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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets 
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Wednesday, January 23, 2002
23:28 - I Can Ponder Perpetual Motion...
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/01/23/ireland.invention.reut/index.html

 (top) link
Hey, look. Another inventor claims to have a working refutation of the First Law of Thermodynamics.

In a demonstration for Reuters, a prototype -- roughly the size of a dishwasher -- was run for around 10 minutes using four 12-volt car batteries as an initial power source.

Emitting a steady motorized hum, the machine powered three 100-watt light bulbs for the duration.

A multimeter reading of the batteries' voltage before the device started up showed a total of 48.9 volts. When it was switched off, a second reading showed 51.2 volts, indicating that, somehow, they had been reimbursed.

The machine went on to run for around two hours while photographs were taken, with no diminution in the brightness of the light bulbs, which remained lit during a short power cut.

"The draw on the batteries was estimated at more than 4.5 kilowatts. With any existing technology the batteries would have been drained flat in one and a half minutes," the inventor said.

Evidently some scientists, though as unwilling to give their names as this Irish inventor is to give his, are willing to at least take this case seriously enough to investigate it a bit. Hey, there have to be major breakthroughs still left to make, right? Things that are within our reach?

I remember it always annoyed me, growing up in the 80s, that there weren't any huge mythical superstars in baseball who had the stature that Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio had while they were playing-- even during their careers it was clear that they would become legends. But these days it's all so much smaller-scale and pettier. Players get lots more money but fade from sight much more quickly.

And that's sort of how I feel about scientific advancement. Galileo and Einstein and Edison came up with discoveries that changed people's lives almost right away; there were immediate returns. Today, Stephen Hawking is certainly in the same ballpark, as was Richard Feynman-- but their discoveries aren't giving us the same returns, so I doubt their names will enter our lexicon as colloquialisms in thirty or fifty years.

So that's where my skepticism of the perpetual-motion dishwasher comes from. Not because I doubt that it's fundamentally possible that the First Law of Thermodynamics can be disproved... but because I can't help but feel that this is somehow the wrong age for it. You know, I just can't believe that something like that will happen in my lifetime, just like that. The Internet is big, yes, but it took thirty years to become big. Free power would change things much faster than that.

Of course, knocking down the World Trade Center sure changed things in a hurry. But then again, here we are four months later, and (aside from in Lower Manhattan) things are pretty much back to normal.
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© Brian Tiemann