Have you encountered Perpetual Motion Disease (PMD)?

[OmCheeto]

hmm... That reminds me of something I saw just moments ago...

"It may be perpetual motion, but it will take forever to test it."
Cartoon by Donald Simanek.​

from mgb_phys's aforementioned http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/unwork.htm#cheng

 

[chiro]

Yes, it is. If someone is there to guide these people. The problem with 99% of people who try to make PPMs is that they aren't learning physics; they attempt to defy it.

Regardless of their intentions of whether they are just curious or whether they just want to prove somebody else wrong and then show everyone else how smart they are and how dumb everyone else is, I still consider it a good exercise none the less.

Sure a lot of people might say they are 'wasting their time', but if that's what they want to use it on, I say good for them.

Also I'm a little surprised about the comment that the person wouldn't learn physics. I mean after all they are doing experiments aren't they in building these machines? Even if the experiments aren't as controlled as you would find in a university lab, and even if they didn't understand all of the calculus and so on, why would you think that the person wouldn't learn about physics?

I would say that they would learn a hell of a lot about physics don't you think? If they spent that much time and that much effort I absolutely gaurantee that they would learn at least something.

To say the opposite is rather condescending, and suggests a little bit of ignorance. Whether they end up failing or not is irrelevant to the learning issue.

 

[DaveC426913]

Regardless of their intentions of whether they are just curious or whether they just want to prove somebody else wrong and then show everyone else how smart they are and how dumb everyone else is, I still consider it a good exercise none the less.

Sure a lot of people might say they are 'wasting their time', but if that's what they want to use it on, I say good for them.

Also I'm a little surprised about the comment that the person wouldn't learn physics. I mean after all they are doing experiments aren't they in building these machines? Even if the experiments aren't as controlled as you would find in a university lab, and even if they didn't understand all of the calculus and so on, why would you think that the person wouldn't learn about physics?

I would say that they would learn a hell of a lot about physics don't you think? If they spent that much time and that much effort I absolutely gaurantee that they would learn at least something.

To say the opposite is rather condescending, and suggests a little bit of ignorance. Whether they end up failing or not is irrelevant to the learning issue.

They would learn mechanics, yes, and certainly some physics. But PPMs are all about energy transfer and work. If they did learn the physics involved, they would come to realize why the PPM is flawed in principle, and drop it.

It is the ones who pursue it without cessation who have not learned the relevant physics, and in fact must actively deny it when put in front of them.

i.e. actually learning physics by building PPMs is a negative feedback process. "The more you do it, the more you'll stop."

 

[DragonPetter]

i.e. actually learning physics by building PPMs is a negative feedback process. "The more you do it, the more you'll stop."

Haha. And if the system is just (not) right, it can still act unstable and grow positively, even with negative feedback present. That's when it maybe is a disease :P

But I agree that there is something comendable about PMM designers interest and determination, and "disease" is a bad term for their obsession. Its only when they are actively fooling themselves and others that I disrespect it. I don't mind a person trying to find and design a PMM, I think that's a noble effort. When they have a system and they find the physical reasoning for why it will never be a PMM and still try to fool themselves and others, they are not learning physics and only hurting it.

 

[russ_watters]

Don't I know that...

retrieving two empty tuna fish cans from the recycle bin: 90 seconds
finding hammer and nail to poke holes in cans: 90 seconds
pulling [STRIKE]neo-neptunian[/STRIKE], [STRIKE]neobdinium[/STRIKE], rare Earth magnets off of 'fridge: 30 seconds
putting it all together: 360 seconds
time to realize what was going on in the "iron plate / magnetic attractor": 3 seconds
taking pictures, transferring data, etc: 1 hour 30 minutes

time it took PF to lock the thread: 1 hour 35 minutes

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=329636

Kudos for doing the test. Fyi, this device was posted again in the past few weeks. I'll see if I can find it...

 

[russ_watters]

Regardless of their intentions of whether they are just curious or whether they just want to prove somebody else wrong and then show everyone else how smart they are and how dumb everyone else is, I still consider it a good exercise none the less.

Sure a lot of people might say they are 'wasting their time', but if that's what they want to use it on, I say good for them.

Also I'm a little surprised about the comment that the person wouldn't learn physics. I mean after all they are doing experiments aren't they in building these machines? Even if the experiments aren't as controlled as you would find in a university lab, and even if they didn't understand all of the calculus and so on, why would you think that the person wouldn't learn about physics?

My experience is:
1. They aren't interested in learning.
2. They don't build, much less test their devices.

So all they do is cling violently to whatever misconception got them there.

 

[chiro]

My experience is:
1. They aren't interested in learning.
2. They don't build, much less test their devices.

So all they do is cling violently to whatever misconception got them there.

