The simple answer is yes, but why? First of all it has investment potential and therefore it could be profitable. Today there are thousands of investment companies looking to invest in new technology, but imagine that, 300 years ago, in Bessler's time, a group of investors had sought something to put their money into, they would have been advised to put it in coal because the steam age was fast approaching; but that would only have happened after the arrival of Thomas Newcomen and his coal-burning water-pumping engine, and later, James Watt with the first steam engine that produced continuous rotary motion, which led to the railways and steam ships. They would also have attracted investors first..
150 years later, they would have been looking at oil as an investment, thanks to the efforts of James Young, who invented a process to distil kerosene from petroleum and also produced a heavier oil for lubrication.In 1848 Young set up a small business refining the crude oil. This led, through a tortuous path and a number of experiments, to the invention of the internal combustion engine which burned a derivative of Young's crude oil refinement - gasoline. Where would today's cars, ships and planes be without gas?
During the 19th and 20th centuries it was and is still oil, but electricity was a burgeoning industry and the means to produce it has become so diverse that the multiple investments have spread across a number of differing methods. Solar panels, photovoltaic cells, wind farms, tidal and wave generators, geothermal units, hydroelectricity, and of course the fossil fuel as in coal and oil. In addition the U.S. Department of Energy evaluated the Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Program on May 13–17, 2013, in Arlington, Virginia. Unfortunately, Hydrogen-powered vehicles are not as green as they are portrayed and although they might be an alternative to gas-powered vehicles, one problem with this is that the hydrogen is typically produced from a fossil fuel—natural gas—in a process that releases a lot of carbon dioxide. Obviously there are more technologies than I can cover in a brief blog, but the picture is clear, there are many competing technologies but they all have one or more negative aspects which have so far precluded complete global investment. Any other problems? Here's three.
Pollution, the peak of available oil production has passed, and global warming is affecting the climate.
The search is on, like never before, to find the ultimate solution to the three problems identified above. Clean energy to combat pollution, and yet which is capable of replacing most of the oil-based (and coal etc.) electricity generators. What ever reason you subscribe to, carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect - or the changing output from the sun - the climate is changing and even though driving a smaller car won't make the slightest difference to the global output of carbon dioxide, reducing pollution anyway has to be a good idea.
Bessler's wheel has no negatives - except for one, and it's a biggy! It's believed to be impossible - against the established laws of physics etc. But I intend to challenge this view with my working model and call to account all those so-called experts who taught us so well, that we all believed them. One of the curious things I intend to comment on in a later blog, is the number of questions I and others asked to which no one ever gave a sensible answer, they just repeated parrot-fashion the old cliches. I don't want to present any of the questions without the reasoning that lies behind each, so I'll leave that aside for now.
So given the industries I mentioned briefly above and how they started so small, each as an idea in one man's mind, and yet were able to colonise the globe with the ramifications which followed their development, what path would Bessler's wheel take?
I can't list all the possible future developments ahead but the first thing to do would be to attach it to electricity generator. Now some say it wouldn't be powerful enough. I don't know why they say that. Bessler said they could be much bigger and obviously if several wheel were placed in series on one axle the power might be sufficient for a whole street let alone an individual house.
Miniature device could be developed so small they could might power tablet computers for instance; or they may become large enough to power cars, ships and trains.
My point is, as it always has been, we must produce the evidence in the form of one working wheel ....and give it away and the entrepreneurs will run with it. Who knows what uses they will find for it, but I know for sure that when it does appear the world will go crazy for it.
JC
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Even upon success, there will be initial cynicism as to whether it can really deliver the panacea we're all hoping for - with inevitable questioning of its power density and scalability etc.
ReplyDeleteFor this reason it will be a priority to build an EM demonstration ASAP - a tiny unit powering its own coils could have phenomenal performance. The gravity-only version will be an iconic breakthrough, but substituting magnetism for gravity will make it many orders of magnitude more powerful, and useful, as an embedded power supply..
Good point vibe.
ReplyDeleteJC
If you think about it, all wheel designs require some type of anchoring to the earth. A stand not only supports the weight, but it also keeps the wheel from sliding or tipping over (along the plane of rotation) due to overbalance. Will any design work without this connection? I doubt it. I believe any successful design will not be true PM. The earth and wheel will share their overall energy, and only by shifting energy from the earth to the wheel will a wheel turn continuously (conserving energy). The effect on the Earth from a single running wheel would be negligible and unnoticeable, probably why Bessler believed his wheel to be PM.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right that energy will be conserved in the bigger picture, but to extract KE from say Earth's rotation seems a long shot - if it was via a coriolis -type effect it'd be very weak, since the weights would need to move quite a long distance in a straight line to see much deflection.. Of course, if this was the exploit, it'd get weaker towards the equator, and flip direction the other side of it, presumably, which would be the telltale behaviour..
