Tag Archives: Science

The perpetual motion machine

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Water Screw perpetual motion machine

The quest to build a perpetual motion machine has been around for at least 400 years; for a perpetual motion machine to be “perpetual”, it has to generate more energy than it consumes – if it did not, the energy lost in overcoming friction and in heat generation would leave insufficient energy to drive the machine and it would stop. The problem is, a perpetual motion machine violates the first and possibly the second law of thermodynamics, two foundational laws of physics.

An early effort to generate a perpetual motion machine was the Water Screw.

It was a dismal failure.

In fact all attempts at a perpetual motion machine have been dismal failures and, today, no one bothers to try – we all believe those laws of thermodynamics.

Everyone, that is, but an Irishman call Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn, who claims to have discovered some hitherto unknown property of electromagnetism that allows a generator to produce more energy than is fed in to power it, essentially creating a free energy source. The only tiny problem is that the generator violates the first law of thermodynamics – meaning it is impossible.

Early attempts to demonstrate a working model of this Orbo – as it is called – machine failed in 2007 to howls of derision from sceptics. The Orbo generator is fed from a battery which it, in turn, recharges; with an intact 1st law of thermodynamics, less energy must be generated than consumed and so the battery will run down and the machine stop. Not so for Orbo, says Sean McCarthy because it uses “time variant magnetic interactions, i.e. magnetic interactions whose efficiency varies as a function of transaction timeframes.” No, I have no idea what that is either, but Steorn attempts to explain:

It is this variation of energy exchanged as a function of transaction time frame that lies at the heart of Orbo technology, and its ability to contravene the principle of the conservation of energy. Why? Conservation of energy requires that the total energy exchanged using interactions are invariant in time. This principle of time invariance is enshrined in Noether’s Theorem.

The time variant nature of Orbo interactions can be engineered using two basic techniques. The first technique utilizes a method of controlling the response time of magnetic materials to make them time variant. This is achieved by controlling the MH position of materials during permanent magnetic interactions.

The second technique decouples the Counter Electromotive Force (CEMF) from torque for electromagnetic interactions. This decoupling of CEMF allows time variant magnetic interactions in electromagnetic systems.

That didn’t help me, much, but I know from the comments on my blog that most readers are much brighter than I, so I expect someone will understand.

Wired had some critical things to say about the initial 2007 demonstration and seems to be convinced that there is a “man behind the curtain” making the allegedly successful 2009 version of the generator work. You can see it for yourself as a live stream on the Steorn website along with some other experiments and talks.

There is a December 2009 experiment that can be viewed and a January 2010 experiment still to come. The December experiment shows a more or less conventional DC motor with a permanent magnet rotor and a stator wound with toroidal coils; this is an odd choice since toroidal wound coils produce a small external magnetic field and so make very inefficient motors. Nevertheless, it does appear to run and, unless the whole exercise is a hoax, produces no back EMF – something else that should be impossible.

So, Sean McCarthy is either a conman busy making a useless 21st C perpetual Water Screw, or is about to be everyone’s hero – except Al Gore’s whose green energy companies would lose billions; for that reason alone I am cheering on McCarthy.

Watch the videos – they are interesting. Here’s the Orbo for dummies video:

Science and Magic

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The other evening I watched the new Harry Potter film, The Half-Blood Prince; it isn’t as good as the book. But it did get me thinking about the hypothetical existence of magic and its relationship to the material and supernatural. According to Arthur C. Clarke, magic cannot exist and, if it seems to, that is merely because any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; magic, in Clarke’s view, is simply science in disguise. David Bentley Hart makes an interestingly similar – but considerably more subtle – point: magic is preoccupied with the manipulation of the material world and, as such, has more in common with science than the transcendent:

