Let’s look at the essentials of Gardamorg’s latest design, a wheel that turns at ever-increasing speed without external energy input. What makes this happen is
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gardamorg
Two waves of gravity spin around each other, constantly excelrating, battling each other, and the wheel is caught in the middle of it.
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This description has serious problems, which I suspect arise from the misconception that gravity acts on bodies like ocean waves act on floating objects, pushing them the way steep waves appear to push a surfboard.
Although the word “wave” is used to describe both phenomena involving changes in gravitational fields and ocean waves, gravity doesn’t work like ocean waves. It behaves almost exactly according to the
law of universal gravitation, which is given for 2 bodies by the formula
, where
is the force exerted on each body,
and
are the mass of each body,
is the distance between the bodies, and
is a constant that makes the equation work using standard units (for kg, meters, and seconds,
). According to the best-verified current theory,
General Relativity, gravity behaves slightly differently than this, but not enough that we need be concerned for systems like spinning wheels.
It’s not too difficult to make a gravitational field where a bit of matter on the edge of a wheel experiences a force in exactly the opposite direction of one on the exact opposite of the wheel. From a standstill, this wheel will begin turning. An example of such an arrangement is a
Cavendish beam. Most of the complexity of this device is due to the “engineered” gravitation field (typically from a pair of big lead balls) being very small compared to the ambient gravitational field (due to the Earth), but, in principle, taken far away from Earth and using bigger balls, this arrangement could cause a very big wheel to accelerate at an appreciable rate. You could attach motors, friction plates, or what-have-you to it, and get energy to do all sorts of things, including ejecting reaction mass from a rocket motor to accelerate the whole apparatus.
The problem is, at some point, the gravitational field must begin working in an opposite direction, slowing the wheel to a standstill, then accelerating it in the opposite direction of rotation. With each “swing” – though Cavendish beams are typically not allowed to complete even a single swing, and aren’t physically constructed to allow it, they are in essence pendulums – the wheel will turn less by an amount determined by the energy extracted by the attached motors, rocket-heaters, etc., until it comes to a standstill. The amount of energy provided to the rocket motors and other devices will be no greater than the amount of energy used to place the wheel and the field-generator (the balls) in their initial position.
Gardamorg mentioned that “two waves of gravity spin around each other”. It would indeed be possible to cause the gravitational field that moves the wheel to spin so that the wheel’s speed always increased. To do this, however, energy would have to be added to the field generator to spin it. Rockets could work - however, the energy gained by the rockets supplied by wheel could not exceed that spent by the rockets accelerating the field generator.
You’d be better off just using the field generator rockets to propel the spacecraft, sparing it the mass and complexity of the wheel, friction plate, and additional rocket motors.
Gardamorg, what you’ve designed is yet another
impossible perpetual motion machine. Although you say
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gardamorg
… I have studied physics through and through, making sure that there were no flaws.
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there are flaws obvious to anyone with even an introductory education in Physics. I think you’ve not studied Physics well enough yet.
A final word on the phrase “over unity”: For most serious scientists and science enthusiasts, the term evokes images of poorly-educated crack-pots and unscrupulous charlatans (the latter typically preying on the former). It’s not a term I’d recommend using in the title of thread describing an idea for a spacecraft.
As used currently by people who look favorably on the term, and have at least an introductory appreciation of physics, “over unity” usually doesn’t mean the same thing as “perpetual motion”, but rather describes a machine that obtains energy from a mysterious or difficult to access source. For example, some have suggested that it is possible to exploit the
Casimir effect on a large scale to extract energy from quantum fluctuation in empty space. While not a credible science site, this
21stcentruryradio.com article gives a decent summary of this fringe scientific field of study.
In a sense, many machines are “over unity”. For example, the small amount of energy to turn the ignition key and press the clutch and throttle pedals results in a lot of energy being released by a car. If we’re willing to consider the chemical energy of burning gasoline “mysterious or difficult to access”, and exclude it from scientific analysis, we can consider a car an over unity system.
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Why it won't work