DeleteAs i see it, the device will work either by modulating the effective weight of a mass - ie. dropping a mass when it's heavy, and retrieving it when it's lighter, or else by dropping a mass in an unconventional way, such as 'dropping' a tensioned chord prior to dropping the weight proper, ie. dropping the effective weight twice for each subsequent lift, or perhaps somehow effecting an extended or constant fall by some other means..
Any type of scheme where the wheel rotates because gravity is performing more work on the drop, and/or less work on the re-lift, will be extracting free work from the fields manifesting the forces -specifically the virtual particle interactions that ARE the force.
In either case though - whether the energy comes from that of the planet or the quantum fields - one can't help but wonder what the wider ecological consequences may be, or just how much usage might be sustainable - obviously if it does turn out we're tapping Earth's spin or orbital velocity then it's not-at-all-sustainable, and should be under global moratorium. But the picture mightn't be much prettier - and possibly, unimaginably worse - if, say the local value of mass were to drift slightly from the global value...
The best case scenario is thus that the energy comes from a global source, such that no local constants are depleted relative to the wider environment. One example - and this is speculating right out there on the fringe, totally unsupported by ANY evidence - might be time; if we suppose that there's an innate energy exchange driving the passage of time, then any global depletion would have no discernable effect, even though the value of a second would be diminishing..
The all-but infinite vacuum energy or ZPE as derived from QED is widely considered one of the biggest currently uncorrected mistakes in fundamental physics. But even if the best estimates were correct, this wouldn't negate the possibility of locally drifting constants which might themselves be a function of the local ZPE density.
Whichever way you look at it, once we accept that energy is ultimately conserved, it seems almost inevitable that our budding 'free energy' panacea may very likely go the same way as all its predecessors. We'd be amazingly fortunate if its unfettered and frankly uncontrollable worldwide uptake didn't perturb something sensitive and precipitate the mother of all fallouts..!
Of course, one big difference between Bessler's wheels and all other motors is that in his designs, the stand isn't a stator. Virtually all other forms of motor push or pull their rotors from a stator, ie. ultimately, they're pushing against the earth. There might be one or two exceptions (Crooke's radiometer? Dunno, would have to think about it..) but as a general rule, this is something that definitely distinguishes Bessler's technology from most others (as if breaking symmetry wasn't enough!)..
One thought experiment you could do is to imagine we place a working Bessler wheel on a spaceship in zero or micro gravity, and then keep accelerating at a constant 1G, simulating gravity. Would the energy generated by the wheel subtract from the craft's acceleration rate, or increase it, or have no measurable (ie mechanical) effect?
Excellent thought experiment Vibe, I like it! I think, in theory, the more artificial gravity you produced, the harder or faster the wheel would turn, so in effect the work done by increasing gravity would pay for the faster wheel, so perhaps the wheel would subtract from the craft's acceleration. Fascinating!
ReplyDeleteJC
IMO, Very good thinking. I believe you might be correct. If so, space itself is conserved. This would indicate that gravity is either "accelerating space" or more likely unbalanced ZPE. Both creating the effect equal to constant acceleration and would act mathematically in the same manner as relativity, with time-dilation and so forth. This is a very smart way to start (or end) a train of thoughts related to philosophy or theories trying to pin down the fundamental mechanism of gravity and energy. (Assuming Bessler was not a liar). Keep it up.
ReplyDeleteIf replacing gravity with inertial force were taken to its logical conclusion - that force is force, and a mass can be counterbalanced, say (assuming that was the exploit), against ANY force; gravitational, inertial, or otherwise: then it is the mechanism that is asymmetric, rather than anything specific to the particular force being leveraged, and we might thus consider the case of a supercharged Bessler centrifuge - such a configuration would rapidly accelerate to failure, unless under sufficient load..
ReplyDeleteAn electromagnetic Bessler wheel powering its own coils would fulfill the same dynamic, but using a force billions of times stronger. Its energy and power densities would be limited only by the materials and engineering limits, at least as far as mechanical applications go - quasi-solid state applications (which must, provisionally at least, be presumed equally viable) free of dissipative losses could have truly epic energy/power densities..
As for the rocket thought-experiment, i agree that we should expect the work being applied by our engines/propellant to be divided equally between accelerating the net mass of the ship and contents, and the 'excess impetus' of the wheel, which would present as an additional load on the system. Hence our acceleration rate drops in proportion to the work our engines have done upon the wheel.
