Brazillian businessman built a giant perpetual engine | Hacker News Reader

Brazillian businessman built a giant perpetual engine

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29 pointsmarcodiego37 comments

I’m always amazed how little ambition proponents of perpetual motion machines have. They always talk about not having to pay their energy bill or charge their smartphone ever again. Here in Ireland we had Steorn[0] which resulted in much amusement at the time. I still remember their failed London demonstration where their device refused to work due to the heat from the lights…

However, if you can generate free energy then you are like a god. You can use chains of even the most crappy perpetual motion machine to generate infinite energy and construct the most fantastical machines, who cares how much energy they consume! You could conquer planets and command your own vast galactic empire. You are only limited by your imagination since infinite energy is available to do whatever you desire.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn

You'd probably go to jail for trying to operate your own power generation plant. Curious thought process, how succeed given an infinite power machine. I'm sure I'd manage to fumble it.

You can fumble as much as you like. It doesn’t matter how crazy your vast ostentatious space palace is or how inefficient it is, you have infinite energy. You therefore have infinite compute. You won’t even need to think.

> You therefore have infinite compute. You won’t even need to think.

Peak HN.

You forgot about power, size, and cost.

I can create a device, which will harvest 1W of power from starlight infinitely. Good luck with your ambitions.

We’re not talking merely scavenging energy here. We’re taking about a perpetual motion machine that gives more out than you put in. I feed it 1 W and I get maybe 1.000000001 W out. Maybe it’s big and cumbersome but the principle, if like all the supposed devices to date, is probably some clockwork arrangement of magnets so it could be made more compact. Maybe it produces slightly less free energy who cares as long as it outputs more than I put in.

I connect many of these together and eventually I have 1.1 W from my 1 W input. I can keep going in this manner, at some expense sure, but now I’m producing 2 W per 1 W input. The effect must be cumulative if the device is truly a perpetual motion machine.

It will cost me less to mine resources giving me economic advantage. Eventually as I build more energy production capacity it will cost me nothing. I can harvest as much raw material as I need and fabricate whatever machines I want at zero cost. Currently this only limited by wealth but in my free energy utopia I’m unconstrained except by availability of material resources, I have infinite energy.

So I build a lumbering ship unconstrained by the limitations of mere rockets and mine the planets. I can build a planetary civilisation from this. I have enough energy, mechanical and computational power to do this easily. I now need to devise a means to achieve interstellar travel. But I have infinite energy, therefore infinite compute and near limitless material resources across the solar system.

Because of the promise of perpetual motion and free energy the effect snowballs at every step.

Reductio ad absurdum

Black hole? Throw mass into a black hole, to generate energy, and increase mass of the black hole, to generate even more energy.

Most perpetual motion machine inventors think like engineers with some understanding of Newtonian mechanics. So practical stuff like gears and pulleys and magnets. Thinking at the scale of a black hole isn’t usually their area.

Thing they don't get is gravity is not energy. It's not even a force.

Gravity can generate motion and one can extract energy from it. But in general some effort is required prior (like sun energy that fills up dams which later use gravity to generate hydroelectricity.

Gravitational motion is not perpetual, either. Water flows towards the center of the massive object curving space-time and that's it. It won't flow in a cycle. Unless some other factor spends energy making it flow, i.e. the Sun.

So a stationary generator that has no external energy input to keep motion flowing connected to gravity cannot generate energy.

There was an Irish company called Steorn in this "space" between 2006 and 2016.

I was invited in 2006/7 to a discussion of the company's technology hosted by the CEO. I was there with a small group of journalists and potential investors. I was there because a publisher I was involved with was contemplating a book about them.

What amazed me was how low the bar is for people to discuss something seriously. There were glaring inconsistencies in their presentation and in the associated materials. The back story they told was completely different to the story which the author of the book had outlined to us.

Even quite basic questions were deflected in the most obvious way.

I am absolutely not a scientist but there were very simple and obvious gaps in what they described.

Nevertheless people's politeness and/or credulity prevented any serious discussion taking place.

I suspect it's because if you push them, you don't get better answers, but you might get a lot of shouting and swearing. There's no point in poking holes in their theories because they believe them and cannot be persuaded otherwise.

So you just quietly sit through their presentation, poke a couple holes that the audience already knows exist, and watch them fail to answer it. Done.

If you check my other comment, the English-language coverage I found, which just involves journalists communicating to an audience with no interested party involved anywhere, is also written in a surprisingly credulous style. (Yes, acknowledging that no machine of this type has ever failed to be fraudulent. But doing so in a low-key, hope-the-reader-doesn't-notice kind of way.)

I remember thinking at the time that it was just a viral/digital marketing stunt. In other words, not a demo of a violation of conservation of energy, but a demo of how much buzz they could generate. Does anyone have any in depth material detailing the saga?

This instantly brought back memories of Steorn. I went down a rabbit hole on that one, learned a ton about the vagaries of magnetism, FEA, hydrodynamics, etc. It always had a crazy smell to it but the diversion scratched an itch. (The underlying concept was that you could use magnetic viscosity (Sv) to create a time variant BH curve in a magnetic field and cheat a few (micro)joules out of the hysteresis loop of a round trip to/from a permanent magnet. Trouble is that the viscosity always worked exactly against you, like it does in liquid/fluid mediums, dumping your joules into the magnet as heat instead.)

