Hi,
today I want to investigate one particular perpetuum mobile machine. First when I wanted to write this post I wanted to let it open ended since I did not know the solution for why it does not work but I have found it so here you go:
Physics is basically based on the fact that energy and mass are conserved. If you were able to put enough strong evidence against it, modern physics would basically collapse, this is the foundation.
Now perpetuum mobile is a machine that is trying to break this law, but not very succesfully since none was ever built. Perpetuum mobile is a machine that gives out more energy than it needs for running.
Performance is larger than power and effciency is larger than 100%. This is not possible though you can check your basic physics skills by debunking these machines.
One of the most common “perpetuum mobiles“. As it turns it is supposed to create torgue and rotate forever.
It has been while since I saw what is called “Brownian ratchet” and I was simply stucked. It is kind of different from other “perpetuum mobiles” since it uses what is called brownian motion to work.
In the box 1 you have small paddle wheel. Particles bump into it because of brownian motion, that is a motion of small particles that goes indifinetely (this is type of thermal fluctuation).
This paddle wheel can only turn in one direction because in the other box you have ratchet as you can see above. The paddle wheel turns one way lifting up something or simply doing work. Where is the problem?
I remember asking my teacher about this. She said that it would really be perpetuum mobile. I knew she is not a good one. Now I did not know but I was sure that there is some flaw in this and I found that there is but I did not find explanation.
Today I found wiki page about this “Brownian ratchet” and they basically say that if the pawl is the same temperature as the paddle it will also undergo the same brownian motion sometimes jumping up and down. The thing is that we can not forget that the thing is also extremely small. If it would be different temperature it would work but based on thermal difference which over time disappears.
Dragallur
Science and rationality 
I gather a lot of the ‘reactionless drives’ invented over the years have ‘worked’ because they actually absorb the reaction via friction, e.g. a mechanical device sitting on a tabletop appears to move along, but that’s actually because the counter-force is transferred to the tabletop via the coefficient of friction the device has with the surface it’s resting on, which is totally Newton’s laws all over and not some magical property of the device.
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Hmm cool. I like how they basically repeat the same idea over and over again 😀
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