Happy New Year and my Resolution.

I have a very good feeling about this year - I am certain that the solution will be revealed!  That's my new year's resolution to achieve!

I'm working on a slightly smaller model at present because my previous one used levers which were too large and I was unable to build in the fine detail required by the mechanism, which resulted in it being too stiff and ungainly to move easily under gravity.  My current model measures only 3 feet wide, two inches thick, and will weigh about 5 pounds, although that may increase if I need heavier weights.  The levers are thin and light and work much more smoothly

I'm not the best engineer and builder and I'm finding the task quite demanding and I am considering alternative options should my limited expertise be insufficient for the job.  I could call upon someone who is an accomplished engineer and a willing collaborator but unfortunately he lives far away, and I'd prefer to find someone in the England if possible, so that we can work together more easily - some of our discussions may involve adjusting certain details to conform to what I believe is the solution, and this would be difficult to achieve if we were too far apart physically; or I might seek out an accomplished animator so that I could produce a video explaining in detail why the design is as it is and how it works; or perhaps I could share what I have with someone who would be prepared to sign an NDA, and could then take on the task for me.  These are merely options due for consideration if I can't complete this task

But my priority is to try to finish it myself, even if it is not very attractive nor efficient, as long as it does just enough to prove the principle, I shall be content.

So back to the workshop!  I work slowly and intermittently and this means it may be a while before I get to make a decision on my next step, but that is how things stand at the moment.

JC

Merry Christmas and a Happy and Successful New Year!

This may be my last post until after the New Year so I would like to take this opportunity to wish every one a very Happy Christmas and a very prosperous New Year.  I know I say this every year but .... will next year, 2015, be the one in which Bessler's secret is at last discovered?

In 2012 I placed a countdown clock here in the hope it would spur people on to find the solution to Bessler's wheel in time to celebrate the 300th anniversary from its first public exhibition.  We missed it but it doesn't matter if we do it next year instead. 2015 would be a good year to celebrate.  1715 saw the introduction to the world of the Merseburg wheel, the first which could spin of its own accord in either direction thus refuting  the accusation that it was driven by clockwork.   Perhaps a successful wheel in 2015 that would be a fitting 300 year anniversary present?

I am trying to finish my current model before Christmas but things are a bit hectic so it may have to wait 'til next year before I find out if I'm any closer to the finishing line. I'm going to Florida for Christmas and hopefully the weather will be much better than here - how can it not be?! It is so relaxing not to have to run around getting ready for Christmas here, we can just chill out in Florida and enjoy the warmth!  We'll be swimming in the heated pool on Christmas day or possibly sitting in the spa with a glass of something.  

I dreamed the other night that there was a headline in a British newspaper which proclaimed, "70 year old retired British engineer discovers the secret of Perpetual Motion."  What a disappointment when I woke up and realised it was just a dream! I'll be 70 next year and I think it's high time I succeeded. I guess we all have those kind of dreams from time to time and I think they spur us on to try and make it come true.  

So will we succeed in 2015?  Any one of us could be the one and I believe we all want it to happen soon or we'll be too old to enjoy it!

There's  a book I came across the other day entitled "Wrong: Why experts keep failing us" by  David H. Freedman.  His 'experts' are, scientists, finance wizards, doctors, relationship gurus, celebrity CEOs, ... consultants, health officials and more.  Briefly he describes how, for instance a medical journal might publish the results of a study which indicate a particular finding, which is seized upon by the media and hailed as a triumph of scientific research.  Often only months later other results are published which call into question the original claims.  For reasons unclear these latter publications are ignored or treated as irrelevant and the public advised to dismiss such evidence as unreliable.

These studies were presumably carried out in a rigorous manner and designed to obtain data which  would allow careful analysis and result in the replacement of the conjecture and careless assumptions which had preceded it.  So just because some inconvenient truths emerged there was no need to ditch them in favour of the first one.

This reminds me of the assumptions made by our old friend Hermann von Helmholtz that "the perpetual motion has been demonstrated by experiment to be impossible".  How do you prove an impossibility?

Good luck in 2015!  Remember "Science is a commitment to a belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman.

JC

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"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

There are often comments, both here and on the besslerwheel forum which strive to cast doubt on various pieces of evidence in an attempt to explain away Bessler's achievement.

For instance sometimes it is an accusation that Karl the Landgrave, was somehow implicated in a plot to lend credit to Bessler's claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine, when all the time, it is said, he knew such devices were impossible.  I have presented all the evidence in my book, "Perpetual Motion; An Ancient Mystery Solved?", and I have no wish nor room to present it again here, suffice to say, read my book and you will see that Karl had no desire or intention to be involved in such a plot, he was an honourable man and recognised as such and he had too much to lose if he was found to have been taken in by a fraudster.

