Last week, Thane Heins of Ottawa took his perpetual motion device (the Perepiteia) to Boston to show it to Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Markus Zahn at MIT's Laboratory for Electromagentic and Electonic Systems.
Zahn says the device's performance was "unexpected and new."
It's now Jan. 28 – D Day. Heins has modified his test so the effects observed are difficult to deny. He holds a permanent magnet a few centimetres away from the driveshaft of an electric motor, and the magnetic field it creates causes the motor to accelerate. It went well.
Contacted by phone a few hours after the test, Zahn is genuinely stumped -- and surprised. He said the magnet shouldn't cause acceleration. "It's an unusual phenomena I wouldn't have predicted in advance. But I saw it. It's real. Now I'm just trying to figure it out."
There's no talk of perpetual motion. No whisper of broken scientific laws or free energy. Zahn would never go there -– at least not yet. But he does see the potential for making electric motors more efficient, and this itself is no small feat.
"To my mind this is unexpected and new, and it's worth exploring all the possible advantages once you're convinced it's a real effect," he added. "There are an infinite number of induction machines in people's homes and everywhere around the world. If you could make them more efficient, cumulatively, it could make a big difference."
13 Comments
rembarHm. I'm thinking about kicking this out of the Science channel. The machine itself obviously functions to some degree, but the description that's been posted makes it almost seem as though it's an actual perpetual motion machine, which is sensationalist at best and outright falsified at worst.
"There's no talk of perpetual motion. No whisper of broken scientific laws or free energy." *snort*. Gimme a break.
RyjkyjYeah, totally uninteresting. Fuck MIT professors. This will probably have zero effect on anything ever.
E_Nygma*requeue because it just might be true:
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/300042#t
siftbotRe-queueing this video for one more try; last queued Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 10:04pm PST - requeue requested by submitter E_Nygma.
rembarEN, I am removing this post from the Science channel. That link pushed it over the edge and off the cliff. Sensational journalism loses out consistently to the laws of thermodynamics.
siftbotThis post has been removed from the Science channel by channel owner rembar. Please review the FAQ to learn about appropriate channel assignments.
choggierembar, you've been on the planet long enough to know that laws are constructs, at best, agreed upon scientific explanations of the phenomenological world are up for constant refinements, and everything you know, could possibly be illusion.
Laws, keep monkeys in their trees, and are there to be tested, altered, ignored
or laughed at.
Science and Spirituality have been placed in separate corners, to the detriment of mankind's progress....
I can appreciate your desire for your channel, being as pure, as sterile, and as efficient as a hive of bees though....more power to ya!
choggieof course, NO SCIENCE WHATSOEVER was involved in the conception, construction, or explanation of this device.....
fissionchipsNothing to see here, move along.
rembarrembar, you've been on the planet long enough to know that laws are constructs, at best, agreed upon scientific explanations of the phenomenological world are up for constant refinements, and everything you know, could possibly be illusion.
I have never, and never will, argue that laws are representative of our understanding of the universe and are always being refined. The point is that changes in scientific understanding are due to gaining a BETTER knowledge of principles through empirical evidence, and there had damn well be better great evidence if somebody thinks they can break one of the most fundamental laws. And this isn't great evidence. This here is a good example of exactly the opposite, in which some high school or college dropout builds a machine with no idea of what he's trying to accomplish, and gets a result that he interprets as something other than what it is because he doesn't really understand it. Spirituality my ass, this guy is just sadly, horribly misguided. At best he could have stumbled upon a boost in efficiency. At worst he could just have fooled himself into using more energy than he thought, or he could be outright lying.
of course, NO SCIENCE WHATSOEVER was involved in the conception, construction, or explanation of this device.....
No, there really wasn't, so far as this video shows. If there had been, there would be an explanation for its principles of "perpetual motion".
Honestly, I would expect better of y'all to not fall for a shoddy gimmick like this.
bamdrewwhy doesn't anything happen
*boring
siftbotMoving this video to E_Nygma's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 3 days.
dgandhiYeah, no load (or load meter), just a simple multi meter on the motor INPUT and no sensors around the "device" to see what it is actually doing to the magnetic field.
What's with the clicking noise when it speeds up? And the numbers he is talking about are irrelevant unless his power supply is absurdly well regulated.
This looks like adding a magnet to an electric motor, which causes the motor to momentarily fail, either by inducing current where it should not be, or acting as a force on electro magnets. This failure coincides with a speed up of the shaft, which may simply be a consequence if the motor getting back in phase.
The next step in the scientific process, collect data, seems to be of no interest, any number of potentially illuminating measurements could have been made in the time that video took. Why simply repeat the same non-informative observation over and over again?
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