Have you encountered Perpetual Motion Disease (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.