I gaurantee you're right in that some (perhaps the majority) are this way, but don't paint everybody with the same brush.

If they aren't actually building the devices and testing them, then I wouldn't really say that they are actually doing what they state anyway since working with the "PPM's" or any similar device requires you to come up with some machine whether it works or not, in a physical form. Absolutely agree on that point.

I'm not a physicist by any means just to get it out there, but if someone showed me something that did what they said, and it physically existed, and I could look at it and pull it apart and see that it really did what it did, I would pay attention.

I wouldn't invest in the technology, I wouldn't claim that the guy broke the laws of physics, and I wouldn't even claim that it does exactly what the person says it does in the principles that they say it does but I would still pay enough attention to learn something and to me, this is an important attribute of any scientist.

 

[DaveC426913]

I gaurantee you're right in that some (perhaps the majority) are this way, but don't paint everybody with the same brush.

Nobody is painting everyone with the same brush. The only ones we are painting are the ones that actually get in our faces and won't leave.

By definition, the ones that aren't crazy either
- don't beat the rest of us to death with their ideas, or
- realize their error and move on.

Either way, we are talking about the ones we do encounter, the crazies.

 

[OmCheeto]

I'm not a physicist by any means just to get it out there, but if someone showed me something that did what they said, and it physically existed, and I could look at it and pull it apart and see that it really did what it did, I would pay attention.

I wouldn't invest in the technology, ...

You don't have to invest! You just have to go to the USPTO after watching the amazing HOJO* video and following their instructions to look at the fully patented MAGNETIC PROPULSION SYSTEM!

I looked at the image, and could build a prototype device in about 17 minutes. (nails, neodymium magnets, one matchbox car) Doesn't everyone have those things lying around the house? I do! If you're CRAZY, you can pay the $49.97 for the amazing instructional video. BUT WHY WASTE THAT MONEY! When you can just go to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and get the whole thing for, can you believe it, FREE!

The other two patents are #4,877,983(issued on halloween. snicker... magnets and a matchbox car again) & #4,151,431(boring! not PM at all... wait... looking at the images. ah! hahahaha!)

Too lazy to click on all those links? HERE! We'll do it for you!

I'm now exhausted from laughing. Must go now. My apologies to the serious people lounging around in GD.



*kook link disabled due to kook links being not allowed here.

 

[Q_Goest]

There are specific behaviors demonstrated by a small group of people that defies all logic. PMD is very similar to gambling for instance, where the victim has the urge to keep gambling irresponsibly.

We’ve all seen the folks with PMD. They are told exactly why their ideas won’t work and sometimes they even understand, but like a gambler, they go right back at it and do it again and again! That’s PMD. In the gambling world, they call it something else. But it’s real. Ralf doesn’t have it, he understood and accepted the logic but you could see it was starting to get hold of him. I think it’s just as neglectful to not recognize it as some kind of disorder just like gambling.

By the way, OmCheeto posted this and the guy isn’t hard to find. If you look, you’ll also find many others that actually believe in his ideas (not to mention having their own ideas about PM) - and I seriously don’t think they’re simply scammers. They really believe in the validity of PM. They’re providing details of their ideas… and not asking for money! I don’t think any logic or evidence in the world will convince this guy that his idea is wrong, and that is what PMD is.

I almost met one once. In that eX-Filed forum I discussed earlier, someone brought together the fact that pistons of different sizes, under the same pressure, would have different net forces applied. So he proposed sinking his device into the ocean to generate huge amounts of free energy. I looked at his drawing and told him that it would work through one cycle and then stop. I also told him that I had a fish tank into which I could submerge a mini-model and prove this. He said it would only work if it were submerged under hundreds, perhaps thousands of feet of water. So I asked him if he required financial assistance for such a huge venture. He of course said yes, at which point I stopped conversing with him.

But I did google his name*, and discovered he lived only a few miles away from me. I now avoid that section of town like the plague...

*He was so confident in his idea, he gave out his real name.
Gads. Googling the concept and my town, still lists him on page 1.
How could I have forgotten that name...
OMG! His invention has it's own Wiki entry!

"A prototype [top secret name] has yet to be built, but several scientists and engineers^[who?] have attested to the validity of the [top secret] concept.^{[citation needed]} Conceptual drawings are available.^[doodle]"​

I feel really special now.

ps: I say this with tounge in cheek... but only a little bit.

 

[russ_watters]

I gaurantee you're right in that some (perhaps the majority) are this way, but don't paint everybody with the same brush.

Please note, there is a selection bias at work here which cause the vast majority of our encounters to be negative:

Those who are willing to learn learn quickly since the issues here are high scool level simple. So such people fall out of sight quickly.

