I was talking to a physics teacher yesterday, a man of some years experience teaching at a fee-paying school and we got to discussing my research into Bessler's wheel.
"Of course you do realise that he was a fraud, don't you?" he said.
"How do you know that?" I asked.
"Surely you know that gravity is a conservative forece and as such it cannot be used to supply energy continuously to drive that wheel of his," was his response.
"But, " I replied, "the evidence that his claims were genuine is overwhelming and the numerous witnesses none of them fools, nor easily misled. Many of them were scientists, teachera and engineers themselves and looking for the signs of fraud."
"I'm sorry, my friend," he replied, "but you must face the facts, it's impossible, and I'll tell you why. To make the weights move in and out to cause overbalance, they will travel on different paths - right?" I nodded because I knew where he was going with this.
"A conservative force is defined as one where the work done in moving an object between two points is independent of the path taken, so even if they move inwards and outwards according to whether they are rising or falling...makes no difference."
"Yes I am aware of that", I said somewhat sarcastically, "gravity is a conservative force but just as a matter of interest, can you name a non-conservative force?"
"Yes of course, friction is a non-conservative force."
"And another one?"
"Well, right now I can't think of any others, but that is not the point," he said.
"But that is the point" I replied, "there are no others worth mentioning because almost all forces are conservative and although you may technically be correct I simply cannoit regard friction as the same kind of force as all the others. Let me ask you this; is the wind a conservative force? Is a current of water a conservative force?"
"Well yes but their interfaces are different."
"What d you mean?" I asked.
Gravity acts on the molecules constituting the weights, while those in the wind and water act on the external surfaces of the blades."
"Sorry," I responded, "that doesn't make any difference if, as you say, the path they take doesn't matter with a conservative force. Yes the shapes of the interfaces alter, but you can't say that that excuses the fact that even though it's a conservative force the wind can still be used as an energy source - or a stream of water. They are conservative forces and yet they demonstrate the fallacy of your argument. Maybe I can make the path of the weights make a different shape depending on whether it's rising or falling, just like the two surfaces of the windmill sails for instance."
"You are wrong my friend, science has taught us that gravity is not a source of energy, other than for the time it takes for a weight to fall, for over 300 years, but if you can prove them all wrong, I'll eat my hat!"
JC
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"You are wrong my friend, science has taught us that gravity is not a source of energy, other than for the time it takes for a weight to fall, for over 300 years, but if you can prove them all wrong, I'll eat my hat!"
JC
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All I can say John is,I hope that phiysics teacher's hat is made of straw because that's all an ass will eat.
ReplyDeleteTotally ignoring the subject, but catching up with Trevor and Jon S. here,
ReplyDeletewith regards to the springs, I was thinking, yet again, about the Zylo sculpture,
if the free-falling of the centre blocks was utilized to wind a spring,
it might just provide enough stored energy to help the last block turn the first, so the cycle repeats.
Small increments released in one big action.
Making the wheel clockwork, but not clocklike, toy car fashion.
Springs are useful because they may be one step in harnessing a temporally-varying force.
ReplyDeleteAlso, they may be a means of optimising the displacement requirements - you can load more energy into a radially sliding-weight that is buffered from its rim stop by a spring - getting the benefits of a longer excursion from a shorter distance.
Another use of springs is as a transmission - a spring can transfer energy between otherwise-incompatible mechanisms...
When JC's physicist friend talks of "non-conservative" forces (or rather, thermodynamic systems), his reliance on the example of friction demonstrates that he is not actually talking about thermodynamically non-conservative forces, but rather, simply dissipative losses; ie. the 2nd law. Of course the whole basis of calorimetry is that the energy of the system is, actually, fully conserved - if we scrub off some speed by applying a brake, we heat up our discs and pads and they also ablate, so entropy increases, but the net energy of the system remains constant.
These are not the kind of non-conservative systems that concern us. What we're interested in is very specific; non-dissipative, non-conservative systems.
