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these gifted amateurs was no less a person than Michael Faraday, sometimes called 'the father of electricity’, yet he was self-taught. The obsessed ‘suffer' from an undue preoccupation with an idea, and such ideas can arise out of need. There was surely never a truer saying than ‘necessity is the mother of invention’; and in def- erence to those whose work could not be accepted until it was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, as Mark Twain once said, 'A crank is only a crank until he's been proved correct’. o what do I really mean by ‘perpetual motion’? It is known by both the layperson and the scientific community that such a device would violate one or more scientific laws. There are continuing experiments in superconductivity, in which metals or ceramics are cooled to such a low temperature that they lose all resistance to the passage of a direct electric current, allowing the current to continue to flow, undiminished, in a superconducting ring. This is usually referred to as 'perpetual motion of the third kind’. It is not required to do work, but to run continuously, yet it takes enormous amounts of energy to keep the conducting materi- al at a very low temperature. Work continues apace to find a ceramic which will operate in the same way at room temperature, and this may well soon happen but the device will still be unable to do work. The kind of perpetual motion which we shall be look- ing at is known as 'the first kind’, and it is expected to do work. Perpetual motion research can be traced back thousands of years. Behind it lies a dream of free energy which could be tapped by mankind for uses such as pumping water or turning mills. Exactly how far back the search can be traced is restricted by the fact that we must rely on written records. A fifth-century Sanskrit manuscript on astronomy, Siddhanta Ciromani, describes 54 ¢ NEXUS an attempt at a perpetual motion machine, but this is unlikely to ave been an isolated example, even at this early period. If one erson saw a need for such a device at that particular time, then others would have done so, but they might not have gone into rint. I suspect that if written records were available, they would show that the search for perpetual motion began a long time efore the fifth century. Indeed, there is a certain amount of evi- dence that pushes the date back some 7,000 years. Our modern educational system has ruled out any chance of such energy generation; but in the 18th century, things were not so definite. Heated discussions continued as to the possibility of erpetual motion. Some believed it might be feasible under cer- tain circumstances. Others, the majority of the scientific estab- lishment, declared such an idea outrageous, ridiculous or impossi- ble. It was known that the ultimate problem was one of friction, and work would only increase the effect that friction was already having. Heat was a consequence of friction, and the heat was readily dissipated to the surrounding cooler air, just as the law of thermodynamics suggested. There would never be enough energy held, within a machine, to draw on for more than a few hours at best, and it would not actually be able to do any work. There are only two laws of thermodynamics, and the first one says that a certain amount of mechanical work will produce an equivalent amount of heat. In other words, energy can be con- verted into heat, but it can't be destroyed or created. The second law says that heat cannot be increased without the expenditure of more work, or energy. This means that heat can only flow out to cooler surroundings; it can't do the reverse. Today these state- ments seem very obvious and, when combined with the laws of motion as defined by Sir Isaac Newton, appear to rule out the pos- sibility of perpetual motion. The first law of motion states the rather obvious fact that a body or thing which is at rest, i.e., not moving, will continue to remain at rest unless acted upon by an external force, i.e., if something ushes it. It goes on to mention that if the body is moving in a articular direction, it will continue to move in that direction unless acted upon by some external force, i.e., if something causes it to change direction. The second law elaborates on the first law in that it states that the action of something pushing or striking a ody in motion is the same in magnitude and direction as if it acted on the body at rest. The third and final law says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction—and anyone who has ever attempted to ice-skate will vouch for the truth of this. So these are the laws which, in part, help to exclude the possi- ility of perpetual motion, and they cannot be faulted. Actually, they are statements of fact that grew out of the writings of the ancients such as Thales, followed by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Descartes. Newton combined the work of his predecessors and then added his own unique brand of genius, producing his Principia Mathematica. Remarkably, it seems that Newton himself did not rule out the possibility of a perpetual motion machine. It is a little-known fact that in his early notebooks, under the heading "Quaestiones" (sic), Newton speculated that gravity (heaviness) is caused by the descent of a subtle matter which strikes all bodies and carries them down: "Whither ye rays of gravity may bee stopped by reflecting or refracting ye, if so a perpetual motion may bee made one of these two ways." Adjacent to these words, Newton added two sketches of perpetual motion powered by the "flux of the gravitational stream". Moreover, Newton became directly involved in a famous controversy regarding a perpetual motion machine, but, although challenged to comment on it, he main- tained a dignified silence. Johann Ernst Elias Bessler, also known as Orffyreus. DECEMBER 1998 - JANUARY 1999