 

[zoobyshoe]

There are specific behaviors demonstrated by a small group of people that defies all logic. PMD is very similar to gambling for instance, where the victim has the urge to keep gambling irresponsibly.

This isn't specific to perpetual motion devices but applies to all invention. The "disease" you describe is nowhere more evident than in the biographies of people like Edison and Tesla, who were addicted to the pursuit of the ground breaking, world changing, invention that would make them rich and famous. The fact they both did invent some remarkable things just made their addiction worse and they both lost much more money pushing their unsuccessful inventions than they ever made with their successful ones. Just like gamblers who win big at the start and keep betting long past the point where their initial winnings are depleted, they both wasted the last half of their lives trying to recreate the success of the first half and failing.

Invention is very much like gold-fever. There's the perception that there are untold fortunes and a place in History to be made with the right invention. A device that produces more energy than it takes to operate is the Holy Grail and also a kind of preliminary filter that catches and holds all the rank morons. It's not a disease unto itself, just a part of the larger fame-and-fortune seeking that lures all inventors, just like the rumor of gold has always lured people into all kinds of hardship and financial calamity.

 

[DaveC426913]

Please note, there is a selection bias at work here which cause the vast majority of our encounters to be negative:

Those who are willing to learn learn quickly since the issues here are high scool level simple. So such people fall out of sight quickly.

More eloquent than the way I expressed it.

 

[lisab]

I'm not a physicist by any means just to get it out there, but if someone showed me something that did what they said, and it physically existed, and I could look at it and pull it apart and see that it really did what it did, I would pay attention.

Re the bolded text: oh definitely, if someone presented me with a PMM that appeared to work, I'd want to get a veeeery close look at it, too. And that's the rub. The PMM people have told me about *don't* exist. I've even had one guy ask me to build a prototype of his idea for him! Lol, yeah right, I'll get right on that...

 

[russ_watters]

This isn't specific to perpetual motion devices but applies to all invention. The "disease" you describe is nowhere more evident than in the biographies of people like Edison and Tesla, who were addicted to the pursuit of the ground breaking, world changing, invention that would make them rich and famous. The fact they both did invent some remarkable things just made their addiction worse and they both lost much more money pushing their unsuccessful inventions than they ever made with their successful ones. Just like gamblers who win big at the start and keep betting long past the point where their initial winnings are depleted, they both wasted the last half of their lives trying to recreate the success of the first half and failing.

Inventionitis is a necessary component of PMD, but PMD goes further. The difference is that for Inventionitis, the prospective inventor may or may not realize or be willing to realize that what they are trying to do violates the laws of physics. If they do, they just have Inventionitis. If they don't, they may also have PMD.

 

[chiro]

Re the bolded text: oh definitely, if someone presented me with a PMM that appeared to work, I'd want to get a veeeery close look at it, too. And that's the rub. The PMM people have told me about *don't* exist. I've even had one guy ask me to build a prototype of his idea for him! Lol, yeah right, I'll get right on that...

It's really unfortunate that indeed a lot of this is done and that we have con-men, people who just don't want to let go of something that is not completely accurate or otherwise.

I guess it's just another example of the challenges of not only being a human being, but also dealing with, interpreting and making decisions based on experiences with other human beings.

I can't believe the guy asked you to build it though, especially if he "is" the real inventor! It would have made more sense for him to ask for you ten million dollars in investor money! ;)

You know come to think of it, I think I have found a way to get money through spam. The nigerians came up with inheritance and prizes, the UK came up with lottery winnings and the Russian women came up with exploiting mens weaknesses: I will come up with investment options for perpetual motion technologies that promise infinite growth and do a few fancy excel charts with my projections. What do you think?

 

[DaveC426913]

I will come up with investment options for perpetual motion technologies that promise infinite growth and do a few fancy excel charts with my projections. What do you think?

Brilliant! You even could skip the PPM technology - go straight to the PPM principle.

Show how you can build a spreadsheet that ignores friction and other losses, and with just an initial kickstart of $1000 (of their money of course), the number-crunching gears and pulleys you've set up in the spreadsheet will generate more money than they put into it - forever!

Over-unity dollars!

Suddenly - with their wallets half out - they become black belts in No Such Thing As A Free Lunch Fu.

 

[edward]

Although not proclaimed to be a perpetual motion machine, this guy has been promoting his energy machine since 1979. It supposedly produces more energy than it consumes.

[crackpot links deleted]

 

[russ_watters]

Uh, yeah, Joe Newman is the archetype for PMD. He is explicitly promoting a perpetual motion machine.

 

[DaveC426913]

He is explicitly promoting a perpetual motion machine.

According to Wiki at least, he claims it is not PM, but mass conversion:

Newman claims that the motor derives its power by converting some of the mass of the copper in the coils into usable energy...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newman's_energy_machine#Claims_by_the_inventor

So that makes him somehow less crazy. Right?

