I note recent comments suggesting that all designs should be shared, so others can study them and build and experiment with them. I have promised to share mine if the wheel works or fails, but in my experience designs are dismissed by the majority and maintaining that you are right only leads to calls for a proof of principle wheel - is that a catch 22 situation? Design is ignored without a PoP model but you can't build a PoP model unless you have the correct design.
The definition of catch 22 in the book of that name (Joseph McLennan) is "a situation in which a person is frustrated by a paradoxical rule or set of circumstances that preclude any attempt to escape from them".
Now that has a familiar ring to it. Our situation requires us to build a wheel which uses the force of gravity to move a number of weights causing a wheel to rotate continuously. Unfortunately we are frustrated by the paradoxical rules which say that what we wish to achieve is impossible, even though it has been done before.
"Begging the question" is a type of logical fallacy in which a proposition is made that uses its own premise as proof of the proposition. In other words, it is a statement that refers to its own assertion to prove the assertion. I think it was Helmholtz who said that perpetual motion machines must be impossible because no-one had ever succeeded in building one 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. That is also, ironically, a circular argument.
JC
