Is perpetual motion truly impossible?

[atal]

I found textbooks on physics (long time ago, when I was a student) where the authors said (paraphrase): "We do not assert that perpetual motion is impossible. It just hasn't been seen so far."
What do the mentors and contributors say about that statement?
(berkeman?)

 

[Dickfore]

Think about the time it would take in terms of the age of the Solar System for a certain quantity of heat to be transferred from a cooler to a warmer body due to random thermal fluctuations.

 

[russ_watters]

It depends on the context of the statement. It could simply be talking About Newton's first law. But if it is talking about violations of the laws of thermo then it, or your recollection, is incorrect.

Edit: btw, the terms free energy and perpetual motion are not necessarily interchangeable. Free energy, if by which you mean due to perpetual motion, is impossible.

 

[atal]

Thank you for your contributions.
Yes, it was about the second law; and it was in a book on thermodynamics.
And yes, I do refer to free energy as resulting from perpetual motion.
Not only is my recollection accurate, but I managed to prove that those authors had good intuition and open minds.

The opposition to perpetual motion, and the resultant free energy, is rooted in the paradigms. One of them is the classification of the physical systems into open and closed,
Think about a system which is ambiguous, fuzzy, with respect to those definitions.
I did construct that system.
But to apply it in life would mean utter destruction (misused).


I posed the question only for one reason: to see where the minds are today, years after Thomas Kuhn has broken ground on the scientific paradigms ("The philosophy of the scientific revolution")

 

[Vanadium 50]

The opposition to perpetual motion, and the resultant free energy, is rooted in the paradigms.

No, it's rooted in the data. One data point is that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of inventors have claimed to make a perpetual motion machine, and the number that have been shown to actually work is identically zero.

In any event perpetual motion discussions are not allowed on PF.