After more than 300 years of trying and failing, one might be forgiven for thinking that we who believe in Bessler must be mistaken. But for myself I have doubt whatsoever that he did what he said he did and that is that he built a wheel which rotated continuously powered by the force of gravity.
I'm not alone; there are hundreds of people around the world who believe the legend and many of whom continue to experiment with different mechanical configurations each designed to induce a continuous overbalancing which will cause the wheel to rotate for as long as it remains within the field/force of gravity.
Consider if this was a court of law. There is an abundance of circumstantial evidence supporting the contention that Bessler told the truth - that his wheel was genuine. In addition we have the evidence of an eyewitness to the internal workings of the wheel, who verified Bessler's claims; a witness of unimpeachable reputation moreover. Not a single shred of evidence that he was a fake, other than the lies of a servant who had already served two prison sentences for telling lies about a previous employer and was about to be dismissed from her current employment. A jury would, at the very least, come to the conclusion that the charge was unproven and he would have been released without further charge.
If you seek an explanation for the continued assertion that his wheel was impossible, then you need look no further than the work of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894). Having graduated as a Doctor of Medicine, this 26 year old youth with no training or experience in either physics or, for that matter, little in medicine either, conjured up his famous conjecture which has formed the corner stone of scientific belief with regard to the Law of Conservation of energy ever since. As is common today his paper was reviewed by his peers - and rejected for being too speculative! Disregarding this setback, Helmholtz turned instead to a fringe meeting of the Berlin Physical Society where he delivered his paper as a speech in 1847.
His fundamental explanation for the impossibility of perpetual motion machines went something like this; 'no-one has ever built a perpetual motion machine, therefore there must be a law of conservation of energy that forbids such machines. If an inventor comes along claiming to have constructed such a machine, he must be mistaken and can safely be ignored because the law of conservation of energy shows them to be impossible!' But if such a machine were to materialise it would invalidate his argument.
Helmholtz's circular reasoning defies logic and should have been dismissed as nothing but hot air 300 years ago and yet we are still hidebound by a tradition of fear of peer pressure where the peer group encourages those who might disagree to change their views to become members of the group, and nothing has changed .
Such a paper would not even be accepted for review in today's competitive world and yet here we are striving to prove Bessler's wheel did work and we are stymied by the existence of a nonsensical argument made by a young man barely out of medical school three hundred years ago. (Thanks to Scott Ellis of besslerwheel forum for above information)
I think that Helmholtz's paper on PM was initially disregarded as the work of an enthusiastic amateur with little experience in the world of science, however this view was probably rectified by his subsequent work in medicine. Here is a quote from a paper by Gerald Westheimer of the Division of Neurobiology at University of California:- 'No single person, before or since, contributed more to the knowledge of the human sensory apparatus than Hermann Helmholtz, and throughout his career he kept concerning himself with questions of the origin of our visual experiences. He first broached the subject in an 1854 lecture, as a 34-year-old beginning professor of physiology in Konigsberg, and returned to it in a variety of settings till almost the last essay he wroteduring the year of his death in 1894.'
This blind acceptance of everything an accredited scientists pontificates upon is a common occurrence today. Often, despite his claim to fame having been given a rapturous reception the frequent subsequent discovery that some of his work was wrong, inaccurate or an example of self-aggrandizement happens often enough to make us cautious about such claims. This is often regarded as a necessary step in the evolution of scientific discovery, when corrections are continually applied to our knowledge of the world. In this case the corrections is taking far longer than usual.
Just because we have not succeeded yet does not preclude the possibility that one or more of us will do so soon. More progress has been achieved in the last five years than in the previous 300 and I am confident that the breakthrough is just around the corner.
JC
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