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Comment by zadler | Hacker News Reader

If such a toy could be created that displayed a perpetual quantum process, wouldn’t that count as doing work?

If so, then you could only have one that contains an unobservable perpetual quantum process; well, you’d need to trust that the seller that it does!

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Brownian motion is perpetual, easily observable by microscope and still it's not doing any work.

No, it wouldn’t count: “work” in this context is a technical physics term meaning a force applied over a distance.

If you are not observing some force over some distance then what, exactly, are you observing?

Constant motion doesn't require constant force.

observation requires the transmission of information to the observer, how is it being proposed to do this without force? The question on the table is "constructing a toy which demonstrates" and demonstration requires observation, I think is what is being said

For example, perfectly circular motion against no resistance requires no work since the force is always perpendicular to the motion.

he's saying you can't observe the phenomenon you are talking about without some additional work being done, which you might say is not part of the system, but it is part of the system that G*P proposed

I suspect it should be possible to have something that reflects light without doing work, or at worst absorbs a small portion of the incoming light and reflects the rest. Since it will sit on a desk, it will always be under light when observed by humans.

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