Perpetual Emotion
Last month, I wrote of scientists who believe in 'zero point
energy'. Here I want to say something about inventors who are producing machines
claimed to be Over-Unity -- that is, machines that can produce more energy than
is put into them, something that conventional science says is impossible.
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The impossibility of energy for nothing is not merely a matter
of habit of thought with science. It is enshrined in one of the most fundamental
and important laws of physics: the first law of thermodynamics or the law of
conservation of energy, which says that energy can neither be created nor
destroyed, but can only change its form.
In every kind of machine, you always get losses, never gains
of energy: the bicycle always runs down eventually once you stop pedalling. You
might gain some temporary advantage from rolling downhill or a fortuitous
following wind and, over the centuries, some inventors have been fooled by such
short-lived freak conditions into thinking they had built a machine that would
run forever. But, in the end, the temporary gain will disappear and your machine
will eventually slow to a halt.
This law is so important in western culture that it has come
to occupy a place of honour not only in science but also in western philosophy
generally.
But if the Law of Conservation of Energy is buried so deeply
in the western psyche, how did it get there? So fundamental a law must have been
arrived at by science's greatest minds, mustn't it? In fact, the truth is rather
more prosaic.
In 1847, a 26-year-old German medical doctor, Hermann
Helmholtz, gave a presentation to the Physical Society of Berlin. The young
man's lecture was to have a profound influence on the entire international
scientific community.
Helmholtz had graduated from the Berlin Medical Institute
three years earlier and had been appointed as military surgeon to a regiment in
Potsdam. His military duties were not pressing and the young man occupied his
time in a makeshift laboratory he set up in the barracks, conducting experiments
in the subject that was his primary interest; human anatomy and physiology.
Unlike his teachers, he was convinced that there was nothing mysterious about
living things. The human body, he believed, was simply a machine. To back up his
theories he collected results from physicians doing research into subjects such
as how the human body uses energy.
Helmholtz was particularly interested in the work of his
fellow countryman Julius von Mayer who had likened the human body to a machine
that takes in fuel and converts it to work and heat. He also studied the work of
England's James Joule who had been able to show experimentally the equivalence
of work and heat as simply different forms of energy.
Now, Helmholtz transformed his thinking into a mighty
principle which he made the subject of a paper destined for the prestigious
journal Deutsche Annalen Physik. No-one had ever succeeded, he wrote, in
building a perpetual motion machine that worked. Therefore, such machines must
be impossible. If they are impossible it must be by reason of some natural law
preventing their construction. This law, he said, could only be the law of
Conservation of Energy.
The peer review committee of the journal examined Helmholtz's
paper and rejected it as being too speculative. Helmholtz turned instead to a
fringe meeting of the Berlin Physical Society where he delivered his paper as a
speech in 1847.
No-one seemed to be struck by the fact that the 26-year-old
recent graduate was a medical doctor with neither experience nor training in
physics, and, indeed, virtually no experience even in his chosen field of
medicine. And, incredible though it may seem, it was this conjecture by
Helmholtz that is the foundation stone of science's belief in the Law of
Conservation of Energy.
Nor does it seem to have struck anyone in physics that the
circularity of Helmholtz's reasoning is a perfectly self-fulfilling prediction.
No-one has ever built a perpetual motion machine, therefore there must be a law
of conservation of energy that forbids such machines. If an inventor comes along
claiming to have constructed such a machine, he must be mistaken and can safely
be ignored because the law of conservation of energy shows them to be
impossible!
Of course, few would dispute that Helmholtz was justified in
his historical assessment: every attempt at perpetual motion before 1847 had
indeed failed, just as though some natural barrier existed to achieving a
self-sustaining mechanism. Where the controversy begins is that in the past
ninety years, there have been more than a dozen scientists and engineers who
have developed machines they claimed to be over-unity, but which have simply
been rejected as impossible without any detailed investigation and without any
serious study of the evidence.
Some of the claims of this sort have been made by inventors
who were undoubtedly crackpots or charlatans and who were unable ever to
demonstrate anything to back up their claims. Some inventors did not so
much defraud others as delude themselves -- a few even died in poverty believing
they had solved the problem.
Inventors of both kinds still exist today and present an
almost insuperable difficulty to any researcher who wants to get to the bottom
of their claims. How exactly do you tell a real inventor from a charlatan? And
how can you tell if an inventor is deluding himself about what he has achieved?
Keep watching this space.
