Science/Medicine : Perpetual Motion Machines

Some time ago some friends of mine and I assembled in a shipping area behind the shops of a marine equipment manufacturer in Costa Mesa. We were there at the request of an attorney who represented not only that manufacturer, but also a number of his friends, all considering investing in an Energy Augmenter.

The attorney, more skeptical than the potential investors, had persuaded her clients to proceed with caution. The Energy Augmenter, offered by an inventor from Central California, seemed too good to be true. An automobile battery putting out a few amperes, an inverter to produce alternating current and the inventor’s device, sealed inside the proverbial black box, were reported as capable of running a 100 horsepower motor--indefinitely! The implication: more energy coming out than going in.

The inventor soundly denied that he was offering a “perpetual motion machine,” but to the attorney, it had that look about it. So, she made a deal with the inventor. He would have to permit his device to be examined by experts before her clients would actually turn over their money--and the amount of money being discussed had six figures to it.

The attorney contacted the Southern California Skeptics, a recently organized society of scientists, engineers, magicians, educators, and others to help shine the light of rationality on the claims of pseudoscientists, paranormalists, and their cohorts. We responded enthusiastically, not only for the intellectual challenge of debunking an impossible device, but also because few of us had ever seen an actual perpetual motion machine, only read about them; and if the inventor’s claims were true, that’s what this machine was, regardless of the title he wished to give it.

Any energy producer with an efficiency greater than 100% is a perpetual motion machine, since you could plug the output back into the input and the machine would run itself, making energy to spare. Alas, we were not to see one that day either.

Perpetual motion machines attained a special category in the U.S. Patent Office about the turn of the century. Officials there felt not only that their time was being wasted, but wasted also were the application fees of the inventors.

So they made a ruling: Before a patent application for a perpetual motion machine could be considered, a working model of the machine itself would have to be presented.

The rationale for this policy is the importance and stolidity of the first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but only changed in form--as chemical energy is changed to heat by burning a log, or as the energy of light is turned to chemical energy by the photosynthesis of a green leaf.

A conservation law like this is important because it says that energy--a fundamental quantity of physics--coming out of any process is exactly the same as the energy going in. The physicist doesn’t have to analyze all the little details inside the process. (There are two other--and more subtle--laws of thermodynamics.)

Science can never prove the truth of any physical law, including this one. The best it can do is devise more and more stringent tests to determine the point at which the law breaks down, and then revise it to take account of the new data, as Einstein did with Newton’s law of gravity.

Over the last century the first law of thermodynamics has been subject to countless such tests. It has never failed. Perhaps some day it will, and what an exciting day that will be! So the Patent Office could never say, “Absolutely no,” to an application for a perpetual motion machine. But they are certainly justified in saying, “First, show me.”

This ruling had the anticipated effect of cutting back on applications for such patents. But it has now had another effect: No inventor of a perpetual motion machine will give it that name.

Indeed, the devices continue to be invented. But in modern times the inventors, who often describe themselves as self-educated, typically claim that they have found a “new source of energy, hitherto unappreciated by traditional science.” This source is usually “rejected by the scientific establishment, still in the rut of old-fashioned physical laws.”

I think I can speak for a number of my colleagues when I say that I would love to see such a device actually work, and witness the disproof of such a basic scientific concept, since such disproofs are the big steps of scientific advance. Its inventor would undoubtedly get a Nobel Prize out of it, as well as a great deal of money.

No doubt a number of such inventors are driven by the former ambition, but unfortunately many seem driven by the latter. Some are undoubtedly sincere but naive. Others are outright frauds.

I have no basis for firmly placing our Central California inventor of the machine we did not see in either of these two categories, but I have my suspicions. He was present in the shipping area, in a pickup truck with a few cardboard boxes in the back, one of which we understood contained his device.

An old 60 horsepower AC engine was sitting on the floor of the shop waiting to play its role in the demonstration. But when the inventor was told that the experts included three physicists, two engineers and two patent attorneys skilled in electronics, he declined to set up the show. One of the leading members of the candidate investor group discussed the problem with him at some length.

He reported back to us that the inventor claimed there were too many people there. Someone would steal his ideas. When asked how many people would be his limit, one? two? he simply backed off altogether. Claiming he had other investors waiting at that very moment to hand him a check, he drove away.

That result was enough to convince the investors to keep their money in their pockets--at least most of it. A small fraction was spent taking us to lunch. They thanked us profusely, and sent us checks as consulting fees. We hadn’t asked for that, but it was some recompense for our frustration at not seeing the device in action.

We learned of other results a few weeks later. It turns out that there weren’t any other investors ready to hand him a check, and it now appears that the inventor had decided to keep the secret to himself, and not share his future fortune with outsiders. Others, however, are not so shy.

A few months ago an inventor of what appeared to be a perpetual motion machine was hauled into court on a charge of fraud. Not only did the jury exonerate him, most of them believed him, and when the trial was over a number were anxious to invest in his enterprise. Another inventor in the Southeast won a court case against the Patent Office.

Government officials were ordered to set aside their skepticism and act on his patent application without ever seeing a working model.

I have the impression that we are in a renaissance of perpetual motion machines, so perhaps we will have another chance to see one.

But for now, we seem stuck with the three fundamental rules of nature: You can’t win, you can’t even break even, and you can’t get out of the game.