In truth, the rise of modem science and the early modern obsession with sorcery were not merely contemporaneous currents within Western society but were two closely allied manifestations of the development of a new post-Christian sense of human mastery over the world. There is nothing especially outrageous in such a claim. After all, magic is essentially a species of materialism; if it invokes any agencies beyond the visible sphere, they are not supernatural—in the theological sense of “transcendent”—but at most preternatural: they are merely, that is to say, subtler, more potent aspects of the physical cosmos. Hermetic magic and modem science (in its most Baconian form at least) are both concerned with hidden forces within the material order, forces that are largely impersonal and morally neutral, which one can learn to manipulate, and which may be turned to ends fair or foul; both, that is to say, are concerned with domination of the physical cosmos, the instrumental subjection of nature to humanity, and the constant increase of human power. Hence, there was not really any late modem triumph of science over magic, so much as there was a natural dissolution of the latter into the former, as the power of science to accomplish what magic could only adumbrate became progressively more obvious. Or, rather, “magic” and “science” in the modern period are distinguishable only retrospectively, according to relative degrees of efficacy. There never was, however, an antagonism between the two: metaphysically, morally, and conceptually, they belonged to a single continuum.

I’m not sure what Albus Dumbledore would make of that but, for any atheist who might be eager to comment, please use your God-given grey cells to understand the point before using them to animate your fingers at the keyboard.

God and science

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Contrary to contemporary atheist superstition, a scientist can be a Christian:

Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, has been named by President Obama to head the National Institutes of Health. What makes this news is the breathtaking idea that someone could be both a scientist and a believer in God.

Like Isaac Newton. Or Johannes Kepler. Or Galileo Galilei. Or most of the other leaders of the Scientific Revolution. And a large number of scientists today.

This isn’t news. What is news instead is the continuing ignorance of people who think that science and belief in God are incompatible. They are not.

Mind games

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A fascinating article in Discover Magazine makes the case for a biocentric universe: a universe that is brought into being by a biological entity – specifically, consciousness or mind – rather than the reverse. Both quantum theory, which has demonstrated that the behaviour of a particle is determined by observing it and relativity, which has proved that things like distance and time are not as absolute as common sense would dictate, make the case for a universe that is shaped by consciousness.

Figuring out the nature of the real world has obsessed scientists and philosophers for millennia. Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all.

For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley’s argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe “out there” into which we have each individually arrived. These models presume the existence of one essential reality that prevails with us or without us. Yet since the 1920s, quantum physics experiments have routinely shown the opposite: Results do depend on whether anyone is observing. This is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the famous two-slit experiment. When someone watches a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through the slits, the particle behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave that can inhabit all possibilities—including somehow passing through both holes at the same time.

Some of the greatest physicists have described these results as so confounding they are impossible to comprehend fully, beyond the reach of metaphor, visualization, and language itself. But there is another interpretation that makes them sensible. Instead of assuming a reality that predates life and even creates it, we propose a biocentric picture of reality. From this point of view, life—particularly consciousness—creates the universe, and the universe could not exist without us.

One of the consequences of this is that it creates a scientifically plausible case for both the origin of the universe being in God’s mind and for the idea that his mind alters the universe now: if our minds shape reality, how much more can God’s in what we call the miraculous.

The truth is out there

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I’ve always enjoyed reading science fiction from H. G. Wells to Arthur C Clark; and now the BBC:

Alien life ‘may exist among us’

Never mind Mars, alien life may be thriving right here on Earth, a major science conference has heard.

Our planet may harbour forms of “weird life” unrelated to life as we know it, according to Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University.

This “shadow life” may be hidden in toxic arsenic lakes or in boiling deep sea hydrothermal vents, he says.

He has called on scientists to launch a “mission to Earth” by trawling hostile environments for signs of bio-activity.

“It could be right in front of our noses – or even in our noses,” said the physicist.

After a good deal of digging, I have discovered an alien life form that lives up people’s noses.

Here it is:birdie2

Anti-Dawkins

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Just as there is matter and anti-matter, there is Dawkins and Anti-Dawkins. And Anti-Dawkins is called John Lennox, MA, MA (Bioethics), PhD, DPhil, DSc, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science, and Pastoral Advisor at Green College.