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).
I've not looked very far into zero-point energy, but, assuming it's thermodynamically valid as you say, wouldn't truly harnessing it lower the zero point of the particles involved to balance the system?
Therefore, you'd either run out of energy when all the zero-points became literal zero, find that the energy harnessed is linear while the zero-point drop is inverse-exponential (an amazing fact indeed), or find that the zero-point is able to become negative.
Don't think of it as an infinite gas tank, but rather a gas tank that's roughly the size of the universe. Theoretically you'll empty the tank eventually, but it'll take a good while.
"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."
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...
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...
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.
Misdirection is a powerful psychological force. It just feels right that energy can come from nowhere, because that's how our world works! There is stored energy all over the place, but we weren't there to see it get stored, so it's like it came from thin air.
Energy just comes up out of the ground, as trees or coal or oil or uranium, and we use it, and when we need more we just do more digging or chopping!
Geologic time is an alien concept for humans, far more alien than anything ever shown on Star Trek. Even those of us with lots of science education have trouble grasping it. It's really quite hard to look at an oil field and think of it as the accumulation of millions of years' worth of solar energy. It's like trying to remember that you are one of seven billion people in the world: that number is so much larger than the number of your friends that you can't really understand it.
There are plenty of Americans who want something for nothing, and people like to root for the underdog. It's the feel-good sensation that's sweeping America!
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.
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.
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?
Actually if you put a wire into a magnetic field and run a current through it, there will be a force on the wire (if it has the right orientation, I suppose). That's how conventional electrical motors work, too.
Someday, I'd like to draft an article that maxes out this scale, and see if I can publish it in a straight-faced student newspaper, or pseudoscientific special-interests publication.
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.
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.
"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.
To be fair, revolutionary scientific advances spend a long time in the heresy box.
Sample bias. If a revolutionary advance wins converts relatively quickly via overwhelming evidence (the invention of the transistor, high Tc superconductivity, the discovery of extrasolar planets, siRNA, mammalian cloning, stem cells...) everyone is astonished for a while, but then they get used to it. But if an advance is so subtle or difficult to measure that it takes 20 years to catch on, we are doomed to hear about that incident, over and over, from every crackpot in the world for the next hundred years.
If Galileo's estate could collect a nickel from every perpetual-motion inventor who has invoked his name, they would own Italy and be bidding on the rest of the E.U.
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.
"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.
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.
And here's Kuhn denying there is such thing as progress short of finding an ultimate, final, perfect truth:
There is another step, or kind of step, which many philosophers of science wish to take and which I refuse. They wish, that is, to compare theories as representations of nature, as statements about 'what is really out there'. Granting that neither theory of a historical pair is true, they nonetheless seek a sense in which the latter is a better approximation to the truth. I believe nothing of that sort can be found. On the other hand, I no longer feel that anything is lost, least of all the ability to explain scientific progress, by taking this position.
I don't see how that's fair. What non-scientific fields are more reasonable than, say, physicists?
Scientists may not be perfect. But they have certain standards, which make them better. For example, scientists have a tradition of disregarding the source of an idea and focussing on examining reasons it is correct or not.
Edit: BTW it's ironic that Planck would say that. I think it's pretty clear that his own life, not his death, advanced physics.
He didn't mean his own death, necessarily. But the death of older physicists that founded previous revolution stuck with the old (and wrong) ideas that were against his new (and right) ideas.
You'll find that historically, older scientists in prominent positions will be adamant against an uprising revolution in his field. If he/she wields enough power in academia, he'll crush it...at least delay it for a while, until he dies.
Newton was rather notorious for this sort of stuff. He held some high position(forgot what it was called) in academia and made it difficult for lots of other younger scientists that came after while he was in power.
In reality, the first is true, even for Planck. He'd be a fool not to realize it too. I didn't mean to say Planck's right forever.
Phrased another way, I don't think his point in saying how science progresses by funerals is to point to his own death. It was to highlight the misconception that most people have that current science theories come to prominence in science because the revolutionaries changed the minds of the old guard through proofs and experimentation. Rather, proof and experimentation changed the minds of young revolutionaries, and only when old guards die off, the revolutionaries rise to take their place and make prominent the new theory.
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
Really? The tone of certainty in several comments on this page lends credence to it. It's difficult to recognize one's own dogmatism.
Fine, it's false. If scientists acted like the Church, we'd have made about as much progress in science as religion.
The reason science is able to find truer explanations is that scientists in fact look for them, rather than musing on how to enforce strictly conservative attitudes. If you deny this, you've unexplained something. Kuhn, and you, have not offered a replacement.
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...