Another accusation suggests that either the witnesses to the wheel tests were a bunch of gullible fools, or else were participants in the same scam described above.  Again, a read of my book will give details of all the most important and influential observers  present at the examinations and it becomes obvious that they were astute and competent witnesses perfectly capable of making up their own minds about the validity of the tests.  Many of them were determined to prove that Bessler was a fraud but ended up supporting his claim.

One suggestion is that Bessler fooled everyone over a period of more than ten years and none of the witnesses, including Karl, realised that they had been duped and that the whole thing was a fake.  The thing people should ask is, how was that achieved?  How did the wheel keep turning for 54 days and nights in a locked and guarded room, without any means found through which someone (who?) might turn the wheel from an adjoining room (they had all been searched prior to the long test) and leave no trace of their presence?

How did Bessler manage to hide any connection to another room, when he showed the wheel on two separate sets of open bearings mounted on separate pillars, changing positions as often as the examiners requested?   There is much more but despite all the evidence in support of Bessler, I sense a certain desperation in these suggestions of fraud, based on no evidence whatsoever, other than that which we have been taught - that it is impossible.

Because people believe, without a trace of doubt, that a gravity-driven wheel is impossible, they search for another explanation - but there isn't one.  Bessler said that the weights formed the perpetual motion itself and there was no connection to any other source of energy other than that inherent in the weights themselves - their weight.  Even those who believe in Bessler still seek alternative energy sources because they simply cannot accept that gravity alone can be that source.  In his book, Das Triumphirende Bessler spoke clearly about the source of the energy his wheel used and he gave his patron Karl, a copy of the book, and clearly he must have known that the Landgrave might read it and question anything which he found deceitful, fraudulent or inaccurate.  

 "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."   The truth is that gravity will prove to be the energy source and the sooner people realise that and accept it, the sooner the solution will be revealed.

JC

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Intuition and Instinct versus Education and Peer Pressure.

I've been researching and building Bessler's wheel for so long, I no longer consider how extraordinary is the thing I will achieve if and when it works, or anyone else who hopes to be successful, instead of me!  For an extraordinary thing it will be, make no mistake - inventing a machine which requires naught but gravity to feed it!

I understand why the prevailing consensus of opinion rules strongly against such a concept and yet man's instinct is that this   will   work!  It is that same intuition that informed us that a heavier than air machine could fly, when experts predicted it wouldn't.  "Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." -- William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, British scientist, 1899. Probably the largest source of wrong predictions today, concern global warming, but I'm not even going there!  On the subject of erroneous scientific predictions, I think that the presumption that gravity-driven machines are impossible will become one of the most famous.

Scientific misconceptions are usually accepted beliefs that were founded on inaccurate arguments that sometimes have little basis in actual scientific fact. Scientific misconceptions can also refer to preconceived notions based on religious or cultural influences. Many scientific misconceptions occur because of faulty teaching styles and the sometimes perplexing nature of true scientific texts. Some topics, like evolution are hamstrung with so much moral interpretation that the truth is rarely revealed and the majority of common knowledge regarding the topic is erroneous.

What is so curious about the Johann Bessler case is that he went to great lengths to prove his claims, improving his wheels, inventing and reinventing new tests to prove that he was not a liar.  All who attended the tests believed him, how could they not?  The evidence was so irrefutable; the tests so conclusive; what else could he have done - other than show the internal workings? But science ignored Bessler's claims and even ignored the word of a man of proven integrity who knew the secret too, confirmed the inventor's claims and supported him.

The key to understanding why it was thought impossible in Bessler's time, lies in the difference between what we mean now by perpetual motion and what they meant 300 years ago.  Because the word gravity, as I have said many many times, simply means heaviness, it was not recognised as a force but rather as an intrinsic feature of all things on earth.  Heaviness did not convey the feeling that one could tap into it as Bessler claimed.  Since it was not separable from the thing having heaviness, how could it be used separately? 

Sir Isaac Newton said that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.  Note that word "force"; in physics a force is any interaction which tends to change the motion of an object.  According to Voltaire, at the time of Newton's death in 1726, even "after 40 years since its publication, his ' Principia' had not 20 readers outside of England", so it is little wonder that any suggestion that gravity might provide the necessary impetus to rotate Bessler's wheel was misunderstood or not believed, and yet Newton himself drew a design for a gravity-driven wheel, so he must have considered the possibility.

So in Bessler's day, perpetual motion meant something which would run continuously without any additional force being added - a closed system.  No wonder the scientists of the day dismissed it; a closed system that needed no energy input and yet kept running and doing work! Perpetual motion as a closed system is pointless, even if it were possible. Today I think of Bessler's wheel, not as a a perpetual motion device, but as something which will run continuously as long as it is fed energy, energy such as the force of gravity, or the energy we obtain from burning fossil fuels in cars, planes and ships.  There is no difference and yet we don't deny those latter devices will run continuously as long as they have fuel to burn and don't break down, but they are not what we understand as perpetual motion machines.  There is of course the small but important detail, can gravity be tapped in the same way that gas can?  Science says no - Bessler says yes!

JC

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