There’s an article on Hackaday about this beast of a machine [1]. A comment there got me wondering if you could build an art piece that breaks gravitational symmetry with the moon. A metric ton on earth would experience ~.03mN (~1 sugar cube) of force towards the moon. In the extreme if you floated a one ton granite sphere in liquid mercury, you would likely see some displacement (edit: actually no b/c plane of mercury would be normal to net gravity vector). Building something even remotely acceptable to demonstrate the concept would be tricky. My aforementioned Steorn interest taught me that ferrofluid can make an extremely low stiction bearing. You could potentially ’float’ a mass on a ferrofluid film and let the moon drag it over an exquisitely flat and leveled (1ppm) surface. You’d need to maintain the oil film but it should otherwise just ’work’.

1 - https://hackaday.com/2013/11/30/gravity-powered-generator-re...

>A metric ton on earth would experience ~.03mN (~1 sugar cube) of force towards the moon.

Would be nice to see more of these physically feasible, but futile, mechanisms to extract energy. Just recently came to know about Atmos'clocks, for instance, and wondered if you could use something similar to power one light of your house or w/e.

Whoa, that's a cool mechanism and even a modest volume would seem to generate quite a bit more power than the clock needs.

Betavoltaics are another cool one. You wrap a beta emitter (like tritium) with a solid state 'betavoltaic' that works like a photovoltaic but for beta particles. These are commercially available and will provide microwatts of power at 1-2v for for 30+ years. (With the downside of a bunch of possible health/waste/regulatory implications)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device

https://citylabs.net/products/

RTGs are their bigger/badder cousins, used for space probes and super-remote monitoring/military applications - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...

Unfortunately I was unable to find any video of that marvelous contraption in motion.

Even if it does not violate any of the three guidelines of thermodynamics I think it might be quite pretty to watch, much like a kinetic sculpture.

Perhaps connect it to some solar panels so it starts undulating on sunny days.

That was my first thought that it looked like an art installation. Making it bigger makes it more impressive, and may hide losses or make them smaller to appear perpetual.

Here's why any rotating perpetuum mobile device cannot work regardless of the principle (gravity, magnets, springs, balls, ...). Anything that moves on it's own is moving because it is lowering it's potential energy. You start at 12 o'clock, and it moves to 3 o'clock because there, it will have lower potential energy. Then it continue to move but eventually it will reach the starting point (because it is circular). But you already know that potential energy there is higher, so the device will not move there because it wants to lower it's potential energy, not raise it.

So any device that at some point reaches it's starting configuration cannot work because the potential energy is the same. If you put ball on flat plane it will not move sideways because potential energy is the same there.

There's a large university in that town and it has a Physics department.

Before this bloke spent his money building this thing, he should have called them up and asked them a few questions.

At the end of the page it seems the university offered some unrequested advice on the second law of thermodynamics.

It was dismissed on the grounds of the sun being "eternal" and gravity being an energy that can be "harvested" in the same way solar energy can.

They are right in the sense that you can count on the earth to pull your stuff down for free, they just forgot they have to put it back up themselves.

Earth rotation and Moon orbiting can do a massive amount of work (see tide waves), but energy density is very low.

> because it is lowering it's potential energy.

There’s also kinetic energy. The Earth rotates, and we have the Moon. It’s theoretically possible to build a machine which harvests energy from that rotation. Tides are powered by that energy, it’s obvious one could build a machine to extract energy from tidal waves in the ocean. It should be possible to build a machine which extracts that energy directly, without the water.

Probably not practical because the energy density is too low, and the machine needs to be prohibitively massive.

Tidal power is definitely a thing, and there are large commercial operations running today. The largest produces 552 GWh / year.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power

I wrote them then asking for more details and inquiring about financing, but they never replied. I was hoping to divine from their reply if they actually believed in this or were just looking to con investors.

Such odd timing - in Turkey we had breaking news of the invention of a perpetual energy machine called "Erke Donergeci (Erke Recirculation Machine)" just around the same time, 2006-2007 I believe - backed by some high ranking military officers and opinion leaders, which disappeared as quickly as it appeared. Funny enough, the company is still around.

Wikipedia entry: https://tr-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Erke_D%C3%B6n...

Company website and their list of patents: http://www.erketurk.com/faaliyetlerimiz-en.asp

More pictures of this bizarre thing here: https://www.hypeness.com.br/2014/01/empresa-brasileira-desen...

what a waste of time and resources

I wonder if these beautiful machines would be usable as compact flywheels. It certainly seems like the energy industry needs them from my armchair perspective

If that machine still exists it should be relocated to the front court of a science museum as a lesson to others.

No surprise but I guess it didn't work, the article is from 2016 and the website no longer exists...

The article is from 2016? It looks like it's from 2013 to me, though admittedly updated in 2015.

I found some surprisingly open-minded English-language coverage, also from 2013:

https://e-catworld.com/2013/09/28/brazilian-company-building...

https://will.illinois.edu/news/story/new-gravity-driven-gene...

> One blogger with a Brazilian radio station dismisses the project as an impossible perpetual motion machine. Even if it’s not quite that, University of Illinois Electrical Engineering Professor Peter Sauer said he’s never seen a gravity-driven device work without some additional energy input.

Didn't see any coverage after 2013. I wonder what the idea was. You can't announce a perpetual motion machine without being aware that there's no such thing.

There is serious work being done on chiral metamaterials which may have the ability to reverse or diminish the Cashimir effect. Note that this fact laughs in the face of all the self-assured debunkers coming out of the woodwork who are making claims way beyond their education.

General relativity does not preserve energy!

If you're going to spout pseudo scientific babble, at least spell "Casimir effect" properly. Please enlighten us poorly educated about this upcoming revolution, though!

Needs [2013]

Perpetual motion machines will never work out, as the laws of thermodynamics forbid the creation of energy

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