Well over the years nothing caught my fancy and made me tear my hair out than perpetual motion machines. When I was small(11 or 12,I think) I used to think wouldn’t it be lovely if one existed and then we won’t have strikes over petrol price increases, energy would be free for all it would be the greatest equalizer but then I came across the laws of thermodynamics in the library and I could see the machine I used to envision run down and break apart (in quite vivid detail, all it lacked was surround sound). Nearly 150 years ago there was a chap named James Prescott Joule who quite cleverly gave a few laws telling everybody from the harebrained inventors to the train driver that there is no free lunch in the universe. You cannot get something out of nothing in this world this holds true for every sphere imaginable (even the lottery). Moreover energy flows from a region of higher concentration to lower concentration i.e. entropy increases in a system reducing differences in temperature, pressure, density, and chemical potential that may exist in a system. There can and never has been a case of reverse entropy in a closed system….
So there can never ever be 100% efficiency there always some loss in the equation. These losses are generally manifested in the form of friction and other such forces. All perpetual motion machines look at only these few laws but the other 2 are equally important, which I shall write about later.
Thus I hope that till now you have understood the concept that underlies this situation or the problem to which it applies. so as I have said there is no free lunch but it is always fun to dream one up in your head (it’s quite entertaining I did it again during my math’s exam today). However not everyone reads the textbook recently there was an ad in The Economist by some folks who have claimed they have built one and were inviting scientists to view it, moreover yesterday they were supposed to demonstrate to the public and due to “technical reasons” couldn’t. Yeah I guess it just doesn’t work or it is probably a fraud of some sort by a poor fool who wanted to recover the money he had invested (it could have been better spent buying a physics textbook), but yet again the Ionian and Renaissance traditions to inquire, experiment and above all keep an open mind came to me and my heart as they say, said 1 to a Googolplex there might be something, something fishy that is. If it works on camera then there must be a hidden power source, for the laws of physics are the only unbreakable commandments in the universe as nature seems to make sure that the event doesn’t happen. Though shall not get free lunch or energy in this universe, now you can take that to a bank, who are even bigger misers (the RBI may revise the freaking interest rate again!)!
This is all I have to say judge for yourself at http://www.steorn.com/orbo/demo/demo.html
Update: Think it might be real? For the love of Liebniz, get a freakin’ clue: if it looks like a toy and the net gain is almost imperceptibly small, you’re selling a freaking measurement error. Sell it well!
Complete and utter nonsense but hey at least I got something to blog on!