But when we try to apply this conclusion back to the gravitational analog, we immediately come up against the limits of this equivalence - the ground isn't literally rushing upwards at 9.8 m/s, is it? Gravity isn't an inertial reaction to a uniform expansion of mass at all locations, but rather an inertial reaction to a curvature of spacetime. Mass and time are the degree to which matter is decelerated from lightspeed, and gravity concentrates mass into 'wells' in which the density and thus time dilation factor are focused towards the center.
Hence my tentative conclusions that an additional load upon this acceleration will deplete either mass or time values, or both.
However, even if we switch from gravitational/inertial modes to EM, we simply shift the applicability from SR to GR, and energy is ultimately conserved in a perfectly analogous way - magnetic force is equivalent to inertial forces in that SR describes EM force as an effect between charges in relative motion - if the trajectories of two charges are parallel there is no EM interaction between them; any deviation however renders a force magnitude appropriate to the acceleration. This relationship is scale-invariant - inter-atomic / molecular forces are EM orbital and 'spin' interactions.
Any variation in these values such as 'spin' would affect the value of the reduced Planck constant h-bar and thus the value of the EM force - the 'fine structure' constant, alpha. The effects of this would be analogous to variations in the value of mass or time - in either case, the local value of a second, gram or meter would drift, albeit in a locally immeasurable way, from its equilibrium value.
This is assuming strict conservation - that there's only so much energy available, and thus that something's gotta give. This principle is encapsulated in the popular notion (generally accepted as fact) that the sum total of thermodynamic energy (defined as all possible displacements under all four fundamental forces) is a constant value that the universe was born with, and which is depleting towards an eventual 'heat death' when all said work is complete.. ie. the classical 'laws of thermodynamics'.
Yet even this definition is shown to be inadequate when we consider the activity of the vacuum - this latent energy will be unperturbed by the exhaustion of the classical "thermodynamic" energy, and if we could visit the restaurant at the end of the universe we'd find that the twin-plate Casimir effect still worked fine, long after everything else had dissipated away.
DeleteIf we can thermodynamically interact with the vacuum energy then shouldn't we be including it in the net universal sum?
And so there's another way to reformulate conservation at cosmological scales, and it's a slight modification - what if it's the total throughput of energy that is constant, rather than a one-time fixed quotient? In other words, what if all the forces are being powered all of the time, and that the universe, this whole balanced edifice of matter and forces, is an active, not passive, system? In other words, contrary to the wearily-dismissive answer on so many physics forums, what if a stationary fridge magnet IS performing a whole load of work, in resisting the pull of gravity - and further that gravity too is performing a whole world of work back upon the fridge magnet and fridge, kitchen and everything else... not in terms of mechanical displacement (ie. classical, mechanical energy) but rather in terms of the energy exchanges powering the forces themselves - what if all of the fundamental forces are being 'powered' all of the time, everywhere?
Such a scenario would offer us one of two further, final conclusions: either the energy supply powering these forces is self-regulating - rising to match the load, as if time itself had an unstoppable inertia. In this outcome, breaking classical symmetry is as safe as can possibly be hoped for - provided we can deal with any subsequent heat dissipation issue, there'll be no ultimate resource depletion.
The other possibility however is that despite being powered, there's still only so much energy to go round and thus the equilibrium constants we currently observe are in a state of 'homeostasis' - a transiently-stable state based on the current flux of constituent equilibria, but thus subject to co-variance accordingly. In this outcome, if we use our fridge magnet to perform asymmetric interactions, there may be less work done by virtual photons or gravitons/Higgs flux etc. or both; they may change equally in step or unequally, but whichever the case, it'll be because we're tapping a finite resource.
In summary, Tesla's popular remark about attaching our machinery to the wheelworks of nature cheerfully disregards any notion of ultimate conservation, basically making a number of tacit assumptions that challenge the very limits of causality itself.
All this ruminating of course doesn't get us any closer to answering these most vexing questions, not least those of Bessler's mechanism, but as a Sunday afternoon meditation on our ultimate priorities it's an issue or set of issues usually under the radar, yet which go to the heart of our quest... something to think about between mad lever schemes and daydreams of glory, perhaps..
Once the problem of getting energy from gravity is solved people will look more closely at how to get energy from the magnetic wind that blows out of one pole of a magnet and back into the other.
ReplyDeleteThe reason that a magnetic field is the same as the flow field of a source and sink at the bottom of a very deep ocean is because that is precisely what it is. Unfortunately the cognitive dissonance that such a claim generates to great for established science. Maybe when RAR is shown to work people will have a rethink.
Steorn tackled this problem but didn't get anywhere.