Science Forums 2

[nemo]

I'd have to agree that I'm not aware of any way to actually demonstrate perpetual motion (although I always find it entertaining when people tell me about things that will never / always happen), but I think you are onto something with your magnet train of thought. While I was reading some marketing propaganda about hybrid vehicles the other day, it occurred to me that electromagnetics could reasonably improve transportation technology far more than any of the current alternative fuel implementations.

Consider the amount of energy generated from an electromagnet compared with the energy you must provide to power the electromagnet. As a crude example, if you were to place a number of electromagnets in a circle, then place a wheel with magnets attached to it inside the circle, would you be able to rotate the wheel simply by providing current to the electromagnets in sequential order?
I may be completely off base on this, but my rather juvenile powers of deduction are telling me that you might be able to dramatically increase the milage an automobile can achieve by lining your wheelwells and hubs with electromagnets and corresponding magnets. I couldn't give you a joule ratio for the potential delta in efficiency (sorry, not an EE) but it seems pretty straightforward to me.