In these systems, their total energy is not constant. They can end up with more or less energy than they began with. The archetypal example here would be temporally-variant systems, where changes in force are a function of time, as well as space.
Of course systems that vary force as a function of time are common, however, normally WE PAY for these variations - work has to be performed in order to change the force. Again, such systems do not interest us.
What we'd want would be a system wherein the variation in force is free - where we don't have to do any work to change the force, but can still harvest the resulting energy from that exposed gradient. Or, if we prefer, dump energy into it instead.
Non-dissipative non-conservative systems are possible, do exist and Bessler's wheel would be one such example. The perfect example question to ask your physicist friends is where Sv losses go in passive magnetic systems... All of them, without fail, instantly reply that it's another form of heat loss, per the 2nd law. Yet they're all wrong! The total energy of such systems is instead a function of the time rate of change differential between mechanical and material response rates. Such losses are non-thermodynamic losses - calorimetry would not be able to detect the missing energy, because it isn't there any more.
These systems are thermodynamically asymmetric, fully reversible, and non-Newtonian.
Oh, and BTW, something interesting for JC - i've been toying with using scissorjacks to convert radial force directly to torque, by attaching one scissor handle to the axle. This produces an angular force on the axle as the jack beams fold out from near-horizontal to near-vertical. However the point here is that each scissorjack can only impart less than 90° of torque this way. Hence 4 wouldn't complete a cycle...
You'd need 5!
Furthermore, more than 5 actually reduces efficiency; 6 would still work, but you wouldn't be getting the full benefit of each jack... 5 is the optimum number of mechanisms!
But only for this type of direct-drive mechanism, via the jacks. There seems to be no underlying physical reason why a radial excursion can't be converted to any angular distance of torque, although 180° would seem ideal for actuators extending and retracting once each per cycle.
I have to say i really am quite excited by my current lines of enquiry. Yeah i'm probably in the throes of another manical delusion, but it's bloody engrossing, innit? ;)
PS: incidently i took Zoelra's advice and started a thread on the, uh, 'proper' forum:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.besslerwheel.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=113192#113192
although i'll prolly keep bombing here anyway.. i'm just ON ONE atm.. merking it. :)
No reason to stop posting here. There are many members that frequent both sites. You can use BW when you need to post attachments and link to those posts here. If you have a point you want to make, a wider audience is always better.
Deletepls see my link posted on besslerwheel.com: http://www.wimp.com/robotbackflip/
ReplyDeleteA good example of the kiiking effect. I love how the robot stuck the landing.
DeleteWhen I read John's story about his encounter with this teacher it just came to me again how much we value we tend to add to scientific theories et cetera, like these theories are infallible or cast in stone. I do not want to take anything away from the scientists who did millions of experiments in the fields of physics, entropy and the like but there is still one big truth that remains for me. We can claim to know a lot about the universe today, maybe we know 75%, maybe 81%, but whatever figure we can come up with, it would be preposterous to claim we know all there is to know as far as general physics is concerned.
ReplyDeleteI ran into someone on Youtube recently who also claimed that Bessler was a fraud. Once again, the weight of the evidence against that statement, all the witnesses involved, that is just irrelevant for him/her. Men and women are fallible, we can create all sorts of laws governing the universe and the world around us and it may be true for 99% of the time but one thing we have to realize, Mother Nature will not automatically play by our rules just because we decide an object must always act in one certain way and never do something else.
There is an excellent account on the internet written by Bruce Welsh about a toy his uncle created for his sons, a machine displaying overunity. Over unity, maybe by one percent, maybe two percent. But still, over unity ! I like the way he states it at the end of his article, "If something doesn't obey a law, I don't get bent out of shape, I just think, well so it doesn't fit into the conventional theory."
When I run into people like this teacher I always remind them of people like Lord Kelvin who claimed that heavier-than-air flight would be impossible or that statement made by a patent office that everything worth inventing has been invented and that they would not accept any new submissions. How wrong they were !