 

[MacLaddy]

I have not had any experience with chronic sufferers of PMD, so I do not know how this would play out, but I would like to ask one of them two simple questions.

1. Do you believe that energy and heat are the same?
-If the answer is yes-
2. Can you describe a perpetual heat source?

This might get their mental gears moving in a different direction.

If the answer is no, walk away quickly.

 

[russ_watters]

According to Wiki at least, he claims it is not PM, but mass conversion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newman's_energy_machine#Claims_by_the_inventor

So that makes him somehow less crazy. Right?

The great thing about Joe Newman is that he's basically an "official" crackpot in that he sued the USPTO for refusing to grant him a patent for his PMM and lost. So his crackpottery is officially recognized by the US justice system. He can argue his device isn't a PMM and should be patented and all he wants, but unfortunately in order to fight his fight in court, he needed to deliver a functioning prototype for testing and analysis.

 

[chiro]

I have not had any experience with chronic sufferers of PMD, so I do not know how this would play out, but I would like to ask one of them two simple questions.

1. Do you believe that energy and heat are the same?
-If the answer is yes-
2. Can you describe a perpetual heat source?

This might get their mental gears moving in a different direction.

If the answer is no, walk away quickly.

Could you outline some arguments for the equivalence of heat and energy in general? I'm interested to read a few perspectives myself and I think anyone that offers sources for perspectives or even their own would be helping a lot of people, maybe even those with PMD.

You never know!

 

[zoobyshoe]

Uh, yeah, Joe Newman is the archetype for PMD. He is explicitly promoting a perpetual motion machine.

No, he's always explicitly said he is not claiming perpetual motion. I read his self-published book many years ago. All he claims is that the machine produces more energy than is contained in the battery that operates it. It's a primitive DC motor run from a car battery. He completely explains how it operates, though he rephrases everything in his own bizarre jargon, and any reasonably handy person could build one. The commutator is clever, and is the "secret". He built a couple of capacitors into the commutator. Contact is broken with the field coil when the commutator rolls around to the capacitors. The switching surge is collected in the capacitor and it is fed back into the battery a bit later in the rotation, recharging it. Just by collecting the switching surge and feeding it back into the battery, the thing runs longer than it "should", though it does run down eventually. He admits it runs down, and does not claim infinite energy, just more than there should be.

This is all the thing does: it just runs. He never uses it to do anything, puts no load on it.

 

[russ_watters]

What is the publish date on the book? Perhaps he has he updated it to back off the overunity claim? Because if it were as you described, there would be no reason not to grant him a patent. 'Well, then it must be nuclear power' (guesstimated paraphrase) seems like a likely reformulation of his claim after losing his mojo to me.

Either way, guys, I'm not very interested in nitpicking the demented rantings of a madman.

 

[DaveC426913]

The great thing about Joe Newman is that he's basically an "official" crackpot in that he sued the USPTO for refusing to grant him a patent for his PMM and lost. So his crackpottery is officially recognized by the US justice system. He can argue his device isn't a PMM and should be patented and all he wants, but unfortunately in order to fight his fight in court, he needed to deliver a functioning prototype for testing and analysis.

Yeah, I read that. That's heartening. I did not know a patent could be refused because a contraption does not work. So many patents are on little more than designs.

 

[zoobyshoe]

What is the publish date on the book? Perhaps he has he updated it to back off the overunity claim?

I don't remember the publish date but it was after he tried to get a patent, because some of the book was a rebuttal to the patent denial. "Overunity" if I understand the term, means greater than 100% efficient, which is a different claim than "perpetual motion". The latter would mean a thing runs literally forever with no input. The former simply means you get more out than you put in, but with no claim it will run forever.

Because if it were as you described, there would be no reason not to grant him a patent.

You're missing the fact it doesn't fulfill the claim: it is NOT more than 100% efficient, not over unity. The extra running time comes from a reasonably clever way of recycling electrical energy that is usually allowed to go to waste. It does not come from the mass of the copper, or anything like that. Any careful measurement would reveal that what the motor does in no way exceeds the energy in the battery. As I said, the motor is never made to do anything: it just runs. All it's ever doing is overcoming mechanical and air friction and bleeding a little energy into heat loss in the coil. By recycling the switching surge, he makes it do that longer than a conventional motor would.

He does not claim it will do anything perpetually, and can't, therefore, be refused a patent based on it not being perpetual motion. He can only be refused based on it NOT producing more energy than is put into it, the latter being something he does claim.

Either way, guys, I'm not very interested in nitpicking the demented rantings of a madman.

You have to debunk what's claimed. If a guy says "I saw a ghost!" you can't shoot him down on the basis he didn't see an extraterrestrial.