be a fun past time. also if you do figure out one that workst you will be famous. just remember you have abetter chance of winning a $100,000,000 jackpot in the lottery a 100 days in a row then conservation of energy being flawed and you making a true perputual motion machine in case you are getting too exited. here is a tip gravity is not a source of perpetual energy. any energy gained just comes from the enertia of of the gravity generating object if you built a gravity based “perpetual motion machine” on earth that means as you use it the earth would slow down till we fell out of orbit and died in the inferno that is our sun.
to sum it up:
-your quantum generater would be just as good as a perpetual motion machine.
-true perpetual motion machines are most probaly impossible
-my spelling sucks
-figuring out perpetual motin machines and then figuring out their flaw can be an entertaining puzzle.
Isn’t our planetary system and others perpetual motion?
No, the planet’s orbits are not perpetual motion.
i think he means perpetual motion in the since that it works in an atmosphere, or you could keep doing work with it with out any fuel source.
I’ll re-itrate: The orbit of the planets could not conitune in the same state forever, they are losing enrgy in several small ways such as collisions in space, etc.
I stand corrected!
IIRC I read in one of Stephen Hawking’s books that the Earth looses energy via gravitation…much like a cork bobbing in water looses energy. I think he said the energy loss is about enough to run a toaster.
So, the Earth is losing energy although at a very slow rate. The sun will die long, long before the Earth spirals into it.
Yep…too good to be true. I started a thread a month or so ago exploring this very idea. The explanations are somewhat hairy but the upshot seems to be that you never get something for nothing.
Negative Mass and Hawking Radiation
slight nitpick: perpetual motion doesn’t actually violate conservation of energy, but rather a different law of thermodynamics all together, namely that entropy increases.
In other words, one can imagine setting up a cycle which just pushes energy around; this manifestly satisfies conservation of energy. But to do this requires non-spontaneous processes to happen spontaneously, which requires an overall decrease in entropy, and it’s thus forbidden.
Nope, There is no known material that has negative intrinsic energy. Although I should probably add that you can get negative energy densities via the Casimer effect.
Won’t work. You can’t create a real particle from a virtual one without supplying energy. In the case of Hawking radiation the energy is supplied by the black hole.
There’s a number of factors that play a role in changing the size of the Earth’s orbit, but I understand the loss of mass by the sun (solar wind plus mass equivalent of radiated energy) are the biggest. That should mean the Earth is slowly moving away from the sun, but I don’t think any one has actually tried to measure to be certain.