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Story: Steorn's free energy seems curiously expensive

Posted by: ralphclark (Saturday 2 June 2007, 1:37 AM)

No, no, no

"the first law of energy conservation that states that energy can not be created or destroyed only converted, but if this is true then science is also admitting that energy is infinitely recyclable, everything we observe in nature is expressed in cycles, where energy is constantly changing forms or is this incorrect."

Even highschool physics covers this. Energy can be endlessly converted from one form to another, but in a closed system such conversions only happen in the direction of increasing entropy. Ultimately all energy ends up as heat, which has the highest entropy. Once the energy in some isolated system has degraded to heat, you can only extract work out of it by exploiting the temperature difference between it and some other region outside of the closed system, and this results in a net increase in entropy in the external region.

"Another troubling dilemma is our explanation depicting atomic structure, where we say that electrons orbit around the nucleus composed of protons and neutrons in a fixed and permanent path, is this not a form of perpetual motion..."

Actually its been known since the discovery of quantum mechanics at the start of the 20th century that electrons aren't discrete particles whizzing around in fixed orbits as you understand the term. Instead the orbitals are rather fuzzy regions within which the electron could be anywhere at any particular time. It doesn't "move" within this region as such, it merely resolves to a particular location if and when it undergoes an interaction with something else. (This is of course a gross oversimplification).

However for the purposes of discussion we can still imagine these electrons as particles orbiting the nucleus with a fixed angular momentum. Why don't the orbits decay or explode? Because quantum physics only allows these electrons to possess a limited number of quite widely spaced energy values. They can only lose or gain energy by discrete amounts. They will normally occupy the lowest energy level available according to the quantum rules and thus the orbit simply can't decay any lower. If they absorb a photon they will rise to some higher allowed energy level (= a higher "orbit") but they will normally re-emit that energy as another photon later, and fall back to the lower energy level. This is the phenomenon known as fluourescence and it's how your kitchen light works.

"...and what about our proven knowledge of planetary orbits, wouldn’t this also be a form of perpetual motion."

The orbit of a planet is subject to the usual Newtonian physics. It continues to go round and round in response to two things:

(1) its existing angular momentum
(2) the acceleration exerted upon it by the Sun's gravitational field.

As long as these two things don't go away (and they don't tend to) it should keep on going round. There is nothing magical about it; it is subject to the usual conservation laws and laws of thermodynamics. The motion is only perpetual as long as there are no energy losses. Such losses could occur in two ways that I can think of - friction with the interplanetary medium (dust, asteroid collision, that sort of thing), or somebody extracting WORK from the planet's angular momentum, such as using a gravitational slingshot to accelerate their space probes. i.e. if we used Jupiter to accelerate spacecraft out of the system enough times, it would eventually spiral into the sun :^)

"In what concerns magnets, if you place two magnets of opposing polarity at a distance sufficient to engage their field attractions you would have to exert a constant force in order to keep them from coming together"

OK...though a simple blob of glue could provide that force, it doesn't have to involve any WORK (work=energy, BTW).

"it is then obvious that the magnets are involved in consistently recycling energy that feeds of the two attracting magnetic poles and will continue this process until they are able to come together, wouldn’t you agree"

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